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India's precious food supply stuck in mud
Sydney Morning Herald - March 12, 2011
Ben Doherty, Sarsa – The potatoes are washed and sorted by the women and children. The men pack them tightly into sacks, stitched with twine.
The season has been good, and Surinder Singh Jahar can expect 300 rupees ($A6.48) for a 50-kilogram bag. But the potatoes are going nowhere today.
The market is only six kilometres away, but a single afternoon's steady rain has melted the lone road out of Sarsa to a potholed, muddy mire.
"When the rains come, I can do nothing," Jahar says through an interpreter. "I cannot take my produce to the market. I sit and wait and I watch my food go bad, and I can make no money for my family."
It might be eight days, he guesses, before he can get to the wholesaler with whatever is then left of his crop.
No nation produces more fresh fruit, pulses or milk than India, and only China grows more wheat and rice. About 52 per cent of India's workforce is directly involved in growing food.
But fully one-quarter of the world's hungry, more than 250 million people without enough to eat each day, live in India. More than 40 per cent of India's children under five are malnourished.
And one of the major causes is as simple as it is crippling: it is the muddy trail that many villages have as their links to the outside world.
It's estimated between 30 and 40 per cent – about 60 million tonnes – of food grown in India goes rotten each year because it simply can't get where it needs to be. A road is washed away, a truck has broken down, the cold storage is full, out of order, or simply doesn't exist.
"An estimated 40 per cent of the fruit and vegetable production in India goes to waste due to lack of storage, cold chain and transport infrastructure," the country's Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, told parliament in his budget speech this month.
Failing transport is pushing up the cost of food. Rural families are going without necessities, even ingredients as basic as onion, because of crippling price spikes. Food inflation is running at about 15 per cent, and the UN food price index says staples have never been so expensive.
The UN's Special Representative on Food Security, David Nabarro, said: "Having roads, having the ability to transport your goods to market, for a start, can make a small farmer a lot of money. But secondly, it increases their access to other foods, which improves their nutrition enormously.
"Vegetables become a possibility, when previously it was only staples," he said. "Access to oils is improved, and this can be crucial. Even if you're very short of food and you're frying up cockroaches, you still need the oil."
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