The nationwide uprising against police brutality has completely changed the conversation around policing and safety. The demand to defund police which would have been deemed unthinkable in the mainstream not long ago, but are now being taken up as official policy in towns and cities across the country. At this moment, it is crucial to expand the conversation to include the idea of community control over policing.
In order to do so, I caught up with activist M Adams, who describes community control as “essential coupling” to the demand to defund the police. Although we did touch upon some of the details of how community control would work, the goal of the interview was more to illustrate the importance of the idea. M. Adams is a community organizer and co-executive director of
Freedom Inc. and a leader in the Movement for Black Lives. As a queer Black person, Adams has developed and advocated for a strong intersectional approach in numerous important venues. Adams is a leading figure in the Take Back the Land Movement, she presented before the United Nations for the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, she is a co-author of Forward from Ferguson and a paper on Black community control over the police, and she is the author of intersectionality theory in Why Killing Unarmed Black folks is a Queer issue.
Q: Let’s begin by asking you to describe the role of the police as a colonial force.
MA: We think it’s extremely important to be scientific in our assessment about what’s causing police brutality. In our assessment, it is because the Black community exists and functions as a colony within the United States. When you use the word “colony”, most people think about one group of people colonizing another group of people in a faraway place, and that is indeed one way of setting up a colony.
What we’re saying is that Black people are an internal colony, not necessarily a different country or nation-state. What defines colonialism is a power dynamic, and as it relates to Black people there are three features.
- There is extraction of wealth and labor, and we can document this from the chattel slavery system to the current day mass We can see the under-employment of Black folks, the precariousness, the displacement. Black people are a hyper-exploited class in the way wealth is extracted from us, our bodies are labor.
- The colony acts as a dumping site for runoff goods; not only do they use our labor to produce or create wealth, but then they also consume the things they think are good and dump the bad ones back on us. We’ve seen that in the recession of 2008, where banks’ exploitative practices like redlining and predatory lending – gendered racial capitalism – put us in a precarious situation where we don’t control anything, land is commodified altogether, and Black people as a class don’t have the ability to house ourselves. Then the banks get the bailouts, get all the money and then they can charge us again, exploiting us another layer.
- In the context of the US, the colonial relationship tends to placate poor white people. Racial capitalism in the US has been a benefactor for poor white folk, as a way to keep poor white folk from turning on capitalists. For instance, the project of neoliberalism was not only a set of policies for capital to gain more power, but was accompanied by punitive policies, by discourses of Black criminality, anti-Black and anti-woman, anti-queer, trans, intersex personal responsibility narratives, of Black people being responsible for the situation we were in. We see it in the current presidency. Trump is able to continuously have white people bought into the project of whiteness whether or not capitalism is actually serving the interests of poor white
If we can demonstrate that Black people are in a colonial relationship with the US government – Black people as a class, not individuals where individuals like Oprah Winfrey are rich – then we understand what the role of policing inside of that is. It is to be an occupying force that maintains the status of capitalism. Hence, Black people are being murdered by the police because we are under occupation. If we want to end the murders, then we must end the occupation. We see this when our military occupies other countries; we know that those occupations only end if we withdraw the military. It won’t end if the military are nice, or militant forces that speak the language, or play basketball, or give somebody a ride-along in a tank. That all sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? Because we understand that military force is an occupying force.
Similarly, we realize that to end the colonial control of the police, we have to fight for community control, which is ultimately about ending the colonial domination that Black people face.
Q: There is a famous quote by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael): “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.” Talk about the systemic aspect of racism and its connection with capitalism.
MA: That quote that you offered is so important. It is illogical to think that we can solve the issues of Black oppression by trying to change the individual mindset of white people. We need to be thinking systemically. Racism at its core is a system of power.
Focusing on police murders, Black people doing anything get murdered. Aiyana Jones and Breonna Taylor were asleep when they were murdered. We get killed when asleep. We can’t go and get skittles from the store like Trayvon Martin. We can’t be like Sandra Bland and ask the police officer what are you pulling me over for, whereas white people can even fight the police. Being murdered by the police is not about the details or facts of an individual incident, but about the system of policing. Things like anti-bias training are completely inadequate. The system aspect is so crucial.
In terms of attitudes, it is probably true that a lot of Black people don’t like white people. I know Black people who do not want to deal with white folk. What is different is that they have no systemic power to enact any harm. We cannot name any historical period where Black people as a class were able to deny white people the right to house themselves, to educate themselves, to use enslavement, extreme violence and exploitation. We can name individual Black people who have resisted, but the same structural power has not been there.
Secondly, focusing on individual attitudes makes little strategic sense. For one, how do you measure that somebody gets it enough that inside of their socio-political standing, they will be pro-Black. Is 100s of hours of counseling enough or 1000s? I’m not saying that because I don’t think people should love Black people. I am Black, and I think everyone should love Black people. But measuring that and depending on that for the path forward is lacking a strong analysis of how we got here. The other consequence of taking the above path is that the organizing among the Black community needs to stop, and instead we should be focusing on organizing the white people to like and love us. That does not put us in a position of power and is instead asking us to pander.
In terms of linkages, capitalism and racism are inextricable. It is impossible to solve one without a reckoning of the other. Take the concept of policing. We may be able to deal with a specific policing institution and transform or convert it inside of capitalism, but we will not be able to defeat policing as an entity unless we defeat capitalism because capitalists will find a way to defend their property.
Similarly, class struggle cannot succeed without a defeat of policing, which is a force that facilitates capitalism. Class struggle cannot succeed without directly confronting capitalists’ ability to dominate. Nobody is choosing to get exploited, instead it is a system forced upon us, and when you go against the system, there is violence imposed upon us.
Other forms of oppression are intimately connected too. A lot of people don’t know that I answer the question of policing not only as a Black person, but also as a survivor of violence, and spend a lot of my time thinking about how we end patriarchal violence, how do we end rape, stop sexual assault, intimate partner violence, etc. Our movement, i.e. of people who are feminist, who work at the intersection of gender based violence, or poor, trans, intersex people, is often used as the reason why we can’t abolish or get rid of policing. People often say what are you going to do for the rapist, for molestation of children, for the person who is abusing their partner. These are all very important questions that I deal with every day. Survivors of violence don’t have power over the system. Police are not accountable to survivors. Police violence is not just beating people up, but also sexual violence through strip searches and also the domestic violence they do in their homes and families. It is reported that the institution of policing has a higher rate of DV than civilian society. Policing violence is the choking of people like Eric Garner, but it is also the violence they commit at home. Having a feminist analysis of policing helps us to do multiple things. First, it helps us hold or better uncover all the victims of police violence who don’t get spoken about. There is a large number of survivors who call the police and then are assaulted by police officers, which is why many of the sex workers don’t even call the police. Not only does it help us better center all these victims of police violence, but it also helps us to understand the whole swathe of what the violence is.
Policing violence is racial capitalism, but it is also patriarchal. It is gendered racial capitalism. It has also maintained the domination over women’s bodies, over queer, trans, intersex bodies. It is also forcing women, queer, trans and intersex folks to carry out reproductive labor.
Q: We have various proposals out there to fight police brutality as part of the uprising. We have 8 can’t wait, then there is 8 to abolition, and then Defund and Community Control. Can you lay them out?
MA: I won’t spend time on 8 can’t wait, because it’s not serious. It’s probably proposed by people who are well meaning, but we don’t need to dwell on it.
8 to abolition is abolitionist in its pivot, not seeking to save the police or make them nicer, it is calling us to address harm and accountability without prisons or police. It also seeks to decriminalize a whole set of things that are criminalized today: skipping schools can be a criminal act, teachers report students for disorderly conduct for minor disobedience, which gets them a police citation, a whole array of age-appropriate behaviors by teenagers – such as smoking weed –are criminalized. It’s a smart intervention and an important intervention.
There are two other distinct sets of ideas right now. One is Defund. The Movement For Black Lives has been pushing Defund. Defund is also abolitionist in nature. It recognizes that the crisis of policing has become big because of heavy investment. Police funding wasn’t organic; it was intentionally developed and heavily resourced, not only with money but with culture. Defund as a strategy seeks to take those resources back. We are still amidst a pandemic; many people are unemployed. In this moment, Defund is saying instead of austerity, take the money from police. Here’s a 100 billion dollars; just take it. Instead fund things like education, housing, health care, preventative measures around domestic violence, on-the-ground community responses to violence, and so on. I think it’s an important effort that demonstrates how grossly over-funded policing is. It’s also helping ask what we want to invest in that creates safety.
Community control approaches the policing question not so much from the money aspect but one that directly asks who has the political power to determine safety apparatuses inside of our communities. Community control is saying to the state: turn over your power to the community, so that we may determine how to keep our community safe. Community control is a necessary coupling to Defund. We cannot be fighting to just take money without wrestling power, because then it will be privatized and then we’ll find ourselves in a fight to take it back from private into public just to get back to where we are today.
What we have been naming as community control has to do with Black people in particular being able to determine policies, practice, procedures, as well as hiring and firing of police. And that would happen by creating hyper-democratic structures inside of communities, where actual community members, not elected, randomly chosen as a way to avoid money in politics will have power over determining what safety looks like in those localities.
Q: You brought up random drawings. Talk about this idea of “sortition” and how in your proposal it is used to constitute the community control board (that will oversee policing).
MA: We envision communities to be defined hyper-locally. Suppose we decide to district up our boards to be areas of 5000 people at a time (maybe that’s too big, I don’t know; details like that will need to be worked out in the future). We want to ensure that regular people living there can be inside of these boards and take power. Elections can be easily bought off; people can be bribed. Furthermore, they are typically fought by career politicians. So, we rejected elections.
We went with random drawings of people living in those areas. You could wake up one morning and your name could be chosen. It’s not a permanent position. You serve for a few years. The fact that next week someone else could be the one who is part of the board changes the dynamics of the community. The board as constituted above would determine the practices and policies of the safety teams.
Some say that the above sounds like I’m not against policing. I do think the current iteration of policing has to go. But I also know that as a leftist, as a survivor of violence, as a queer person, as a female-assigned person, as a Black person, that many things that I value and affirm are not popular. I am serious when I say sexual violence has to end. But if put to a vote, we might not win it. We still need some form of organized force to deal with those issues, with white nationalists who are mad. You need some form of organized force to deal with harm. But under community control, it would be radically different.
Raghav Kaushik is an activist based in Seattle. His recent engagements have been with the Tax Amazon campaign in Seattle, and the fight against the authoritarian Modi regime in India, specifically the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act and National Registry of Citizens.
An attempted coup d’etat is underway in Lebanon. Another orchestrated colour revolution being attempted, as rioters turn violent, takeover government buildings, burn documents & properties. The target is regime change, or worse an outright religio-sectarian Civil War, which for long has been a US-Israeli-Saudi plan to destroy Lebanon.
Interference by US & France in the immediate aftermath of the terror attack
Statements by US Ambassador Shea Dorothy & French President Macron are clear pointers to this nefarious design.
USA ambassador Shea Dorothy issued a statement supporting the rioters stating, “The Lebanese people deserve leadership that listens to their demands for transparency and accountability.”
In fact MK Moshe Feiglin, an extreme right-winger from Israeli PM Netanyahu’s Likud Party, could not hide his happiness at the tragedy that had befallen Beirut. Feiglin wrote that he was, “sending his thanks to G-d, and all the geniuses and heroes really (!) who organized for us this wonderful celebration in honour of the Day of Love.”
Feiglin surely seems to know the “geniuses & heroes who organised” this massive terror attack. Interesting indeed!
President Macron of France, the old colonial power, immediately flew into Beirut on the 6th of August, 2 days after the terror attack on the 4th of August & went on to say, “If reforms are not carried out, Lebanon will continue to sink. What is also needed here is political change. This explosion should be the start of a new era.”
This is the same Macron facing massive popular protests in France from hundreds of thousands of discontented & angry farmers, workers, students, pensioners, who are protesting against Macrons’ Neo-liberal reforms and massive corruption. The Yellow Vest movement as it’s popularly called, faces great repression and violence from the French police. Thus the pretentious & arrogant Macron is hardly qualified to preach to other nations. Infact, on a lighter note, the French are appealing to the Lebanese to keep Macron in Beirut as he’s a disaster for France.
Which country, which government, which army, will permit an ambassador or a president of a foreign nation to make such provocative statements immediately in the aftermath of such a massive terror attack on their soil?
The entire Beirut port destroyed, more than a 150 dead and counting, more than 5000 injured, with an unprecedented 3,00,000 people who have lost their houses. The population of Beirut itself is around a million, whilst the entire population on Lebanon is around 4 million. It will take between an estimated $10 to $15 Billion to rebuild the port and the city. Beirut city itself has been declared a National Disaster.
An online petition has been floated on Avaaz, appealing to France to once again come & rule Lebanon under the French Colonial mandate for 10 years. This is truly pathetic & the collaborators will soon be exposed.
These are all clear a signals for the collaborator forces to carry out a coup, ensuring US, French, Israeli & Saudi support.
Protesters resort to violence & vandalism
Protesters have killed one policeman, even as many protesters have been injured in violent clashes with the police. A group of Retired Army officers too got into the act & took over the Foreign Ministry & announced that it was the HQ of the revolution & appealed to the protesters to takeover other government buildings. Three hours later they were vacated by a contingent of the Lebanese army.
The protesters are destroying, burning documents & files in key government ministries, namely Foreign Affairs, the Economic & the Environment Ministries. These are clear attempts to destroy the evidence & thus pre-empt the time bound investigation being carried out by the Government looking into the Beirut blast.
On their part, both the Lebanese Government, President Michel Aoun, PM Hassan Diab and the Army have stated that the people have legitimate grievances and have the right to protest. But the protests must be peaceful and the vandalisation of property, of government buildings and documents will not be allowed. PM Diab has also called for elections to be held within a period of 2 months.
Target: The Lebanese National Resistance
The target of this terror attack, contrived destabilisation & chaos is undoubtedly Hezbollah & all the constituents of Lebanese National Resistance that have made great sacrifices whilst valiantly resisting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. They have defended & successfully defeated Israel, when finally the Zionist military machine was forced to retreat in the year 2000, though yet they continue to occupy the Sheba farms. This was followed by another Israeli invasion in 2006, where again the Lebanese National Resistance defeated Israel & ended their military domination of the region. Israeli terror, its military machine had finally been counter-balanced by the courage & resilience of the Resistance.
The Beirut Port Blast
In context of the Beirut blast, aspersions are being cast and anger mainly being directed against the Hezbollah for storing weapons at the port, a charge that Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has denied & scoffed at. The Hezbollah is the primary target of the Israeli war machine and thus the Hezbollah takes great precautions in hiding & securing it’s weaponry from being targeted by Israel. Thus a public place like the port is clearly out of the question. On his part, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has called for an open & transparent investigation into the Beirut blast.
Key Questions for the Investigation
The investigation will prove as to who were the real perpetrators & thus some of the key issues that they need to ascertain are the following:-
▪Who controlled the port security?
▪Was there a Hezbollah weapons depot?
▪ Who was responsible for the storage of the Ammonium Nitrate, since when was it present, why was it allowed to remain in the port?
▪ Was the destruction caused by an advanced potent weapon fired by a foreign nation?
▪ According to the Lebanese Army, there were 29 aerial incursions of Lebanese airspace by Israeli fighter-jets, over the 1st & 2nd of August just 48 hours prior to the blast on the 4th of August.
▪Radar images of unusual patrols and reconnaissance operations of four US Navy spy planes on the Lebanon-Syria are also part of the evidence. Was the US monitoring the operation leading to the massive attack on Beirut?
So who does control the access to the port?
According to Steven Sahounie, journalist & political analyst, “Hassan Koraytem is the General Manager of the Port Authority of Beirut, and a member of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s ‘Future Party’, which controls access to the Port.” Once again we have the Hariri factor, the pro-US-Saudi ally in control of the port. Another key part of the mounting evidence of internal sabotage and an external attack.
On the issue of the Ammonium Nitrate, that does require further investigation, as it was clearly present in the port. Yet the “White Mushroom Cloud” that we all have witnessed, is evidence of another volatile material, a new weapon, a new advanced missile, that has been ominously unleashed in this terror attack.
Here Lebanese President General Michel Aoun has publicly stated that, “The cause has not been determined yet. There is a possibility of external interference through a rocket or bomb or other act.”
In fact US President Trump clearly stated that it was a “terrible attack”, and went on to say that “American generals told him that it was likely caused by a bomb.”
Trump’s public statement is remarkable indeed, as his Generals clearly told their President that it was an “attack”.
This later led to denials by Defence Secretary Mark Esper, who insisted it was an “accident”. Yet the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows defended the President and stated that, Trump only told reporters on Tuesday what military officials had told him. “The president shared with the American people what he was briefed on, with 100% certainty I can tell you that.”
Clearly an attack by an external force, namely Israel, with the full knowledge of the US, France & Saudi Arabia cannot be ruled out. In my estimation, they are the real perpetrators of this vile act of terror. They have a history of such bloody acts, as we all well know.
The Lebanese National Resistance
In this hour of great peril, we stand in solidarity with the Lebanese people & the Lebanese National Resistance and both are intertwined. This remarkable nation has survived despite all the plots to divide the society & engineer civil wars.
Lebanon has survived despite the economic sanctions imposed upon them by the US, France and Saudi Arabia. This has created a severe economic crisis, leading to hyper inflation & record unemployment rates. That even as Lebanese oligarchs have swindled the banks, leaving Lebanon burdened with gargantuan debt of around $90 Billion. This compounded with the fact that the war on Syria itself has led to a great degree of political, economic and social destabilisation within Lebanon.
Do note that effigies of President Michel Aoun & Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah are being selectively burnt by protesters. This is despite the well known fact that it was the US-Saudi backed Hariri clan, the Future Party & their allies, that control the key sectors of the economy and have gained enormously by their corrupt misrule of the country. Thus if the current Michel Aoun government arrests certain powerful corrupt leaders & individuals, Lebanon will descend into civil war, protected as they are by foreign powers & private militias.
Lebanese Confessional Political System
In fact it is the French gift of the sectarian parliamentary system that has been the bane of Lebanon. The entire political edifice is based on a “confessional system”, whereby the political representatives are elected on the basis of their narrow religious and sectarian identities. This has ensured that Lebanon remains internally divided and thus weak. The political system itself is designed to prevent a larger Lebanese National identity from emerging, strait-jacketed as they are in a narrow religio-sectarian system.
This compounded with the fact that there is a disproportionate amount of foreign interference in domestic Lebanese affairs, due to which the government remains divided, weak & indecisive. This infact provides the space for the unbridled loot & corruption of the ruling classes.
The Lebanese National Resistance
Yet, despite all these seemingly insurmountable hurdles, Lebanese society has given birth to one of the most remarkable national resistance movements of our times. A resistance movement that has withstood and defeated the combined might of the US & Israel over nearly 4 decades. This in itself is a miracle.
Basically Lebanon is paying the price of standing with the axis of the Resistance in the region, namely Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran & Yemen. These nations refuse to surrender their sovereignty and their independence to the might of the imperial, Zionist, collaborator nexus & are thus facing an outright war on both the military, and economic fronts.
Despite all the odds, this nation with a population of only 4 million, continues to resolutely stand with the resistance. The overwhelming number of the Lebanese People remain committed to the liberation of Palestine, of the entire region – and it is due to this very reason that they are paying the ultimate price.
All these plots have failed, that even as the Lebanese National Resistance has grown stronger & has gained legitimacy & respect across the world, much to the chagrin of the imperial-collaborator nexus.
We stand with Lebanon
This is also an appeal to the International solidarity movements against Imperialism & Zionism, the international Palestine solidarity movements, the Anti-War movements, to come out and expose this nefarious plot against the Lebanese National Resistance and the liberation movements across the region & the world. An appeal to come and stand with Lebanon and defend the Resistance that today is the vanguard and stands at the very frontlines & defends the world.
Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian affairs. He is also the Founder-National General Secretary of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum. He was also the organiser of the First Asian Convoy to Gaza (2010) & the Global March to Jerusalem (2012).
Four days after the Beirut Blast of 4th August 2020, the Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, has attempted to explain what caused the largest explosion since the end of the Second World War. He attributes it to either the accidental ignition of 2750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate ( AN) stored in a warehouse at Beirut port or a planned attack by some external entity. There maybe a nexus between the two causes.
If the blast was an accident, its impact has been devastating. More than a 160 people have died so far and at least 6000 have been injured. Most observers agree that the storage of the fertilizer did not adhere to safety procedures. Negligence and incompetence appear to have scarred the 6 year storage of the AN. Besides, it is alleged that fireworks were also stored close to the warehouse recently.
A number of officials connected to the port and customs have been arrested. The elected government made up largely of representatives from the Shia and Christian communities is determined to show that it will not tolerate gross dereliction of duty and ineptitude. At the same time it is aware that it should not scapegoat any individual or group in order to protect the real culprits behind the blast.
It is quite conceivable that the real culprits are linked to the second likely cause — a planned attack. This theory which has different variations has been advanced by some respected commentators. One such variation by the French writer, Thierry Meyssan argues that“Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu authorized a strike against a Hezbollah arms depot using a new weapon that has been tested for seven months in Syria.” The weapon which “is a missile with a tactical nuclear component in its warhead – causes a smoke mushroom characteristic of nuclear weapons “ but “is obviously not an atomic bomb in the strategic sense. “ It has also been deployed against Iranian military vessels in the Persian Gulf
Israel has of course denied that it was behind the Beirut blast. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has also insisted that his group has no arms depot at the Beirut port. In this regard it should be noted that it was Netanyahu who in a speech at the UN General Assembly on 27 September 2018 alluded to alleged Hezbollah arms at a warehouse in Beirut port. The allegation has never been proven.
This is why there has to be an impartial inquiry into the Beirut Blast of 4th August President Aoun and the Hezbollah are against internationalizing the inquiry. They fear that given US and Western influence within the international system such an inquiry will be manipulated to exonerate Israel .A way out of this situation would be for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres to establish a small Committee of Inquiry comprising a representative each from the US, France, China and Russia with the UNSG as the chair whose main objective would be to determine who was responsible for the blast. The Committee will report its findings directly to the UN General Assembly.
The Committee should look deeply at the two causes which President Aoun referred to. In examining the second possibility— an external attack — the Committee one hopes will have the courage and the principles to reveal why Lebanon has been under tremendous pressure in the last few months, both economic and political, aimed at emasculating the government in Beirut and bringing about a regime change that will benefit Israel and Western interests
Without such an understanding of the geopolitical forces at work in the region where Lebanon is located, it will not be possible to fathom why the Beirut Blast occurred
Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World. (JUST) Malaysia.
Food is the basic need and fundamental right of every human being. The United Nations (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25,1948) used an ecological perspective rooted in social justice to define “right to food”. It emphasizes ” quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumers belong, and which ensure a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear” ‘. Therefore ensuring food security is the responsibility of every nation. Food security has been defined in 2002 by FAO as Ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. India has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains in the 1970s. It has consistently been able to provide enough food for its entire population since the mid-1990s, with a decline in production between 2014 and 2016 caused by drought. But India needs to take various new and improved initiatives to enhance and improve its food security as it faces supply constraints, water scarcity, low per capita GDP, and inadequate irrigation. The Economic Survey said that India ranked 76th in 113 countries assessed by The Global Food Security Index (GFSI) in 2018, based on four parameters – affordability, availability, quality, safety, and natural resources. Therefore food security is a complex phenomenon, which includes a range of factors i.e. poverty, income distribution, international trade markets, agricultural development, human resources management and development policies and programs of the government, population growth, and climatic conditions. Poverty being the main cause of food insecurity as poor households are not able to fulfill their square meals. Thus results in malnutrition, undernourishment, and various health issues. Developing countries, especially India faces the problem of food insecurity due to the economic crises.
Despite various schemes and programs, Initiated by the Indian government to counter food security issues Indian’s biggest challenge remains for ensuring the population the nutritional and enough food. The government introduced many major programs to eradicate food security issues such as the public food distribution system (PDS), Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Entrepreneurs Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), etc. But these programs fail to reach every section of the society and hunger continue to make vulnerable and deteriorated situation of the poor people. The International food policy research Institution (IFPR) classified the status of hunger into five categories–low, moderate, serious, alarming, and extremely alarming, India falls into the category of alarming. Further studies have indicated that consumption and expenditure on food grain have decreased up to a certain level due to an increase in food prices and enlargement in the consumption of non-food items. Despite the economic growth in recent years around one-third of Indian’s population still lives the poverty line. All these estimates indicate the existence of food insecurity at the micro-level in terms of either lack of economic access to food or lack of absorption of food for a healthy life.
No doubt the Government of India introduced The National Food Security Act, 2013 (NFSA 2013). It includes the Midday meal scheme, the Integrated Child Development Services scheme, and the Public Distribution System. Further, the NFSA 2013 recognizes maternity entitlements. The main problem in the implementation of the NFSA is how to identify the beneficiaries? Although the Act purposes to cover 67 percent of the population, it does not provide any identification criteria based on which beneficiaries will be chosen. The socio-economic and caste census (SECC) data can give some direction on how this can be done, but it does not provide a clear estimate. Instead of identifying the poor, it would be better to adopt an ‘inclusive approach’ in which all poor and marginalized populations are included and rich people are kept out, It requires proper verification and counter checks by various departments without being involved in corruption practices. Otherwise, the NFSA will fail to reach its beneficiary or target population.
The overall impact of ICDS and MDM scheme on malnutrition has remained very limited due to a meager allocation of resources, faulty project, and carelessness in implementation. The poor quality of food served under MDM in many schools in different states across the country is a serious cause of concern. In fact, in 2012, the corporations (comprising North, south, and East corporations of Delhi states) found 83 percent meals nutritionally deficient. Moreover, utensils and dining areas were often found to be unclean and unhygienic. The most serious problem in ICDS is related to implementation and accountability. Since children have no ‘voice’ in the system, there is no self-correction mechanism. There is rampant corruption in each phase of the implementation of these projects. Thus results in failure of ICDS and midday meal scheme
PDS (Public Distribution Scheme) was established to provide essential consumer goods at cheap and subsidized prices. The main agency, which provides food grains to the PDS, is the Food Corporation of India (FCI) set up in 1965. Its primary duty is to undertake the purchase, storage, movement, transport, distribution, and sale of food grains and other foodstuffs. But the PDS has been criticized on various grounds. The main motive of PDS was to manage and distribute food stock to the poorest of the poor at affordable and cheap prices so that hunger and malnutrition can be eradicated from the country. But it was found that the poor people are least benefited i.e. only 20% of households are provided the stock with the cost-effectiveness which is very small. Another critic of PDS is the burden of food subsidy, which puts several fiscal burdens on the government. There is also the inefficiencies in the operations of FCI as some researchers and The Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices (BICP) of the Government of India (GOI) have pointed out several inefficiencies in the operation of the Food Corporation of India. The economic cost of FCI foodgrain operations has been rising because of an increase in procurement prices and other costs that is distribution cost and carrying costs. The inefficiencies in the operations of FCI are due to its highly centralized and bureaucratic mode of operation. To rectify this, experts advocate the ‘toning up’ of the personnel and working of FCI on the one hand and reorganizing the food security system on the other hand. Another flaw in the PDS is that the ration cards are provided to only those people who have their residential addresses and those who are migrant laborers and homeless are left out of the food security system.
Bisma Ahad, Research scholar university of Kashmir and can be mailed at bismaahad456@gmail.com
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