India: The Threat of Famine

REMEMBER! said the three-column ad in Indian newspapers, TODAY is A DINNERLESS DAY. Thus the government one day last week began its campaign to prepare Indians for what has become an annual food crisis. It was bad enough last year when India harvested 88 million tons of grain, far short of the nation’s need. This year the harvest is expected to fall below 75 million tons. What with some 12 million more mouths to feed, India faces its severest food crisis in two decades.

Hail Farmer! Indians blame it on scanty rain during last summer’s monsoons. Maharashtra state in western In dia reports crop losses as high as 75%. Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and the Punjab, normally big grain-producing states, see serious trouble ahead. Predictably, the shortages have sent grain prices up 30% in the past few months. To curb profiteering by speculators, the government is buying grain direct from farmers and selling it in government-run “fair-price shops” in the cities. Yet this plan has a drawback, for it attracts peasants from the countryside to the cities in search of lower food prices. Already 4,000 families from West Bengal villages have streamed into Calcutta, swelling the city’s army of derelicts.

Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri’s miss-a-meal campaign is one part of an official food-conservation program. Another was an appeal to farmers to grow two crops a year instead of only one—or three instead of two. In his speeches, Shastri often cries Jai Kisan! (Hail Farmer!) giving farmers equal billing with the soldiers on the Pakistan battlelines in the fight to save India. Shastri has also asked city dwellers to raise whatever food they can. “A well-kept garden should be a matter of pride to every household,” he says. Obeying his own advice, he dutifully had his own lawn dug up and planted in wheat. There is also a drive to stamp out rodents and pests that currently devour 10% of India’s grain. The government is discouraging persons from making grain sacrifices to the gods. Food rationing will begin in New Delhi this week and will be extended to all major cities by Jan. 1.

The Wheat Weapon. For all this, most foreign observers feel that the government’s approach has been curiously low-keyed. There is little official follow-up to induce the population to cooperate. In an address in Madras last week, Shastri talked mostly about the border war, passed by the food crisis with the remark that “two months hence we may have to face special difficulties.” Few Indians have responded to his appeal to eat less. Fewer still are growing gardens. The Royal Calcutta Turf Club at first voted to dig up its emerald inner oval for crops, but so far the immaculate infield remains untouched.

The shortages could hardly come at a worse time for India; the U.S. is now using its Public Law 480 “Food for Peace” as leverage to coax recipient nations toward wiser economic policies (see THE NATION). Though Indian Minister of Food Chidambaram Subramaniam desperately wants a new long-term U.S. commitment on grain shipments, Washington insists on delivering only on a month-by-month basis until India presents convincing proof that its next five-year plan will modernize its famine-prone farm system. And though Washington won’t say so, it may well be that no long-term agreement for U.S. wheat will be forthcoming until India complies with the United Nations order to pull back its troops from the truce line along the Pakistan border and show some sign of interest in a settlement of the Kashmir question.