ENSURING FOOD SECURITY OF RURAL PEOPLE : SOME POLICY INTERVENTIONS

Abstract

Food security is not only physical and economic access of minimum quantity of food for survival but includes
the nutritional aspects also. While addressing the issue of food security it is necessary to consider food
security in a much broader perspective. Food security is directly related to poverty and inequality in
productive resources. The rate of growth of population, economy, inflation, agricultural sector and
development of human resources equally affect the overall quality of life of rural people, whether in rural
or sub-urban and urban areas. Semi-urban people face the problem of food insecurity mainly because most
of them do not own any productive resource, expect their own labour. A few of them, who own productive
resource like land, face the problem of indiscriminate use of land for other purposes than cultivation due to
expansion of cities and small towns. Proper identification of poor as a target group suffering from
malnutrition and food insecurity itself is the main problem in cost-effective food management system.
Export-led growth of agricultural commodities is necessary to avail the benefit of access to international
market but food security can not be compromised with export-led growth. It is necessary that agriculture,
which supports majority of people, must focus on increasing food production. Broad-based agricultural
growth with wide coverage and focus on increasing labour productivity as well as labour use intensity would
be more useful strategy for increasing economic access of food to the rural poor. Agriculture should be
diversified with product-mix based on the crop suitability of region that can have value addition. Moreover,
non-price factors such as public irrigation, human resource development, and yield-increasing technologies
are equally important in improving agricultural as well as labour productivity. Often it is reported that food
for poor people through public distribution system does not reach to them and also the quality of food
products is very poor. In addition, the transaction cost for procurement and distribution of food is often too
high. This requires proper management and active participation of private sector also. The bureaucratic
hurdles and administrative cost substantially increases the food subsidy. Hence, food management system
should be redesigned and responsibility of procurement and distribution should be entrusted to local people
at local level by their greater involvement. This is the essence of this paper.