For last three decades food was available for cheap–the cheapest ever in known human history. But that seems to be changing. Price of rice and wheat have almost doubled over the last one year in the international market. Some Facts and Figures on food prices from BBC.
Rising food prices help net sellers and hurt net buyers of food. I was wondering what percentage of people in Bihar–the most rural, the most agricultural and the poorest state of India–are net buyers of food? I could not find the answer on the internet or in published NSS reports. So, I did this rough estimation from land distribution data I found in a 2002 NSS survey (see the table).
There were 11.7 million rural households in Bihar in 2002-03. 29% (~3.4 million HHs) of them did not cultivate any land–own or leased– in 2002-03. Another 15% (1.8 million HHs) operated holdings smaller than 400 sq. meters. Altogether, seventy-five percent of rural households in Bihar did not cultivate any land or cultivated holdings smaller than 0.5 hectares.
| Operational Landholding Pattern in Bihar | |||
| Size (ha) | # (‘000) | % of total HHs | % operating HHs |
| nil | 33824 | 28.95 | |
| <0.002 | 2024 | 1.7 | 2.4 |
| 0.002-0.005 | 5588 | 4.8 | 6.7 |
| 0.005-0.04 | 9387 | 8.0 | 11.3 |
| 0.04-0.5 | 36730 | 31.4 | 44.2 |
| 0.5-1.0 | 15646 | 13.4 | 18.8 |
| Total | 116853 | ||
| Source: TableN-E NSS Report# 492, 2002-03, p.176 | |||
Please note that the extent of landlessness (in terms of land ownership) is most probably higher than these numbers suggest because here we are counting sharecroppers as operational holders even if they do not own any land and many of them do not. According to a World Bank survey in 1998, “nearly 25% of cultivated land in Bihar was leased-in. For small landholders (0.2-0.4 ha), leased-in land was as much as half the size of their average cultivable land; for SC/ST households around 80% of cultivated land was leased-in”.
I must say that I am shocked by these numbers.
Moving on from land ownership to subsistence status of rural Biharis. An average Bihari villager consumes about 150 kg of cereals per year; an average Bihari family of 5 needs about 750 kg/year. Per hectare crop yield of the rice-wheat system is about 2400 kg/ha of NSA (net sown area) in the state. This means that a typical farmer requires 0.33 ha of land to grow that much food. If he is a sharecropper, he needs to operate on twice as much land (0.66ha) to have 750 kg of food for his family consumption. We saw above that 75% of all rural households in Bihar operate no land or landholdings smaller than 0.5 ha. The incidence of extreme poverty is 46 to 56% among those who own less than 0.4 ha of land against the state average of 40%. These rough estimates show that 8.75 million of Bihar’s 11.7 million rural households are net buyers of food; they are the poorest and they will suffer heavily from the recent spike in food prices, at least in the short-run. [It does not help matters that Bihar has the most leaky public distribution system in India. ]
Part of the problem is the low crop yields and low cropping intensity in a high population density region. Bihar’s population grew faster in 1990s (by 28%) than in 1980s and there are signs that it is not slowing down even in the new millenium. The problem is that the increasing population density has not led to increase in land-use intensification. The prognosis of Malthus, not Boserup, is turning out to be true in Bihar and that is Bihar’s tragedy.
