Surging food prices that affect the everyday diet of ordinary Indians matter.
They deserve more attention even at a time when the return of Donald Trump to the White House and its tumultuous implications across the United States and the world dominate the global headlines.
The average wholesale price of onions, a kitchen staple, surged to a five-year high on November 6. It was selling at Rs 5,400 per quintal at the Lasalgaon Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC), one of the country’s largest wholesale onion markets. It is not just onions. Potatoes, tomatoes, pulses have also become a lot more costly. A recent report by Crisil (Credit Rating Information Service of India), the well-known rating agency, noted that the average price of a vegetarian home-cooked meal was 20 per cent higher compared with last year and six per cent higher over the month.
A whole host of factors are driving the surge in food prices. One key factor is frequent extreme and erratic weather, fuelled by climate change, affecting crop yields leading to an uptick in food prices. For example, the price of onions and potatoes is up due to lower arrivals caused by incessant rainfall in September.
“These rising prices”, Kochi-based economist A.M. Ravindran noted in a recent commentary piece, “not only strain household budgets but also add inflationary pressure across the economy, potentially impacting discretionary spending. Persistent food inflation could pose challenges to sustaining India’s growth trajectory”.
“Unpredictable monsoons and extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts, disrupt crop cycles, reduce supply, and lead to higher prices, particularly in staple vegetables and cereals. These factors are joined by rising input and production costs. Fertiliser, seed, labour, and transportation costs have all increased, influenced by both domestic and global market dynamics, with supply chain disruptions since the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbating these cost pressures. Speculative hoarding also plays a role, with traders often stockpiling goods in anticipation of higher prices, creating artificial scarcity and further driving prices up”, he observed.
Geopolitics also affects the price of everyday food. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict disrupted not only the supply of essential commodities such as wheat and vegetable oil, but also fertilisers, leading to an uptick in prices.
High food prices have taken a toll on household budgets and dented consumer purchasing power, as families are compelled to set aside more money for food. As the price of essential food items goes up, so does the cost of a healthy diet.
This has huge implications.
Experts have repeatedly pointed out that Indian children do not get the minimum dietary diversity recommended by the World Health Organisation. India’s current political leadership is extremely prickly when it comes to international reports flagging hunger even as the Indian economy grows and the country becomes more influential on the global stage. But India’s own researchers and experts have also been repeatedly pointing to disturbing nutrition trends.
A recent article in the National Medical Journal of India (“Regional patterns in minimum diet diversity failure and associated factors among children aged 6-23 months in India”) pointed out that the overall, minimum diet diversity failure (MDDF) in India has improved from 87.4 per cent (2005-06) to 77.1 per cent (2019-21), but authors Gaurav Gunnal, Dhruvi Bagaria and Sudeshna Roy observe that the prevalence of MDDF still remains high (above 75%) and that “there is a wide regional variation with children in central and northern Indian states suffering from severe MDDF”.
“Augmented efforts in child-focused programmes such as Poshan Abhiyan, National Nutrition Mission, detection of severe acute malnutrition children, awareness raising and strengthening of nutrition counselling procedures and use of media in information education and communication and outreach activities through Village/Urban Health and Sanitation and Nutrition Day and local self-governance mechanism) must be channelised towards pregnant women, those with high-risk pregnancy and mothers with children less than five years of age as a priority. It would also undoubtedly require increasing national-level public expenditure on these programmes and recruitment of more human resources, with intensified attention paid to the states located in the central and northern parts of the country,” says the authors, scientists trained in population and health studies who tapped into National Family and Health Survey datasets.
They point out that MDDF is more prevalent among younger children compared to their older counterparts. This is worrying because early childhood is a critical phase and what, when and how children eat is more important before age two than at any other time in life.
Poor diets in early childhood can potentially impact not only physical growth but also brain development.
In an article in Down to Earth last month, Gaurav Gunnal, one of the authors, spelt out why MDDF is such a critical issue.
“Minimum dietary diversity is a reliable and widely used indicator approved by the WHO that reflects the access and consumption of diverse food groups and essential micronutrient availability to the children. As per the WHO, nutrition-related factors lead to approximately 35 per cent of child deaths and contribute to 11 per cent of the total disease burden globally. Poor levels of nutrition augment the risk of children to delayed motor and cognitive development, which translates into low immunity, vulnerability to infections and deficiency diseases as well as a host of poor health conditions.”
“Since diet diversity failure is one of the reasons for stunting and wasting among children under five years of age, it is crucial to understand the dietary consumption pattern of young children to ensure minimum adequate diet is being consumed and align public budgetary policy to meet the need-gap,” added Gunnal.
Good nutrition in early childhood is vital. It boosts child survival, body growth, cognitive development and school readiness.
These are issues affecting millions of India’s children, and the nation’s future. If children don’t get good nutrition when they need it the most, their potential development is at risk. Government-funded school meal programmes in India are also struggling amid the rising prices of vegetables, fruits and pulses, as a recent Reuters report revealed. This is an economic issue as much as a health and nutrition issue.
The high cost of food affects all Indians. We need to pay a lot more attention to what all this is doing to our children. In the time of climate change, extreme and erratic weather is the norm. There is an urgent need to boost agricultural resilience by promoting climate-resistant crops, grassroots screening of malnutrition and counselling.
These are not issues of the faraway future. They demand our urgent attention now.