Farmers Movement Archive

Rural economy needs a New Deal for revival

A historic farmers’ movement is a moment to unveil a vision for the future. Not just for farmers or agriculture, but for rural India, and indeed for the future of India.This movement has already created history. It has firmly brought back the farmers to the national imagination. You can’t pretend they don’t exist. It has put the fear of vote, more effective than the fear of God, in the minds of the political class. You don’t take panga with farmers. It has shut up market fundamentalists who whisper too-clever-by-half agri-reform recipes to the powers that be. No more corporate plugs masquerading as textbook economics pushing for “reform by stealth”. At least for some time! It has succeeded in pushing the envelope to where years of academic and political debates on agriculture could not.Yet, it will be a pity if that is all this movement achieves in terms of imagination. It will be tragic if the successful halting of the ‘agri reform’ onslaught becomes a pretext to perpetuate the status quo. It will be sad if this pushback to corporate agri-business turns into a push for trade unionism of the better off farmer. The imposition of the Modi government’s farm laws must serve to draw attention to the multiple crises faced by the farmers, farming and agriculture. These laws are not the starting point of farmers’ woes. Nor is their repeal the panacea they need. This great movement must take forward the idea of India that places farmers at the heart of our future.Indian agriculture faces three intertwined crises. While the current focus is, rightly so, on the economic crisis, we cannot afford to forget the ecological crisis. Both these crises together produce what the farmers experience as an existential crisis. Indian farmers need nothing short of a New Deal that addresses these three crises simultaneously. Ideas, policies and politics must come together to design this.The economic crisis is easy to describe. Although nearly half of our working population (58% of the rural households) is mainly engaged in agriculture, farming is not economically viable. Landholdings are small: 86% own less than 2 acres, based on the agriculture census of 2015-16. The average yield is low and uncertain. Prices are low too and kept systematically so. According to my calculations, this yields a meagre monthly income of less than Rs 8,000, including all sources of income. The number of agricultural wage labourers has kept swelling, though farm wages have been stagnant. No wonder the average monthly consumption is higher than the income. More than half of the farm families are in debt.The lazy economists’ formula is to say reduce the population dependent on agriculture, except that they forget to mention the continent where this additional population should be transported; or to specify sectors of our economy waiting to offer millions of additional jobs, notwithstanding the overall state of joblessness. The challenge is to find a decent income for hard-working small farmers.The ecological crisis is less easily noticed and is even more pressing. The Green Revolution has come to a dead end. Superstitious belief in chemical agriculture and overexploitation of water exposed us to the degradation of soil health and groundwater depletion on a frightening scale. Add to this the loss of biodiversity, shrinkage in seed variety, decline in nutria-crops like millets, loss in livestock economy and deforestation, and you begin to see why the ecological crisis is not a hobby horse of fringe environmentalists.And now think of the looming challenge of climate change. Soaring temperatures and uncertain monsoon is a recipe for disaster, especially for farmers dependent on rains. Incomes of these ‘dryland’ farmers are predicted to fall by as much as a quarter due to climate change. Ecologically sustainable agriculture is a material and pressing concern that we should have addressed yesterday.Finally, there is the existential crisis that the farmers feel and react to, the story of farmer suicides, over 3 lakh in the past two decades. As agriculture shrinks, farmers experience a loss of dignity. As the self-respecting cultivator, the farmer is forced to become a labourer, and soon, a migrant labourer. Farmers do not want their next generation to take to farming.The challenge and the opportunity of the farmers’ movement today is not just to ward off the impending threat of the three laws or to secure some enduring economic gains, but to come up with a way forward on the economic, ecological and existential crises facing agriculture.It requires, above all, an imaginative leap. Leaders, policymakers and thinkers must be able to stand up and say: India is not condemned to relive European history. Agriculture will follow an Indian path. Agriculture can and will provide a dignified livelihood to a substantial population. Rural India is a land of opportunities, and the key to our national future.This resolve, an article of faith if you will, can open the path for new policy architecture. This will have to be led by the government and backed by a substantially bigger budget. Some of this state support must take the form of higher and more efficient subsidies, as our net subsidy so far has been low, if not negative. Some of these resources must be spent on a truly universal and comprehensive crop insurance as well as debt relief and reconstruction. But much of state support must go towards building agricultural and rural infrastructure that facilitates private entrepreneurship, agro-processing, farmers’ cooperatives, animal husbandry, forestry, and so on. Flourishing private initiative in agriculture needs more, not less, state support.The design of this new architecture will be around a combination of income support and ecologically appropriate agriculture. The current focus on government procurement of wheat and paddy creates perverse incentives for farmers. Instead, farmers need price support for a wide range of produce on the condition that they adopt crops suitable for local ecological conditions. Crop loan and crop insurance could be added to this mega scheme. A small top-up component of income support for small and women farmers, and other vulnerable sections could be included. This will have to be linked to a boost for pastoralists, rural industry and handicrafts etc. The future must be integrated with a big push for decentralised reinvigoration of the rural economy.Will this cost a lot of money? Yes, at the current prices, we should be looking to spend an additional Rs 3-4 lakh crore, around 10 per cent of the Budget, for this New Deal for rural India. Can the country afford it? Should this be our national focus? Well, that is a question of political will. The real measure of the success of the current farmers’ movement would be the extent to which it succeeds in creating this much-needed political will.Views are personal

The Tribune

2021-02-18