Journal Press India^®

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Ensuring food security is not only the responsibility of the national government but the right of the common people of the nation. In order to keep track of the issue, the Indian government has decided to undertake bulk procurement of basic food crops like paddy, wheat and coarse serial; and distribute them to the downtrodden people at a very nominal price. In this paper, we have applied Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling based on India’s Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) to study the impacts of trade liberalisation and food subsidy policies on the macroeconomic variables. We find that, subsidy policy in basic food crops like, paddy, wheat and coarse cereals along with some reallocation of budgetary expenditures in other developmental activities will certainly reduce food insecurity, destitution and hunger among the targeted population. This will increase overall social welfare as in the whole process of food transfer mechanism, the upper tier of the urban and rural population will have to sacrifice less than the welfare gain enjoyed by the targeted rural and urban population. ​

Keywords

Food Security, Social Accounting Matrix, CGE

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