Planners look ahead on food security

Apparently buoyed up by prospects of a record boro harvest, the Centre For Policy Dialogue (CPD) organised a dialogue session on 'Boro Procurement and Food Security Strategy an Actionable Agenda'. High government functionaries, planners, academics, farmers, rice mill owners and rice importers spoke by turn putting together an action strategy to build a food buffer stock for this year and beyond.
A consensus emerged among the experts that to have a comfortable food reserve to see us through next financial year three crore 20 lakh metric tonnes of food grain would have to be produced in the country. There should be a standing food buffer stock worth 50 lakh tonnes. To this end, during the aman and boro seasons government has to ensure availability of adequate quantities of high quality seed and fertilizer to the farmers. Another critical input would be access to irrigation in view of the added necessity for bringing fallow land under cultivation. Such a scheme of things should be duly reflected and provided for in the next budget.
The declining productivity of food grains worldwide, bio-fuel claiming a good acreage of cultivable land, squeeze on export and the ever increasing prices of cereals in the international market leave us with no other alternative but to grow the food we need on our own.
We can take the cue from the boro success attained despite the initially flawed distribution of fertilizer. The subsidies provided for the inputs have paid dividends in terms of output. That is on the production side, the government intervention on the distribution side through OMS, VGD and VGF yielded results by way of crisis management.
The storage capacity of the government has decreased from 19 lakh tonnes to a maximum of 12-14 lakh tonnes. This is a major constraint in building food reserve to the tune of, let's say, 50 lakh tonnes. In fact, taking into account the task of preserving fertilizer, seeds etc, the private sector must be encouraged with bank loans and other financial incentives to build strings of silos at appropriate locations to be rented out to the government, if necessary.