Dal is Meat (rhyme Small is Big)

My idea of a delectable meal often presupposes a meat-rich diet. This has worked well for the foodie in me, providing latitude for wide — some would say wild — experimentation in cuisine and ingredients over the years. Indeed, it would be difficult to think of occasions in the past that would have found me averse to conspicuous consumption of the non-vegetarian kind. It is equally easy to remember my preaching from the pulpit to those deprived of similar indulgences.

Alas, what use is a tale without a twist, and mine came up against one via marriage when my dedicated six-seventh carnivorous pursuit met its match. (Incidentally the existing Tuesday exception was likely on account of historical habit more than purely religious reasons.) To cut a long story short, one could be pardoned for thinking my last post — Dal, Not Boring was my first on food; built around an eminently vegetarian delicacy — to be an ‘inspired’ choice! Yet, extenuating domestic circumstances (an outvoted minority status) apart, my alibi is a mehengayi-dayan discussion pending from that post. Indeed, not only is the virus of inflation agnostic to dietary preference, but its acute focus on foods hurts dal as much as chicken, making a complete mockery of the Great (Veg/Non-Veg) Divide.

With this backdrop, let me hark back to the RBI Q2 Monetary Policy document that was mentioned in my last post. The central bank's pointed concerns about food inflation expressed therein are a good starting point to appreciate the worrisome situation (in case you missed your grocery bills these last few months). Terming it 'structural', the Review referred specifically to prices of protein-based foods (despite policy tweaks and good monsoons, inflation in this segment "remained persistently elevated" mid-20s; six months ago it was a whopping 34%). What officialese did not make explicit was the fact that the uptrend is over a year old — meaning this inflation is working off an already high denominator. The resultant compounding effect on end-consumer wallets is, naturally, stark.

It is not difficult to discern the roots of 'structural demand-supply mismatches' the RBI laments, or to build a case for future worsening. Demand is up, driven by a burgeoning population and changing consumption patterns (economic progress whets the appetite for more nutritious food). Neither of these is likely to recede — in fact one can well expect significant upside in each. At the same time, we are faced with what the RBI calls 'inadequate supply response', meaning there is little relief on the other side of the economic equation. Specific to dal, none of the three global producers (US, Oz, Burma) displays any urgency to increase areas under pulse cultivation. (We could, of course, collectively root for a dietary switch towards meat — but that puts at stake much more than my personal domestic discord!)

As a conundrum, it is a desperate one — what else could be more compelling for a nation languishing at #67 in 85 countries on the Global Hunger Index? Unfortunately, the much-required sense of urgency seems thus far missing from all stakeholders — policymakers, producers, consumers, et al (and certainly in our TRP-happy mainstream media, preening with self-proclaimed righteousness, but content to sell the day's news). The logical solution would be for Indian agriculture to step up, even if its immediate ability to do so remains fairly suspect. Otherwise, declared national goals like a Security Council seats are rather meaningless.

Dal, Not Boring

Vir Sanghvi's Rude Food is an occasional staple of my weekend reading. To get to it is not always a cakewalk, though — one must navigate past other HT Brunch features that are often hopelessly inane. Of course, Shri Sanghvi himself, his broad repertoire on his sleeve, is capable of giving any self-respecting foodie more than enough cud to chew. Frequently, his fare is extravagantly esoteric in choice of subject and idiom, more daunting than delectable for the average seasoned traveller. Yet, when confining himself to playing patron versus patronising, his entrée does justice to his vaunted gourmand credentials — even the pungency of his strong opinions tickles the buds and makes for mild intellectual exercise appropriate for Sunday mornings. In either case, the studiedly exclusivist stance is unmistakable.

This week, though, Rude Food was positively brilliant. It swung the spotlight on humble, ubiquitous dal, justly extolling its virtues as the quintessential Indian dish. As Sanghvi points out, though content to play second fiddle to other offerings, the dal does not suffer from a lack of variety. All forms of Indian cuisine profess a version and each civilisation coming into contact with it has enriched its canon. At one level, it is in fact quite interesting how hard-pressed one would be to find dal-oriented eateries when one considers how every household carries its individual specimen — and even the occasional cook's experiments have elevated its pantheon. (My mother for instance, not exactly given to much adventurism in the kitchen, still cooks a memorable dal, and so one would suspect for many mothers, spouses, and chefs of varying culinary expertise across the nation.)

However, there is one facet that Shri Sanghvi barely scratches the surface of — owing, perhaps, to his proclivity for intellectual snobbery, or simply his relative munificence. This is the continued spiral of rising dal prices and its clearly deleterious consequences on household budgets (one speaks equally from personal experience, of course). In fact, this has worried no less a body than the RBI, going by the commentary in its Q2 FY11 Monetary Policy Review. Well merited as it may be, it is too early in the weekend to attempt this fuller discussion tonight. Let me, therefore, leave that for later — perhaps tomorrow, after being fortified with my ritual Saturday khichdi lunch!

Animal Farm

One of India's more watched news channels and its leading English daily recently ran an exposé on the pitiful state of our food distribution system. Given the sheer emotive value of rotting grain in a nation home to the world's largest concentration of the hungry, yet with superpower ambitions, public interest was bound to get fired up. Again, the backdrop of runaway food inflation (that has under its spell more than a trifling percentage of our Great Unwashed) provided the outrage with a tinge of rare immediacy. A call to action, so to speak, seemed immanent in the wave of national indignation.

Yet, it remains a moot question whether this will lead to tangible change. While a grandstanding media may have chanced upon its newsworthiness now, the issue has been hanging fire for ages. My personal recall is of (copious, if not compelling) lamentations on 'distribution losses' two decades ago, in the pursuit of an Economics degree — and the problem was not of recent vintage even then. Indeed, pithy 'mouths fed if gaps plugged' protestations brought academic glory to many (not me!) over the years — clearly, to little avail, as the sordid TV visuals testify. The agricultural supply chain was held hostage to political ambivalence for far too long. Such was the potency of notoriously enmeshed vested interests in every leg that one had to be content with a status-quoist survival play, with cynicism and not challenge being the dominant trope.

A quick dekko illustrates the extent of the rot in the entire ecosystem. Starting at the farm gate, the so-called farmer lobby (read: large agriculturists) cannot think beyond input subsidy retention and diesel price control. Interest in output is limited to pushing periodic MSP increases, with populist governments only too willing to oblige. Their small and marginal brethren are too fractured to wield any real political influence, clear from the typically lackadaisical, stopgap response to farmer suicides. A lack of organised credit confines their choices in any case — a fledgling microfinance revolution is still some time away. (This is not to undermine the fact that better contextual appreciation and economic timing help sustain local moneylender-cum-intermediary strangleholds.) In this extant reality of stagnant productivity, the otherwise laudable NREGA and mostly reprehensible Maoist violence add fresh undercurrents. It remains to be seen how these play out, but (at least for now) they have bred more questions than solutions.

Moving ahead in the chain, the picture alters only slightly. Higher investment continues to be a crying need in the storage and distribution of agricultural produce. Public sector agencies hold the key, but gunny sacks full of foodgrain don’t have a vote, and tackling post-harvest waste remains low on their list of priorities. Other logistics players, only occasionally different from middlemen, have little motivation to drive efficiency, given the infrastructure (and corruption) squeeze on margins, unless to profit from (artificially induced) supply imbalances. Lastly, wholesale through last-mile retail suffers from a lack of scale, subject to high rents, rising operating expenses, and limited organised investment, disadvantaging honest trade.

Fact remains that our nation also drove a Green Revolution. The erstwhile stage was one of stronger political will, with public memory fresh from ignominious PL 480 capitulations. In consequently sympathetic ears, AIR propagated research science prescriptions, and rural India took to HYV seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation in little time. (Incidentally, the most common critique of the Revolution centres around land degradation, showing little appreciation of R&D’s evolutionary nature — science is a process of constant churn, not a one-time infusion. Critics likewise gloss over the lopsided nature of fertilizer subsidies and the like.)

In short, we must lean on science again. Be it input optimisation, cultivation and processing practices, storage, or transit efficiency — each can benefit from the strides the scientific-industrial world has taken over the years. (Robust risk modelling too can help drive deeper microcredit penetration, but that science, alas, draws much derision in a post-Lehman world!) And our IT prowess can be brought to bear on information gaps that mess up cycle time, cost, and pricing across the value chain.

Of course, it would be naive to think one can solve it without social science. And no, this is not a call to the political class to miraculously conjure the will to lead the charge. Shorn of direct electoral gain, political commitment levels seldom multiply manifold — if it has not happened in years, a blog post or television theatrics won’t. (Our beloved Agriculture Minister is anyway planning to focus on his new ICC chair when not engaged in periodic one-upmanship exercises with his professed allies.) This is merely a plea not to wilfully muddy the waters. We cannot afford to continue ludicrous supply-pricing games, with ill-advised and badly executed (if not dubiously intended) market interventions lacking economic sense.

Hypercritical of politics after a fashion? No. We must recognise the math by which 58 million tonnes of stock accumulates, double the actual need. Or how over a million tonnes are lost to storage and transit in just four years while at least as many parts of the country reported starvation deaths. (Yes, we did give folks with BPL cards TV sets in some state elections. Good — they can watch the tragicomedy live now.) So, if our political masters can just about manage to keep their gaming instincts under control, this can get off the ground well enough. And if we are really, truly lucky, perhaps they can think visionarily — and allow full mobility and free markets in the sector. Food Security would then move from policy shibboleth to proud reality.