India needs to invest more in accelerating diversification of food production: FAO Chief Economist

About 40.4% of the Indian population (approximately 60 crore people) are unable to afford a healthy meal, said Maximo Torero Cullen, Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

Talking to The Hindu, Dr. Cullen said the number was a significant decrease compared to FAO’s assessment in 2023 that 74.1% of India’s population was unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021. He said India needed to start to invest more in accelerating the diversification of food production.

Dr. Cullen said India played a crucial role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of zero hunger by 2030 because of the level, the size and the population of the country.

“Reduction of hunger in India affects the world and affects, of course, South Asia. So India, I think, has a huge role to play. That’s why we believe it’s so important that they continue and accelerate the transformation. India needs to move to the higher level — that is access to healthy diets, which right now is 40.4% of the population. So we need to improve that even more and also to find ways to assure this today and tomorrow,” he said.

“The Green Revolution played its role, but now it’s time to do more. So don’t forget about it, but do more. We need to do more,” Dr. Cullen said.

On FAO’s assessment in 2023 that 74.1% of India’s population was unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021, he said that in 2024, the percentage of the population that could not afford a healthy meal was 40.4.

“The methodology is improved. So yes, there is an important decrease. So the number to compare is basically to look at the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World [SOFI] of this year to look at the previous year’s number. But yes, there is a significant improvement, but still it’s too high. Healthy diet is diversity. It means fruits and vegetables, proteins, and also means cereals. More than 40% of the country’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. So it’s a minimum cost to healthy diet,” the FAO Chief Economist said.

Dr. Cullen added that the immediate step the Indian government should take to address the situation was diversification. “India needs to start to invest more in accelerating the diversification of production. To move from cereals to high-value commodities. Pulses could be an option because they are more nutritious, they also have proteins. So pulses is an option and this is very consistent with your culture. But India should move more to fruits and vegetables and that requires an effort because you will need to substitute at some point,” he said.

Tariff war

On the tariff war, he said the first problem of tariffs was inefficiencies. “You will be more inefficient in the way you move commodities. Because before you were optimising the world, now the world is segmented. The world that wants low tariffs, but the world that has now high tariffs. The second issue is uncertainty. The changes of tariffs every day has created a lot of uncertainty and that complicates markets. Although markets have already learned how to manage this uncertainty, so things don’t change too much,” he said.

Dr. Cullen, however, said the impact of food insecurity due to tariffs was not so high, but inefficiencies would be high. “But assume that they get into a situation where you play tit-for-tat, then this could be very dangerous. It’s not happening at this point, countries are not responding. So let’s see how it evolves, but uncertainty and inefficiencies will make us less resilient for sure, because we will have less places where to have food access because of the tariffs. It will affect farmers, it will affect the smallholders, especially will affect the farmers who are more linked to the markets. But what will happen at the end is that you will have a segmented trade. Instead of having a spaghetti bowl of the whole world, you will have segments. This is spaghetti bowl here, this little spaghetti bowl here. So a lot of inefficiency,” he added.

Relative to the impact of COVID-19, the impact of Ukraine on the food security was significantly smaller, Dr. Cullen said. “The impact of Ukraine was on 19 million people only. The impact of COVID was on 180 million people. Big difference,” he said, adding that there were a huge increase in the gender disparity in food security during COVID-19. “Now we are seeing a little increase again because food prices affect more women. Empowering women to more access to assets is important so that they can get more access to resources. Reducing wage inequalities for the same skill sets is also important as normally women earn less than men, 0.8 of a dollar of a man,” he said.