National conference of States’ Food Ministers to be held tomorrow

The Ministry of Food and Public Distribution is organizing a national conference of food ministers on Wednesday to develop an action plan for the procurement of coarse grains during the 2023-24 Khareef Marketing Season (KMS), which begins on Oct. 1. The event will also deliberate on the Public Distribution System (PDS), food and nutrition security, sugar and ethanol. The conference, which will be chaired by Food Minister Piyush Goyal, will see the launch of the sugar ethanol portal.

“Other key agenda points for discussion include implementation of SMART-PDS, supply chain optimization, profiling of purchasing centers, and conversion of fair price stores (FPSs), among others,” the Food Department said in a statement.

Develop a roadmap

The conference will serve as a platform to reflect on the challenges and opportunities to achieve transformation in the food and nutrition security ecosystem in the country and to set the roadmap for 2023-24.

The statement said the Department of Food and Public Distribution has taken several initiatives in the past nine years, to ensure targeted and timely delivery of food grains to the poor and vulnerable groups in society. The implementation of the master scheme, Pradhan Mantri Garip Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) from January 1, 2023, has made it possible to provide more free food grains to nearly 80 crore beneficiaries.

Officials said that in order to maintain progress and improvement in the public distribution system, the government plans to introduce new initiatives to enhance the efficiency of the system and strengthen the focus on food and nutrition security.

To encourage the purchase of coarse grains such as jowar, bagra and ragi, the center allowed countries to transfer surpluses to other countries if there was demand from consuming countries. Earlier, states were allowed to buy as much as they could distribute within their state.