Whatever it takes
February 23, 2021
Recent agriculture data is concerning enough to send chills up one's spine. The food import bill is up a massive 52 percent for July 2020 to January 2021, compared to the same period last year. It presents a formidable amount of $4.64 billion in just seven months.
Spending on import of cotton has increased by a whopping 266 percent to $0.7 billion in the same period. On the other hand, export earnings of basmati rice have fallen by more than 31 percent to just $0.3 billion.
On the domestic front, the Sensitive Price Index (SPI) has risen in the range of 0.32 percent to 0.81 percent, week on week, for the last five weeks in a row to February 18, 2021. On a yearly basis, the SPI has increased by 9.92 percent. The SPI is a reasonably good measure of the change in the cost of a fixed basket of goods and services purchased by a household.