Professional Documents
Culture Documents
grains in India.
• The prevalence of widespread hunger is
not due to the non-availability of food in
the market, but due to lack of adequate
purchasing power amongst the rural and
urban poor.
• Inadequate purchasing power, in its turn,
is due to insufficient opportunities for
gainful employment.
• The famine of jobs and of purchasing
power is becoming the primary cause for
the famine of food in the households of the
poor.
• Worldwide, 848 million people suffered from
chronic hunger in 2003-05 (FAO 2008).
• Of these people, 65 per cent live in only seven
countries - India, China, Democratic Republic of
the Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and
Ethiopia.
• India has an undernourished population of around
231 million (Figure 3.2.1).
• On the demand side, life expectancy in India has
increased from 59 to 63 years since 1990-92.
• So the minimum dietary energy requirements had
outpaced that of dietary energy supply.
• The combination of the declining per capita growth rate
in total dietary energy supply and higher per capita
dietary energy requirements resulted in an estimated 24
million more undernourished people in India in 2003-05
compared with the base period.
• The increased food needs of the ageing population
amount to about 6.5 million tonnes per year in cereal
equivalent.
• However, the prevalence of hunger in India decreased
from 24 per cent in 1990-92 to 21 per cent in 2003-05,
marking a progress towards meeting the MDG hunger
reduction target.
• Hunger in India is not necessarily a function of
underproduction, bad monsoons or the fall in
buffer stocks.
• In fact, India today finds itself in a paradoxical
situation of having food grain stocks with the
Food Corporation of India (FCI) standing at an
all time high of 63.1 million tonnes in July 2002
(Patnaik, 2003).
• This exceeds the requirements for food security
by about 20 million tonnes, yet above 200 million
people go hungry and about 50 million are on
the brink of starvation (Goyal, 2004).
• The existence of food stocks above buffer
requirements has not translated into availability.
PRESSURES
1. Poverty