A
friend recently asked me “Where did we go wrong with our agriculture?”.
In my opinion it was with our history, heritage and hypocrisy.
We inherited from the Moghuls, with the British continuing it, the current system of agricultural governance and ownership. After independence, except for a few states like Kerala and West Bengal, there was hardly any real reform in the feudal land ownership and its governance. There were large landlords, their serfs who cultivated the land and those marginalised in the rural areas who owned no land and were worse off. Only names and titles changed. Today, it is almost the same in spite of land ownership ceilings, etc. The 2011 Census showed that the number of medium & large holdings account for less than 5%, they make up for close to 1/3rd of the total area under operation (https://factly.in/agricultural-land-holdings-statistics-india-account-for-close-to-a-third-of-the-total-agricultural-land/). Without change in land ownership pattern, our rural resources remain skewed in distribution and use and a cause of rural poverty. Almost all our governments have wanted to retain this system. Some in such ownership pattern have access to plenty of resources and the rest none. Because of this, as agriculture depends a lot on use of natural resources, the agricultural system has become stagnant and remains so. The large landlord on his own cannot cultivate the land and the tenant/labourer has no stake in it. Because of our land ownership pattern our productivity on the basis of natural resource use efficiency remains low. This cannot be corrected without land reforms by technology alone. Our history of land reforms will increasingly come to haunt us in the future.
Our agricultural heritage is also of subsistence farming. We used
whatever resource we had on the farm and village in our farming. We mostly
consumed what we produced in a large part of country till the 1960s. Even in
the 1970s, I remember my and my family’s friends, many who were senior
government officers, would get from their “muluk“ grain and ghee produced on
their farms. The “Operation Flood” for milk was urgently needed because of this
subsistence farming. Fresh milk became scarcer to access in rapidly growing urban
areas such as the 4 metros and had reached a level to cause riots in these
cities. We had to devise ways to provide
milk to our growing urban populations and Operation Flood had to be devised,
come what may. We did not improve production. We improved marketing. And, we further impoverished rural areas
taking away a vital nutrient from those living in rural areas. A very famous
person involved with Operation Flood famously remarked when accused of taking
this vital food away from villagers that "with the income they can get from
milk they can buy dal". But then, no one had the guts to ask, "Can you feed a
villager’s baby dal?" The so-called “Green Revolution“ was also a similar solution to feed
our growing population albeit at an all India level. Our subsistence, a low
input-low-output (LIP-LOP) system’s productivity was too low for
self-sufficiency in food as our populations grew. We had to import food grains
that was unsustainable for many reasons including self respect, dignity and
foreign exchange. However, with the “Green Revolution” our farming became
dependent on external inputs, both to the farming system and for the country.
Those who had access to these resources (and new knowledge) and they were
mostly the large and mid-sized land owning farmers such as in Punjab, Haryana
and Western Uttar Pradesh reaped the benefits of subsidies and support prices
and became relatively prosperous. The rest, especially in dry land agriculture,
were and still are left to fend for themselves. They were given cheap ration
wheat and rice to survive but nothing to improve their subsistence farming and
once in a while loan melas and consequent mafi or wages to dig ditches under
MGNREGA. And this is also the hypocrisy
of agricultural development.
Our leaders in 1950 said “Everything can wait but not agriculture.
In 1965, Jai Jawan Jai Kisan and so on and on. In 1992, we abandoned our
“mixed” largely so called socialist economy which in reality was replacement of
the British exploiting class by our similar
”Indian” class, a mix of politically connected industrialists,
politicians and bureaucrats. While this
greatly changed the industrial and service sectors of our economy, gave new
entrepreneurs opportunities and brought about a consumer revolution, nothing
was done to fit agriculture in this revised economic structure. It continued
its Mahalonobian character, the transfer of wealth out of agriculture. Our agriculture and farmers were not connected to
the market after 1992 and we still struggle to do so preventing a symmetry of financial flows with commodity flows.
If we want our agriculture, farming and
agri-food systems to be righted, we will need land reforms of course of a new
kind so that entrepreneurs who want to farm as an enterprise can own or lease
land for cultivation for long periods. Today in many states only “a farmer” can
officially buy farm land. It will only be
then when we consider farming an enterprise that new technology will be
integrated effectively in our farming and the use of natural resources,
especially water, made efficient as it will be priced as an input to the
production system. Contract farming
etc., does not really help as many of the contracts cannot be enforced with
weak regulatory and enforcement mechanisms. Neither will producer companies work unless we
eliminate APMC and its related acts totally. We will very
soon need, as a perfect storm of rural poverty, unemployment and urbanisation looms,
to introduce significant reforms in agricultural markets and marketing. The new
GST has laid the core foundations for it and instead of winking at APMC and
other agricultural market related acts, we will have to just eliminate them and
bring new regulatory mechanisms such as for food safety with traceability, ethical
and environmentally friendly production and marketing. And we will have to give up our
hypocrisy and rhetoric about “poor farmer”, “current farming as a sustainable livelihood”
and “farmer centric” policies. The future farming is an enterprise and the
future farmer is an entrepreneur.
