This post is the fourth in a series sharing findings from a research project Sam Kornstein and Paul Artiuch are working on throughout the month of January. Paul Artiuch and Samuel Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste.

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By Samuel Kornstein and Paul Artiuch

January 15, 2012

Over the past week, we’ve learned quite a bit about how food gets from farmers’ fields all over India to the plates of the country’s 1.2 billion people. What struck us most is the level of fragmentation across the supply chain, which hinders the country’s ability to plan and quickly make adjustments to the system when necessary. These challenges, coupled with the importance of India’s agricultural sector in feeding the population, have compelled the government to step in and regulate parts of the system. Sometimes this is a good thing – government programs provide food for millions of low-income families – however, these government programs can also be extraordinarily inefficient and wasteful, which we’ll discuss at length in later posts. In the meantime, we thought we’d share a brief overview of how the system works, which will hopefully provide some useful context for subsequent entries.

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