Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to analyse the role of globalization and corporatisation in food insecurity in India.

Paper long abstract:

The process of Globalisation and corporitisation is one of the highly contentious, much debated issues by all genres of expression — academia, media, policy circles, government officials and international agencies. Although this story is often presented in a picturesque, full-blown fashion, its real substance differs substantially from region to region, from community to community, and from one polity to another, and thus, requires a comprehensive, socio-economic analysis.

The prime objective of the present paper is to understand and present the intertwining of relationships between the economic integration with the global process and the considerable challenges this intertwining relationship brought to the agriculture sector. In the first place, a number of major crops have been witnessing a decline in productivity growth over the past decade in particular. Second, and perhaps more important from a short-term perspective, is the fact that Indian agriculture faces unfair competition from cheap imports, which poses an enormous threat to the livelihoods of the farming communities.

The commodities which are expanding today and are likely to grow in future to meet metropolitan demand - rice, cotton, vegetable oils, animal feeds, vegetables, flowers, ornamental plants and orchids, prawns and other sea food, and hardwood timbers for luxury furniture and house fitting. All of them precipitate complex problems like displacement of food growing land, displacement of hired labour, and in addition there is irreversible forest and land degradation caused by some of these changes. As has been briefly indicated above, this objective will be pursued under the strict vigilance of sociological methodology.