The below mentioned article provides a short note on white revolution.
‘Operation Flood’ (OF) commonly referred to as ‘White Revolution’ is an activity launched in 1970 to make use of the dairy aid offered by European Economic Community (EEC), that ended in 1996.
It is set within an ambitious framework in terms of both time and space and in the wider context of the political economy of evolving trade and the aid policies. The main argument on this project was —Food aid is often the benign face of surplus disposal, benefitting special interests in donor countries and disrupting farming in recipient countries.
In India, OF is an exception to the rule that food aid does more harm than good; here Government funded agriculture research ensures people’s entitlement to food better than big commercial ventures.
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India’s White Revolution was successful because of the creation of a small farmer-controlled network of diary co-operatives. Initially the problem apprehended by the economists that the foreign monetary assistance would cause milk prices to crash, disincentivise milk production and ultimately make India permanently dependent on other countries for its needs of dairy products.
The challenge was to see that the flow of the dairy is calibrated in a way that the supplies do not flood the market and to design a consolidated national plan to mitigate disincentives to the domestic dairy farmers. The strategy was to ‘monetise’ the aid; invest the profits from the monetised commodities into capital- incentives through essential infrastructure in the form of National Milk Grid System (NMGS).
This holistic and multifaceted strategy paid off. Not only did the market supplies remained unaffected but also the dairy farmers got the right prices. The necessary infrastructure was established and streamlined to match the growing urban demand. In India ‘Amul’ is hailed as the model in Gujarat.
The small farmers accounted for about 70% of milk production, and 22.5% of the rural households’ income came from milk. Thus, India dispelled fears that food aid would throw it to a state of perpetual dependence on others, serving as a market for the surpluses of the rich countries.