For those who might not know, following a week after the Russia-Ukraine wheat embargo, there are even bigger and ominous signs hinting at global food insecurity and the catastrophic agricultural crises coming our way.
India last week banned export on all non-basmati rice varieties.
I repeat: EXPORT BAN ON ALL non-basmati RICE varieties.
[Aside: export of basmati variety will continue, the demand for which is relatively small in India when compared to the nearly 15 major varieties of rice (it's home to at least a 1000 varieties) consumed by very large populations everyday(these are the ones which are now banned). Basmati is a "festive" and only occasionally consumed variety in India. It is largely exported to the richer nations, many of whom think it is the only variety of rice from India.]
Why is India banning rice now?
Answer: global warming.
What’s happening in India (and South Asia at large) should both terrify you and wake you up
Here’s more (facts? trivia? bothersome news? how the world actually works?).
With erratic monsoons now a regular feature, intense floods are followed immediately by heatwaves that have caused the entire agriculture cycle to go haywire, crop yields to plummet, and near droughts across all major food basket regions in India.
Tamilnadu, my home state, used to be rice-country, historically recorded by both the Tamils and later the Brits as giving three harvests a year. Now it is barely struggling to give a single harvest.
West Bengal, one of the largest rice producers has reported highest levels of aridity in its arable lands.
Punjab, and Haryana, the heartlands of most agriculture have had multiple crop collapses, the worst top soil degradation because of intensive practices, and fertilizer polluted irrigation ways (not to mention the highest levels of cancer).
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states, and heavily reliant on agriculture as both economy and livelihood have had one of the worst years on record for yields on almost all food crops.
Riverbeds, lakes, and canals that depend almost exclusively on the monsoons are drying up.
All across the country, groundwater has plummeted and deep wells are now dug that reach waters from a few million years back.
What is said of India extends to the entire Indian subcontinent/South Asia as well.
Pakistan too is a wheat and rice basket and a major rice exporter, and we saw what happened when nearly a third of the entire country was flooded last year. This year, the temperatures soared to 50 degrees across most of that flooded region.
Sri Lanka, in a moment of hubris and misguided thinking (however good willed) decided to ban all intensive farming overnight and forced everyone to adapt to organic farming with nary a transition plan. The result, a complete collapse of everything.
Bangladesh, which in normal monsoon has roughly 5-10% of its delta region swallowed by water, now has more than 20% sinking. It too produces a bunch of essential food grains for largely domestic consumption, but also some exports (especially lentils).
Of course, Bangladesh will be the canary in the coalmine when global warming hits the fan and when “climate politics” starts. This is a people already preparing for climate adaptation, not waiting for the reversing to happen, they are well aware nothing is getting done elsewhere.
Europe saw Syria (that civil war began with a global warming induced drought in the late 2000s) come and were repelled, wait when Bangladesh comes at you, and they will come.
It's slowly dawning on the “stalwart agricultural and economic experts” in New Delhi, trained at the premier institutes that know how agriculture works better than farmers and agricultural scientists, i.e., the Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Chicago and the likes. They are realizing that Food security is a matter of national security and economy. And that at some level, though they are the elites, they are realizing they are still from India, and when they call for help from their buddies in DC or Brussels, it might go to the voicemail. Not that they know what they are doing about food security, they will be making a hash of it anyway.
The volatility in the grains futures markets in Singapore and Chicago, the staggering drop in crop yields, and inflationary pressure have all caused one of the largest price hikes for rice in India within a year.
The export ban is a way to stabilize prices and feed its people. India is still the country with the highest absolute number and percentage of malnourished children. Oh, also, there is an election coming up next year, no incumbent government (state or central) would like to be on the receiving end of getting voted out by angry starving masses. Democracy at work you know.
Rice is not the only basic food commodity that is off the roofs. Wheat prices have soared too, and price controls were put in earlier. Most recently, a kilo of tomato costs as much as 200 Rupees now. Adjusted for currency exchange and purchasing power, that's like buying a kilo of tomato for more than 10$ in the US! How does that "cost of living crisis" sound?
India has forever been an "ecological basket case", heavily dependent on an almost clockwork arrival of the monsoons for its ecological and economic revival. The effect of erratic monsoons and intense heatwaves has forced very large areas of formerly arable land to waste. Top soil degradation is fully apace thanks to intense adoption of monocultures, use of fertilizers and herbicides etc.,
Global warming is the distal cause for which India will and should take no blame and must point the finger at the West.
However, let’s not give the Indian governments a free pass.There are many proximal causes for the decimation of the backbone of Indian society and livelihood, that is the Agricultural sector.
Those proximal causes should be squarely blamed on the state (not just the current dispensation). Several serious policy flaws, failures, and disastrous ideologies have been set in motion since 1991, when India “liberalized” and opened itself to the "free market" regime. Hey, we are global players now, let’s see what we can do.
Here’s a litany of the wonderful things that the Indian state has been responsible for, one way or another since we became “liberal” in 1991:
*Failures in proper grain storage, management, and distribution. In doublespeak, supply chain. So much so that large amounts of food grains (strategic reserves) are left to rot rather than feed the hungry and emaciated. India produces enough “essential food grains” to feed two Indias. At the height of COVID-19, the first and only priority was to make sanitizers out of rice rather than to feed the largest number of humans in the world who went hungry. The free food public distribution for 80% of the population came much later.
*Per capita consumption of essential food grains have plummeted. For a few years, they were as low as what it was in the Bengal Famine of 1943 (which killed 5 million people) under the British Raj! Starvation deaths for the first time in Independent and Democratic India. To this day, the per capita consumption is lower than what it was pre 1991.
*Failure to pay farmers "Minimum support prices" as recommended by the Swaminathan committee (this has been so since late 2000s).
*Predatory land grabbing by corporations (Indian and international), with the full support of the Indian state for “development”, hell-bent on extracting every bit of value that can be extracted from adivasi lands all the way to agricultural lands.
*Predatory consumption and resource extraction by the largest corporations within and from outside India while pacifying a tiny middle class in the megalopolises. While the wonderful malls, beauty products and luxury cars were parading these megacities; electrification, irrigation, and basic access to credit were delayed or denied to the people who produced their food.
*Subsidizing agribusiness and acquiescing to the WTO agreements. Somehow the poorest farmers and agricultural workers in the world must restructure themselves to be market viable, but the US (and EU) has every right to be protectionist and subsidize its agriculture to the tune of 65 billion$ annually. Even more perverse, for example, the subsidy offered year-on-year for sugar and cotton produced in the US is more than the total revenue they generate. Some efficient market viable agriculture.
*Letting market forces dictate, and forcing farmers from planting food crops to cash crops.
An example: Wayanad (literally means paddy country) in Kerala went from paddy farms to vanilla cultivation. Indian market for vanilla, near zero. When the global market found a better offer from Madagascar and Indonesia (not blaming them), the plantations collapsed. Many parts of Wayanad didn’t make it back to paddy.
*Forcing farmers in a vicious cycle of debt-despair-suicide. The less I say about this, the better for everyone, including my own sanity.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, the list goes on.
What’s the principal outcome of all these agricultural policies?
Decimation of livelihood in the Indian countryside leading to the largest internal migration within any country in modern history (you can call it internal displacement, sub-national refugees, asylum seekers) from the rural to the urban.
And no, before you jump in, this urbanization is no sign of progress. No viable replacement for their livelihoods has been created. The manufacturing sector remains teetering, and the high tech service sector is saturated. The primary education system is criminally underfunded, opportunities to reskill hardly exist. Most important of all, even with skills and training, some of the highest levels of unemployment while we can boast of having the 5th largest economy. Meanwhile, the two richest Indian billionaires must have worked so hard that they now are combined wealthier than two of the relatively wealthy states (Punjab and Haryana). If there is anything that has a sensational growth that any economist can be proud of, it’s the rate of growth of inequality in India.
That’s the state of India, its food, agriculture and roughly 80% of its people (~1.1 billion).
Now back to the rice export ban from India with which we started. Why is this a big deal internationally?
India is THE largest exporter of rice and accounts for 40% of the total. These predominantly feed the poorest peoples in Africa (western and sub Saharan) and other parts of Asia. That’s feeding about another billion people. With the wheat market in deep trouble following Russia-Ukraine, the world was already straining (look at Egypt, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa), now with the Indian rice ban, and Thailand and Vietnam (the next largest exporters) not being able to meet the world's demand to fill India's void, it can just tip over. Expect a lot of hunger and misery.
The great philosopher and one of the very few economists, and intellectuals of our times, Amartya Sen (who lived through the Bengal famine of 1943) wrote, “All famines are political… No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”
We might have to sadly upend that worldview (I hope I am horribly, completely wrong on this count!).