State food distribution should be revived

Food, the most basic of our people’s needs for survival has now become scarce in Sri Lanka. While it is shortages of supplies including milk powder that sets some people on a scrambling search, for marginalised people rising prices have put essential foods including even rice out of their reach.
We have for long ignored the food system. The State dismantled the public distribution system of food by the early 1980s along with cuts to social welfare and its policies of trade Liberalisation expanding agricultural imports. 
And academics abandoned research on the agrarian question and issues relating to the national food system, as they were co-opted into greener pastures of Western-funded development research. 

Research and policy interest in agriculture and food receded, even as projects for infrastructure development, value chains linked to exports including high-value foods and tourism linked even to health and education services gained ascendance.
The urgent question now is overcoming this crisis in food availability and keeping a section of our people from facing famine-like conditions in the years ahead. 
Why is this crucial issue of food for survival neglected by the economic and policy establishment? What should the state do to ensure the distribution and availability of food? I argue the Government should immediately institute a public distribution system with food rations.

Rising prices

In my previous columns, I have mentioned the need to revive the public distribution system and for the State to prioritise imports of essential goods to reduce shortages. The Government is failing at the task of food security, and in recent months, there are not only shortages but also tremendous rises in prices. 
A report by the Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Sri Lanka published on January 26, 2022, documents the food price rise and its nutritional impact in the country. 
The report illustrates that between September 2021 and January 2022, the retail price of rice and wheat flour has gone up by over fifty per cent. 
The report claims:

“As rice, wheat and sugar products account for about 40, 12 and 10 per cent, respectively, of the average calories intake, vulnerable households have likely reduced their food consumption and/or switched to comparatively cheaper but less nutritious foods, with an overall negative effect on their food security, health and nutrition status.”
This problem of food security and nutrition needs urgent attention. The great fluctuation in prices due to multiple factors such as the disastrous fertiliser ban last year leading to low yields of rice production, the historic rise in global food prices, the continuing pressures on the exchange rate and the tendency of traders to hoard amidst shortages, all call for action by the state in the interest of its citizenry. 

Rationing food

We cannot address these great price increases by continuing to depend on the market. Rather, the State in the interest of avoiding starvation and ensuring nutrition needs to re-institute the system of universal food rations.
Times of great crisis require drastic measures. The recently published World Development Review 2022 of the World Bank claims this is the “largest global economic crisis in more than a century.” 
The Report goes on to state:

“Economic activity contracted in 2020 in about 90 per cent of countries, exceeding the number of countries seeing such declines during two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the emerging economy debt crises of the 1980s, and the 2007–09 global financial crisis. In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy shrank by approximately 3 per cent, and global poverty increased for the first time in a generation.”
It was following the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the context of the Second World War that food rations were instituted by the British and continued by post-colonial Governments in Sri Lanka until the 1970s. We are in similar crisis times now that requires rationed foods. 

The dilapidated network of Co-operatives across the country should be revived, the State-owned Sathosa stores should be mobilised and even the Divisional Secretariats engaged to urgently activate such universal food rations. 
Failing to do so risks losing a generation to malnutrition and tremendous suffering with a famine.

Ideological struggle

We know the arguments that will come from the elite quarters and the economic establishment. Who will pay for it and how will the corrupt State institutions manage food rations? 
Let us look at the cost, for if each individual is provided four kg rice per month, which is approximately half the current per-capita consumption of rice in the country, the total cost will vary between Rs 100 billion and Rs 150 billion per year-the latter being the highly inflated retail prices today. 

That is a third or half of the investment on roads and highways allocated in the Budget for 2022. 
On the other hand, if we don’t want to undermine investment in the interest of economic growth, a wealth tax should be instituted to redistribute resources in the interest of avoiding starvation. The resources for food rations are ultimately about priorities and political will.

The ideological argument is about moving away from the market and worries about corruption. Similar arguments were made at the time of the Great Depression, and John Maynard Keynes countered such thinking while putting forward a robust role for the state. In the concluding paragraph of his magnum opus, ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ published in 1935, Keynes took on dogmatic thinking and their consequence:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

In our day in Sri Lanka, it is not just the madmen in authority and vested interests that we have to confront. We also have to confront the ideologies that have colonised much of our intelligentsia, who even at this moment of great crisis are unable to think beyond the market. 
Food rations to avoid starvation needs to be urgently debated, even as there are signs that the working people are likely to demand that out on the streets.