Famine | ukwatch.net

Afghanistan faces humanitarian crisis- Oxfam

tim — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:03:49 +0000

Afghanistan needs urgent help to avert a humanitarian crisis this winter, with millions facing some of the worst conditions for more than 20 years, a leading British charity said on Saturday.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world with more than half of the population living below the poverty line and millions of Afghans facing constant food shortages.

About 1,000 people died in the last, exceptionally severe winter marked by bitter cold and heavy snowfall.

“This is a race against time, the international community needs to respond quickly before winter when conditions deteriorate,” Matt Waldman, the head of policy in Afghanistan for British charity Oxfam, said in a statement.

“If the response is slow or insufficient, people could be forced to sell assets or leave their homes and villages, and there could be a further deterioration of stability,” he said.

Oxfam said Dai Kundi province in central Afghanistan may be facing the worst conditions in more than 20 years, and similar conditions could be found in other provinces.

Many areas in Afghanistan are virtually inaccessible in winter because of snow, poor roads and worsening security, hindering the delivery of aid and food.

In a letter to international development ministers around the world, Oxfam has called for a “major humanitarian response” after a poor take-up of its appeal in July for $404 million.

While Britain, the United States, Canada and the European Commission have already committed funds, many more have yet to contribute to the appeal which has reached only one fifth of target, said Oxfam.

Staff shortages mean there are also not enough people to organise and coordinate the required aid effort, Oxfam said.

Afghanistan relies heavily on international aid with around 90 percent of its spending coming from foreign donors. Drought, rising food prices as well as spreading insecurity have all contributed to a worsening humanitarian situation in the war-torn country.

Manufactured Famine

tim — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:31:02 +0000

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history”, between 12 and 29 million people died(1). Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish(2). Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women(3). Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal’s stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997(4).

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements(5,6). In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.

The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen – mostly from Spain and France – have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take the country’s fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.

Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised.

The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU’s negotiations as “not sufficiently inclusive”. They suffer from a “lack of transparency” and from the African countries’ lack of capacity to handle the legal complexities(7). ActionAid shows that Mandelson’s office has ignored these problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and “moved ahead in the negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle.” If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be responsible for another imperial famine.

This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK’s indirect consumption of water, purchased in the form of food(8). We buy much of our rice and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of Pakistan’s best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley’s aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.

Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over “the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on.” Through “secretive bilateral agreements,” the paper reports, “the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis.” (9)

Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of hectares(10,11). This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passed across the right desk magically transforms other people’s property into foreign exchange(12,13). But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can only exacerbate such famines.

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but – in the short term at any rate – we will hardly notice. The rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.

References:

1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.

2. ActionAid, 11th August 2008. SelFISH Europe. http://www.illegal-fishing.info/uploads/ActionAidSelFISHEurope.pdf

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Vlad M. Kaczynski and David L. Fluharty, March 2002. European policies in West Africa: who benefits from fisheries agreements? Marine Policy, Volume 26, Issue 2, pp75-93.
doi:10.1016/S0308-597X(01)00039-2

6. Tim Judah, 1st August 2001. The battle for West Africa’s fish. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1464966.stm

7. UNECA, EPA Negotiations: African Countries Continental Review, African Trade Policy Centre, February 2007. Quoted by ActionAid, ibid.

8. Ashok Chapagain and Stuart Orr, August 2008. UK Water Footprint: the impact of the UK’s food
and fibre consumption on global water resources. Volume one. http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_uk_footprint.pdf

9. Javier Blas and Andrew England, 19th August 2008. Foreign fields: Rich states look beyond their borders for fertile soil. Financial Times.

10. ibid.

11. Barney Jopson and Andrew England, 11th August 2008. Sudan woos investors to put $1bn in farming. Financial Times.

12. For discussions of how landrights in Africa are overruled, see:

Lorenzo Cotula, September 2007. Legal empowerment for local resource control. International Institute for Environment and Development. http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/12542IIED.pdf

and:

13. Camilla Toulmin, 2006. Securing Land and Property Rights in Africa: Improving the
Investment Climate. Chapter 2.3 of the Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum, Switzerland.

The global food crisis

tim — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:53:42 +0000

This is not a sudden and unexpected crisis: the signs have been around for some time now. Even though international bureaucrats have been referring to the current problems in the world food situation as ‘a silent tsunami’, the truth is that this one could easily have been seen to be coming. Even so, its impact has been powerful and already quite devastating, as food shortages and rapidly rising prices of food have adversely affected billions of people, especially the poor in the developing world.

It is also very much a man-made crisis, resulting not so much from ineluctable forces of global supply and demand as from the market-oriented and liberalising policies adopted by choice or compulsion in almost all countries. These policies have either neglected agriculture or allowed shifts in global prices to determine both cropping patterns and the viability of farming, and also generated greater possibilities of speculative activity in food items. Cultivators in developing countries have been ravaged by the fearsome combination of exposure to import competition from highly subsidised agriculture in developed countries, removal of domestic protection of inputs and reduced access to institutional credit – to the point that even the global increase in agricultural prices after 2002 did not compensate sufficiently to alleviate the pervasive agrarian crisis in much of the developing world.

What are the symptoms of this crisis? The most immediately evident feature is the recent rise in food prices. Globally, the prices of many basic food commodities have not risen faster for more than three decades. In fact, even in recent years, food prices internationally had shown only a modest increase until early 2007. But since then they have zoomed, such that International Monetary Fund (IMF) data show a more-than-40% increase in world food prices over 2007, and even more rapid increases in the first three months of this year. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) food price index, which includes national prices as well as those in cross-border trade, suggests that the average index for 2007 was nearly 25% above the average for 2006. Apart from sugar, nearly every other food crop showed very significant increases in price in world trade over 2007. This trend has accelerated in the first few months of 2008.

The increase has been marked in essential food grains that are staples for most of the world’s population. Global wheat prices increased by 77% in 2007 and rice prices increased by nearly 20%, which are some of the most rapid annual increases in the past half-century. Since the start of 2008, world rice prices have soared even more, increasing by nearly one-and-a-half times just in the first 100 days of the year. Wheat prices have been highly volatile in the current year, increasing by 25% in one day and then falling even more sharply in early April, but are still well above the levels of most of last year. The price of corn – another major staple especially in Latin America – has more than doubled in the past two years.

Across developing countries there is evidence of growing shortage of food in retail trade, even if not always in domestic production. Price rises for food grains have varied in intensity according to how well different governments have been able to manage the global impact and ensure domestic supply. And prices of other food items – ranging from meat and vegetables to edible oils – have also skyrocketed.

The impact of this has been felt most sharply in poor countries where most people tend to spend around half of their family budgets on food items. There have already been food riots in countries as far apart as Haiti, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bangladesh, Philippines and Indonesia. And many more countries are threatened by social unrest as rising food prices cause not merely dissatisfaction but the spread of hunger. In several countries in Asia, such as Pakistan and Thailand, troops have been deployed to guard food stocks and prevent seizure of grain from warehouses.

Even the institutions that have encouraged policies that have brought the situation to this pass have had to sit up and take notice. The World Bank President now estimates that such high food prices could cause more than 100 million people in low-income countries to be pushed back into deeper poverty.

There are many explanations being offered for the recent increase in global food prices. It has been argued that this is essentially demand-led, the result of several years of rapid economic growth and rising incomes in some of the most populous nations (particularly China and India), hence the growing demand for food. It is pointed out that as per capita incomes rise, even though people may spend a lower percentage of their income on food, the absolute amount of demand still increases. And even when they consume less food grain directly because of a change in food consumption patterns, the indirect demand for grain still increases, often more than proportionately, because of more demand for animal products, since livestock also need to be fed and some like cattle require even more grain than humans. It is estimated that each kilo of beef requires seven kilos of grain to be produced.

However, the contribution of increasing global demand, while it has a role, should not be overplayed, especially in the case of China. In fact, a study by Germany’s National Office for Agricultural Produce Prices rejected the claims that growing demand in China is the main reason for the current spike in world food prices and said that China’s alleged influence on markets is often exaggerated. It noted that while over the past decade Chinese domestic consumption of milk and dairy products rose by more than five times, the bulk of this increase in demand was satisfied by a simultaneous expansion in Chinese production. Currently China meets more than 90% of its needs in wheat, maize and rice, and it is aiming for producing 95% of its estimated future demand for these items.

In certain products, China’s involvement in global markets has played a role in affecting prices. In 2006 and part of 2007 Chinese pork production had collapsed because of animal disease, causing higher imports of both pork and corn feed for pigs to increase domestic pork supply. Similarly, 40% of world production of soyabean is currently imported by China, largely for use as animal feed. Chinese imports of other primary products such as cotton, vegetable oils, rubber, timber and animal skins have soared. But these are not responsible for higher world prices of wheat and rice. In any case, it should be noted that this is not the first time that the world economy has witnessed increases in income of a significant portion of the population, and these previous phases were not accompanied by such sharp increases in food prices. Rather than these simplistic explanations, therefore, it is likely that there are other forces at work. Five major aspects affecting supply conditions have been crucial in changing global market conditions for food crops.

First, there is the impact of high oil prices, which affects agricultural costs directly and indirectly in a variety of ways. This is because of the growing significance of energy as an input in the cultivation process itself as well as in transporting food. Changing cultivation technology has meant ever-growing reliance on chemical fertilisers whose production costs are directly affected by oil prices. Greater mechanisation of agriculture in the form of tractors, harvesters and threshers requires more oil to run these machines. The spread of irrigation, especially ground water exploitation, requires energy in the form of diesel or electricity to run pump sets.

This rise in energy costs has had more of an impact than before because in most countries, especially in the developing world, governments have reduced protection and subsidies on agriculture. This means that high costs of energy directly translate into higher costs of cultivation, and therefore higher prices of output.

Second, there is the biofuel factor: the impact of both oil prices and government policies in the US, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere that have promoted biofuels as an alternative to petroleum. This has led to significant shifts in acreage to the cultivation of crops that can produce biofuels, and diversion of such output to fuel production. For example, in 2006 the US diverted more than 20% of its maize production to the production of ethanol, Brazil used half of its sugarcane production to make biofuel, and the European Union used the greater part of its vegetable oil seeds production as well as imported vegetable oils to make biofuel.

The US has led this shift globally. President George Bush provided an impetus to domestic ethanol production by providing large subsidies, in a desperate attempt to reduce dependence upon petroleum once it became evident that the imperialist attempt to control Middle East oil supplies had come unstuck with the failed invasion of Iraq. According to the IMF, corn ethanol production in the United States has accounted for a minimum of 50% of the increase in global corn output since 2006.

In addition to diverting corn output into non-food use, this has also reduced acreage for other crops and has naturally reduced the available land for producing food. Soyabean production has been affected by the acreage shift, and therefore oilseed prices have gone up. Meanwhile, the use of maize to make ethanol has caused corn prices to rise, and increased the price of animal feed, thereby causing increased prices of livestock and therefore meat and dairy products.

The irony is that biofuels do not even fulfil the promises of ensuring energy security or retarding the pace of global warming. Ethanol production is extremely energy-intensive, so it does not really lead to any energy saving. Even in countries like Brazil where sugarcane rather than corn is used to produce ethanol, it has been argued that the push for such production has led to large-scale deforestation of the Amazon, thereby further intensifying the problems of global warming. Indeed, recent scientific research suggests that the diversion of land to growing biofuel crops can produce an enormous ‘CO2 debt’ from the use of machinery and fertilisers, the release of carbon from the soil and the loss of CO2 sequestration by trees and other plants that have been cleared for cultivation. Yet, as long as government subsidies remain in the US and elsewhere, and world oil prices remain high, biofuel production is likely to continue to be encouraged despite the evident problems. And it will continue to have adverse effects on global food production and availability.

Third, the impact of policy neglect of agriculture over the past two decades is finally being felt. The prolonged agrarian crisis in many parts of the developing world has been largely a policy-determined crisis. Once again, even international officials are now admitting what has been obvious to independent observers for several years. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf has admitted that the crisis had been building for decades: ‘The situation we are in is the result of inappropriate policies over the past 20 years.’

These inappropriate policies have several aspects, but they all result from the basic neoliberal open market-oriented framework that has governed most economic policy making over the past two decades. One major element has been the lack of public investment in agriculture and in agricultural research. This has been associated with low to poor yield increases, especially in tropical agriculture, and falling productivity of land. Greater trade openness and market orientation of farmers have led to shifts in acreage from food crops to cash crops that have increasingly relied on purchased inputs. But both public provision and government regulation of input provision have been progressively reduced, leaving farmers at the mercy of large seed and fertiliser companies and input dealers and allowing input prices to increase quite sharply. There have also been attempts in most developing countries to reduce subsidies to farmers in the form of lower power and water prices, thus adding to cultivation costs.

The lack of attention to relevant agricultural research and extension by public bodies has denied farmers access to necessary knowledge. It has also been associated with other problems such as the excessive use of ground water in cultivation; inadequate attention to preserving or regenerating land and soil quality; and the over-use of chemical inputs that have long-run implications for both safety and productivity. Similarly, the ecological implications of both pollution and climate change, including desertification and loss of cultivable land, are issues that have been highlighted by analysts but largely ignored by policy makers in most countries.

Reversing these processes is possible, and of course essential, but all this will take time and also will require substantial public investment. So until then, global supply conditions are likely to remain problematic. And meanwhile, increases in global prices of food are likely to be exploited by large agribusinesses based in the North rather than benefiting farmers in low-income countries.

There are also issues related to the loss of cultivable land because of industrialisation. Predictably, this has been most rapid in recent times in fast-growing Asia, but that is also because the process was already more advanced in the more industrialised regions of Latin America. For example, in Vietnam it is estimated that around 40,000 hectares of rice paddies are lost every year to urban construction, industrial zones and roads. In Thailand, the amount of land under cultivation dropped by more than 13% between 1995 and 2005.

Fourth, there is the impact of recent climate change, which has caused poor harvests in different ways, ranging from droughts in Canada and Australia to excessive rain in parts of the US. It is projected that warmer and earlier growing seasons will increase crop susceptibility to pests and viruses, which are expected to proliferate as a direct result of rising temperatures. Some more arid regions are already more drought-prone and in danger of desertification. The rapid melting of glaciers in Asia is of huge consequence to China and India, where important rivers such as the Yangtze, Yellow and Ganges are fed by such glaciers. This will deprive the hinterland of much-needed irrigation water for wheat and rice crops during dry seasons, which is of global significance since China and India together produce more than half the world’s wheat and rice. Once again, official policy has been tardy in considering such problems, much less addressing them.

Fifth, there is the impact of changes in market structure which allow for greater international speculation in commodities. It is often assumed that rising food prices automatically benefit farmers, but this is far from the case, especially as the global food trade has become more concentrated and vertically integrated. A small number of agribusiness companies worldwide increasingly control all aspects of cultivation and distribution, from supplying inputs to farmers to buying crops and even, in some cases, retail food distribution. This means that marketing margins are large and increasing, so that direct producers do not get the benefits of increases except with a time lag and even then not to the full extent. This concentration also enables greater speculation in food, with more centralised storage.

It is probably not a coincidence that this has happened over the same period that governments across the developing world in particular (with the notable exception of China) have reduced public holding of food stocks. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that global stock holding of wheat is at its lowest level in 30 years, despite substantially increased world demand. It should be noted that the same multilateral donors (the IMF and the World Bank) whose representatives are now breast-beating about the food crisis have earlier played a major role in this reduction of state involvement, by encouraging or forcing developing-country governments to reduce ‘wasteful’ and ‘expensive’ holding of food grain stocks.

This has inevitably reduced the capacity of public intervention to prevent speculative activity from dominating markets and prices. And because public food reserves necessarily take time to build, they cannot quickly be created to ensure a reduction of speculation-induced price rises. The point has been made bluntly, if belatedly, by Jose Graziano, FAO’s Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean: ‘The crisis is a speculative attack and it will last… Speculative attacks become possible when you have low reserves.’

The point is that such speculation is not likely to dissipate any time soon. As the global financial system remains fragile with the continuing implosion of the US housing finance market, investors will continue to search for other avenues of investment to make up their losses and find new sources of profit. Commodity speculation has increasingly emerged as an important area for such financial investment. Such speculation by large banks and financial companies explains at least partly why the very recent period has seen such sharp hikes in price. Once again, government policies, especially with respect to the financial sector, are largely responsible for this, since financial deregulation has allowed many more complex forms of speculative activity that affect trade in commodities.

The role played by private traders and speculators has been especially evident in countries where aggregate domestic supply has been adequate to meet demand but there has not been enough in the hands of the public agencies. Thus in India, private trade played a role in pushing up prices of essential items even though there was no absolute shortage in aggregate terms, because the public agency had not procured enough to dampen market expectations of price rises.

So it is clear that the entire process that has led to the current food crisis has been largely policy-driven, which is probably good news because it means that policies can also reverse the process. But it is important for governments to recognise the precise role played by specific policies and think strategically on how to change them in a progressive and sustainable manner, rather than simply engage in knee-jerk reactions.

Unfortunately, though, it seems that knee-jerk responses are dominating at present. Of course, some of these are necessary to deal with the immediate crisis and ensure access to food especially for the poor. Of 58 countries whose reactions are tracked by the World Bank, 48 have imposed price controls, consumer subsidies, export restrictions or lower tariffs. But another response has been to slash import duties: at least 24 nations have reduced duties and value-added taxes on food items and allowed cheaper imports. Many countries are restricting or prohibiting exports, especially of rice or wheat. These include Egypt, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, India and China. Meanwhile, net importers, often poor countries in Asia and Africa, are scrambling to secure supply contracts as the domestic production of food staples cannot meet consumption requirements.

Meanwhile, governments are once again turning their attention to the need to maintain public food stocks. In January, the Malaysian government announced that it would create a new agency to stock up on oil, rice and other items. Other countries in Asia are also busy stockpiling grain. The Indian government has put fresh energy into ensuring that the public agency procures enough wheat from the recent harvest to ensure more than adequate buffer stock.
Another fallout of the food crisis is the greater willingness of some governments to consider genetically modified crop production. Thus, the Mexican government, which had banned GM crops for a long time, is now considering lifting the ban on genetically modified corn. It is possible that similar bans in the European Union and some countries of Africa could also be reconsidered if the aggregate shortages continue.

In this context it is worth considering the case of countries that have managed to avoid severe crisis. Venezuela in Latin America stands out as a country where food prices have increased only marginally, largely because oil revenues have been used to subsidise essential items consumed by the poor. In Africa, Malawi has not only weathered the current storm but has achieved recent success in food production, allowing it to achieve food self-sufficiency and even export, by ignoring World Bank advice and extending substantial subsidies for fertiliser and other inputs to farmers. Even China, blamed so often for high global prices, has actually increased domestic production to meet domestic needs and also stockpiled large quantities of grain, so that rice and wheat prices have not risen much in the country despite rapid global inflation in these crops. In India, the banning of futures trading in four essential commodities last year, the recent control of trade and the ability of the government to use public procurement to feed the Public Distribution System have played some role in keeping grain price rises below the global increases.

However, in India even small increases in food prices directly impact upon the poor and adversely affect food consumption, because most workers do not get inflation-indexed incomes. In India the problem is more severe because such a large proportion of the population is already malnourished and thereby more prone to debilitating illness and inability to achieve normal growth. Even small reductions in food consumption can have devastating social effects in such a context, quite apart from the political destabilisation that can occur.

All this suggests that real solutions to the present food crisis will not be found until governments across the world seriously reconsider the neoliberal economic strategies that created the crisis in the first place.

Jayati Ghosh is a Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.