Excess Food Stocks, Public Distribution System (PDS) and Procurement Policy

A fairly long series of normal monsoons has coincided with a policy of ensuring relatively higher returns on production of rice and wheat and led to a surplus of food grains accumulated in the FCI godowns, which is well beyond prescribed buffer stock norms. The problem facing the country today is not one of shortage of food grains but finding ways and means of managing the accumulated surplus. The stock of food grains available with the government agencies as on 1-4-2002 was 50.95 million tonnes, which constituted of 24.91 million tonnes of rice and 26.04 million tonnes of wheat. This stock level was well above the normative buffer stock, prescribed by the government. In this paper we try to examine some of the factors that have led to accumulation of excess food grain stocks and make policy prescription on how to deal with the problem.