1. People whose labour has made us a food-surplus country struggle to make a living. Vast numbers of them have never known any financial security. Many of them go to bed hungry on most nights. The farm family is helpless, impoverished, and forced to continue on the path of further impoverishment.
2. Speaking to the farmers about market access without first addressing basic issues like credit, tenancy rights and minimum base price is insensitive in the extreme. Throwing them, with their precarious livelihoods and slender resources, to the big, predatory corporate wolves is sheer cruelty.
3. The neo-liberal clerics who dominate our economic establishment do not receive wisdom from anywhere other than some western universities, the corridors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Their eyes are sewn shut to the east.
They should look at the experience of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam. These countries addressed the agrarian question by undertaking redistribution of land, making family farms, giving secure land rights, encouraging financial institutions to supply credit. That was the origin of the cycle of their economic development and manufacturing. Their countryside teemed with small-owner cultivators rather than insecure tenant farmers, ‘squatters’ and landless labourers. Agriculture yields rose by 50-60%. Farm incomes rose by 100 – 150%, – yes, 100 – 150%. We have something to learn from such experiences.
4. What is good for the farmer is good for the country. Without prosperous farmers we cannot have a prosperous India. They create wealth. Put food on our table. They don’t loot us and run away to Antigua and London.
5. Without addressing issues like land ownership, title, availability of dependable seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation, energy supply, infrastructure, research and development, access to credit, storage, transportation and a host of other vital issues, the government and the brand of economists it favours, want to address the marketing issues. They want us to believe that only marketing needs reform and not all the other vital areas.
{Compiled by Yaw Nsarkoh, 9 August 2024}
