It is coincidental that Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture and Co-operatives (MoAC) this week proclaimed a decline in paddy and maize production by around 11 percent and 4 percent respectively as compared to last year. The following week world leaders in the Rome summit renewed their commitment to ‘eradicate hunger from the face of the earth sustainably and at the earliest date’.
The whopping decline in the production of major staples (paddy and maize) in Nepal will usher in worsening food insecurity at a time when we have already been facing food deficit for the last few months following the failure of winter crops -wheat and barley—in hilly and mountain districts. According to one estimate, this year 575,000 tons of major crops (500,000 tons paddy and 75,000 tons maize) are expected to be lost due to late monsoon, flooding and landslide and worsen the food deficit situation. Government officials too have predicted a shortage of around 132,000 tons of food in the country.
While on one hand the adverse climate has been threatening food security; on the other hand government’s apathy to increase food production is worsening the food security situation in poor countries like Nepal. Ironically, despite the ballooning volume of national budget each passing year, the amount set aside for agriculture has not increased proportionately as policymakers continue to fail to acknowledge the significance of agriculture in food security.
Keeping in view the impending food shortage on the heel of declining food production, the MoAC had proposed an ambitious three year programs worth over Rs 25 billion to boost agro-production. The plan had laid special emphasis to sharply increase production and productivity of rice, maize and wheat beside raising meat and milk production through special incentives to the farmers and thereby commercializing farming. However, the package initiative was aborted because of lack of budget and absence of will power of higher authority to implement it.
The rising threat of food insecurity cannot to be blamed only on the government’s apathy and reluctance to make substantial investment in the agriculture sector which accounts for over 30 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product. There are newer threats emerging such as rapid urbanization in leading agricultural districts and migration of youths to urban areas and/or overseas job destinations which has weakened agricultural work force in rural areas.
Similarly, growing encroachment of fertile agriculture lands for human settlement due to the booming realty sector poses further challenges in production of food grains in key districts for cereal production such as Jhapa, Morang, Sunsari, Chitwan ,Rupandehi, Dang, Banke, Bardia, Kailali and Kanchanpur. The surge in realty sector has made land owners more interested in selling their lands rather than toiling hard in the farms with of no guarantee of recovering cost or making profit from agro produces. Kathmandu valley with its vast fertile land succumbing to realty aggression has been the biggest victim. Once a major source of vegetables for locals and surrounding districts, the valley has turned into a concrete jungle leaving more than four million of population dependent on outsourced vegetables. Cultivation of paddy in the valley too has faced a similar fate.
Though the government officials are very much aware of the burgeoning food deficit, they lack concrete plans to ensure food security through higher yield in the coming days as agriculture lands continue to shrink and farmers shift to other profitable ventures.
Worse still, people in the remote districts—who are highly dependent on external supply of food—have begun taking subsidized foods from UN Food Program for granted and have stopped cultivating their arable land for food production. They are not at all interested to increase production of local foods such as potatoes, buckwheat, oat and millet and have become obsessed with consuming rice. It is uncommon to see large swathe of fertile land unattended while villagers lineup for subsidized food at the local outlets of Nepal Food Corporation—the state owned food distributor—despite the long distance from their home.
The government is unwittingly responsible for the increasing dependency of rural folks on external supplies for foods because no special programs have been launched to encourage people to produce and promote local foods and continues to blindly supply food worth hundreds of millions of rupees.
The government must also acknowledge the increasing marginalization of agriculture sector and formulate policies to boost agriculture yield through different incentives so that the more farmers can be lured back to this sector. The recently concluded World Summit on Food Security also stressed on the need to devise development, economic and policy tools required to boost agriculture production and productivity.
Regarding conservation of arable land the government must strictly ensure their proper utilization and prevent it from being gobbled up by the growing population. The government should formulate stringent rules to tackle the onslaught of realty sector and put a halt to random use of agricultural land for non-farming purposes,. Local folks of rural areas too have to let go of their obsession for rice and start consuming other varieties of foods available through commercialization of local food grains rather than relying on either subsidized rice or handout from donors. We can definitely do away with dependency on donors. But as long as local people of remote areas are not motivated to actively reengage in agriculture for self sufficiency, merely supplying food from other sources by investing huge sums of money won’t solve the food deficit problem. Incentives and assurance of lucrative prices for the local food grains by the government is necessary to retain farmers in the occupation and to discourage them from abandoning farming altogether.
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