Transforming food systems for a rising India

Abstract

India poses some of the greatest puzzles in the world for agricultural economists and food policy analysts. How does a country with some of the most selective universities in the world, and home to some of the planet’s most technologically advanced companies, nonetheless have an agriculture sector still surprisingly dependent on smallholders practicing rain-fed cultivation using decades- or centuries-old methods? How is it that some of the world’s wealthiest families live among the largest number of undernourished people in the world? How can some of the most logistically sophisticated supply chains in the world coexist alongside agricultural input and output value chains that routinely fail poorer farmers? These and similar juxtapositions make the food systems of India especially fascinating and complex. The study of India’s food systems is valuable not just for educational purposes, however. The prospective human well-being impacts of solutions to the various obstacles that impede India’s various food sub-systems hold enormous promise. For the past several years, the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI), led by Professor Prabhu Pingali, has been at the forefront of field-based, multi-disciplinary, rigorous scientific research to unpack the complexity of India’s food systems and to identify and evaluate prospective solutions. This volume shares with readers the fruit of findings by TCI and its collaborators, along with what seem the blueprints for many years’ efforts by them and dedicated others.