 Thank you Focus for organising this webinar and also for inviting me to be on this panel. It's quite an honour to be on the panel with the fellow speakers with Walden and Indra. So I will be basically talking only about the situation in India and also coming from where I am which is as a right to food activist in this country. That's where I am beginning from. And of course even while we are talking about food distribution, about hunger and malnutrition we have always seen the connections with the kind of food systems that we have and like I think Walden also said in the beginning of his presentation that to understand hunger and the issue of food insecurity it can't be separate from understanding the food system, the global food systems that are currently in place and who controls food production and procurement and distribution and so on. In India we are facing this in the context of COVID and the lockdown this very contradictory kind of situation where we have huge stocks of food grains in the public storage places and at the same time massive distress across the country. So the big question for us right now is a question of distributing those grains but I also think that in India as well that this entire COVID is another opportunity for us to actually think about how our food systems can be much more decentralized with greater local control over what is being produced and how it is being distributed. So I will come to that bit a little in the second half of my presentation but I would like to start with the situation of hunger and with what is going on in terms of making basic food grains and basic needs available to people. So a number of you who might not be outside of India but this has been getting covered in the media quite extensively might know that as a response to the pandemic India saw one of the most stringent national lockdowns as has been seen anywhere in the world and we had a national lockdown quite early stages of the pandemic and this was stringent in the sense that it was a curfew and people were all transport between cities even within cities or villages was completely stopped and many the other aspect of the lockdown was also that it came without any warning so it was a Prime Minister speech which said that 4 hours after the speech the lockdown would start. So as a result of this what many are calling an ill planned lockdown what we are faced with now even after the lockdown has been lifted in many parts of the country and immediately what we faced was a massive crisis of stranded migrant workers wanting to go back to their homes but not being able to because there were no transport systems and people were not allowed to move. A livelihood crisis and therefore a resultant food and hunger crisis as well. So and this has been quite extensive and now we have some phone surveys which tell us how bad the situation is for instance a university in Bangalore the Azim Premji University did a phone survey where they spoke to over 5,000 people and where people responded that 77% of the households that responded are consuming they said they were consuming less food than they were doing earlier than before the lockdown and 66% 2 thirds of them said that they had lost their employment. Another survey done by the Center for Equity Studies in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Institute they also found in their sample that only about 40% of people said that caused the lockdown they were able to avoid hunger completely and many reported that they reduced the quantity of food that they are eating they reduced the quality to cope up with the lockdown induced crisis. So there are a number of such surveys and just another that there are some young volunteers who are maintaining a list of just on the basis of newspaper reports of people who died of starvation and financial distress because of the lockdown and the various restrictions imposed by it almost 200 people they have listed has having died because of these reasons. There are other deaths due to accidents and suicides and so on without including those just the starvation hunger related deaths have been almost 200 in the last 3-4 months. To understand why the lockdown created this kind of a crisis we of course have to go a little bit into what is the situation in the Indian economy free the lockdown and the reason why there's been this kind of crisis is of course the unequal economic system that we have and have been perpetuating over the last 15-20 years where more than 90% of our workers are in the informal sector and about 80% of the workers earn less than rupees 18,000 a month which is roughly around 240 dollars a month and therefore as soon as people as the lockdown was imposed people lost their jobs being in the informal sector very few people earned enough to have savings to be able to see them through through this lockdown period in a context where over the last 3-4 years we have already been seeing a slowdown in our economy we've been seeing rural wages being stagnant over the last 3 years in fact post 2016 we've had multiple occasions where farmers from across the country took to the streets because of the debt crisis they were in because they were not getting remunerative prices for their crops so the issue of agrarian crisis was something that was seriously there in India even before the lockdown began and the pandemic and the lockdown has only contributed to exasperating this situation also not just about farmers not getting remunerative prices on the other hand India also faces one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world with almost 40% of children under 5 years being stunted over 20% of children being wasted and since 2017-18 the right to food campaign has also been documenting reports of hunger related deaths from different pockets in the country something we had stopped hearing of for some time where we see that it's coming back particularly in pockets which have tribal Adivasi populations amongst all people single women and so on so it is in this context that this lockdown happened and like I said what we saw therefore was this absolute acute crisis of hunger and people desperately looking for access to food on the other hand what we see is that the government where we have a public procurement program where farmers are offered a minimum support price for their crops and this works effectively only for rice and wheat and in some parts of the country but where it works it's a very effective scheme so the grains that the state procures under this public procurement program have been so high in the last couple of years that even before the lockdown began we had nearly 18 million tonnes of rice and wheat and paddy at the beginning of the lockdown soon after the lockdown was the harvest season and therefore another round of procurement took place where we find currently with almost 100 million tonnes of rice paddy and wheat in the government stocks so this contradiction of having high stocks on the one hand and having hunger on the other hand is the story of food security in India and this is linked to the highly centralized food system that we have in our country currently so as a response what did the government do firstly on the distribution side on responding to the situation of hunger the government after announcing the lockdown it announced some welfare measures in the first week after the lockdown to provide free food grains to about 800 million people which is about 60% of India's population so 5 kilos per head of rice or wheat was to be given free and 1 kilo of pulses per household and pulses in India is one of the main sources of protein in people's diets this is not because most people are vegetarian in fact most people are non-vegetarian but because people cannot afford animal products, meat, milk, eggs or meat and therefore we find that the most affordable protein that is already part of people's diets albeit not as much as they should be eating is pulses so only one kg of pulses per household for free is what the state announced as a result of this lockdown while 800 million might seem a huge number like I said earlier this is 60% of India's population but we have 90% over 90% of our population being in the informal sector and as the pandemic extended more and more people falling into this crisis of hunger and therefore what we were faced with immediately for the civil society to take up also was this issue of a large number of people who did not have these ration cards under the National Food Security Act and therefore despite the government announcing these free grains they were not eligible to get the free grains they were also a large number of people who had the ration cards but you're allowed to take those free grains only from the local distribution centre from where your card was issued whereas a huge migrant population which was now living in different places were not able to use their cards to get the grains so we were faced with this situation where there is grain on the one side there was an announcement of free grains but there was still a large population who were left out of this free grain distribution it was in this context that the Right to Food Campaign along with large number of civil society groups have been demanding that along with the community kitchens, the feeding centres and the free grains what we really need right now is a universal public distribution system a universal system which says that anybody who is in need of grains can come to the designated shops and will be given those 10 kilos a month of food grains for free or at a very low price without having to prove that they're poor or that they're migrant or that they belong to the informal sector because the experience has been that this kind of targeting where people have to prove their status of poverty is one which excludes people and why are we making this argument on the other side like I said earlier is also because of the mounting food grains that we have 100 million tons which is more than enough to do a universal PDS for almost a year and we are going to have another harvest in about 3-4 months now which will again be procured so the stocks will increase of course there has been a reluctance from the side of the government to do this because of their considerations of subsidy and their reluctance to expand the fiscal deficit and to spend more now coming to the issue that we are mainly discussing today how does this link to the whole issue of agriculture and food sovereignty and the food system in general now if we look at the situation that India is in as well we can see that this is partly because of the centralised system that we have where procurement operations the way it has been designed in India takes place in only some states in the country and is focused on only these two crops so although we have such a huge procurement operation on the other hand we find there was a government report a few years back which said that only 6% of the farmers are able to contribute to the government's procurement mechanism and what does that mean that most of the farmers who are not able to sell at this minimum support price are in fact selling in the market for much lower prices so we have a situation where on the one side the farmers are not getting remunerative prices for their crops and on the other side people are not getting access to food but the farmers have still delivered where despite this lockdown and despite the pandemic we saw that we had a good crop this year and there's been enough harvest and the report so far is that for the next season as well despite all the problems and the lack of government support the sowing has been going on pretty much at the levels that it went on last year although there are concerns about seeds not reaching farmers farmers having trouble in accessing credit and so on so in this context I would argue and many of us with the right to food campaign also felt and the same I think with many agriculture farmers groups in the country that this would actually be seen as an opportunity to decentralize the food system in India as well as to expand state support to the small and marginal farmers where they can in fact see the linkages between agriculture and nutrition as well as agriculture as a sector that can actually contribute to growth and contribute to the overall economy so in that imagination what one would have liked to see was that there was an extensive decentralized procurement where they moved from this excessive focus on only rice and wheat and only on certain states in the country to actually having local procurement units across the country which was very important to have in the current context because even areas where procurement normally takes place farmers were finding it very difficult with the absence of transport networks so to have procurement happening at the village level of millets of pulses of fruits vegetables milk eggs and so on and then to use the extensive distribution mechanism which we have through the public distribution system where we have over 500,000 fair price shops across the country which are already in place through which this could have been distributed while making sure that farmers despite the lockdown got a remunerative price for their food crop whatever the crop was but we did not see that happen in fact what we saw was reports of vegetables and fruits particularly being thrown away because farmers did not have mechanisms to store them and on the other hand did not have access to the market because everything was being closed or being sold away at very very low prices because of this situation the government and response so the lockdown began around the 24th of March in May around the 18th of May we had another huge stimulus package that the government announced while they first said that this was going to be a massive stimulus package what was disappointing was that it was seen that there was no stimulus that the amount that was given of 20 billion rupees was in fact was not what the government was going to spend but it came in off it was not an expansion and fiscal spending of the state and even more disturbing is that the government was trying to use this opportunity of the lockdown of the parliament not functioning of people's movements not being able to come out on the street to push forward reforms which have been on the agenda of the state for many many years including in agriculture so reforms which result in greater commercialization in agriculture the neoliberal reforms which many have been demanding is what the government has been trying to push forward so if we see the three main changes that they announced for agriculture as a result of the pandemic none of them as I said is as a result of pandemic it has been there on the agenda for long one is that the essential commodities act which put a limit on how much stocks traders could fold on essential commodities that act has been diluted secondly India has something called the agriculture APMC act which regulates the marketing of agricultural commodities which also there have been attempts to try and dilute for a very long time so now we have an ordinance which is called the farmers empowerment protection agreement on price assurance and farm services ordinance basically what this ordinance is trying to do is to deregulate the agriculture markets so losing the rules which say that agriculture produce have to be sold through these APMC Mondays through the markets which have been set up under the APMC act and that they could directly sell to private traders and also to make contract farming easier in the country so both of these have been on the agenda of neoliberal reforms for a long time and the COVID-19 pandemic is being used by the government to push through these kind of reforms and this is completely opposite to what I was speaking about a little bit earlier where in the context of India where we have still almost 50% of our population depending on agriculture for the livelihoods in one way or the other 80% of our farmers are small and marginal so they're actually net consumers of food these reforms only do not and we know that through certain states which have tried to do it as well that actually do not increase access to markets for farmers it only brings in the space for private traders for multinational corporations to get into the agriculture sector in India and to in fact centralize our food system much more destroying the local decentralized systems that are already in place so what should be done I'll quickly summarize again what we have been demanding as the right to food campaign is to use this as an opportunity for a decentralized procurement where you procure local crops in local areas and distribute them locally and then take the surplus to areas where there are deficits therefore not just rice and wheat but other crops as well and this is important even when we keep climate change considerations in mind therefore reimagining the entire procurement and distribution in India towards diverse crops and greater decentralization which would mean greater investments by the state and agriculture more infrastructure in terms of even roads, irrigation markets with a focus on small and marginal farmers and on the other side universalization of entitlements which is also not limited to only rice and wheat but includes pulses and eggs and milk and other items as well so this is what we have been pushing for but unfortunately like I said the kind of system that the state is trying to push for in this context is something which is much more centralized which in the long term would have devastating effects for hunger and nutrition in the country so we do hope that we'll still be able to put pressure on the government to withdraw on some of those for instance even the land laws are being revised and labor laws and towards this universal public services built on decentralized food systems