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The deep water crisis

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/the-deep-water-crisis/article4960717.ece
P. Sainath

A few thousand drilling rigs roll into parched states each year and drill over a thousand feet to extract scarce groundwater for the farm.
The Hindu A few thousand drilling rigs roll into parched states each year and drill over a thousand feet to extract scarce groundwater for the farm.

Hard-working rig-operators are providing a real response to a very real demand from farmers, but with grave consequences for groundwater supplies
No other town can boast as deep a connection with the rest of the country as this little one in Tamil Nadu. Machines from here have struck great depths in most Indian States (and in many African countries as well). Tiruchengode is the nation’s borewell rig capital and thousands of machines and operators from here go down as much as 1,400 feet on any day, most months of the year. The monsoon has paused their activity in States like Maharashtra where they have picked up a great deal of business in recent years. But there are parts of the country where they’re still drilling for water.
The water-crisis in Maharashtra — which only gets highlighted in summer — saw many thousands of borewells drilled in just the Marathwada region in the first three months of this year. The truck-mounted borewell rig was omnipresent in the fields. And the borewell itself was a major source of debt, if not of water, in the rural districts. Most of the rigs we saw rumbling along the roads turned out to be from Tamil Nadu. (Some were from Andhra Pradesh). “They seem mostly to be from a single town,” a senior geologist of the government of Maharashtra had then told The Hindu. That town, it turned out, was Tiruchengode in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu.
“I stayed four months this year in a village close to Nanded in Maharashtra,” C. Vaiyapuri of Sree Balamurugan Borewells told me in Tiruchengode. He is a dynamic, hard-working rig-operator. In four months, this single operator sank about 500 borewells in Maharashtra, mostly in water-stressed Marathwada. “You can do up to 1,300 feet a day,” he says, “if the soil is ‘loose formation’ and so easier to drill. Which means you can sink even four a day if the wells are under 300 feet. If it’s ‘hard formation,’ you won’t go past 1,000 feet in a day.”
Each truck-mounted rig is supported by a second large vehicle ferrying both equipment and men. The whole team could be up to 20 people. A manager, two drillers, two assistants, two drivers, a cook and 12 manual labourers. The workers bring another pan-Indian dimension to Tiruchengode’s reach. The rig operators of Tamil Nadu have agents and brokers in every State. The workers are mostly from Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. Just a handful is from Tamil Nadu. The standard pay is Rs. 200 a day plus three meals for work that could last many months in the year.
It’s hard work, and the rate varies according to how tough the job is. In some of the harder surfaces of Andhra, you can’t go beyond 80 feet in an hour. That fetches Rs.75 per foot. So drilling a 1,000 feet a day brings in Rs. 75,000. In the “loose formation” soil where Vaiyapuri says you can go as low as 120 feet in an hour, the rate drops to Rs. 56 a foot. But you can reach 1,300 feet, or almost Rs.73,000 a day. Even if you’re on the job for just 200 days (it’s often much more), that would total close to Rs.15 million.
How many rigs are there in Tiruchengode town and taluk? Not more than 5,000, says T.T. Paranthaman, Managing Director of PRD, a major drilling rigs concern. Nearly 7,000, estimates N.P. Velu, president of the Tiruchengode Lorry Owners Association, and a rig owner himself. Up to 20,000, insist other operators. All three estimates could be right — at different levels. An industry veteran says: “A lot of the owners and rigs are here. But many rigs are registered in other States, perhaps for tax purposes.”
Meanwhile, rig operators are returning from places as far off as rural Rajasthan. One had even sunk borewells in Jammu. There are two or three months in a year when the rigs take a break for servicing. That’s mostly when the rains have set in.
The average borewell depths vary in different States, says Mr. Velu. “In Karnataka, the average is now close to 1,400 feet. Not very much less in Tamil Nadu. It all started with a drought in the 1970s.” Sensing an opportunity in this sector, groups of farmers and workers engaged in sinking wells, pooled resources and bought a few rigs. (Even today, over a third of the rigs here are owned by such groups).
“At that time, the depths at which we hit water was no more than 100-200 feet,” says Mr. Velu. “Maximum 300. The greatest increase in depths to which the wells are sunk has come in the last five years.”
The story of this town’s rig operators throws up a serious dilemma. They have brought jobs and prosperity to Tiruchengode and nearby regions. Among them are those once illiterate workers who banded together in the late 1970s to buy their rigs and work their way out of poverty. (This entire belt of Tamil Nadu, including Coimbatore, Karur and Tirupur, has an impressive history of entrepreneurship from below). The rig operators also respond to a real demand from farmers across the country. A demand driven by despair.
The same process, though, implies grave consequences for groundwater supplies. Rampant exploitation of that resource has seen the water table plummet across the country. The Collector of Osmanabad in Marathwada said this March that the water table in his district (where the rigs had been active) was five metres below its five-year average. If 10,000 rigs from just one part of Tamil Nadu are sinking a 1,000 feet a day on average across India — that’s 10 million feet. Doing this even for just 200 days a year would make that 2 billion feet. That’s a lot of drilling. Even with high failure rates, that’s a lot of groundwater being sucked out.
The Tiruchengode rig operators did not choose this path of development for the country and can’t be faulted for that. They did not impose the regime of unchecked groundwater exploitation that prevails. And though they are the major force, there are also other operators in the country. Further, rigs have other uses too, but the great demand is for borewells. And the explosion of those signals disaster. (The groundwater accounts for two-thirds of irrigation water and over four-fifths of drinking water in India). The much-needed social control of this process won’t happen in the present water regime.
Why are there so few many machines at work in your own neighbourhood, I asked one Tiruchengode veteran. “There’s not so much water here, now,” he said. “We’re hitting 1,400 feet in nearby Erode town.”
(psainath@gmail.com)

Weedkillers tied to depression in farmers

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sns-rt-us-weedkillers-20130726,0,4595601.story

Kerry Grens Reuters2:34 p.m. CDT, July 26, 2013

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Farmers who used weedkillers were more than twice as likely to be treated for depression than farmers who didn’t use the chemicals in a new study from France.
Whether the weedkillers are causing depression “is not clear,” said Marc Weisskopf, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “But (the result) suggests we should not be ignoring herbicides just because they’re targeting plants.”
Earlier research on depression and pesticides has focused on insecticides, particularly organophosphates, which are known to be toxic to nerve cells, said Weisskopf.
Monocrotophos, the insecticide that killed 23 school children in India this month, is an organophosphate, for example.
The use of pesticides has also been linked to Parkinson’s disease among farmers (see Reuters Health story of May 28, 2013 here:).
As part of a study on Parkinson’s disease, Weisskopf and his colleagues assessed the risks for depression with exposure to any kind of pesticide by surveying 567 French farmers about their use of fungicides, insecticides and herbicides.
The team conducted home visits to get a detailed assessment of chemical exposures, including going over bills for pesticide purchases, looking through farming calendars and inspecting old pesticide containers.
They also asked the farmers whether they had ever been treated for depression.
Weisskopf’s group reports in the American Journal of Epidemiology that 83 farmers, about 15 percent, said they had been treated for depression. Forty-seven of them had never used pesticides, while 36 had.
Among the farmers without Parkinson’s disease, 37 who had never used herbicides and 20 who had used the weedkillers reported being treated for depression.
There was no difference in the risk of having depression among the farmers who had used fungicides or insecticides, compared to those who hadn’t used any pesticide.
But when the researchers took into account factors linked with depression, such as age and cigarette smoking, they determined that those farmers exposed to weedkillers were nearly two and a half times as likely to have had depression.
Furthermore, farmers who had greater exposure – either more hours or longer years using herbicides – also had a greater chance of having depression than farmers who had used weedkillers less.
That kind of dose-response relationship is usually thought to support a connection – in this case, between the chemicals and depression. But this type of study cannot prove cause and effect.
One possibility that wasn’t ruled out is that the exposed farmers might have had other health conditions that affected their ability to work, which in turn made them vulnerable to depression.
“The health of the farmer is critical. If they can’t work, they get depressed,” said Cheryl Beseler, a researcher at Colorado State University, who was not involved in this study.
She said the study was otherwise very well done in terms of collecting information about the farmers’ past pesticide use.
The results do not apply to the average gardener, although Weisskopf said it will be valuable to better understand herbicides’ safety in farming and non-farming settings.
“It’s very important given their widespread use around the home,” he said.
Beseler agreed.
“I think people tend to not take (the risks of pesticides) seriously when they’re gardeners,” she told Reuters Health.
Weisskopf said one explanation for his finding that insecticides and other pesticides were not tied to depression is that farmers might be aware of their potential hazards and they take greater precautions to avoid being exposed.
Another possibility is that the chemicals simply don’t cause depression.
He said that more research is needed to determine the safety of herbicides, and meanwhile it would be wise for farmers and gardeners to be just as diligent about protecting themselves as they are with other chemicals.
“If (herbicides) are considered in general safer and people take less precautions because people think they’re not as bad, then that poses a problem,” he told Reuters Health.
“This still has to be considered a relatively first, small study. There’s more work to do, but it raises concerns that need to be looked into more fully,” Weisskopf said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1dXuiro American Journal of Epidemiology, online July 12, 2013

Pesticide Exposure and Depression Among Agricultural Workers in France

  1. Marc G. Weisskopf*,
  2. Frédéric Moisan,
  3. Christophe Tzourio,
  4. Paul J. Rathouz and
  5. Alexis Elbaz
  1. ↵*Correspondence to Dr. Marc G. Weisskopf, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Landmark Center, 401 Park Drive, P.O. Box 15697, Boston, MA 02215 (e-mail: mweissko@hsph.harvard.edu).
  1. Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; HR, hazard ratio; OR, odds ratio; PD, Parkinson’s disease.
  • Received January 4, 2013.
  • Accepted April 17, 2013.

Abstract

Pesticides are ubiquitous neurotoxicants, and several lines of evidence suggest that exposure may be associated with depression. Epidemiologic evidence has focused largely on organophosphate exposures, while research on other pesticides is limited. We collected detailed pesticide use history from farmers recruited in 1998–2000 in France. Among 567 farmers aged 37–78 years, 83 (14.6%) self-reported treatment or hospitalization for depression. On the basis of the reported age at the first such instance, we used adjusted Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for depression (first treatment or hospitalization) by exposure to different pesticides. The hazard ratio for depression among those who used herbicides was 1.93 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.95, 3.91); there was no association with insecticides or fungicides. Compared with nonusers, those who used herbicides for <19 years and ≥19 years (median for all herbicide users, 19 years) had hazard ratios of 1.51 (95% CI: 0.62, 3.67) and 2.31 (95% CI: 1.05, 5.10), respectively. Similar results were found for total hours of use. Results were stronger when adjusted for insecticides and fungicides. There is widespread use of herbicides by the general public, although likely at lower levels than in agriculture. Thus, determining whether similar associations are seen at lower levels of exposure should be explored.

National Food Security Ordinance: Anything But Expensive

http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/national-food-security-ordinance-anything-expensive.html
Vol – XLVIII No. 30, July 27, 2013 | Dipa Sinha

While critics have overblown the cost estimates of the National Food Security Ordinance, the ordinance itself is a missed opportunity. What is needed is a more comprehensive Act which incorporates measures such as procurement, storage and distribution through a decentralised, strengthened and universal public distribution system, among others and a strong grievance redressal and monitoring mechanism.
Dipa Sinha (dipasinha@gmail.com) is an activist with the Right to Food campaign.

With the promulgation of the National Food Security Ordinance (NFSO) last week, there have been many shrill voices warning the nation about the high costs of its provisions. The media, especially the TV news channels, have been continuously flashing figures on how expensive, and therefore harmful to the Indian economy the food bill will be. The most popular figures seem to be 3% of the GDP annually as estimated by the economist Surjit Bhalla (Indian Express, 6 July 2013) and Rs. 6 lakh crores over the next three years as estimated by Ashok Gulati, the Chairperson of the Commission of Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP) (The Economic Times, 4 July 2013). It is necessary to understand how these figures have been arrived at, based on extremely dodgy assumptions. Further, there is a need to look beyond this superficial discussion and investigate how far this ordinance will go in addressing people’s hunger and malnutrition.
Surjit Bhalla uses an erroneous method to arrive at this estimate of Rs. 3 lakh crore per year. He assumes the actual consumption and outreach of PDS as reported by people in the NSS survey to be the current provision of the government and adjusts it to the proposed coverage and lower prices under the ordinance. So, he argues that according to National Sample Survey (NSS), 44% of the people get access to Public Distribution System (PDS) at an average of 2.1 kgs per head[1]. To expand this to 67% coverage and 5 kgs per head at lower issue prices as proposed by the ordinance, the food subsidy of 2011-12 (Rs. 72000 crores) has to be increased 4.3 times. The implicit assumption here is that the present level of leakages as reflected in the NSS will remain the same even after the ordinance is rolled out and further, that the government will allocate resources taking into account leakages. His calculations do not take into account the fact that the allocation of foodgrains under the Act will in fact go up only by 2 mn tonnes from 60 mn tonnes to 62 mn tonnes or that the current allocations are at three different issue prices for the Above the Poverty Line (APL), Below Poverty ine (BPL) and Antyodaya Anna Yojana(AAY) populations; or that currently the allocations are at the scale of 35kgs per household per month or even that the expenditure of many state governments on food subsidy will now go down as they will be getting grains cheaper from the central government. By using statistics to one’s own convenience without clearly mentioning the assumptions being made, such a method of estimating the food subsidy is only misleading.
Overblown Costs
By challenging readers to counter his calculations Bhalla tries to convince them that there can be nothing wrong with it. In fact the counter-question to be posed to Bhalla is how he proposes the Rs. 314,000 crores will be put to use. Food subsidy is the difference between the economic cost and issue price; which is currently around Rs. 20 per kg. To spend Rs. 314,000 crores the government will have to procure 157 mn tonnes of foodgrains, which is even more than the total marketable surplus of cereals produced in the country. Is he by any chance imagining that the NFSO will nationalise the foodgrains market? That would be too far-fetched for even someone like Bhalla!
Ashok Gulati on the other hand inflates his estimates by including “the investment in agriculture that will be needed to stabilise production, the investment that would be needed in storage and the investment that would be needed in transportation through railways”. The question to ask here would be whether these costs can all be attributed to the NFSO. “Food subsidy” only includes the cost to the exchequer on account of procuring foodgrains at minimum support prices, storing and transporting the grains and then selling them at a subsidised price to the consumers.
It is only fair that when we are comparing how much higher the food subsidy will be as a result of the NFSO, only these aspects are included in the Ordinance being taken into account. Moreover, is Gulati suggesting that the government (or he) does not think it is necessary to invest in agriculture and the only reason to do it would be to provide for the NFSO. The public investment in agriculture has stagnated since the 1990s leading to stagnation in the agrarian economy and this needs to be corrected to protect the lives and livelihoods of majority of our rural population and to ensure that we remain food sufficient and do not become import dependent like in the 1960s. This is a goal in itself whether we have a PDS or not. An expanded and reformed PDS can only contribute to revitalising agriculture by increasing decentralised procurement (which by the way will also reduce transportation costs) and including newer crops such as pulses and oilseeds.
The NFSO in fact is only a very small step towards ensuring food security. It is a myth that it is very expensive and that it will result in food shortages in the open market. The current food subsidy is around Rs. 90,000 crores. With an average subsidy of Rs. 20 per kg; the food bill will cost about Rs. 1,24,000 crores (for 62 mn tonnes). This is around 1.2% of the GDP and not 3% as projected by media reports. The other figure that is repeatedly quoted by the media is that food subsidy was only Rs. 25,000 crores 10 years back and it has been constantly increasing at a rapid rate. The reality is that as seen in the figure below from the Economic Survey of 2013 over the last 10 years the food subsidy has hovered around 1% of GDP. Interestingly, the percentage of households accessing foodgrains from the PDS has gone up from 28% in 2004-05 to 39% in 2009-10 and 44% by 2011-12 despite the expenditure remaining constant at less than 1% of GDP. This has also been accompanied by steep reduction in leakages in the PDS. In fact it is the improvement in efficiency of PDS which has been ignored by Bhalla’s calculation. But that also explains why the NFSO can still deliver subsidised foodgrains to 67% of the population without much additional costs if the PDS is made efficient.

Source: Economic Survey, 2013
This unfortunate discussion around the cost of the NFSO has only served to divert the attention away from the real issues. Similar attempts were made to derail the NREGA when it was being passed, with one estimate stating the Act will cost up to Rs. 2,08,000 crores a year. After it was passed, the expenditure on NREGA has been less than Rs. 40,000 crores a year.
So, how far does the NFSO go in addressing hunger and malnutrition? Is it indeed the “gamechanger” that it is being made out to be?
One of the positive aspects of the NFSO is that it presents the opportunity to move the PDS away from the current APL-BPL system (linked to the poverty line) which is fraught with problems of identification and ensuing exclusion of many poor to one where only the rich are identified and excluded and the rest are covered with uniform. The NFSO proposes to do this by covering 67% of the population at uniform prices of Rs. 3 for rice, Rs. 2 for wheat and Re. 1 for millets; while excluding the rest. The 67% is to be divided across the states based on their level of development. So states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan can expect to cover 80% or more of their rural population under the PDS. Such an expansion, if accompanied by some reforms, can be expected to go a long way in strengthening the PDS in these states. In fact, the NFSO can also be expected to contribute to lowering of leakages in the PDS. Recent studies based on NSS data and field surveys have shown that the extent of leakages in the PDS have been going down in many states. The PDS is functioning better in states where the BPL coverage has been expanded, where issues prices have been decreased and reforms in PDS have been initiated (Drèze and Khera, 2011; Himanshu, 2011; Khera, 2011; Sen and Himanshu, 2011) which is precisely what the NFSO aims to do.
Concerns with the NFSO
However, there are problems with the way in which the PDS entitlements have been currently defined. While the principle of excluding the rich and covering the rest is a sound one (of course, it would be even better if the PDS is universalised) the ordinance does not specify the identification criteria for exclusion. Moreover, a cut-off (75% for rural areas and 50% for urban areas) is prescribed at the national level but there is no clarity on what the percentages will be in each state. There is once again the danger of some poor being left out arbitrarily. What can be hoped is that the state governments take this opportunity to universalise coverage, at least in the poorest districts, by using state funds. The NFSO also provides only a limited quantity of 5kgs per head per month and restricts itself to cereals; where the minimum basket should have included pulses and oils. By doing so, the extremely inadequate diets of the poor could have been addressed to some extent.
The NFSO is also very limited in its entitlements for children, who ideally should have been central to a food security act. Child malnutrition levels in India are extremely high and it is well known that interventions to address malnutrition must focus on children under two years of age, pregnant and lactating women and adolescent girls. While the NFSO converts the existing schemes for mid day meal and take home rations in schools and anganwadi centres into legal entitlements, this is not accompanied by essential interventions for treatment of malnourished children, provision of calorie-dense local foods, growth monitoring, and nutrition and health education and so on. Addressing malnutrition would also require other complementary interventions such as access to basic health care, sanitation and drinking water.
The NFSO introduces a limited but extremely critical entitlement for women in the form of maternity entitlements for all pregnant women. By doing this, for the first time we recognise the right of children under six months to breastfeeding and that most women in our country are in fact ‘working’ women. However, once again the ordinance fails us by not going far enough – maternity entitlements are wage compensation for women to be able to stay home for rest and exclusive breastfeeding. They should therefore have been linked to minimum wages. But, the ordinance at least makes a beginning by including this very important entitlement.
The Congress is now in a hurry to implement the ordinance and reap electoral benefits. Such hurry without working out proper identification criteria and mechanisms can derail the entire process. On the other hand, many state governments over the last few years have moved many steps forward in improving their PDS – these states can now take advantage of the additional resources to universalise coverage and even provide other items such as pulses and oils if they are not already doing so.
In many ways the NFSO is a missed opportunity. A comprehensive Act which includes procurement, storage and distribution through a decentralised, strengthened and universal PDS, universal nutrition services for children, special provisions such as community kitchens in urban areas, provision of cooked meals for the destitute persons, social security pensions for the aged and strong grievance redressal and monitoring mechanism is the need of the hour[2]. One can only hope that when the ordinance is debated in the Parliament amendments towards strengthening its provisions as introduced by the Left and some regional parties are discussed and passed.
 
References:
Bhalla, Surjit (2013): Manmonia’s FSB: 3% of GDP, Indian Express, 6 July 2013
Drèze, Jean and Reetika Khera (2011): PDS leakages: the plot thickens, The Hindu, 12 August 2011
Himanshu (2011): A revived PDS is visible now, Livemint, 16 August 2011
Khera, Reetika (2011): Revival of the Public Distribution System: Evidence and Explanations, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 46 Issue 44
Sen, Abhijit and Himanshu (2011): Why Not a Universal Food Security Legislation?, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 46 Issue 12

 

[1] 2.1 kg per head is the average consumption from PDS for the entire population and not just the 44% who are accessing PDS.
[2] See www.righttofoodindia.org for the Right to Food Campaign’s demands in relation to the Food Security Act. It covers all of these aspects.

Accept expert panel report on GM crops: forum

Gargi Parsai

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/accept-expert-panel-report-on-gm-crops-forum/article4950675.ece

The report is a strong indictment of regulatory affairs: Coalition

Welcoming the recommendations of the Technical Expert Committee () on Genetically Modified crops, the Coalition for a GM-free India has urged the government to accept the report and “not come in the way of delivery of justice.”
The panel, set up by the Supreme Court in a Public Interest Litigation, has recommended in its final report that it would not be advisable to conduct any field trials in Bt transgenic crops till gaps in regulatory system are addressed.
“The report is a strong indictment of the state of regulatory affairs with regard to modern biotechnology in the country. We urge that the Central government to take the report seriously and act on it in the interests of food safety, security, and sovereignty as well as protection of environment and farm livelihoods,” the Coalition said in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
However, the Association of Biotech Led Enterprise – Agriculture Group (ABLE AG) that represents the industry has termed the document — though an improvement over the interim report that called for a 10-year moratorium on field trials of Bt transgenic in all food crops (those used directly for human consumption) — as “regressive and a troubled treatise” that promises to push Indian agriculture into an archaic age.
“The industry believes the TEC report, besides being incomplete, is also anti-science and anti-research and will severely dent the future of country’s farmers besides destroying the domestic private and public sector research. While improving the testing programmes is a continuous process, we do not believe that testing should be stopped in the interim,’’ said Ram Kaundinya, Chairman, ABLE AG in a press statement.
The report submitted to the Supreme Court has not been signed by R.S. Paroda, the representative of Agriculture Ministry who was inducted after the submission of the interim report last year.
“This is not surprising given the fact that Dr. Paroda’s very inclusion in the Committee was controversial and objectionable — his organisation receives funding from biotech majors like Monsanto and Mahyco — and this constitutes a clear conflict of interest. It is ironical that even this court-appointed committee has had to face such a conflict of interest situation, given that this has been the case with almost all GM-related issues in India so far,” the Coalition’s letter said.
The TEC’s comments with regard to bio-safety dossiers that were approved by the current biotechnology regulator is a scathing indictment of the failings of the existing regulatory regime, the Coalition noted.
The TEC could not find any compelling reason for India to be the first country, where Bt transgenics are widely consumed in large amounts for any major food crop that is directly used for human consumption.
The TEC has therefore reiterated its recommendation made in the Interim Report that there should be a moratorium on field trials for Bt in food crops, until there is more definitive information from sufficient number of studies as to the long-term safety of Bt in food crops.

  • Industry calls report as regressive, biased and a troubled treatise
  • Report not signed by R.S. Paroda, Agriculture Ministry representative
 

India’s Food Security Rots in Storage

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/06/indias-food-security-rots-in-storage/
By Manipadma Jena 

Paddy stock being salvaged from open space storage in Bhubaneswar as monsoons arrive early this year. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPSPaddy stock being salvaged from open space storage in Bhubaneswar as monsoons arrive early this year. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 21 2013 (IPS) – Shooing off a quartet of hens that come pecking, 24-year-old Kamala Batra sits guard over a sack of coarse rice spread out on the courtyard. After small black insects slowly crawl away in the sun’s heat, she gathers it to cook for the day’s free midday meal – a pan-India government food security scheme for students.
Batra, a member of the women’s collective that cooks school meals in Kosagumuda village, in the tribal Nabrangpur district of the eastern state Odisha, says government supplies of old and almost inedible food grains under the subsidised public distribution system are not uncommon.
A recent report from the national auditor, tabled in parliament, found that India did not have space to store 33 million tonnes of foodgrain worth 12 billion dollars, which it had bought from farmers for various government food security schemes.

“Thirteen percent of [India’s] gross domestic product (GDP) is wasted every year due to wastage of food grains in the supply chain.” — Dinesh Rai, India’s Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority.

 
This constituted a 40-percent shortage in storage space, for a total stock of  82 million tonnes that was held by the Food Corporation Of India (FCI) in June last year.
A 1964-born monolith under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, FCI procures, disburses and maintains buffer food grains, mainly rice, wheat and coarse grains, countrywide.
FCI has recently resorted to wheat export to ease the storage problem.
“How will it handle additional quantities that will have to be mandatorily procured when India formalises the National Food Security Bill (NFSB)”, asked food security activist Badal Tah from tribal populated Rayagada distric, which in 2002 saw a national uproar over deaths due to starvation.
Malnourishment and inequitable access to food are unwieldy issues India is currently grappling with as the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reach closure in 2015.
The NFSB will provide legal entitlement to subsidised food grains to around 67 percent of India’s over-two-billion population. It is likely to cost the exchequer about 21 billion dollars.
Tah is joined by a strong section that says India may well be comfortably placed in regard to the availability of food grains, but its present infrastructure and approach to crop management need structural changes before it can implement the food security law.  The bill has been debated in parliament since December 2011.
Assessing a five-year period from 2007 to 2012, a recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) tabled in parliament in May of this year, severely indicts the FCI for colossal mismanagement in food procurement, storage and evacuation.

While a volley of recent studies reiterates colossal food wastage owing to inadequate and unscientific storage infrastructure, up to 20 percent of India’s population live on 1.25 dollars a day.
A 2013 report from the London-based Institution of Mechanical Researchers, “Global food: waste not, want not”, finds India wastes a quantity of wheat equivalent to the entire production of Australia every year, of which 21 million tonnes perishes every year due to a lack of inadequate storage and distribution.
FCI itself admits India lost 79 million tonnes, or nine percent of total wheat produced over a four-year period from 2009 to 2013.
“Thirteen percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) is wasted every year due to wastage of food grains in the supply chain,” said Dinesh Rai, a senior official of the federal government’s Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority.
Aside from food grains, India loses 12 million tonnes of fruits and 21 million tonnes of vegetables every year due to a lack of cold storage facility, according to a 2009 study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
In India’s remote areas, in a bumper harvest year, fast perishable vegetables like tomatoes are sold at dump prices for two rupees, or 25 cents, per kilogramme.
Lack of storage is a major tool in the middleman’s hands to exploit the small farmers.
“We wait for government procurement officials to get the minimum support price (MSP), but they have delayed these last two years,” Raju Jani told IPS from Odisha’s Koraput district.
They are heavily in debt, he said, for things like seeds and fertilisers, “So we give our harvest to the rice miller’s agent for whatever price he offers”.
With storage space shortfall and a go-slow government procurement, farmers are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – the loan shark and the middleman.
The CAG report has questioned the basis for high a MSP, which is being viewed increasingly as a political sop to voters. According to current rules, if farmers come forth to sell at MSP, the government cannot decline to buy or set a cut-off procurement quantity.
This is yet another reason for excessive procurement of food grains over the last few years. It however benefits the large landholders more, say a section of political observers.
In 2012, it cost the federal government 16 billion dollars to overall handle the grain it bought at MSP, including transportation, storage and other overheads; its subsidised disbursement, in turn, fetched 4.7 billion dollars.
With the food security law, the government would procure much larger quantities for distribution, at subsidised prices of one to three rupees (about 0.02 to 0.05 dollars).
Amid the losses, many NGOs are calling for the reinstitution of  village level grain banks.
“Farmers lost their self reliance, all because of the centralized food production of wheat and paddy. Multi-cropping should be brought back,” Thooran Nambi, of the Tamil Nadu Farmers Association, told IPS from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu State.
He’s in favour of abolishing subsidised food for rural people, saying it should be given during emergencies only, he added.
In its study, the Institute of Mechanical Researchers recommends developed nations transfer their engineering knowledge, technology and design know-how to developing countries.
Meanwhile, “The storage and warehousing sector should get infrastructure status,” Suman Jyoti Khaitan, who heads a policy advocacy group, told IPS. “So that finances are availabe and the private sector can get in, too.”

Phosphorus: Essential to Life—Are We Running Out?

BY |APRIL 1, 2013

applying phosphorus fertilizer

Fertilizing a corn field in Iowa. Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Phosphorus, the 11th most common element on earth, is fundamental to all living things. It is essential for the creation of DNA, cell membranes, and for bone and teeth formation in humans. It is vital for food production since it is one of three nutrients (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus) used in commercial fertilizer. Phosphorus cannot be manufactured or destroyed, and there is no substitute or synthetic version of it available. There has been an ongoing debate about whether or not we are running out of phosphorus. Are we approaching peak phosphorus? In other words, are we using it up faster than we can economically extract it?
In fact, there is plenty of phosphorus left on Earth. Animals and humans excrete almost 100 percent of the phosphorus they consume in food. In the past, as part of a natural cycle, the phosphorus in manure and waste was returned to the soil to aid in crop production. Today phosphorus is an essential component of commercial fertilizer. Because industrial agriculture moves food around the world for processing and consumption, disrupting the natural cycle that returned phosphorus to the soil via the decomposition of plants, in many areas fertilizer must now be continually applied to enrich the soil’s nutrients.
Most of the phosphorus used in fertilizer comes from phosphate rock, a finite resource formed over millions of years in the earth’s crust. Ninety percent of the world’s mined phosphate rock is used in agriculture and food production, mostly as fertilizer, less as animal feed and food additives. When experts debate peak phosphorus, what they are usually debating is how long the phosphate rock reserves,i.e. the resources that can economically be extracted, will hold out.
Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at the Earth Institute, does not believe there is a phosphorus shortage. “In my long 50-year career, “ he said,  “once every decade, people say we are going to run out of phosphorus. Each time this is disproven. All the most reliable estimates show that we have enough phosphate rock resources to last between 300 and 400 more years.”
In  2010, the International Fertilizer Development Center determined that phosphate rock reserves would last for several centuries. In 2011, the U.S. Geological Survey revised its estimates of phosphate rock reserves from the previous 17.63 billion tons to 71.65 billion tons in accordance with IFDC’s estimates. And, according to Sanchez, new research shows that the amount of phosphorus coming to the surface by tectonic uplift is in the same range as the amounts of phosphate rock we are extracting now.

Global meat consumption from 1961 to 2009. Photo credit: FAO

Global meat consumption from 1961 to 2009. Photo credit: FAO

The duration of phosphate rock reserves will also be impacted by the decreasing quality of the reserves, the growing global population, increased meat and dairy consumption (which require more fertilized grain for feed), wastage along the food chain, new technologies, deposit discoveries and improvements in agricultural efficiency and the recycling of phosphorus. Moreover, climate change will affect the demand for phosphorus because agriculture will bear the brunt of changing weather patterns. Most experts agree, however, that the quality and accessibility of currently available phosphate rock reserves are declining, and the costs to mine, refine, store and transport them are rising.
Ninety percent of the phosphate rock reserves are located in just five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan and the United States. The U.S., which has 25 years of phosphate rock reserves left, imports a substantial amount of phosphate rock from Morocco, which controls up to 85 percent of the remaining phosphate rock reserves. However, many of Morocco’s mines are located in Western Sahara, which Morocco has occupied against international law. Despite the prevalence of phosphorus on earth, only a small percentage of it can be mined because of physical, economic, energy or legal constraints.
In 2008, phosphate rock prices spiked 800 percent because of higher oil prices, increased demand for fertilizer (due to more meat consumption) and biofuels, and a short-term lack of availability of phosphate rock. This led to surging food prices, which hit developing countries particularly hard.
With a world population that is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and require 70 percent more food than we produce today, and a growing global middle class that is consuming more meat and dairy, phosphorus is crucial to global food security. Yet, there are no international organizations or regulations that manage global phosphorus resources. Since global demand for phosphorus rises about 3 percent each year (and may increase as the global middle class grows and consumes more meat), our ability to feed humanity will depend upon how we manage our phosphorus resources.
Unfortunately, most phosphorus is wasted. Only 20 percent of the phosphorus in phosphate rock reaches the food consumed globally. Thirty to 40 percent is lost during mining and processing; 50 percent is wasted in the food chain between farm and fork; and only half of all manure is recycled back into farmland around the world.

Eutrophication in the Caspian Sea. Photo credit: Jeff Schmaltz, NASA

Eutrophication in the Caspian Sea. Photo credit: Jeff Schmaltz, NASA

Most of the wasted phosphorus enters our rivers, lakes and oceans from agricultural or manure runoff or from phosphates in detergent and soda dumped down drains, resulting in eutrophication. This is a serious form of water pollution wherein algae bloom, then die, consuming oxygen and creating a “dead zone” where nothing can live. Over 400 coastal dead zones at the mouths of rivers exist and are expanding at the rate of 10 percent per decade. In the United States alone, economic damage from eutrophication is estimated to be $2.2 billion a year.
As the quality of phosphate rock reserves declines, more energy is necessary to mine and process it. The processing of lower grade phosphate rock also produces more heavy metals such as cadmium and uranium, which are toxic to soil and humans; more energy must be expended to remove them as well.  Moreover, increasingly expensive fossil fuels are needed to transport approximately 30 million tons of phosphate rock and fertilizers around the world annually.
Sanchez says that while there is no reason to fear a phosphorus shortage, we do need to be more efficient about our use of phosphorus, especially to minimize eutrophication. The keys to making our phosphorus resources more sustainable are to reduce demand and find alternate sources. We need to:

  • Improve the efficiency of mining
  • Integrate livestock and crop production; in other words, use the manure as fertilizer
  • Make fertilizer application more targeted
  • Prevent soil erosion and agricultural runoff by promoting no-till farming, terracing, contour tilling and the use of windbreaks
  • Eat a plant based diet
  • Reduce food waste from farm to fork
  • Recover phosphorus from human waste
Cow dung to be used as fertilizer drying in Punjab. Photo credit: Gopal Aggarwal http://gopal1035.blogspot.com

Cow dung to be used as fertilizer drying in Punjab. Photo credit: Gopal Aggarwal http://gopal1035.blogspot.com

Phosphorus can be reused. According to some studies, there are enough nutrients in one person’s urine to grow 50 to 100 percent of the food needed by another person. NuReSys is a Belgian company whose technology can recover 85 percent of the phosphorus present in wastewater, and turn it into struvite crystals that can be used as a slow fertilizer.
New phosphorus-efficient crops are also being developed. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute discovered a gene that makes it possible for rice plants to grow bigger roots that absorb more phosphorus. The overexpression of this gene can increase the yield of rice plants when they are grown in phosphorus-poor soil. Rice plants with this gene are not genetically modified, but are being bred with modern techniques; they are expected to be available to farmers in a few years.
A breed of genetically modified Yorkshire pigs, called the Enviropig, has been developed by the University of Guelph in Canada to digest phosphorus from plants more efficiently and excrete less of it. This results in lower costs to feed the pigs and less phosphorus pollution, since pig manure is a major contributor to eutrophication. Last spring, however, the Enviropigs were euthanized after the scientists lost their funding.
The Agriculture and Food Security Center is working on food security in Africa and attempting to eliminate hunger there and throughout the tropics within the next two to three decades.
In the mountains of Tanzania along Lake Manyara, Sanchez’ team has discovered deposits of “minjingu,”  high-quality phosphate rock that is cheaper and just as efficient as triple super phosphate (a highly concentrated phosphate-based fertilizer) in terms of yields of corn per hectare.

Minjingu Mines & Fertilisers Ltd.. Photo credit: IFDC Photography

Minjingu Mines & Fertilisers Ltd.. Photo credit: IFDC Photography

Minjingu deposits are formed by the excreta and dead bodies of cormorants and other birds that roost and die in the mountains, forming biogenic rock phosphate or guano deposits. Guano, the feces and urine of seabirds (and bats), has a high phosphorus content, and in the past was often used as fertilizer.
Sanchez’ researchers have also discovered a common bush called the Mexican Sunflower that is an efficient phosphorus collector. It grows by the side of the road, fertilized by the excreta dumped there by farmers. The farmers cut it down and use it as green manure, an organic phosphorus fertilizer which helps grow high-quality crops like vegetables.

Mexican Sunflower. Photo credit: John Tann

Mexican Sunflower. Photo credit: John Tann

The Agriculture and Food Security Center team also helps farmers contain erosion and runoff by encouraging them to keep some vegetative cover, either alive or dead, on the soil year-round. This is done through intercropping, leaving crop residue in the fields, contour planting on slopes or terracing.
“There is no data to support the idea of peak phosphorus,” said Sanchez. “Just fears. New deposits are continually being discovered. We also have more efficient extraction that is getting more phosphate rock out of land-based sediments. And there is an enormous 49-gigaton deposit of phosphorus in the continental shelf from Florida to Maritime Canada that scientists have known about for years. Now there is some experimental extraction going on off the coast of North Carolina.”
Pedro Sanchez, author of Properties and Management of Soils in the Tropics published in 1976, which continues to be a bestseller, is currently working on Tropical Soils Science, an update of his previous work. It will be published by 2015.
Correction: This post was updated on March 22, 2019 to remove a statement that phosphorus is a renewable resource.

The Dragon and The Elephant: A Comparative Study of Agricultural and Rural Reforms in China and India

“During the past two-and-a-half decades, China and India have implemented a series of economic reforms that have led to recent growth rates of 9-11 percent per year in China and 8-9 percent per year in India. The rapid economic growth of the two countries has not only captured the attention of the world but has also set into motion a rethinking of the very paradigm of economic development because, despite similar trends in growth rates, the two countries have taken different reform paths, which have led to different rates of poverty reduction. Thus far, agriculture-led growth in China has reduced poverty much faster than has India’s experience of liberalizing and reforming the manufacturing sector. With public investments in rural roads and agricultural research and development (R&D) playing critical roles, China has been able to not only feed its population but also raise rural incomes despite having much smaller average landholding size than in India. Nonetheless, there are also lessons to be learned from India’s experience. This brief is based on a book, The Dragon and the Elephant: Agricultural and Rural Reforms in China and India (published for IFPRI by Johns Hopkins University Press and, in South Asia, by Oxford University Press-India), which compares the rural development and agricultural reform experiences of China and India and examines the lessons that can be learned from both.”
Book published by IFPRI
2007 The Dragon and The Elephant A Comparative Study of Agricultural and Rural Reforms in China and India
Paper published in EPW
2008 The Dragon and The Elephant A Comparative Study of Agricultural and Rural Reforms in China and India

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