As the area under dal cultivation keeps on reducing to make way for wheat, rice and cash crops like soya and sugarcane the price of the essential food will keep on rising. And the cost to us is not only monetary but we will be paying a price on our health as well, as dal is the cheapest source of protein and iron for a grossly malnourished population.
By Amir Ullah Khan
In a country that is still wary of importing food and livid when it is exported, dal is a notable exception. When pulses get exported, no one blinks an eyelid. When we import lentils, there is no hue and cry. This anomaly is easily explained. We export very little of the dal we produce. And we always are under pressure to import as we are always falling woefully short of demand, leading to ever-increasing prices of all kinds of dal.
The fact of the matter is that India is the largest producer of pulses in the world and our consumption demand is much higher than what the world produces. No wonder the farmer in Canada, who has little use for dal in his food habits, grows more and more every year to export to India, where dal productivity has dropped and prices have shot up.
Pulses have been critical to Indian agriculture for ages. They have been known to improve soil fertility, are crops that do not need the kind of water that rice or wheat crops need and are tough competition to most known weeds and pests. For the human being, dals are the cheapest source of proteins. Pulses also provide much needed iron to a malnourished population that does not consume nor have access to the amounts of meat eaten in just about every other part of the world where meat is the chief source of protein and iron. However, that is where we get hurt the most.
While the total area under rice and wheat has grown substantially and we have spent billions on irrigation and support, the per capita availability of pulses has reduced to almost half from about 60 grams a day just after independence to 26 grams a day now. In the absence of other sources of protein and iron, the recommendation coming from the Indian Council of Medical Research is at least 43 grams of dal a day per head.
To go back to the peculiar nature of trade in dal, it is interesting to note that more than 90 per cent of all pigeon pea produced in the world (arhar or toor) is grown in India. While chickpea, or chana comes behind with more than 70 per cent grown in India. We are effectively the only producers and consumers of arhar in the world. No wonder we cannot import.
And when we do, we only can access some really minor quantities of dal from Burma, which exports nearly 95% of its production to India. But Burma is really tiny and even if it increases its dal production, it cannot match India’s ever-increasing demand for dal. All dal that we import comes from Canada, Australia, Burma, Mozambique, Iran and Turkey; each a small player struggling to grow a crop that does not find much demand domestically.
What adds to the problem is that the dal grown elsewhere is not really the dal we are accustomed to on our dinner tables. Some dal that tastes like ours comes surreptitiously from Pakistan through Dubai.
Simply because here is a large dal eating nation that cannot increase its production from the 15 odd million tonnes a year it has been maintaining stubbornly for nearly five decades now.
Almost axiomatically, prices have been going up exponentially and what sold for Rs 35 a kilo even three years ago now is comfortably retailing at more than a hundred. In a queer turn of fate, these price rises have not gone unnoticed, and news has started leaking that the Afghan farmer too now finds it much more viable to produce dal for India. It is certainly safer, but also gives the same kind of returns that opium farming might.
The concern over dal is just as serious as the one over oilseeds. Both crops are the main villains behind primary or food inflation hovering above 16 per cent for several quarters now. The entire focus seems to be on the monetary policy with the Reserve Bank of India being looked upon to solve price rise with adjustments in money supply and interest rates. Which is all fine, but what can monetary policy alone do when food supply is the major bottleneck even if demand were to be static.
The oilseeds sector is another story that needs attention specifically. Some of its concerns however are the same as the ones we are discussing here. Demand is growing at 2 per cent for dal per annum and supply as we have already noted refuses to go up. There are no buffer stocks that can be played with. Farmers who rather fancy growing dal because of its ability to grow in drought like conditions and
with very little or no fertilizer are unable to break the shackles of poor productivity.
The moot point that would occur to anyone reading this dal tragedy would, why is it that farmers do not move to producing dal in India? If prices are skyrocketing, why does the famer continue growing wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton? Why is it that if in 1964, the area under chickpea cultivation in the northern states was 5 million hectares, it now is struggling at less than a million hectares? Also why is it that despite the government finally guaranteeing a minimum support price to pulses, there are no takers unlike in the case of wheat or rice?
There is desperation in the dal sector now. The government is consistently increasing the MSP. It has announced that the increase, which ranges from Rs 380 a quintal to Rs 700, is part of the government’s strategy to boost production of pulses in the country.
The agriculture ministry also has said that additionally farmers selling tur, urad and moong to procurement agencies during the harvest period of two months will get an additional incentive of Rs 5 per kilogram. Will this be enough?
In the MSP race that started with enormous benefits to wheat and rice farmers, the pulse farmers demand Rs 3,000 a quintal now. With productivity really low, pulses do not bring in the cash even if retail prices are high. In any case, in the absence of milling facilities, the farmer must sell to the middleman, and in a hurry as pulses cannot be stored unless turned into dal at the mill. The ministry has tried other ways to raise production. In one really out of the box idea, it has now asked for approval to encourage Indian firms to acquire land abroad, especially in Africa to grow pulses.
Another idea was to encourage sowing pulses in the high yielding wheat and rice growing regions of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
But with procurement of pulses uncertain and unlikely, even at MSPs being announced, it will only be a reckless farmer who will convert his guaranteed wheat production into anything as fanciful as pulses. He
knows that wheat will always be purchased, buffer stocks notwithstanding.
He also knows that sugar has its lobbyists in the right place and that rice will never be left high and dry. The risk with pulses, with their poor quality seeds, lack of infrastructure, uncertainty over government procurement and dependent on demand from the relatively poorer customers, is rather high and any move in this direction foolhardy.