In particular, the policies of the last two decades have neglected small farmers who still constitute the vast majority of rural cultivators. The lecture draws on official statistics as well as evidence from village-level surveys across the country.
Madhura Swaminathan is Professor and Head of the Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, and Chairperson of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. She has a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford and has worked on issues of food security, agriculture and rural development for over 25 years.
She has authored ten books and numerous publications including Weakening Welfare: The Public Distribution of Food in India (2000); How Do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies in India (2017) and Women and Work in Rural India (2020). She was a member of the Government of India’s High Level Panel on Long Term Food Security, a two-term member of the board of governors of The International Potato Centre CIP (2002-8) and on the Committee of Development Policy of the United Nations (2013-2015). She was a contributing author of the HLPE Report on ‘Multi-stakeholder Partnerships to Finance and Improve Food Security and Nutrition in the Framework of the 2030 Agenda’.
Discussant: Elisabetta Basile, Sapienza University, Rome
Source: European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), 20 January 2021