Waste less, eat more

Several African countries and Sri Lanka have asked the Indian government for about 1million tons of food grain. It seems they are not asking for the grain free of charge, but they are asking the flow of grains to continue.

Recently the Indian government had banned exporting of food grains after the continued rise in prices. The diplomatic requests put us in a bind, given the hesitance of the government to risk further increase in prices in an election year. Additionally, the Indian government has recently made some friendly trade overtures to Africa in the hopes of strengthening relationships and counter-balancing China’s oil investments and trade.

It seems to me that the solution out of this bind is actually quite simple.

But before we go into that, let’s put the 1 million tons in context. India produced 227 million tons of food grain per year in FY08, of which about 140mt is rice. India has 13mt of rice stored with the Good Corp. of India and state warehouses. So the amount needed by Africa is less than 1% of total production of rice and about 8% of stored rice.

But about 10% of the grains produced in India are lost post-production: wheat 8%; rice 11%; pulses 9.5%; and all food grains, 9.3%. Most of this is lost due to poor storage – either the grain is not dried sufficiently before storage or because of lack of adequate storage facilities.

If we manage to reduce wastage even slightly from 11% to 10% of production it would be more than enough for what Africa needs. And if we reduced it further, we could even add more rice to India’s food supply.

So instead of traditional knee-jerk measures of banning exports changing the amount of grains stored in govt warehouses, if we invested in proper grain drying and storage facilities, we’d have more than enough for everyone – India and Africa, alike.

Add to that the remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the "growing Indian and Chinese appetite is contributing to the global food crisis"… Tell me again, which country has the largest percent of overweight people on the planet? Jokes aside, probably what she meant to say is that millions of people slowly coming out of poverty is raising the demand for food, putting pressure on food prices. The US can no longer assume it can continue to consume the largest portions of the world's food and energy production. Progress made by developing countries will inevitably lead to less distorted consumption patterns around the world.

Sources for food production and waste data: CommodityOnline, UN Food and Agriculture Organization