Time for India to Graduate from Food to Nutrition Security

Nutrition security is a strategic necessity for India for various reasons, most important being renewed focus on healthier way of life post-pandemic.

In the month of January, the harvest festival of Makar Sankranti is celebrated with great pomp and enthusiasm. It was the same day in 1761 when the Third Battle of Panipat was fought when the Maratha Empire, with its allies, obstructed Ahmad Shah Abdali and his allies. The battle witnessed choked ration and food supplies, a monumental lesson on wartime food and nutrition security. As the British Raj gradually took control of India's agriculture, food security became a survival issue.

Most of us have forgotten that immediately after the First War of Independence in 1857, the Indigo Uprising exploded against the forcible indigo cultivation by the British East India Company, and their indiscriminate push for other cash crops, hoarding of agricultural produce, deliberate dropping of groundwater levels, and the worst induced famines. In the post-Independence era, when India was staring at barrel-low stocks in its granaries and markets, China (1962) and Pakistan (1965) saw it as an opportune time to pull India into a war. Lesson learned, India soon became self-sufficient in agriculture and a significant exporter on its own terms. This is the right time to graduate from food security to nutrition security.

Food v/s Nutrition Security

So how are the two different? The United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security defines food security as the state where all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. The Indian government’s Ministry of Agriculture recognises nutrition security as adequate nutritional status in terms of protein, energy, vitamins, and minerals for all household members at all times, and thus, in principle, is more than food security.

Since the times of India’s Green Revolution in the 1960s, most of the global pursuit for food security, including that in India, has made it congruent with reducing hunger and providing calorie sufficiency to the population. This congruence has over-emphasised cultivating sugar, rice, wheat, corn, and soy. Over the years, minimum support prices, the food distribution program for the underprivileged, and the mid-day meal schemes for children have primarily depended on these staple crops. Such dependencies overshadowed the cultivation of micro-nutrients rich crops, including millets, pulses, and other coarse grains. Today, the entire food and beverage (F&B) and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry are rigidly married with the value-added products of staple crops. To add to the woes, highly-urbanised and staple crop-sourced food consumption patterns are causing micronutrient malnutrition, which is becoming a root cause of numerous lifestyle diseases.

Dependency on Staple Crops

The extent of dependency on staple crops is not limited to the commercial food-to-plate supply chains. Still, its signatures are witnessed in powerful international multilaterals too. I stumbled upon this lop-sided dependency while studying trends in agricultural remote sensing worldwide.

At the behest of the 2011 Group of Twenty (G20) Summit, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) established the Agricultural Monitoring Information System (AMIS) under its aegis. The AMIS is an inter-agency platform formed by agencies of G20 countries to make markets transparent and enhance policy response for global food security. It must be mentioned here that India is yet to assume the chair position for AMIS. While that happens, it is crucial to understand the institution and the issue at hand. AMIS receives immense assistance from space agencies through international bodies like the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) for its agricultural monitoring. CEOS has only space agencies as members, whereas GEO has diverse members, including universities, research institutions, industries, space agencies, and intergovernmental organisations. The GEO provides AMIS its GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) open-community agricultural monitoring initiative. GEOGLAM has been endorsed by the G20 grouping for its AMIS, and its membership spans beyond the G20 members. Over the years, GEOGLAM has provided satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) information on conditions of select crops so that production shortfalls are mitigated and market transparency is maintained. Interestingly, those four staple crops are rice, wheat, soy, and corn.

So, how can we untangle this messy knot? We must accept that the world, including India, is excessively dependent on staple crops. Hastily reducing dependency is no solution. It would instead create even more disputes. Staple crops are central to the minimum support prices for farmers, the food distribution programme for the underprivileged, and the mid-day meal schemes for children. Staple crops are also prioritised for hunger elimination and safeguarding calorie sufficiency. But these priorities, over the years, have created rigid supply chains and lobbies. However, such rigidity is not always redundant. Rigidity is vital for intergovernmental consensus on agriculture on multilateral platforms, accords on agriculture trade, setting phytosanitary standards, ironing issues between trade blocs and farm unions, and security of economic interests vested in value-added agro-products. On the downside, these factors resist constructive agriculture reforms. Nutrition is well-regarded throughout in this scheme of things, with hardly any entity criticising it. However, nutrition security stands last in the descending order, with economic security topping and food security on the second pedestal.

Importance of Nutrition Security for India

Given that India has achieved food security, the time is suitable for India to emphasise more on nutrition security. Our pursuit for nutrition security can have a three-dimensional rationale — public health, climate change and national security.

On the public health front, urban and rural surveys monitoring micronutrient levels in the population are necessary. The Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey and the Poshan Abhiyaan (Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment) undertook a micronutrients survey for the first time between 2016 and 2018. However, the survey was constrained to pre-school (0-4 years), school-going (5-9 years), and young adolescents (10-19 years) age groups. There is a need to expand the survey to other age groups and include a wide range of micronutrients missed in that previous survey. After that, the survey will assist in creating pathways to shift overly economics-driven agricultural practices to balanced and nutrition-driven farming practices.

The COVID-19 global pandemic created a constructive and revisionary narrative around public health in India. The emphasis on Ayurveda, a balanced diet, micronutrient supplements has grown tremendously in India. Market research shows that the compound annual growth rate of these Ayurvedic and other AYUSH (Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy) medicine and micronutrient supplements are experiencing a sudden growth spurt due to growing awareness about holistic health wellness. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), in scientific consultation with the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), has announced new rules on the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of vitamins and minerals. According to the new regulations, the RDA for both men and women has been increased in a big way. The rules will come into force from 1st July 2023 onwards. On the manufacturing front, the Indian government announced the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for the Food Processing Industry in May 2021. The scheme has prioritised millet-based products, processed fruits and vegetables, and milk products. While incentivising coarse-grain agro-products, millets, in this case, the government has also taken care to sustain the staple-crops industry but strengthening them with biofortification programs. In October 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated 17 biofortified varieties of 8 staple crops, including zinc-rich rice, protein and iron-rich wheat, calcium, iron, zinc-rich corn, and many more.

Second. Climate change is creating enormous challenges for classical farming practices. Agricultural practices are facing the brunt of anthropogenic climate change in both developed and developing economies. A Cornell University-led econometric study published by the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change in 2021 suggests a fall in total global agricultural productivity by 21% since 1961, with a severe drop in productivity, in the range of 26 to 34%, in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. India, fortunately, does not figure as a country with a drop in productivity.

Nevertheless, India will have to prepare climate change resilient agricultural practices to avoid famines. One such approach would be to reduce the cultivation of geographically incompatible staple crops detrimental to groundwater and soil fertility. Having estimated a considerable drop in productivity, reducing the emphasis on the productivity of such staple crops has become indispensable. This also means that the G20 will also have to create new AMIS-like mechanisms focusing on coarse grains, fruits, vegetables.

Third. The most comprehensive aspect of upkeeping nutrition of citizens is linked with national security. Take the U.S. example. The U.S. is one of the biggest spenders on research and development on medicine globally. Yet, a review published by the magazine Politico in 2019 evaluated that the U.S.’ National Institute of Health had spent 1.8 billion U.S. dollars in nutrition research the previous fiscal year. The same year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent 88 million dollars on human nutrition. On the contrary, the U.S. is estimated to have spent nearly 3 billion dollars in 2021 only on Halloween candies. Low emphasis on nutrition lowers life expectancy, increases medical expenditure, lowers productivity during years as students and later as professionals, and leads to weak military readiness in combat and non-combat roles.

India has begun to make significant investments in precision sports training, human spaceflight, and keeping the armed forces fighting fit. The common link between these three pursuits is nutrition. With the PLI Scheme for Food Processing, India is building capacities in manufacturing highly-nutritious Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) and One-Man Combo Pack Rations. These will go a big way in creating profound awareness about nutrition. Indian soldiers, sports stars, and the upcoming astronauts will be highly regarded personalities. The Indian government and even the non-governmental institutions can leverage their popularity to increase the sentiment about nutrition and wellness.

As we set the house in order, India will simultaneously have to exert balanced economics- and nutrition-oriented agriculture on the international front. Steps taken towards nutrition security will also raise the phytosanitary standards of our agro-produce and their value-added products. Such efforts will eliminate the regulatory hurdles our agro-exports face in various parts of the world. Once that is done, it will be clear how prioritising nutrition security can bring economic returns to India.

Nutrition security is a strategic necessity of India. Still, it has been overshadowed by food security and myopic agro-economic goals. In 2019, China's moon rover, Change 4, attempted to plant potato seeds, rapeseeds, cotton seeds, yeast, fruit fly eggs, and a common weed. Of them, only the cotton seeds sprouted. Similarly, the International Space Station has been attempting to grow various plants. However, all these pursuits were complex and needed precision-driven resource management. Suppose we are to assume the planet Earth as one big space station. In that case, we will be able to initiate practices that focus not only on economic returns but also on sustainable practices and precision-driven management about what gets cultivated and what gets fed to us. Nutrition will always remain a cornerstone of human progress here on Earth and it will remain the same as we become interplanetary species sometime by the 22nd century.

This blog was published in the January 2022 edition of Science India magazine published by Vijnana Bharati.