UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation 's honour for Modi sparks debate Over ‘Rewarding Failure’
HOW does an expert UN body such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) hand medals for agricultural achievement to a country where millions upon millions of children go to bed with empty stomachs, when mothers dilute milk to make it last another day, when elderly citizens quietly skip meals so younger family members can eat? What morality survives in politics when suffering is hidden beneath ceremony and applause? How does a mere medal qualify a nation to celebrate food security while millions sleep hungry?
And yet, in Rome, amid diplomatic grandeur and carefully staged symbolism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was presented the Agricola Medal by FAO awarded the Prime Minister for what was described as “exceptional leadership” in food security, sustainable agriculture, and rural development.
The Agricola Medal is the highest honour conferred by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. It is awarded to distinguished world leaders and individuals in recognition of exceptional, long-term contributions to global food security, sustainable agriculture, poverty reduction, and improved nutrition. The FAO’s decision is wide of the mark and the recognition will draw mockery of both the FAO and the Indian government for its shallow judgment.
The imagery was deliberate and carefully curated: India projected as a nation that had successfully confronted hunger, transformed agriculture, empowered rural populations, and emerged as a global model worthy of international recognition. Yet the ceremony exposed not India’s success, but the widening gap between political image-making and lived social reality.
The award was not merely misplaced. It represented a profound distortion of the condition of contemporary India. At a moment when millions continue to experience hunger, nutritional deprivation, indebtedness, and agrarian insecurity, the conferring of such an honour revealed how global institutions can become participants in the manufacture of political mythology rather than defenders of human truth.
The ethical obscenity becomes even sharper when one confronts the numbers themselves. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), over 35 percent of Indian children under five are stunted, nearly 19 percent suffer from wasting, and more than 57 percent of women aged 15- 49 are anaemic. UNICEF and global hunger assessments continue to warn that India carries one of the world’s largest burdens of child malnutrition.
Various estimates suggest that hundreds of millions of Indians remain unable to consistently afford nutritious food, while reports linked to the Global Hunger Index have repeatedly ranked India poorly compared to far poorer nations. Behind every percentage lies a child whose growth is permanently damaged, a mother whose body is exhausted by deprivation, an elderly worker surviving on one meal a day.
In India today, hunger is not an abstraction. It has faces. It has names. It lives in underfed children whose bodies are stunted before adolescence. It lives in exhausted farmers trapped in debt. It lives in widows counting grains of rice. It lives in migrant labourers who build shining cities yet remain unable to secure dignified nutrition for their own families. In a country aspiring to global greatness, millions still negotiate daily with deprivation, malnutrition, and despair.
Millions of children continue to experience irreversible developmental harm because nutrition remains inaccessible or inadequate. Maternal anaemia remains widespread. Rural distress persists despite repeated declarations of transformation and progress. The everyday reality experienced by vast sections of India’s poor bears little resemblance to the triumphant narrative projected before the international community.
This disconnect is not accidental. It emerges from a development model that increasingly privileges spectacle over substance, aggregate economic indicators over social justice, and corporate expansion over human welfare. The Indian state under Modi has become extraordinarily skilled at constructing narratives of national greatness through diplomatic visibility, global branding exercises, summit politics, media choreography, and symbolic recognition abroad. International awards function within this ecosystem as instruments that reinforce legitimacy and consolidate perception.
But the fundamental question remains unavoidable: can a government presiding over persistent hunger and agrarian distress credibly be celebrated as a global exemplar of food security?
To ask the question is to expose the fragility of the narrative itself.
India’s economic rise has been repeatedly celebrated through the language of growth, modernisation, infrastructure, digitisation, and geopolitical ascent. Yet beneath these triumphalist claims lies a deeply unequal social order in which wealth concentration has accelerated even as nutritional insecurity continues to haunt millions. The coexistence of food grain surpluses with chronic hunger reveals not a problem of production alone, but a structural failure of distribution, access, and justice.
This is what official rhetoric systematically obscures. Hunger in India is no longer merely the consequence of insufficient agricultural output. It is increasingly tied to unemployment, wage stagnation, inflation, ecological vulnerability, shrinking welfare protections, and the commodification of basic necessities. A country may produce record harvests while simultaneously denying large sections of its population the economic means to secure nutritious diets. In such circumstances, food insecurity becomes inseparable from broader structures of inequality and exclusion.
The FAO award effectively erased these realities from public consideration.
Supporters of the Modi government defend the recognition by pointing to India’s agricultural production figures, welfare schemes, promotion of millets, climate-resilient crop initiatives, digital public infrastructure, and technological interventions in farming. Yet these achievements, even where genuine, cannot be abstracted from the broader social context within which Indian agriculture operates.
The lived reality of farming in India remains one of deep insecurity. Rising cultivation costs have placed enormous pressure on small and marginal farmers. Diesel prices, fertilisers, seeds, pesticides, electricity, transport, and irrigation expenses continue to increase while market returns remain unstable and often inadequate. Millions of cultivators survive within conditions of chronic indebtedness where a failed crop, a market crash, or a climate event can trigger devastating consequences.
The unresolved debate around Minimum Support Prices (MSP) illustrates the depth of this crisis. Farmers’ organisations have consistently argued that MSP calculations fail to reflect the true cost of cultivation as recommended by the M. S. Swaminathan Commission, formed in 2004 to address nationwide agrarian distress and farmer suicides. More importantly, MSP itself remains non-statutory, leaving farmers vulnerable to market volatility and exploitative purchasing structures. Procurement mechanisms benefit only limited sectors and regions while large sections of cultivators remain exposed to the full violence of market fluctuations.
The repeated spectacle of farmers dumping tomatoes, onions, or potatoes on roads because prices collapse below transportation costs is not an isolated market irregularity. It is evidence of a structurally unstable agrarian economy in which those producing food frequently lack economic security themselves.
The historic farmers’ movement against the Modi government’s agricultural laws revealed the extent of rural anxiety and distrust. Tens of thousands of farmers occupied the borders of Delhi for months because they believed the proposed reforms would accelerate corporate consolidation within agriculture while weakening already fragile protections for small cultivators. The movement exposed a central contradiction within India’s development trajectory: policies celebrated internationally as reforms are often experienced locally as threats to survival and dignity.
The eventual repeal of the farm laws did not resolve this deeper crisis. It merely postponed a confrontation over the future direction of Indian agriculture and the place of small farmers within an increasingly corporate economic order.
The broader developmental framework within which these policies operate deserves closer scrutiny. Contemporary India increasingly measures progress through stock market growth, billionaire wealth accumulation, infrastructure spectacle, and international visibility. Yet such indicators conceal as much as they reveal. Economic expansion that coexists with widespread malnutrition, precarious livelihoods, and deepening inequality cannot automatically be equated with social advancement.
This is precisely why the FAO award appears so politically troubling. It transformed a deeply contested and unequal reality into a sanitised narrative of success. In doing so, it reflected a wider global tendency to reward states for technocratic performance indicators while ignoring underlying social contradictions. International institutions frequently privilege aggregate production data, digital innovations, and policy branding while paying insufficient attention to questions of distributive justice, democratic accountability, and lived human experience.
The result is a form of institutional abstraction in which hunger can coexist with celebration so long as macroeconomic and administrative metrics appear satisfactory.
Yet hunger is not merely a technical policy issue. It is fundamentally a question of power, access, and political priorities. The right to food, recognised under international human rights frameworks, implies far more than the existence of grain stocks or welfare databases. It requires equitable access to adequate nutrition, stable livelihoods, functioning public systems, and social arrangements that protect human dignity. A society in which millions remain nutritionally vulnerable despite economic abundance cannot plausibly claim to have resolved the question of food justice.
The erosion of welfare protections further intensifies this contradiction. Programmes such as MGNREGA continue to function as critical survival mechanisms for rural labourers and vulnerable households, yet they face persistent budgetary constraints, delayed wage payments, and administrative limitations. Public welfare increasingly operates through systems of exclusionary digitisation that often render access more difficult for precisely those populations most dependent upon state support.
Within this context, the celebration of political leadership through international honours acquires an almost surreal quality. The award ceremony in Rome projected confidence, competence, and achievement while obscuring the structural realities experienced across large sections of rural and urban India. It invited the international community to celebrate a narrative that millions within the country would scarcely recognise as their own lived experience.
The deeper danger lies not only in the award itself, but in what it reveals about the contemporary relationship between political power and institutional legitimacy. Governments increasingly invest enormous resources in controlling perception because perception itself has become politically productive. International recognition generates symbolic capital that can be deployed domestically to neutralise criticism, delegitimise dissent, and reinforce claims of successful governance.
In this sense, the Agricola Medal functioned less as an objective assessment of India’s food reality than as part of a broader machinery of image production.
History is unlikely to judge such spectacles kindly. It will ask how institutions entrusted with questions of hunger and human welfare became willing participants in narratives that overlooked deep structural suffering. It will ask how food insecurity could coexist with celebration on such a scale. And it will ask why the voices of farmers, labourers, malnourished children, and vulnerable communities were rendered secondary to the imperatives of diplomatic symbolism and political branding.
The central tragedy of contemporary India is not merely that hunger persists. It is that suffering itself is increasingly managed through spectacle rather than resolved through justice.
And that is why this medal cannot be viewed as an innocent honour. It was political theatre masquerading as humanitarian judgment. The Agricola Medal did not validate India’s success against hunger; it mocked the hungry themselves. By rewarding power while ignoring lived deprivation, the FAO abandoned moral seriousness for diplomatic convenience. An institution expected to speak truth about global hunger instead chose applause over honesty, spectacle over evidence, and propaganda over the cries of millions who still sleep without food.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
