Despite celebrating World Food Day every year, there is little improvement in reducing number of hungry people as compare to last year. It has fallen to 925 million from the last year?s historic of more than 1 billion. The progress of decline in people below poverty is indeed unacceptably slow.
The prevailing trends clearly show that there is very little possibility to achieve the targets of ?Millennium Development Goals? of reducing poverty to half. In India, the poverty is widespread and declining at a very slow pace. Almost one-third of the world?s poor live in India. As per the World Bank estimates based on international poverty line of $ 1.25 a day, about 42% people were below poverty line in 2005. As per the estimates of the Planning Commission, about 27.5% of the population was living below the poverty line in 2004?2005. Poverty is mostly concentrated in states like Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, eastern Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. All these states are rich in biodiversity, abundant in labour force and receive adequate rainfall but still poor performers in agriculture.
Unfortunately, markets for agri-food commodities, especially high-value and perishable ones, are not well integrated due to lack of infrastructure. This leads to lower prices in production pockets and high prices in consumption centres. Incidentally, the resource poor small and marginal farmers take supplementary enterprises (such as vegetables, milk, poultry, fish) to augment their incomes. But in the absence of appropriate markets and infrastructure, the benefits of emerging opportunities are taken by middlemen.
The existing supply chains add cost, increase wastage and raise prices in consumption centers. Improving value chains through appropriate institutional mechanisms (such as contract farming, farmers? associations, farmers? companies, cooperatives) would help in integrating markets and share the benefits of emerging opportunities in agriculture with the farmers and consumers.
?The writer is director, National Academy of Agricultural Research Management, Hyderabad