From the always interesting Marginal Revolution –
One third of the value of Indian fruits and vegetables ends up destroyed or spoiled on the way to market, mostly because of bad infrastructure, most of all bad roads.
When we think about / talk about economic growth, it’s easy to get preoccupied with high geek glamor fields like software and biotech. When push comes to shove however, trucking, Wal-Mart, and logistics have a far greater bearing on quality of life for the masses.
A commentor @ Marginal Revolution notes that the “spoilage” rate in the US is 1/10 of this – or nearly 30% more food available en toto for a given amount of production. As Amartya Sen famously pointed out, modern hunger ain’t about growing more food, it’s about getting it to the market.
yes i know this to be kinda true, because back in India my dad was in PUNSUP (spelling??), it’s like the food department in Punjab, India. And he’s told us so many stories that wheat and other crops would lay and rot in Punjab while people in Orissa or other states would starve because the Railways department wouldn’t give them more bogies to carry the food and eventually they would just have to throw the food away. One story he told us was when the Iraq food for oil program thing was initiated, Iraq even returned Indian rice because it wasn’t up to the mark. Now that is just sad.
In addition to bad roads India has a complete ban on the import of used cars/trucks and charges huge import duties on foreign made cars/trucks, which (I reckon) translates into very few refrigerated trucks on Indian roads and more food spoilage.
refrigerated trucks would do wonders. and a wal-mart style distribution system is foreseeable in the metropolitan areas, but many baby-steps are needed to develop the infrastructure in the rural areas. how about steady and reliable electric and water supply to begin with? my in-laws house is one of the few in their village to have ceiling fans, but there is rarely any current!
once basic infrastructure reaches the rural areas, then rural markets can further develop which saves local people time and transportation costs to get the food and other supplies they need. rural markets will also provide employment opportunities for those who cannot sustain themselves on farming or other traditional occupation alone.
How does one become a blogger here? Guest or otherwise
A bit off-topic, but somewhat related http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Quadrilateral
By being deemed mutinous by the monkeys in the bunker
Also, one-third of the crops are lost to rats.
Well, it’s just like sorority rush, really. We invite you to our party/meetup, scrutinize you mercilessly, ask you pointless questions (like what your major is) just so we can gain more time to study your pores up close and then after you leave, we sit around and argue about which of you is good enough to become a sister; if a current member endorses you or has provided a letter of recommendation, that bodes well for you. Amardeep and Siddhartha are our latest lovelies, I don’t know that we’re COB’ing any more pledges anytime soon.
As for guest blogging, it’s obvious and simple; we notice people in our fabulous community who speak up/show up often enough–and with articulate, witty comments, mind you…just spamming threads is only going to work against you–to become the sort of “regular” that we AND our readers adore. Then we go to their blogs and check out how they entertain at chez them before we let them play host at our cocktail party which never ends…etc.
If you’re interested, I’d suggest hyperlinking your URL to your handle, so we can make an appearance over at YOUR blog and see how you roll. Mind you- don’t just type “saffronballs-dot-blogspot-dot-com” like it’s some signature a few spaces below your comment…that annoys the shit out of me and almost guarantees you being blackballed.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have pledges who need hazing. Go SIGMA MU!
Makes you wonder though, how much food in the US gets wasted after delivery to consumers.
True! But to set up that kind of a supply chain, there’s no getting around a long overdue massive investment in basic infrastructure. And both the direct benefits and positive externalities of this, for rural Indians, is HUGE! I like the way George Abraham keeps emphasizing this need against the appeals to trendy quick-fix solutions like micro-credit etc. Don’t know if you rememeber the portion in Gurcharan Das’ book “India Unbound” where he discusses an Indian entrepeneur who tried to set up a Walmartesque grocery-chain for rural produce in the nineties, only to be done in by (among other things) a lack of infrastructure. Perhaps the timing was a little early – I hear that Reliance moving into retail now and opening “superstores” all over the country. Let’s see where they take it!
Vinod, logistics actually has a very high geek-glam quotient. It’s almost impossible to talk to a modern logistics/supply chain theorist without two whiteboards and 5 differently colored markers.
But India’s problem is not ‘scheduling’ or ‘routing’ traffic efficiently to minimize spoilage, or to find the right ‘facility locations’ for freezing products and stuff. The problem is that we don’t have enough roads in the first place. The network needs to be there first — the network optimization will come much later.
Badmash beat me to the punch!
“Pyaar ka pehla khhat likhne mein waqt to lagta hai naye parindon ko udne mein waqt to lagta hai”
Do you need me to translate it ?
They may not, but this Malayalee who doesn’t speak Hindi does.
It surely takes time to write that first billet doux It surely takes time for fledglings to fly out too.
roads, roads and more roads and not just the one lane highway where to pass a truck you have to go headon with oncoming traffic in the other lane..
wah wah! first love and spreading the wings…nicely put
DDiG wrote:
Wow! I’m glad that you did the translation. I couldn’t have top-ped that.
aadaab Shukriya.
Who says Market supply and logistics isn’t sexy?
A friend of mine has a rose farm in India and has a much more hi tech operation where he has custom built air conditioning units onto trucks. His greenhouse where the baby roses are grown before they are moved is one of the most state of the art facilities I’ve seen. Almost 90% of this roses are exported to the far east and some parts of the middle east. His business actually guarantees fresh flowers on delivery. However he says a lot of the flowers once they reach their local destination will ruin because of the amount of time it takes to grease every person along the way to move the shipments to the final desination. One year he had a bumper crop but because of all the downstream problems the bumper barely made a dent into his bottom line and he saw very little increase in profits as a result of it. The demand existed but the supply chain couldn’t handle the increase.
On the side I’m trying to convince (read: kiss the right asses) at work to let me move to the South East Asia Supply chain division. No luck so far. 🙁
Fantastic — some fellow Jagjit Singh fans here on SM 😉
fantabulous way of describing “under the table” process
Besides infrastructure and supply-chain management, (which no doubt are major causes), I wonder if Indian agribusinesses use genetically modified food and/or hot-house on an American scale…
We all have family member who complain about how fruits and vegs “taste better back home” even though they look so juicy and delishus here in the states.
I know nothing about selling goods in the market..so, uh, just asking…
They certainly do, which opens up another can of worms — on the one hand the Green Revolution would never have been brought about in India if it wasn’t for the adoption of GM crops. On the other hand the high input needs for this kind of agriculture to work makes it viable only in the more developed regions of India (e.g. Punjab).
This is some serious stuff here. India produces enough food to feed itself, yet, many go hungry. Logistics and food inventory management, distribution, and processing is something that was perfected here in the United States (where else in the world are poor people actually fat?). Perishable foods gone bad, items sold and supplied in a chaotic manner, rats eating away stuff in warehouses,etc. is a huge problem. Thankfully, Indians aren’t a fan of canned spam like products.
With the supermarkets slowly entering the field, this will definitely improve and in the long run hopefully drive food prices down while increasing the availability of produce all over the place.
Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Infrastructure…..[insert infrastructure geek joke here].
People who have been recommending improved infrastructure aided by sustained and calculated capital expenditure as a solution for India’s problems are being unreasonable and unoriginal! That would be merely mimicking the west and adopting an alien way of life which is a sure route to disaster. India should embrace home-grown philosophies to protect home-grown vegetables. The solution does not lie in creating a logistics chain; rather, the solution lies in doing away with it. India should decimate large cities and reclaim that land for cultivation. Thus large cities will become small villages with self-reliance in terms of fresh fruits and vegetables. Sure, a lot of rich people will lose their houses and livelihoods during this decimation; some may even die. But, they can be remembered as Martyrs and their wealth can be used to construct and deploy large and elaborate tombstones on their graves. Moreover, literate villagers can be employed to write colourful post-modernist epitaphs on those tombstones. In all probability, such a concerted effort should meet with tremendous success. However, if this measure fails, India should deploy resilience as its prime national agenda. The Indian nation should become believers in fighting fire with fire; If fruits and vegetables rot during the summer heat, instead of looking for refrigerated trucks, these fruits and vegetables should be left exposed a bit longer to the sun and the masses should be advised to consume dry fruits and dry vegetables for sustenance. By searching within her womb and setting free the altruistic philosophies that she finds there, India will be slashing the chains of her dependency on the west and attaining trans-national fulfilment and deliverance
Hail
MogamboUberMetroMallu!😉
I thought only the right wing parties in India were nativist, post-modernist tools. UMM has proven me wrong.
beef-eating-atheist-hindu:
i applauded you on another post, but cruel personal attacks on an eloquent M, particularly an UMM is not v nice. bad beef-eater!
someome needs some stream of consciousness beautiful outpouring of his/her own truth (spot my postmodernism) to counter the clinical style with which others look at people’s lives. behind ‘productivity’ and ‘spoilage of resources’ lie real human beings with real stories.
to some of us a song is as valid as statistics. go UMM go 🙂 at least the tools you hate respect your way of looking at issues, why can’t you respect theirs? there is more than one way to look at the world, and they’re all just as special 🙂
“clinical style” of development economics is not necessarily heartless. Jeffrey Sachs argues that a clinical approach is what economics needs to make real progress; the blanket band-aid fixes of the world bank et al in the past do not account for the specific cultural, regional, etc characteristics of individual countries. A doctor takes a complete history of a patient before attempting to make a diagnosis– so to solve India’s poverty/hunger/health problems, one needs to determine what is holding India back. Basic amenities like a steady supply of food, water, and electriciy will inarguably help the rural and poor populations. It is probably a States issue in India– some are very developed like Panjab and some are not like the NE states and Bihar (who all have severe governance issues).
Enough of that from me now 🙂
Vinod:
In Sen’s book “Hunger and Public Action” with Jean Dreze, the main argument which explains hunger and undernourishment in India are a high regime of prices which subsidize rich farmers, consequently generating massive supply whilst depressing demand. The price subsidy allows rich farmers to produce more and earn more, thus transferring wealth to these groups while keeping the mouths and hands of the laboring poor away from food. Huge pressure groups cater to the interests of these farmers while the interests of a much larger number of people who buy food rather than sell it, are sacrificed. While there are poor farmers, the overall effect of high food prices has been on the underdogs of society – casual laborers, slum dwellers, poor urban employees, poor farm hands, migrant workers – who simply cannot afford to buy enough food to stay nourished.
So if we want to talk about food politics, let’s start with an explicit class analysis….if priorities mean anything at all.
Hello bloggers at SP: SP is about attitude. You are diluting the good stuff with some of your new entrants.
I guess you meant “SM” old fella.
Anuja – I wouldn’t reduce their argument purely to class analysis. After all Sen-Dreze look at a variety of factors (food/labour markets, political responsiveness etc) that contribute to the problem. But I see your point about the role of power and influence — and this is why speaking of a purely market solution to the problem is misguided because some of the deeper systemic problems will remain until they are directly addressed.
Badmash Green Revolution was not the result of GM crops but Genetically improved crops through breeding. India has recently allowed research and even cultivation of certain GM crops like cotton. Punjab was like all other states before the green revolution, but heavy subsidies and a focussed program helped it reach where it is now. as a side note one of the major achievement of that focussed programs was road connectivity in rural areas for market access alongwith the availability of high yielding varities.
Actually, Vinod–the mutineer who wrote this post– has been a part of “SP” since day ONE. He is neither a new nor an entrant. Discuss. Tawk amongst yourselves. 😉
HM – thanks. I didn’t realize that there was a distinction between GM crops and the older HYVs. My bad!
Funny isn’t it that the GR obviously benefited the country as a whole a great deal and yet there is a significant portion of those who believe that for farmers in Punjab itself it might not have been entirely a good thing. It’s the same sort of local vs. global argument that is used by some anti-globalization apologists today.
Good roads are essential, but most critical infrastructural bottleneck in my opinion is power/energy, especially for perishable produce. Refrigeration requires energy, both from petro-fuels and electricity, and India doesn’t have enough of either. A refrigerated truck can travel on bad roads, but you need a referigerated truck in the first place. Recently Reliance started a program for buying fresh produce from punjab and selling it in Europe. Biggest problems they faced were refrigeration at the airport and bureaucracy. Roads as I said in an earlier comment are relatively better in Punjab.
For walmart like operations Energy/Power might again be the biggest hurdle. In small towns and villages 6-8 hours of power is a norm (Atleast in Punjab). A big box like walmart will have to generate its own electric power for 16-18 hrs a day to run AC, lights and “produce coolers”. I assume the walmarts already know this and have done there analysis, or they are hoping India would generate enough power in 5-10 yrs from now.
i’d say i haven’t seen the comment of people actually being able to afford the food being brought up yet.
the green revolution was basically about increased use of pesticides…that translated to stunted crops but more quantity. there is a trend in punjab to go back toward organic farming as effects of many years of pesticide use are being seen. increase in diseases, polluted water et al.
db – I was sort of addressing the issue of people not being able to afford to buy food in my post. Check out Post #30.
Infrastructure is vital. But there are more fundamental issues that need to be addressed before we build Walmarts all over India.