The government has raised the price it pays to buy wheat by more than 70 percent since 2007, which only encourages more production. In India the government buys rice and wheat from farmers at a guaranteed price, a support system akin to the subsidies that led to Europe’s notorious butter mountains and milk lakes. “Nobody steals it, but people use it to feed fish and poultry farms.”Īt another dump, on the outskirts of Punjab’s Amritsar city, locals told Reuters that officials sometimes dip into the sacks of rotting grain to mix it with fresh wheat for distribution to the poor who hold ration cards. It smells very bad,” said Hakkam Singh, who works as a watchman at the open field. “The wheat has been lying there for the past five years. Tarpaulins cover most of the mounds, but many of the bags are torn, spilling blackened grain blighted by fungus and insects. Here there are thousands of sacks of decomposing wheat, occupying an area the size of a football field and towering in some places to the height of a house. Saddomajra, a village in the bread-basket state of Punjab, is one of the dumping grounds for the record stockpile of wheat that has accumulated after half a decade of bumper harvests in the world’s second-largest producer of the grain. Analysts say the losses could be far higher because more than 19 million tonnes are now lying in the open, exposed to searing summer heat and monsoon rains. Officials say that, in all, about 6 million tonnes of grain worth at least $1.5 billion could perish. “The ruling party has been the worst manager of the demand-supply of food grains.” Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India, an opposition group. “This is a case of criminal neglect by the government,” said D. Quite why the authorities could not simply offload the mountains of grain for free to fill empty stomachs is puzzling, but the explanation lies in the complex regulations that govern procurement and distribution. It is an extraordinary paradox created by a rigid regime of subsidies for grain farmers, a woeful lack of storage facilities and an inefficient, corruption-plagued public distribution system that fails millions of impoverished people.Īnd it is an embarrassment for the government led by the Congress party, which returned to power in 2009 thanks in large part to pledges of welfare for the poor, who make up about 40 percent of the 1.2 billion population. A watchman sits next to stacked sacks of rotten wheat crop at Dera Mir Miran village in Punjab June 27, 2012.
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