📰 Restructuring our food system for a healthy world
Many disease outbreaks show that within the welfare of animals lies the welfare of people
•The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is an opportunity for us to analyse our food system, ideate and make changes for a healthier and more sustainable future. It is widely believed that the disease is zoonotic, which means that it got transferred to humans from the exotic animals stored in the ‘wet markets’ in Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the outbreak. Like SARS-CoV-2, SARS too was believed to have spread from civet cats to human beings in 2002. There are similar theories about Ebola and HIV. What lessons do these various outbreaks offer us?
Antibiotic resistance
•The first is for us to rethink the ways in which we farm animals. India has the world’s largest livestock population, is the largest producer of buffalo meat and produces about a 100 billion eggs annually. Animal agriculture is moving away from backyard operations to larger industrial facilities which aim to produce more meat with fewer resources. Industrialising animal agriculture comes at a huge cost to the environment, animals and to human beings. One concern is antibiotic resistance. According to the World Health Organization, the large volume of antibiotics given to farm animals contributed to the development of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria particularly in settings of intensive animal production.
•A majority of Indian households buy meat from local meat shops which, much like the wet markets, follow no regulations in the way the animals are kept or slaughtered. Most of the standalone meat vendors do not follow the standards laid down by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). Further, while welfare standards of animals are often neglected, one thing is clear: immunocompromised animals are the most likely to pass on an infection. It is thus imperative that India understand the risk of zoonosis and antibiotic resistance in terms of following FSSAI regulations and adhering to welfare standards in animal husbandry.
•The second lesson is to undertake greater investment in the alternate protein industry. India has a high rate of malnutrition among children under the age of five and is trying to combat this by encouraging meat production. With a paucity of space, this can only be done by giving a boost to industrial agriculture. Before India does that, it must explore the potential behind plant and cultivated meats. Plant-based meats are made from plants and are cholesterol- and antibiotic-free, but taste and feel like meat. Cultivated meat is produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and replicating them outside of the animal; the resulting product is real meat, but without the antibiotics, E. coli, salmonella, or animal waste. These foods represent an enormous opportunity to solve the problems of rampant malnutrition, low farmer incomes, antibiotic dependency, and inhumane factory farming of animals.
•In the Western world, these plant-based meats are already popular and two plant-based companies – the Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat – won the Champions of Earth award, the United Nation’s highest environmental honour. India, an agrarian economy, could export raw materials to make these products and feed its people.
Every act has an impact
•Finally, we must understand the interconnectedness of the world. Advocates of animal rights have argued that within the welfare of animals lies the welfare of people. Every act we undertake has an impact on us all. Pursuant to global lockdowns, wild animal populations have returned to cities and pollution levels have dropped globally. We need to innovate and encourage technologies that allow us to maintain the standard of living we are used to while ensuring that we are working towards a healthier world.
India has shown diplomatic resilience and leadership by forging unity in the neighbourhood in the war against COVID-19
•A tweet by Prime Minister Narendra Modi resulted in the first-ever virtual summit of SAARC leaders on March 15. Their deliberations reflected a recognition of the serious menace posed by COVID-19 and the need for robust regional cooperation to overcome it. What has happened to this innovative exercise in health diplomacy since then?
Solid follow-up
•Those who hastened to dismiss the video conference as a mere show may have been disappointed. Considering that SAARC has been dormant for several years due to regional tensions, it is worth stressing that the fight against COVID-19 has been taken up in right earnest through a series of tangible measures. First, all the eight member-states were represented at the video conference — all at the level of head of state or government, except Pakistan. The Secretary General of SAARC participated. They readily agreed to work together to contain the virus, and shared their experiences and perspectives. Second, India’s proposal to launch a COVID-19 Emergency Fund was given positive reception. Within days, all the countries, except Pakistan, contributed to it voluntarily, bringing the total contributions to $18.8 million. Although it is a modest amount, the spirit of readily expressed solidarity behind it matters. Third, the fund has already been operationalised. It is controlled neither by India nor by the Secretariat. It is learnt that each contributing member-state is responsible for approval and disbursement of funds in response to requests received from others. Fourth, in the domain of implementation, India is in the lead, with its initial contribution of $10 million. It has received requests for medical equipment, medicines and other supplies from Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Maldives, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Many requests have already been accepted and action has been taken, whereas others are under implementation. Fifth, a follow-up video-conference of senior health officials was arranged on March 26. The agenda included issues ranging from specific protocols dealing with screening at entry points and contact tracing to online training capsules for emergency response teams. Steps are now under way to nurture technical cooperation through a shared electronic platform as also to arrange exchange of all useful information among health professionals through more informal means.
•Those who argue that SAARC members have committed rather limited resources for a grave threat have a point. But they need to study the latest figures which reveal an interesting picture. So far, South Asia has not exactly borne the brunt of the pandemic. Of the total confirmed cases in the world that stood at 12,89,380 on April 6 (according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resources Center), SAARC countries reported only 8,292 cases, representing 0.64%. Whether the low share is due to limited testing, a peculiarity of the strain of the virus, people’s unique immunity, South Asia’s climate, decisive measures by governments, or just good fortune is difficult to say. But it is evident that India’s imaginative diplomacy has leveraged the crisis to create a new mechanism for workable cooperation. It will become stronger if the crisis deepens and if member-states see advantages in working together. Seven of the eight members already do.
A new SAARC?
•To conclude that SAARC is now returning to an active phase on a broad front may, however, be premature. In the backdrop of political capital invested by New Delhi in strengthening BIMSTEC and the urgings it received recently from Nepal and Sri Lanka to resuscitate SAARC, I recently posed a question to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar at a public forum. He said that India had no preference for a specific platform, but it was fully committed to the cause of regional cooperation and connectivity. The challenge facing the region is how to relate to a country which claims to favour regional cooperation, while working against it. Clearly, India has little difficulty in cooperating with like-minded neighbours, as it showed by forging unity in the war against COVID-19. This is diplomatic resilience and leadership at its best.
•Finally, a thought for consideration of ‘SAARC purists’ who maintain that all proposals for cooperation should be routed through the Secretariat and activities should be piloted by the incumbent chair. Given what Pakistan has done to harm India’s interests since the terrorist attack on the Uri Army base in 2016 and its continuing resistance to cooperation against COVID-19, the purists’ scenario is unrealistic. Both New Delhi and its friendly neighbours need to start preparing themselves for SAARC 2.0.
📰 Democracy should not permit a trade-off
Measures taken during emergencies cannot come at the cost of institutional checks and balances
•Independent India inherited a legal system which was designed to control the colonised. Caught in the relentless grip of COVID-19, several State governments have invoked the Epidemic Diseases Act, first drafted to deal with bubonic plague that swept Maharashtra in 1897. The Act prohibited public gatherings, and regulated travel, routine screening, segregation, and quarantine. The government was given enormous powers to control public opinion. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, described as the ‘father of Indian unrest’ by Valentine Chirol of The Times (London) was imprisoned for 18 months. His newspaper, Kesari, had criticised measures adopted by the government to tackle the epidemic. The law was stark. It did not establish the right of affected populations to medical treatment, or to care and consideration in times of great stress, anxiety and panic.
•Silence on these crucial issues bore expected results. In June 1897, the brothers, Damodar Hari Chapekar and Balkrishna Hari Chapekar, assassinated W.C. Rand, the plague commissioner of Poona, and Lieutenant Charles Egerton Ayerst, an officer of the administration. Both were considered guilty of invading private spaces, and disregarding taboos on entry into the inner domain of households. The two brothers were hanged in the summer of 1899. The assassination heralded a storm of revolutionary violence that shook the country at the turn of the twentieth century.
•Today our world should have been different. The government could have paid attention to migrant labour when it declared a lockdown on economic activities, roads, public spaces, transport, neighbourhoods and zones in which the unorganised working class ekes out bare subsistence. The result of this slip-up was tragic. Thousands of workers and their families were forced to exit the city, and begin an onerous trek to their villages. The unnerving spectacle of a mass of people trudging across State borders carrying pitiful bundles on their heads and little babies in their arms, without food or money, shocked the conscience of humankind. The neglect of workers upon whose shoulders the Indian economy rests, exposed the class bias of regulations. Confronted with the unexpected sight of people defying the lockdown, State governments and the Central government rushed to announce remedial measures. The afterthought came too late and gave too little.
Dispensing with rights
•On March 31, at a hearing of the Supreme Court of India on two petitions relating to the welfare of migrants, the Central government demanded that the Court should allow the imposition of censorship over media reports on measures adopted by the state. The government claimed that panic over the migration of thousands of bare-footed people was based on fake news, and that the scale of migration was over-estimated. Therefore, the Court should support rules that no news will be published or telecast without checking with the Central government. The plea was rejected, and the Court suggested that responsible journalism should rely on daily official bulletins. Witness the irony. The government is concerned about reports of involuntary migrations. It is not concerned with the reason why people were forced to walk out of the city in the first place.
•The issue at hand is not the lockdown or other measures taken by the government. We recognise with great unease that governments easily dispense with basic human rights in the name of managing pandemics. We bear witness to the fact that a group of helpless workers were hosed down with chemical solutions in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. The decision to close down an entire country without simultaneously recognising the specificities of Indian society has resulted in brutality and violence. Consider scenes of the police swinging their lathis indiscriminately to punish individuals who are forced to defy the lockdown.
‘Overreach’ of power
•There is another cause for unease. Admittedly in emergencies governments have to adopt extraordinary measures. Yet, reports of authoritarian leaders across the world, giving to themselves unprecedented power at the expense of legislatures, judiciaries, the media, civil society, and civil liberties have set off ripples of doubt. When the disease has run its course, will these leaders abdicate the power they have amassed in the time of the coronavirus? Will they restore institutions that inspire public confidence, because they act as brakes on the exercise of unbridled power?
•The prospect seems remote. If democratic India continues to invoke draconian colonial laws that were drafted in another time and for another purpose, why should we expect anything different in the future?
•On March 16, United Nations human rights experts issued a statement expressing deep concern with the way leaders were amassing power ostensibly for dealing with the pandemic. The statement urged governments to avoid an ‘overreach’ of security measures when they respond to the coronavirus outbreak. Emergency powers, the experts insisted, should not be used to quash dissent. More significantly, these measures have to be proportionate, necessary and non-discriminatory. Some states and security institutions, continued the statement, will find the use of emergency powers attractive because it offers shortcuts. There is need to ensure that excessive powers are not hardwired into legal and political systems. Care should be taken to see that restrictions are narrowly tailored. Governments should deploy the least intrusive method to protects public health. “We encourage States,” concluded the statement, “to remain steadfast in maintaining a human rights-based approach to regulating this pandemic, in order to facilitate the emergence of healthy societies with rule of law and human rights protections.”
•The rights experts have good reasons to issue this warning. Around the world, we witness the sorry spectacle of leaders — not precisely known for their commitment to democracy or human rights — steadily unravelling every check on the use of unmitigated power by the executive. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing court cases for corruption and breach of trust, has closed the judiciary and postponed his own trial. The government has been given immense powers of surveillance. And a newly constituted Parliament, or Knesset, is not allowed to meet.
•In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, notorious for his anti-migrant tirades, has personalised immense power. He now rules by decree. Existing laws and parliamentary oversight have been suspended. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has appropriated broad emergency powers in order to take effective decisions to tackle the virus. Again, he is not known for his commitment to civil liberties or to the Constitution. In Chile, the declaration of a ‘state of catastrophe’ has repressed anti-government dissent that has been raging on the streets since last year.
No counter-balancing steps
•States are the product of history, composed of layers of meaning some of which have been fashioned for another time. The nature of the state is historically specific. Yet modern states share a common determination; a ruthless ambition to control the minds and bodies of citizens. Epidemics provide an opportunity to accomplish precisely this, to do away with inconvenient checks and balances institutionalised in the media, the judiciary, and civil society. The dismantling of constitutions and institutions will have a major impact on societies. Do decisions to control the pandemic have to be at the expense of human rights and democracy? On March 6, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, advised governments to ensure that the measures they adopt to control the virus do not adversely impact people’s lives. “The most vulnerable and neglected people in society,” she recommended, “must be protected both medically and economically.” She gave sage advice, democracy does not permit trade-offs.
📰 Farmers are at their wits’ end
As global trade falls and supply disruptions persist, a prolonged lockdown will adversely affect food security
•The COVID-19 pandemic has led to global concerns on the state of agriculture and food security. On the one hand, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned of a “food crisis” if countries do not protect vulnerable people from hunger and malnourishment. On the other, farmers face a stalemate as they are unable to work on their land, earn remunerative prices and gain access to markets. We can try to understand the impact of COVID-19 on agriculture with three questions. One, does the world have enough food to feed its people? Two, is food available at affordable prices? Three, how are farmers coping with the lockdown?
Food stocks and prices
•According to the FAO, as on April 2, 2020, the total stock of cereals in the world was about 861 million tonnes. This translates to a stocks-to-use ratio (SUR) — i.e., proportion of consumption available as stocks — of 30.7%. The FAO considers this “comfortable”. The SURs for wheat, rice and coarse grains were 35.3%, 35.1% and 26.9%, respectively. But world stocks are different from national stocks. About 52% of the global wheat stocks is held by China, and about 20% of the global rice stocks is held by India. If the major holders of global stocks decide to turn precautionary and stop exporting, and if the lockdown is prolonged, countries dependent on rice imports will suffer.
•Kazakhstan, a major wheat exporter, has banned exports. Russia, the largest wheat exporter, is expected to restrict its exports. Vietnam, the third largest rice exporter, has stopped its exports, which will reduce the global rice exports by 15%. If India and Thailand too ban exports, world supply of rice will sharply fall. In March 2020, the Philippines and the European Union, major rice importers, had inventories of rice enough to feed their populations for about three months. Others, however, had inventories to hold on for about one month only. If the lockdown continues beyond a month, these countries will face food shortages.
•India’s foodgrain output is projected to be about 292 MMT in 2019-20. On March 1, 2020, the total stock of wheat and rice with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was 77.5 MT. The buffer norms for foodgrain stocks — i.e., operational stock plus strategic reserves — is 21.04 MT. Similarly, for pulses, India had a stock of 2.25 MT in mid-March 2020. In both cases, the rabi harvest is slated to arrive in April 2020, and the situation is expected to ease further.
•There is always an element of uncertainty on how prices will behave if both demand and supply fall together. Prices in different markets fluctuate considerably given differences in the extent of production, stocks, arrivals and supply disruptions. According to the FAO, the world food price index fell by 4.3% and world cereal price index fell by 1.9% between February and March 2020 due to the weakening demand for food and the sharp fall in maize prices owing to poor demand for biofuels. However, retail prices of rice and wheat have been rising in the Western economies in March 2020. The major reasons identified are panic buying by households, export restrictions by countries and continuing supply chain disruptions. Retail prices of beef and eggs have also been rising.
•In India, wholsesale and consumer price indices (WPI and CPI) for March 2020 have not been published yet. WPI and CPI for food in India were rising from mid-2019 onwards, reflecting a rise in vegetable prices, especially onion prices. January and February 2020 saw a moderate fall in these indices, but vegetable prices have remained high. If food prices rise due to the lockdown, it will be on top of an already rising price curve.
•However, unlike in the West, food prices in India have not risen after the lockdown. While supplies have declined, demand has fallen too. In the APMC mandi in Mumbai’s Vashi, if about 600 to 700 trucks arrived per day before the lockdown, only about 200 trucks arrive per day after the lockdown. Yet, wholesale prices of foodgrains and vegetables in the mandi have been stable, with only the prices of pulses showing a tendency to rise. This is because there has been a sharp fall in the consumption of foodgrains and vegetables. Similarly, the consumption of milk has fallen by 10-12%.
The crisis in farming
•Harvesting and marketing of crops are in crisis across India, because of (a) disruptions in the procurement of foodgrains by government agencies; (b) disruptions in the collection of harvests from the farms by traders; (c) shortage of workers to harvest the rabi crops; (d) shortage of truck drivers; (e) blockades in the transport of commodities; (f) limited operations of APMC mandis; and (g) shutdowns in the retail markets.
•Second, these supply bottlenecks have led to a fall in farmgate prices. According to media reports, tomato growers in Maharashtra were receiving only ₹2 per kg. Wheat prices in Madhya Pradesh fell from ₹2200/Q to about ₹1,600/Q. In Punjab, vegetable prices fell from ₹15/kg to ₹1/kg. In Delhi, the price of broiler chicken fell from ₹55/kg in January to ₹24/kg in March. In Tamil Nadu, egg prices fell from ₹4/egg in January to ₹1.95/egg in March.
•Third, the large-scale return of migrant workers to their homes has disrupted harvest operations, and farmers are being forced to leave the crop in the fields. While mechanical harvesters can be used, there is a shortage of drivers/operators. Most rice mills work with migrant workers, and their return home has meant that these mills are not buying paddy from farmers. There are also severe labour shortages in milk processing plants, cold storage units and warehouses.
•Fourth, supply chains remain disrupted across India. Agricultural goods have been notified as essential goods. But about 5,00,000 trucks are reportedly stranded in the highways and State borders. Milk trucks are able to unload at the destination but unable to return empty, which has upset supply schedules. Trucks are in shortage as drivers have gone home. Imports of vegetable oils are not being lifted from ports due to shortage of trucks. Most APMC mandis are functioning only twice or thrice a week. Livestock feeds are in short supply, and this is breaking the back of livestock growers.
•The world and India have adequate food stocks. But as global trade shrinks and supply disruptions persist, a prolonged lockdown will adversely affect food security in many countries. In the Western world, food prices are rising due to panic buying and stockpiling. Food prices are not yet rising in India. What has kept Indian food prices low is the severe decline in food consumption, especially among the poor, after the lockdown. That is, hunger may keep the food inflation in March 2020 low. Concurrently, farmers face acute labour shortages, falling farmgate prices and lack of access to input/output markets. It is unclear who is benefiting, but farmers, workers and the poor are at their wits’ end.
