Former World Bank economist Prabhu Pingali chosen to head effort.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Even as the Indian government is struggling with the opposition parties to pass the National Food Security Bill in Parliament, which if implemented would make available food at cheap prices to around 900 million people in the country, Cornell University has started an initiative to help reduce poverty and malnutrition in India with the help of a $25 million endowment from the Tata Trusts, chaired by alumnus Ratan Tata.
Prabhu Pingali, a former World Bank economist and deputy director of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be spearheading the Tata-Cornell Initiative in Agriculture and Nutrition (TACO-AN), said the university in a press release today. He will begin his tenure on June 1st.
The goal of the initiative is to reduce poverty and malnutrition in rural India while protecting environmental, economic and human health. Cornell researchers will collaborate with their peers in Indian universities, as well as governmental and nongovernmental organizations in an effort to enhance individual and institutional capacity in the areas of agriculture, nutrition and rural development, said the release.
“The TACO-AN initiative comes at a time when agriculture and nutrition are at the top of the policy agenda in India and across the developing world. TACO-AN can play an important leadership role both in research and policy advocacy,” Pingali said in a statement.
Pingali has previously served as director of the Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He was also director of the economics program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico; agricultural economist at the International Rice Research Institute at Los Baños, Philippines; economist at the World Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department; visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Food Research Institute; and affiliate professor at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, according to the release.
The author of 10 books and more than 100 refereed journal articles and book chapters, Pingali was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a foreign associate in May 2007 and as a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association in 2006. He was president of the International Association of Agricultural Economists from 2003-06. He has also received several international awards for his work, including two from the American Agricultural Economics Association.
According to Cornell President David J. Skorton, the initiative will have Cornell faculty and students engage those in India whose lives are affected, “to address the multifaceted problems related to the food system and rural development.”
Experts at Cornell say that failures of food systems are both the cause and consequence of persistent poverty, which is true of India where food wastage is a crime of gargantuan proportions, and the Food Security Bill – which the opposition says is a mask to cover the plethora of corruption scandals that have plagued the nation, going into the general elections next year in May – seeks to address. The bill has even received support from the likes of Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen.
India is home to 25 percent of the world’s hungry poor, according to the World Food Program, the food aid arm of the United Nations.
To contact the editor, e-mail: sujeetrajan@americanbazaaronline.com