Keywords: Food grain production, VECM , Johansen Cointegration.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Introduction: The Vedas have vividly articulated the concept of “Annamayakosa”, which basic exemplifies the importance of food and food grains. Food grains are primarily consumed by all individuals as staple food to feed the basic necessity called Food. Unlike other crops they form a sizable portion of any Indian plate and simultaneously contribute significantly in terms of calories and quantity of food consumed. In countries like India they also bear the popularity of being the traditional staples and funding the average Indian body with enough energy and carbohydrate to engage in the age-old tradition of agriculture.
The production of food grains in India has several inbuilt advantages towards the society and economy as a whole. In India they occupy 2/3rd of the total cropped area, which amounts to be 219.33 million hectors in 2019. This evidently proves the agricultural dependency of farmers on production of food grains. The reasons of such significance can be attributed to requirement of less expertise in the production process, more use of surplus manpower and most importantly the tradition of allocating some portion of land for production of food grains in order to avail the minimal food requirement for a year. So after using to feed the family the surplus amount is spent on commercial purposes. Evidently it has contribution in both subsistence and commercial level of agriculture. The employment of rural population as a prominent of rural livelihood is hugely contributed by food grain production as this gives routine agricultural employment to the largest portion of rural agricultural workforce. This contribution lies independent of extensive operation of Lewis’s theory of Unlimited supply of labor in rural India. This fact is highly influenced by the basic nature of technology and labour mix required for food grain production. Though it is evident from every ordinary agricultural field in India that technology has started taking over manpower and substituting it, but the human contribution id yet to be called as insignificant.
After independence during the Green revolution only, absolute focus was centralized around food grain production in order to make India self-sufficient and to ensure food on every Indian plate. After that by observing the current situation of food grains production in India, it can be inferred the need for further robust research on the ground of food grain production. So this paper tries to analyse some determinants of the same.
Literature Review: Though voluminous research has been conducted o the determinants of agricultural productivity but very insignificant dive has been given to this particular site of agriculture i.e. food grains production. Followings are some of the most important research literatures that we went through and that inspired this piece of exploration:
Nayak & Priyadarshini (2017): This paper specifies the long run simulation between various factors of land productivity and suggests for non-product specific support from the Government Side. By taking variables like irrigation, electricity consumption, private expenditure on agriculture, fertilizers consumption and non-product specific inputs it tries to elaborate the long run and short run impacts of these factors on agricultural productivity.
V. M Rao (1992): This paper primarily implied towards further reorientation of agricultural pricing policy & the government should concern itself with the major determinants of growth and stability and with the task of ensuring a market framework with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
Parikh, Kumar & Darbha (2003): This paper yielded some interesting findings like, increase in the MSP of wheat and rice leads to decline in overall GDP, increase in aggregate price index and reduction in investments. Even the increase in agricultural GDP resulting from higher MSP dwindles rapidly and only a minuscule positive impact on agricultural GDP remains by the third year.
Chand (2007): This paper titled “Wheat Supply, Price and Food Security”, found that wheat production on average has not grown at the pace equivalent to growth of its demand. While focusing primarily on the production of wheat, this paper vividly analysed the pricing policy of wheat and roll of its determinants in ensuring food security in India.
Data Sources & Methodology: This paper basically used timeseries data of 30 consecutive years, starting from 1989-90 to 2018-19. The datas collected here are of secondary nature which are collected from various sources like RBI Statistical Handbook on Indian Economy, Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Census and Economic Information Center (CEIC). Following is the table of all the variables taken under consideration.