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Christian Oldiges
Christian Oldiges is Senior Economic Affairs Officer at UN ESCWA, Beirut. Before joining ESCWA, he served as Policy Specialist at UNDP, New York and was Director of Policy Research at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford. As a trained Development Economist, during 10 years at OPHI, he led multiple initiatives to develop national poverty measures together with governments in South Asia and Africa. In his research, he examined welfare effects of India’s employment guarantee act, trends in multidimensional poverty reduction as well as interlinkages between multidimensional poverty and migration and armed conflict. He studied Economics at Heidelberg University, Hindu College and the Delhi School of Economics (Delhi University) and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Heidelberg University.
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100 million tonnes of cereals are missing… every year
In an earlier I4I post, Drèze and Oldiges drew attention to India’s ‘cereal gap’ – a large difference between net availability of cereals and household consumption. In this post, they use recently released consumption survey data, and find that the gap is more than twice as large as their earlier estimate of 45 million tonnes for 2022-23. They discuss the possible reasons for this yawning gap.
The ‘cereal gap’: Looming issues in India’s foodgrain policy
Cereal production in India recently crossed 300 million tonnes for the first time. In this post, Drèze and Oldiges point out that a major gap has emerged between the net availability of cereals and household consumption – and it is unclear where the balance goes. With cereal production expected to increase further, they argue that there is a looming inconsistency between pricing policy and the realities of cereal demand.