In many Indian villages, most households have to rely for their food security on government-run ration shops and low-quality food grain. In Bayamma's village of Mirzapur in the Medak district of Andhra Pradesh, however, she and other householders have co-operated to improve their food security. Bayamma is the Head of the village Women's Group and she looks after the communal grain silo that holds the Group's sorghum.

 

Mud, dung and straw grain storage bin, India © University of Greenwich

Because of the unsustainable cost of public-sector grain management and persistent food insecurity in rural India, policy makers have encouraged research into policy and practical guidelines for village-level food security. The advantages of decentralized grain storage are:

• it provides the poor with access to food
• it links poor farmers to the grain market without the inherent risks and costs of conventional transactions, and
• it reduces poverty.

Locally controlled and managed grain banks, building on a high level of community involvement, represent one approach currently being tested jointly by the Indian Grain Management and Storage Research Institute and the Centre for Environmental Concerns, partnered by NRI. This enables poor groups within villages to acquire and build grain stocks and preserve quality, thus ensuring their food security in lean periods, while marketing any grain that is surplus to community needs. Group members decide upon a viable system for adding to or withdrawing from the grain in a grain bank scheme, with interest rate payments allowing a gradual accumulation of capital within the grain bank.

 

In following this approach, the research partners are firstly seeking to understand the situation, characteristics and needs of village communities, recognizing that any initiative in community storage should be developed through a process in which demand is established, and the way of working elaborated, by the group. At the same time, the wider market and policy environment, and any prospective developments in this, need to be kept in view. This process should ensure the development of sustainable local institutions for grain management, financial viability of the management methods, and technical viability of the storage system.