Food inflation hit war on poverty

Rising food prices and economic crisis have eaten into the gains made by India and the world in reducing poverty during the first half of this decade, a United Nations report released on Wednesday said. See graphic

Updated on: Jun 24, 2010, 03:41:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Rising food prices and economic crisis have eaten into the gains made by India and the world in reducing poverty during the first half of this decade, a United Nations report released on Wednesday said.

"Newly updated estimates from the World Bank suggest the crisis will heave an some 64 million into extreme poverty by end of 2010, principally in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia," the Millennium Development Goals, 2010 report said.

In South Asia, including India, 21 per cent of the population is poor in 2008, one percentage point less than 2000-02 and same as in 1990.

"The report shows that India's quota-based poverty eradication policies have failed," said CPIM leader Brinda Karat. She also claimed that poverty estimation was a jugglery of figures in India and the actual number of poor was much more in India than estimated by the Planning Commission.

"Government has come out with three different poverty figures. No one knows which one is true," Karat said.

Arjun Sengupta committee has said 70 per cent of India's population was poor, N.C Saxena committee said 50 per cent were poor whereas Suresh Tendulkar committee said 37.5 per cent of Indians were poor. The government has accepted Tendulkar's estimation. "It is statistical manipulation of official records to show less poverty,” she said.

The report also highlighted that the number of hungry especially in poverty struck regions such as South Asia had increased, with 830 million people in 2009 being malnourished as compared with 817 million in 1992.

The number may cross one billion in 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations had estimated.

"Prices of staple foods remained high in 2009. The incomes of poor households diminished because of higher unemployment following economic downturn. Both crises contributed to a considerable reduction in effective purchasing power of poor consumers, who spend a substantial share of their income on basic food stuffs," the report said, while explaining the cause for increase in hunger.

Economist Jayati Ghosh said with just 30 per cent of India’s poor with BPL ration cards, which authorised them to buy subsidised food grains, the present policies would not suffice to eradicate poverty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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