Coming … red, yellow and green alerts on farm produce availability

Red, yellow and green – the familiar colours that make up our signals and help streamline traffic at junctions – are going to do a similar job in the food supply chain.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will shortly introduce these warnings for the Union and State governments, providing them alerts on the availability of agricultural commodities.

The timely alerts should allow the governments to take necessary remedial measures well in advance, and are expected to be introduced in the next few weeks.

Red would mean the situation is dire, yellow an upcoming problem that needs to be addressed and green abundant availability. Facilitated by the Institute, the dedicated portal already monitors macro and micro economic issues related to food security with a real-time update on commodity prices.

The institute is also looking at studying the need to improve institutional innovation and use of e-commerce in agriculture to increase the efficiency of the sector.

“We are using technology to piece together information on agricultural commodities from across the country. We will compile them to assess the situation and alert the Government. We closely track news to monitor issues related to food, food inflation, affordability and supply chain issues,” PK Joshi, Director (South Asia) of IFPRI, told BusinessLine.

He was here recently in connection with a brainstorming session aimed at identifying areas for research on the factors that influence food inflation.

He said that one of the priority missions for the institute was to increase intake of pulses to achieve nutritional security along with food security. The institute is doing pilotprojects in Gujarat, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to study issues that are specific to the respective States. The workshop, attended by stakeholders from academia and the private sector, felt that affordability of food is a concern, and said that the food should reach the unreached.

It came out with a recommendation that agricultural policies must be modified to improve nutritional security.

It called for efforts to reduce urbanisation of agricultural lands in Telangana and to give incentives to improve cultivation of vegetables, cereals and pulses so that the price of food reduces.