Kerala and food security

Recently food securiy of kerala came to lime light due declining sotck pile of rice in the state which price rise of essential commodities and a decrease in central pool of rice quota. Adding spark to the dynamate came American president George bush' remark on price rise of food and its roots in india.

Now All politicians and polically sponsored think tanks in economy wanted hier piece of pie in lime light by George bush bashing.

Why are they forgetting the basics, I woul like to attention back to kerala food security and its causes. Just 20-30 years before tapioca, jackfruit, platain,yum,sweet potato consisted of 50% of staple diet of an average keralite. Now it is not even 5%, food habits of keralites have changed so drastically due to non availabilty of these items. shortage of these food items where seen even before shortage of rice came to notice what are the reasons. The major reason is during 30 years there was a silent revolution in agriculture scenario of a migration from food crops to cash crops.Of these rubber can have the first position,rubber during last many years spread ike wild fire eating into the traditional territories of food crops and now it is vanilla and the like.

I would argue that if there is a food security problem due to convertion from food crops to cash crops, kerala has been a front runner, due to which kerala from being a producer of food crops shrinked itself to become a consumer of food grains from other state, We cannot blame any one not america or any other states but ourselfs to blame. All the governments ignored the food scenario on of the state on the behalf of cash crop farmers.

In conclusion i would like to say
The current problem has 2 parts
1. change in food habits, over dependency on grains.
2. decrease in food crops cultivation.

So the solution lies within go back to basics.
1.Eat more traditional food and reduce the dependancy on food grains.
2. make available more land for food crop cultivation, that may require a change in policy of making available more land for cash crops.