Why are Indian kids starving?

I thought you and your readers would be very interested in this new essay at Boston Review. From the pages of the May / June issue, Siddhartha Deb reports on growing disparity in the shadow of the so-called "Indian Miracle." Deb writes, "43 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished."

In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 28 percent; it’s 7 percent in China, to which India is so often compared. The Indian government’s own data show that 800 million Indians live on about twenty rupees (about $0.50) a day. Half of those are farmers who produce food that they, for the most part, cannot afford to eat thanks to the demands of speculators and affluent urban consumers. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), wheat prices reached a record high in February, and the cost of rice—which accounts for 30 percent of the typical Indian diet—hovers at around 22 rupees per kilogram even in Patna and Chennai, capitals of major rice-producing states. That’s about twice the average cost from 2000 until the middle of 2007, when prices began to rise sharply. The average Indian consumes 73 kilograms of rice per year, which means that farmers, assuming they eat at least as much rice as their non-farming countrymen, are now spending some 20 percent of their income on rice alone.

Read the rest: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.3/siddhartha_deb_india_food_crisis.php

I hope that you'll share this disturbing piece of investigative journalism with your readers. The dilemma of rising food prices in economically booming India is rapidly transforming into an humanitarian crisis.

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This press release is reprinted by Alanna Shaikh out of an obscure sense of guilt. It does not represent the opinions of Alanna Shaikh or any of her employers.