Policies for food security in India : an assessment of current policies and reform options

Ever since India’s independence large-scale government interventions have been drastically shaping the landscape of the food grain sector. From a famine-prone country, India has become a large exporter and stockholder, with stable domestic prices and several nutrition programs. At the same time, 15 per cent of Indian population is still undernourished. The Indian government is currently implementing one of the world largest food aid programs - the National Food Security Act (NFSA) – in the course of which it experiences many challenges and needs rigorous analysis of the measures and tools of managing the system. Additionally, there is a strong international pressure on India to liberalize its policies in the food grain sector. The present dissertation studies various aspects of the food grain policies in India aiming to provide their comprehensive analysis. We use econometric time-series techniques to ex-post evaluate the impacts of the policy measures on the market outcomes. Among other conclusions, we find a strong response of the wheat and rice production to the support prices whereas the rice consumption is mostly driven by the distribution of the subsidized grains. Due to protectionist trade policies, the grain export is so distorted that its volumes hardly correlate with the prices. We detect a clear upward trend in inflation adjusted fiscal costs, started in 2006-07, as a consequence of growing procurement, storage and distribution of wheat and rice. We develop a dynamic partial equilibrium model with stochastic production shocks, based on the econometric results mentioned above. We produce mid-term simulations of different scenarios with possible policy measures to comply with the NFSA obligations based on the current, in-kind, system. We find that the high pressure on fiscal costs and public stocks, put by the NFSA, can be mitigated at the cost of higher and more volatile market prices. Our simulations indicate that a cash-based regime, alternative to the in-kind distribution, generates lower fiscal costs while the total stocks remain sufficient due to the increase of the private stocks. However, the higher market prices and volatility characterizing this scenario may negatively affect the producers, consumers, and the political stability. Basing on household consumption data, by means of cross-sectional econometric techniques we analyze the consumption patterns of wheat and rice delivered through the Public Distribution System (PDS), targeting errors and reasons for leakage, self-selection and under-supply of staples. We find some serious targeting errors of the PDS: many poor households are not included in the system and migrant workers and female-led households are often not well covered. There is a negative self-selection of the richer households that results in cost savings, which would be lost under a cash-transfer scheme. We find that the leakage rates are in general very low for poor households and regions. Furthermore, we find that subsidizing increases the total consumption of wheat and rice. This increase, however, produces additional pressure on the prices that can have negative consequences for the poor excluded from the system because of the high targeting errors

The canon : (im)movables

W artykule podjęto rozważania na temat pojęcia kanonu w praktyce krytycznoliterackiej ostatniego trzydziestolecia. Odwołując się do toczących się wówczas debat społecznych i kry-tycznych oraz do używanych w nich różnych definicji kanonu, autorka pokazuje konteksty i reperkusje jego poruszenia (demontażu, rekonstrukcji). Nie tracąc z oczu zasadniczego faktu, że rozumienie kanonu przekłada się na sposób myślenia o literaturze oraz roli/powinnościach/możliwościach krytyki literackiej, analizuje zarówno cele, jak i sposoby używania tego pojęcia. A także okoliczności, w których w dyskusjach i tekstach krytycznych, podejmujących problematykę wartościowania, literackich hierarchii czy zadań krytyki, miejsce kanonu jako punktu odniesienia przejął mainstream i inne kategorie, bardziej adekwatne do heteronomicznego charakteru pola literackiego.This article discusses the concept of the canon in Polish literary criticism in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. The author discusses contemporary social and critical debates and dif-ferent definitions of the canon employed in them and shows the contexts and repercussions of redefending (disassembling, reconstructing) the literary canon. Bearing in mind the funda-mental fact that the understanding of the canon translates into the way of thinking about lit-erature and the role /obligations/possibilities of literary criticism, she analyzes both the goals and the ways in which the concept of the canon is used. She also analyzes the circumstances in which the canon, as a point of reference, was replaced in discussions and texts devoted to literary hierarchies and/or literary criticism by the mainstream and other categories which were better suited to describe the heteronomous nature of the literary field.canon

Krytyk w PRL-u

THE LITERARY CRITIC IN THE POLISH PEOPLE’S REPUBLICThe essay entitled The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic constitutes an attempt to answer the fundamental question: how one is to present and describe today the Polish literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. The essay illustrates that it is worth going beyond the widely accepted view concerning the political and social enslavement of critics and to look at their writings as expressions functioning within an internal system of literary life, accompanied by internal confl icts, myths and hierarchies. For not all of these writings have their origin in the current political system (although they must always refer to the mandatory public discourse). One of the examples of a different than merely a political point of reference here is the moralistic, Catholic self-censorship; another example is the need to defi ne one’s attitude toward the critical-literary tradition, defined above all by such people as Brzozowski and Irzykowski.The acceptance of the inner perspective of a critical expression transfers the whole problem onto the plane of dual reference which is (at all times) a characteristic feature of literary criticism: namely the reference to literature and what is literary and towards “life”, i.e. the sphere of politics, moral choices etc., and to a lack of autonomy as the fundamental issue of the existence of literary criticism

Co to znaczy dzisiaj być polskim krytykiem?

What Does It Mean to Be a Polish Art Critic Today? The discussion on the topic of contemporary literary criticism has been contained within two symbolic poles: the article What does it mean today to be a Polish writer by Karol Maliszewski written in 1995 and What does it mean today to be a Polish authoress, written in 2008 by Igor Stokfiszewski. The former paper, which is characteristic of the critical-literary awareness of the 90s of the 20th century, promotes literature that is far from being involved and is based on an individual writer’s gesture; the latter, on the other hand, belongs to one of the better known critical projects of recent years and it promotes a political turnaround proclaiming literature that is engagé and one that is treated as an instrument of social critique. The project of literary criticism is at the same time an expressive and controversial proposition and its significance also consists in the fact that it became a strong impulse which mobilized literary criticism to define and defend other conceptions of literature and criticism and in this way contribute to a fundamental debate in the milieu of critics