Russia wants to include India in its strategic reserve plan for wheat. India will need to handle its foreign relations and grain storage much better to take advantage of that
In June, 2009, at the World Grain Forum, organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in St. Petersburg, Russia, Viktor Zubkov, the first Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, made an announcement. He stated that he was in consultations with the governments of India, China and Turkey to build wheat reserve stocks in their respective countries, as a move towards providing food security. He also said that he was keen to promote joint ventures with overseas investors to develop the 20 million hectares (2.47 acres to a hectare) of unused arable land available with Russia. This offer was reiterated in September at the FAO summit.
Sadly, the government does not pay attention to this, says an executive from the Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC), which stores much of the grain that the government procures either from domestic markets or from overseas. In July 2009, a leading publication (India Today) secretly filmed how 300,000 tonnes of pulses that “were imported from the international market using taxpayers’ money … are lying [to rot for several months] at Tuticorin port . . . and in the warehouses of CWC.”
(This story appears in the 05 February, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)