India's Food Prices surge to an all time high, what needs to be done?

Can the government look at the prices of essential commodities.It is really becoming un-affordable. We need actions. These risks are posed by either government inaction or, more often, overaction. On the one hand, investments in, say, irrigation are still lacking: Annual per capita consumption of cereals has been falling since the 1970s, a reminder of India’s food insecurity. On the other hand, the government complicates matters by throwing fertilizer subsidies indiscriminately, imposing bans on exports and futures markets and raising MSPs by margins as large as 30% for rice.

It is also high time that a fresh perspective is got in into key sectors. Why cant we identify 6 key sectors & set goals for them to be accomplished by 2012? Also I will like to highlight that criticism is also required otherwise government will keep on working unchecked. Perhaps it seems that some of us didn’t read the "importance of opposition in Indian democracy" during our secondary education....... :(

The lack of awareness of what global warming is and can do to us has left us scratching our heads!! We have been harping about the Go GREEN campaign but we are only talking about it!!

We need to wake up and preserve our forests, chopping of trees has to be banned completely and we should start planting more trees on our sidewalks, open more gardens and all that is necessary. If we keep taking away from mother nature her natural treats what are we going to get back?? What we take is her immense cover for the seasons cycle to continue undisturbed, what we are getting is a disturbed ctcle of seasons and that is not healthy!!

The supermarket chain retailers are contributing to the Price rise to a large extent.from my enquiries I have found that food grains are sourced out by these large retailers directly from the farmers at prices just above(carrot for bait) /same rate, cash down or upfront

The same is accumulated (i want to use this milder word for it)and when supply becomes short in the market as the grains are in their barns,they shoot up the prices in  their malls with another carrot dangling for the consumer Buy one kg of dhall @'x' price and take 'this non moving product' at 50% discount/free.

so anyhow the price of the necessity item is attacted by tagging the non necessity item therby falling for the bait.The food grains gets sold at hiked up price with another peice of junk stashed away in consumers home

This so called accumulation has to be checked thru a regulatory body very seriously as it has far reaching effects.

This trend came in with pepsi /lays introducing the land leasing of farmers for free seed /fertilisers for freee manual labour inturn and agreed price for their potatoes.now as seasonsd progressed , in this aspect also farmers are getting a raw deal

There are too many beneficiaries in our process activity between growing and consumer which do not add any value to the commodity yet take the biggest pie of the cake. Encouraging healthy co-operatives or large retail companies directly picking up is the only answer.

According to me  it is supply constraints of food products and no proper infrastructure is making it hard for farmers to get the food products they grow till market, as most of the time the middle men eat up the profits and poor farmers are left with very meagre amount out of which they can't do anything..

So would like to know what are the other action that is needed to be taken in this regard.

I think less rainfall is also one of the reasons other than supply constraints. There was no adequate rainfall in many of the villages which forced the govt to block the supply/increase the rates. And so food prices reached the peak.

ALSO the govt had launched lot of schemes where they gave food supplies to poor at very lesser rate few years back. But the poor actually didn get get their share . Instead the food was blocked and sold out in BLACK. This especially happened in AP.