Why Food Inflation is 'Key Parameter' for Political Success?

Why Food Inflation is 'Key Parameter' for Political Success?

Food Inflation is hurting quality of Life

By:

Vijay Sardana

We need income to maintain our quality of Life. If there is inflation it makes things expensive and our purchasing power goes down and our quality of life suffers. In order to main the quality of life, our income either from salary or from interest on savings, must improve to compensate the inflation.

If we are not compensated for inflation, the surplus disposal income, after spending on essentials of life like food, health, education housing will shrink. It means with less surplus income, the demand for non-essential items like travel, entertainment, services, luxury items, etc. will also go down. On one side this reduced the quality of life and on the other it reduces the demand for these non-essential industries. In inflation is high in essential items like food, health, education and housing this also has serious impact on public health, quality of education and housing.

It is observed that consumers have tendency to adopt the items and producers which are cheap not what is good for them. This imbalances have very serious, short term and long term negative implications on investments, health & education, productivity in society. Issues like malnutrition, child and mother mortality, stunting, lack of learning ability, lack of stamina to work hard, poverty, etc. are social challenges caused by economic reasons like inflation.

Food inflation in India is growing challenge and it is becoming increasingly difficult for governments to control the same. The reasons are very obvious. There is lack of planning and resource allocation for the same. It is estimated that every year human population of India increases by 15 million and animal population by another 5 million on an average. It means we need more food than last year to feed these growing mouths. As a country we want industrial development and export growth. Large number of industries engaged food, feed, fiber and fuel also need raw material from agriculture sector. If you club all these the demand of agriculture products is increasing at a faster pace. We also need foreign exchange and agriculture products exports are also required to meet export demand as well.

On the other hand, we have limited agriculture land, limited water resources and climatic challenges which restricts our ability to grow products as per our wish.

The growing population is pushing urbanization. Every year some porting of agriculture land is going for infrastructure development and pushing agriculture production areas away from residential area. Growing population is also putting pressure on fresh potable water and ground water sources which are also required for food production.  

These factors are reducing vital resources which are required to sustain the food and feed production in the country. This widening gap between demand and supply is creating inflationary pressure on food and feed system and which is visible in market when you see rising prices of food and feed materials all over the country.

In order to address this challenge on sustainable basis bother central as well as state governments must prepare a sustainable food security plans. Today we do not have any such plans which can tell us how much food and feed is required and who planners are planning to address these gaps. There is need to relook at the data compilation mechanism because agriculture is highly fragmented and unorganized and there is reliable data which can be used as reference point for planning.

Agriculture is a state subject. All state governments should be asked to submit their food security plan. These plans must have 20 years plan with annual break-ups so that time bound action plan be taken and progress can be monitored on annual basis. This will make system accountable and people of this country will judge the quality of governance based on food inflation. Today, when common man is suffering due to food inflation, the claim of good governance is not making sense.

As a welfare state it is the moral duty of the governments that quality of life of a common people do not suffer due to food inflation.