Fri, Jun 27, 2008 page9

• India’s new middle class underlines global food disparities

  • By Siddhartha Kumar and Peter Mayer / DPA
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  If there is one place in the Jethani household that shows the family’s swift rise to prosperity over the last few years, it has to be the kitchen.

  The hub of activity in this middle-class New Delhi household, the kitchen is full of the aroma of spices and sound of utensils as the women focus their efforts on the dining table throughout the day.

  Six years ago, when Shiv Jethani, a middle-ranking government official retired, the family faced an uncertain future: There was no steady source of income and his only son, Gireesh, had yet to complete his engineering diploma.

  The Jethanis had a meager diet consisting mostly of vegetables. Mutton or chicken, much relished by the family, was cooked only on Sundays.

  But as India witnessed the highest salary increases in Asia, Gireesh hopped jobs and joined a British real-estate multinational as an assistant project manager earlier this year, earning 120,000 rupees (US$2,805) a month, seven times his father’s salary.

  Every weekend, Gireesh and his wife procure food and meats from the neighborhood Spencer’s department store, which is among numerous food and grocery outlets that have sprung up across Indian cities and are packed every evening with families picking the best off the shelves.

  Now non-vegetarian meals are almost a staple at the Jethani home; chicken or mutton is cooked three or four times a week. The family’s tastes have also become more “global,” with a diverse range of foods, such as olive oils, cheese and exotic fruits from far-off countries making it to the dining table.

  But while millions with increasing wealth in fast-growing India and China buy greater quantities of food and meat, this has driven up food prices and become a key aggravating factor in the global food crisis. The spurt of meat consumption — particularly in China — has ratcheted up demand for grains for bread as well as cereals for animal feed.

  Every kilogram of mutton, pork or beef requires several kilograms of grain to produce. Thus grain is shifted to animal feed or land is diverted from human food to animal food production.

  There are other important causes behind the growing global food crisis as well, including US subsidies that continue to encourage biofuel production, population growth, the surge in oil prices, poor harvests owing to climate change and governments amassing stocks and placing export restrictions on food to control domestic prices.

  In many ways India encapsulates on a national scale a global situation in which food prices have risen to the highest levels in 30 years. This exacerbates a crisis that, according to UN estimates, has 862 million people facing food shortages.

  The food crisis has sparked riots in several countries in recent months and is now being treated by world leaders on a par with terrorism as a threat to international stability.

  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has listed 22 countries that are particularly vulnerable because of a combination of high levels of chronic hunger — defined as population undernourishment of more than 30 percent — and being net importers of both food and fuel. Countries such as Eritrea, Niger, Comoros, Haiti and Liberia are particularly affected.

  But nowhere is the situation as ironic as in India.

  The country that has the fastest growing list of millionaires and billionaires and sees growing ranks of obese children in cities also has the highest number of hungry people on Earth — one in every three malnourished children is an Indian.

  While the removal of trade-distorting subsidies and government restrictions on production are talked about as possible solutions, the forecast remains grim, with food experts saying that it could take at least a decade to bring down food prices.

  Against this backdrop the UN recently organized a high-level conference in Rome attended by delegates from almost every country to hammer out ways to curb food price hikes.

  Governments, however, remain divided over the causes of the soaring food costs, especially on the relative impact of trade barriers — including taxes and other export and import controls — the role of biofuels, market speculation and even climate change.

  Through a declaration, the Rome conference re-affirmed a 1996 pledge by world leaders to cut in half the number of hungry people by 2015, a pledge that has looked shaky in recent years because most intermediate targets have not been met.

  It also committed its signatories to two short-term courses of action: to respond urgently to requests for assistance from hunger-threatened countries and to lend immediate support to agricultural production.

  But most observers agreed that no clear agenda was reached to tackle food prices, relegating controversies over trade barriers and biofuels to a declaration while not even mentioning market speculation, let alone ways to counter it.
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