National Food Policies Impacting on Food Security: The Experience of a Large Populated Country — India

India accounts for 16.7 per cent of the world’s food consumers. India’s size in terms of food consumers is many times larger than the average size of the rest of the countries, except China. At the time of independence in 1947, India was in the grip of a serious food crisis, which was accentuated by the partition of the country. The demand for food far exceeded supply, food prices were ruling at high levels and more than half of the population were living below the poverty line with inadequate purchasing power. With high rates of population growth, the dependence on imported food increased further. However, the situation improved considerably after the mid1960s, when a new agricultural development strategy and food policy were adopted in the country. The production of staple cereals increased substantially, mainly contributed by productivity improvements. The dependence on food imports reduced and the country became a marginal net exporter of cereals. There was also an improvement in physical and economic access of households to cereals and other nutritive food products. The proportion of households reporting hunger went down and the incidence of economic nnvertv was reduced. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.