Referring to food security, he noted that access to food, its quantity and quality was decided by the politics. He endorsed the ground-breaking theory of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen that hunger, malnutrition and starvation deaths were caused not by insufficient production of food or famine, but because of the lack of access to it and the lack of purchasing power of the poor. He explained the point by saying that famine was not natural, but a man-made phenomenon. The National Food Security Act and a number of policies had sought food for the poor.

Policies like mid-day school meals, highly subsidised food for the poor sold through the public distribution system (PDS), different versions of food for work programme and an assured minimum income from the progammes, like MANREGA, had eased problems, he said. He argued that in India access to food was dependent on one’s location and his/her ethnicity. It was no coincidence that most starvation deaths occurred in remote areas of states like Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Most of the victims of starvation were Dalits or socially and economically weaker groups, he pointed out.

He noted that food security also depended on the kind of agricultural policy the state enforced and the wages fixed by the government, the extent of access of the farming groups to agricultural inputs and the terms thereon, etc. He pleaded for a discussion on the larger policy-related issues like farm loans from banks, seeds from sharks like Monsanto and Cargil and the environmental sustainability due to the use of chemical fertilisers, organchlorine and organo-phosphate-based pesticides.