Oxfam India is working on ensuring food justice in a resource-constrained world. The NGO will launch a major campaign across the country on June 1 on different issues of food security under one umbrella. The issues that the campaign shall cover are food security for citizens, entitlement aspects, protection of agricultural land from acquisition by government, and illegal and legal land grabs by corporates.

“Roughly, we will concentrate on seven focus states (Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Bihar). In the human development indicators, these states are far behind,” Deepak Xavier, programme coordinator of Oxfam India told Governance Now. “Later, the Oxfam India will add more states.”

There has been a spurt in corporate take-over of the farming sector. In many places of India, the farmers have resented and accused government of promoting land grabbers in the country. “Oxfam India will come out with some kind of index rate to find the accountability level of private companies. The index will see how much private companies are accountable to the farmers of India,” says Xavier.

The main aim of the campaign is to reaching out from supply side to the demand side in the food security discourse.

Women form lion’s share of the labour in India’s agriculture sector. Despite the central role they play the conditions they work in leave much to be desired. “We are also trying to reach out to people at the ground level and one of the key issues of this campaign is recognising women as producers. We will have huge gender aspect to the campaign,” Xavier added.

Oxfam India wants to bring different civil society and NGOs on one platform who have been working on affected communities on different issues related to the food security.

Oxfam will launch the campaign worldwide on the same day. Globally, the campaign will be focused on three different layers of countries. In the ambit of the campaign, there would be 11 strategic countries (India, China, Russia, South Africa etc) because it has implications on the other countries. Oxfam will conduct a larger campaign on 24 focus countries while in 18 countries, it will target one or two issues related to agriculture.

“It will be long term - four or five years long time frame campaign because the issues are large,” Xavier said.