Conclusion: Lessons From Bihar’s Food Processing

This chapter summarizes the key findings in the book. The basic requirements for setting up food processing are delineated in the earlier Chaps. 1 to 4, keeping in mind region-specific constraints. These constraints are detailed for three separate trajectories: developed economies without major financial market imperfections, the national food processing industry for India and the regional case-study of Bihar. The discussions in these chapters show the distinct features of these trajectories, which necessitate a detailed investigation of the industrial ecosystem that delivers outcomes. For the Bihar trajectory, we study the impact of the government’s industrial policy, historically-determined distortions in the distribution of firm sizes (as reflected in the missing middle) as well as the individual entrepreneurs’ decision-making process in detail in Chaps. 5, 6 and 7 respectively. What comes out from these analyses is a lack of cohesiveness between the different actors in the industrial ecosystem (the government, the small entrepreneur and established large firms). This results in suboptimal outcomes of incentive policies directed at vitalizing the development of the food processing industry in Bihar. This chapter also knits together the region-specific policy suggestions mentioned in Chap. 8 for a more general understanding of how to progress from agri-resource abundance in a region to manufacturing activities in processed food in a region.