"Urgent measures needed to stave off agrarian crisis" Staff Reporter Commission on Farmers to recommend Food Guarantee Act,

as ryots faced gamble of markets and monsoon: M.S. Swaminathan

RECOGNISING TALENT: M.S. Swaminathan, Chairman, National Commission on Farmers, at the second convocation of the Tata Dhan Academy at Melakkal near Madurai on Tuesday. Photo: K. Ganesan MADURAI: : The mid-term appraisal of the Tenth Plan has come as a `wake-up' call for the economy and highlighted the need for urgent steps to avert an agrarian crisis, M. S. Swaminathan, Chairman, National Commission on Farmers, said on Tuesday. The commission would soon submit its second report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, calling for a National Food Guarantee Act to ensure `zero hunger'. The Act was essential, as farmers were facing the gamble of markets and monsoons and drought or flood, he said. Dr. Swaminathan was addressing the second biennial convocation of the Tata Dhan Academy. Slow progress

He said the appraisal of the first three years of the Plan revealed that progress in agriculture was slow and the growth fell below four per cent. Food production was below the population growth rate. Hence, the `off-track' performance had to be set right. Dr. Swaminathan said reversing the decline would help to stave off an agrarian crisis. The Food Guarantee Act should facilitate creation of a decentralised network of grain storage structures. It would enlarge the composition of food security basket. The commission's second report would suggest steps to give relief to farmers. Brazil and Kenya had announced `zero hunger' programmes. The first report suggested setting up of 50,000 farm schools covering all States to facilitate `farmer-to-farmer' learning and promote role models in agriculture. It also recommended digging one million wells under the community water security system. Dr. Swaminathan called for a comprehensive plan to eradicate hunger, malnourishment, sanitation problems and infant mortality. India could launch a `Make Poverty a History' campaign as in the Western countries. He lauded the role played by movements such as Kalanjiyam and Vayalagam for developing the self-help group network and facilitating community banking/micro-credit in villages. M. P. Vasimalai, Executive Director, Tata Dhan Academy, said the Dhan Foundation was working in 6,000 villages. Academy chairperson A. Umarani and Kalanjiyam founder Chinnapillai were present. Dr. Swaminathan presented certificates to 25 students who completed PostGraduate Diploma in Development Management. "Outsource worksto rural areas" The country's greatest challenge is to retain the rural masses in villages. Outsourcing of works from urban places to rural areas will help to solve the

problem, M. S. Swaminathan, Chairman, National Commission on Farmers, has said. Addressing presspersons here, he said that with e-governance, even the transaction cost of outsourcing works to rural areas would be low. The challenge of food security was caused not by the lack of food grains but the lack of purchasing power among the rural masses. The huge human resource in rural areas could be utilised in post-harvest value addition and marketing. The self-help groups were charged with maintaining land records in villages in Andhra Pradesh, he said. The private sector, especially the chain stores, had a critical role in outsourcing works. They could partially manufacture their products in rural areas. China had developed hi-tech rural township enterprises. Such programmes would benefit the companies as well as the rural people. The companies would get cheap labour and the rural people employment, he added. He advocated creation of opportunities in villages for a job-led economic growth. Regretting that the younger generation was not attracted to farming, he said the intellectual challenge in biotechnology and information technology was lacking in agriculture. Farming technology should be upgraded to stimulate the educated youth. The investment in rural areas should be increased and infrastructure provided to help rural literates have a reasonable earning. On the environmental impact of the Sethusamudram project, Prof. Swaminathan said the eco-system in the Gulf of Mannar had already been overexploited. However, he referred to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's assurance that the environmental aspect would be looked into while implementing the project.

Inequality exists because of failure to resolve agrarian crisis Economist V.K. Ramachandran delivers V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture If hundreds of millions of India's people continue to live in conditions of hunger and poverty, of curable diseases, of illiteracy in the absence of schooling and are

subjected to the worst forms of caste, class, and gender oppression, the one reason is the failure to resolve the agrarian crisis, economist V.K. Ramachandran said on Wednesday. Listing out seven conditions, which he said would need to be addressed for the agrarian question to be resolved, Mr. Ramachandran of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, said the distinguishing feature of the Indian state was that there was no permanent policy regime in place to deal any one of the issues. There are people who stake their political career on selling out to Wal-Mart. There are people who stake their political career on polishing the shoes of George Bush. But they cannot spend a single day tackling any one of these issues. This kind of inequality and injustice exists because of the failure to resolve the agrarian crisis, he said, delivering the V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture organised by Indian School of Social Sciences. Mr. Ramachandran, who talked on Resolving the agrarian question in India', said that in India any understanding of the agrarian question required to go beyond the strict categories of socio-economic class, caste, gender and other forms of group exclusion and repression. The first issue he highlighted was the need to free the countryside of all forms of landlordism, old and new, arguing that landlord households owned most of the land and, generally, they did not participate in major agricultural operations. But they dominate not only economic but modern social and political hierarchy in the village, he said. The second issue was to free the working peasantry and manual workers from their fetters of unfreedom and drudgery and to guarantee them means of income and livelihood. The third, Mr. Ramachandran, said was to distribute agricultural land. The popular perception is that land concentration has broken up. But statistics show there is concentration. In 2006 only 4.8 million acres of land was distributed and West Bengal accounts for 20 per cent, he explained.

Mr. Ramachandran said the fourth issue was to provide the rural working people with home sites and basic, clean, sanitary homes and habitations. The fifth issue was to create the condition for the liberation of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, of women and other victims of sectional deprivation, including the rural Muslim population. The question of landlordism is very important here, because it stands at the apex not only of the economic system, but also the apex of the system of caste hierarchy. The sixth issue was to ensure universal formal school education and the last was to achieve general democratisation of life and progressive cultural development in rural India. To a question from N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu, who wanted his opinion on the argument that FDI in retail trade would be of huge help to agriculture, that living standards would thrive because of it and that employment would be generated and infrastructure created, Mr. Ramachandran said that historically, there was evidence of de-propertisation of the peasantry, because what was being practised was not cooperative farming, but contract farming. There is no guarantee for buying because they could always say that the production fails to match our standards. As a result, many people lose their income and their property. He said that after a very long time India had established food sovereignty in terms of production and it was the basis for national sovereignty. He said the crop pattern and land use would be dictated by the demands of the supermarket, and not by India's need to be food sufficient. Keywords: V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture, agrarian crisis Agrarian Crisis and its Neo-liberal roots from Nidhin Sasi date Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 4:04 PM subject Agrarian Crisis and its Neo-liberal roots

"The story starts from 1991 when Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister started hounding farmers by reducing the fertilizer subsidy, cutting development expenditures so sharply that per capita GDP actually fell in one year and the death rate rose in one State, virtually doubling the issue prices of foodgrains from the Public Distribution System over three years in order to cut the food subsidy (which predictably boomeranged since the poor were priced out and the first episode of build-up of 32 million tonnes of unsold food stocks took place by 1995)." "By 1996, Manmohan Singh had succeeded in reducing rural development expenditures as a per cent of Net National Product to 2.6 compared to nearly 4 per cent during the pre-reform Seventh Plan. Through multiplier effects, the decline of rural employment and incomes as a result of expenditure deflation, had already been affecting this sector badly. When the United Front was in power for a brief period, it was misled by Bank-Fund propaganda into introducing the disastrous policy of targeting the food subsidy by arbitrarily dividing the population into those above and below poverty line. This excluded millions of the actually poor from access to affordable foodgrains." "During the NDA period, the complete submission of the government to U.S. pressure and rapid removal of protection to agriculture between 1996 and 2001 before the deadline set by the World Trade Organisation, resulted in farmers being exposed to the fury of global price declines. Between 1996 and 2001, prices of all primary products (cotton, jute, food grains and sugar) fell by 40 to 60 per cent and farmers who had contracted private debts in particular, became insolvent. The syndrome of hopelessly-indebted farmers committing suicides in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab started in 1998 and rapidly spread to other areas where cultivation of cash and export crop was predominant. The crash in pepper, coffee and tea prices came a few years later after 1998 and farmer suicides in Kerala and insolvency of tea estates in West Bengal date from around 2002." "The UPA government has also exacerbated the problems of export crop

producers by entering into regional trade agreements without consulting the States that would be most affected by those agreements. The RTA with Sri Lanka, for example, has meant coffee and coconut products pouring in from Indonesia and Vietnam through the open door of Sri Lanka. " "In the meantime, falling rural incomes meant a sharp reduction in aggregate demand for basic foodgrains. As the purchasing power of the masses fell, the second episode of build-up of unsold public food stocks occurred, which by July 2002 was a massive 64 million tonnes. " "The NDA government exported 22 million tonnes out of stocks during the worst drought period of 2002 and 2003, at a highly subsidised rate for feeding European animals, at a time when the average Indian family was absorbing 120 kg less of grains a year." http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl2506/stories/20080328250601700.htm

Inflation-hit agri sector worries experts Binay Singh, TNN Nov 9, 2011, 11.38AM IST Tags:
y y y

Saket Kushwaha| Price hike| petroleum

VARANASI: While the common people are feeling the heat of the fresh hike in petroleum price, agricultural scientists are worried about the deteriorating condition of agriculture. Agriculture is the pivotal sector in India for ensuring food and nutritional security, sustainable development and for alleviation of poverty. "The inflationary trends in the agricultural commodities at the consumer end and bottleneck are likely to continue in the future also. The most unfortunate part of