Skewed Food Policies, Distorted Inter-crop Parity, and Nutri-cereal Farmers

Farmer profitability, cost of food production, and associated issues of nutri-cereals are analysed by leveraging a large database spanning a 35-year period. The skewed food policies being followed in India are highlighted here. An unacceptably high distortion in inter-crop parity was found, which led to loss of profitability, increased costs, and lower prices for the nutri-cereals.

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for comments that helped in useful revisions and improving the presentation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav Conference on “Economic Resilience and Public Policy” organised by the Goa Business School, Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi and the Ministry of Finance, Government of India at the Goa Business School, Goa University during 10–11 October 2022. The authors acknowledge the useful comments of the participants, especially Chetan Ghate, Pranab Mukhopadhyay, William Joe, and Amit Basole. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors.

Farmer profitability, cost of food production, and associated issues of nutri-cereals are analysed by leveraging a large database spanning a 35-year period. The skewed food policies being followed in India are highlighted here. An unacceptably high distortion in inter-crop parity was found, which led to loss of profitability, increased costs, and lower prices for the nutri-cereals. The policymakers must take corrective measures in several aspects, including technologies, prices, input provision, processing, storage, and distributional policies to promote the production and consumption of nutri-cereals in India.

Persistent malnutrition, hidden hunger, livelihood concerns, and climate change imperatives on the one hand, while global commitments arising from the Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs) of the United Nations (un) on the other, brought back focus on millets, now called “nutri-cereals.” Green revolution-era policies and the consequent neglect of millets are well-documented (Nagaraj et al 2013; Pingali et al 2017; Nuthalapati et al 2022a). Policymakers promoted wheat and paddy to overcome food shortages for achieving self-sufficiency and built an elaborate framework to support their production. Several superior traits of nutri-cereals like drought tolerance, climate resilience, diet diversity, and nutritional superiority are ignored in the process, and “inferior goods” label was fixed on millets. Moreover, large number of smallholders in ecologically fragile environments with erratic and scanty rainfall cultivate nutri-cereals under rainfed conditions. It is both impossible and undesirable to shift them out of cultivation of these crops (Makkar et al 2019).