India's Food Future

February has finally brought some relief in the rise in India’s food prices. The government has some breathing room in this dimension—just as well when it is beset by multiple corruption scandals. It is easy to get excited about blatant corruption, or even mismanagement of a specific sporting event or allocation of spectrum. And of course it is justified. It is somewhat harder to achieve the same level of concern about governance of an entire sector, food and agriculture—especially when there are so many possible external villains.

Food price inflation can always be blamed on the weather, on globalisation, on evil speculators, and now also on faster growth in poorer countries. Some of these factors do matter, but they divert attention from past policy failures and from what needs to be done going forward. All of the usual suspects may not be guilty, and the others have been in plain view for some time, so policy making should have already taken them into account.

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