Punjabi farmers bring their rice to the open-air grain market in Kot Kapura, where it is dried, winnowed, and graded before being sold to government buyers at set prices of around twelve cents per pound. About 20 percent of India’s rice crop goes into the Food Corporation of India, which distributes the staple grain to the poor at subsidized prices. Punjab was the focal point of the Green Revolution in India, in which the introduction of high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and subsidized irrigation turned the nation from a grain importer to a grain exporter in the 1970s. Yet despite bumper crops, India remains one of the hungriest nations in the world, with more than 220 million people undernourished and half of reproductive-aged women anemic. Poverty is the primary culprit.
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