When will Indian agriculture become economically viable?

Speaking after inaugurating the 166-km-long four-lane-road project at Kaithal in Haryana the other day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn farming profitable ushering in prosperity for farmers and at the same time result in overflowing foodgrain godowns.

Coming at a time when agriculture continues to reel under a terrible agrarian crisis, when an estimated 60 per cent farmers go to bed hungry, and at a time when close to 10-lakh farmers abandon agriculture and trudge into the cities looking for menial jobs every year, the promise to make farming economically viable is like a blessing from the heavens. For the 600 million farmers, somehow surviving against all odds, there can be nothing more cheerful. But will this really happen? 

Successive governments have only added on to the farm woes by continuous neglect and apathy. Going by the mainline economic prescription of cutting down drastically the population engaged in agriculture to boost economic growth, the policy thrust has been to push farmers out of agriculture. Creating economic despair, and hand over precious natural resources, including fertile land, for non-farming purposes therefore became an easy route. Perhaps the Prime Minister will see through the folly, and reverse the trend to ensure that the benefits of economic growth are judiciously and equitably distributed. India has the ability to chart out an economic development model that does not add to global warming as well as rampant destruction of natural resources.

This is possible if the policy thrust shifts to encourage sustainable agriculture and thereby in the process gainfully employ 600 million people. I don’t understand the economic rationale of displacing farmers from their meager land holding, and forcing them into the cities to work as daily wager workers or drive auto-rickshaws. Displacing people from their stable jobs in agriculture and re-locating them to the cities to work as labourers in infrastructure projects is no job creation. The challenge is to make agriculture more profitable, and ensure that improved skills are provided to farmers. An economically viable agriculture not only boosts economic growth, removes economic disparities, but also ensures food security. Let’s be very clear: a food importing country can never be economically powerful.

It is in this connection that the Prime Minister deserves all the applause for taking a bold stand by not succumbing to international pressure at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). By refusing to sign on the protocol of amendments to the Trade Facilitation Treaty unless a permanent solution to the vexed problem of providing minimum support price to Indian farmers is resolved, Narendra Modi has sent a strong message. After all, if Japan can impose 738 per cent import tariffs on rice and 328 per cent on sugar – so as to protect its domestic farmers and industry, why can’t India stand firm to protect its farmers as well as its hard-earned food self-sufficiency.

This has to be now translated into policies and actions that can revive domestic agriculture. To understand the political implications of neglecting agriculture let’s revert back to the days when Lal Bahadur Shashtri was the Prime Minister. The year was 1965 when India was hit by a devastating drought. India had imported 10 million tonnes of foodgrains under the PL-480 from North America. But later in the year, in an interview with an American journalist Shashtri was asked: “What did he think about the war in Vietnam?” To which Shashtri replied: “It is an act of aggression.” This small sentence annoyed the then US President Lyndon Johnson.

It is very easy to teach a lesson to a hungry nation. US stopped food exports to India under what is called a ‘stop-go’ policy. So much so that at one stage only food stocks for another week was left. This prompted the then Food Minister C Subramaniam to send an SOS to US president requesting him to divert the ships carrying foodgrains to India otherwise millions would die of hunger. The UN FAO had also appealed to the US President. India thus had rightly earned the epitaph as a country living in a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence.

Mrs Indira Gandhi too had faced the brunt of food diplomacy. Soon after she took over as Prime Minister, at a time when the drought had continued for the 2^nd year in 1966, Mrs Gandhi had allowed the import of high-yielding seeds of wheat from Mexico to usher in what is now called as Green Revolution. Agriculture scientist Dr M S Swaminathan, who is hailed as the father of India’s Green Revolution, once told me that the seeds of Green Revolution were actually sown in a car journey that he took with the Prime Minister. During the short car journey Dr Swaminathan recalls Mrs Gandhi had sought a commitment from him if he could provide an assurance that “India will have a surplus of 10 million tonnes or so in a couple of years because I want the bloody Americans off my back.”

Dr Swaminathan made the commitment. The rest is history.

But a couple of decades after India become self-sufficient in foodgrains, a dangerous complacency has set in. In 2013-14, farmers produced a record harvest of 264.4 million tonnes of foodgrains. Production of oilseeds has reached a record high of 34.5 million tonnes, a jump of 4.8 per cent. Maize production increased by 8.52 per cent to reach a level of 24.2 million tones. Pulses production reached an all-time high of 19.6 million tones, an increase of 7.10 per cent over the previous year. Cotton production too touched a record high.

With such record production, the nation should be indebted to its virile and hardworking farmers. But they are not only being ignored, but penalized. Last year, in 2013-14, when farm production recorded a quantum jump, agriculture received 19,307-crore from the annual budget kitty, which is less than 1 per cent of the total budget outlay.  For 60 per cent population less than 1 per cent of is the resource allocation. In 2014-15, only Rs 22,652-crore has been given to agriculture and cooperation departments. In fact, if you look at the 11^th Plan period, the total outlay for agriculture was Rs 1-lakh crore. For the 12^thPlan period it was raised to Rs 1.5 lakh crore. Now what miracle can you expect when the governments deliberately starve the most efficient sector of the economy, which incidentally is also the biggest employer?

Just before Mr Atal Bihar Vajpayee took over as Prime Minister for the first time, a closed door meeting was held with some economists to work out the economic pathway for the new NDA government. I remember insisting that NDA would never faces anti-incumbency if it devoted 60 per cent of the annual budget to agriculture, which employs 60 per cent population. This was agreed upon, and was also talked about but in reality agriculture did not even receive 6 per cent of the annual budget. Agriculture in reality is faced with negative terms of trade meaning more money is being taken out from the rural economy than what is being invested.

It is primarily for this reason that the average income of a farming family in India, comprising five persons, has been computed to be less than Rs 2,400 a month. This is less than what a household help receives in a city. No amount of efforts to raise productivity or leaving farmers to face the vagaries of the market economy can help farmers realize a better income. Let’s be very clear, neither future trading nor by allowing big retail like Wal-Mart and Tesco to purchase directly from farmers has helped raise farm incomes even in US and European Union. It is direct income support that has made farming a profitable venture in the developed countries.

I am therefore hoping that the Prime Minister too would spearhead an economic renaissance in Indian agriculture. Mr Modi has a number of times talked of raising the procurement prices. But since procurement prices only benefit 30 per cent farmers, any tinkering in the form of ‘cost plus 50 per cent profit’ will only benefit a section of farmers. It is therefore time to set up a National Farmers Income Commission that aims at providing a monthly guaranteed take-home income package to farmers. This must be linked to production and the location of the farm.

If in the past nine years, the government has shelled out Rs 1,100-crore every day as tax concessions to India Inc, totaling Rs 36-lakh crores, which did not result in increased industrial production nor created additional jobs, I see no reason why even a quarter of it cannot be given to farmers. When I say this I am not being against industry, but at the same time I see no economic justification in why industry should be allowed to replace agriculture. It should in fact be supportive of agriculture. India needs agro-based industries.

Imagine a scenario wherein farming becomes a profitable enterprise, as the Prime Minister said, the boost it will give to the Indian economy would be unprecedented. I only hope the Prime Minister lives his dream. #

Source: The Organiser, Aug 24, 2014

67 Years after Independence, Indian farmers have disappeared from the economic radar screen -- My interview

Indian farmers continue to toll against all odds. 

(pic from web) 

On the occasion of the 67th Independence, Aug 15, 2014, the Hindi magazine Yathawat interviewed me on the state of Indian agriculture. In this short and crisp interview, I was asked to track the historical backdrop and to look at the present and future agricultural policies and approaches.  

Q: When India got its Independence in 1947, how did its agriculture look like? 

India got its Independence in 1947 in the backdrop of Bengal Famine. The famine happened in 1943 taking a massive human toll. Some estimates point to 3 million people perishing in the famine. But Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work tells us that there was no shortfall in food production in 1943. It was only because the private trade had diverted the food that millions of people were left starving. In 1947, when India got Independence, agriculture was in a pathetic state, a fallout of the neglect and wanton destruction of agriculture during the days of the British Raj. With more than 80 per cent population engaged in subsistence farming, Independent India was a hungry nation.

Q: What prompted Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri to give the slogan of "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" in 1965? Was it a reflection of the grave crisis afflicting farmers and farming, and of course the threat India faced from across the borders. 

When Lal Bahadur Shashtri took over a Prime Minister in 1964 India was a food importing country. It depended on food imports from North America under the PL-480 scheme. Not many people know that 1965, the year when India went to war with Pakistan, was also a drought year. In 1965 India had imported 10 million tonnes of wheat under PL-480. Knowing how precarious the food situation was, and knowing the extent of prevailing hunger, Lal Bahadur Shashtri had urged the nation to fast for a day. I know many people who have continued to fast on Monday’s since then. It was primarily because Lal Bahadur Shashtri understood the role that soldiers and farmers play in maintaining national security thereby preserving national sovereignty that he gave the slogan ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’

Q: Green Revolution came in the late 1970s. What led to that ..

For almost 20 years after Independence in 1947 India had remained a food importing country. In fact, after the 10 million tonnes food import in 1965, the next year 1966 also turned to be a drought year in which India imported 11 million tonnes of foodgrains. That was the biggest food import at that time in history. before that, it was not that the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru did not make any serious efforts to improve food production. He launched various community development programmes but could not achieve the desired results. On Aug 15, 1955 he had shared his frustration with the nation when he said from the rampart of Red Fort: “It is very humiliating for any country to import food. So everything else can wait but not agriculture.’

After the premature death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shashtri in Jan 1966, Mrs Indira Gandhi took over. But before Shashtri died he had annoyed the then American President Lyndon Johnson when he had told an American journalist, in reply to a question, that the war in Vietnam “was an act of aggression’. This sentence had annoyed Johnson who had stopped food exports to India under what is known as ‘stop-go policy’. India was then in such a precarious situation that even the Food & Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations had to make an appeal to US to allow food exports to India. Food would come directly from the ship to the hungry mouths. India was then called as a country living in a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence.

Mrs Indira Gandhi sowed the foundation of ‘Green Revolution’ in 1966 when she allowed the seeds of dwarf and high-yielding varieties of wheat from CIMMYT in Mexico. India imported 18,000 tonnes of wheat seed from Mexico, adapted them to Indian conditions, and as per an earlier demarcated programme, distributed these seed to farmers in Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh where irrigation was available. The first wheat harvest after cultivating high-yielding seeds in 1967 was five tonnes more than the previous. This was a record increase at that time and was termed ‘wheat revolution’ by Mrs Gandhi.

Q: Green Revolution increased production in wheat and rice. Besides high-yielding varieties, there must be something else too?

The quantum jump in the wheat production was followed by rice two years later. India received high-yielding varieties of rice from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, in 1968. These rice varieties were adapted to the Indian conditions and distributed to farmers in Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh and also in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Rice also recorded an increase in productivity and production. The term ‘Green Revolution’ was later coined by an American scientist, William Gaud.

Green Revolution turned the country self-sufficient in wheat and rice, and by early 1970s India stopped importing food under PL-480.

Since the days of Green Revolution, Indian agriculture has grown manifold. There has been an all around development in crop production not only in wheat and rice but also in coarse cereals, maize, cotton, sugarcane etc. Improved technology was packaged well with right policy decisions. The setting up of Food Corporation of India and Agricultural Prices Commission in 1965-66 were the two major planks of what Dr M S Swaminathan calls as the ‘famine-avoidance’ strategy.

Q: How come after Green Revolution turned the corners, farmers are committing suicide on a large scale?

By the mid-1980s, the environmental impact of intensive farming systems that used chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides and groundwater had begun to emerge. These are called the 2^nd Generation Environmental Impacts. But instead of encouraging farmers to adopt sustainable practices to thwart the negative impact of intensive agriculture, farm scientists tried to address this by encouraging more Green Revolution. In other words they asked farmers to apply more chemicals. This deteriorated the natural resource base. At the same time, the policy support for agriculture declined. Reduction in public sector investment in agriculture, failure to encourage sustainable farming practices, and unremunerative prices for agricultural produce were among the factors that turned agriculture into a losing proposition. The damage was more pronounced in cash crops like cotton. Farm suicides began as a trickle around 1987 or so and since then have taken a toll of nearly 3 lakh farmers in the past 17 years.

Q: What is behind the terrible agrarian crisis that India faces? 

Farm suicides are the outcome of the continued neglect and apathy of the farm sector. Besides the policy makers, a significant role is also played by agriculture scientists and economists. They cannot simply absolve themselves from the terrible agrarian crisis that have prevailed for almost two decades now.

Q: Is it because India does not have a clear cut understanding and focus on how to prop up agriculture? Is it because of a wrong direction coming from international institutions? 

About 20 years after the Green Revolution began, and somewhere in the early 1990s, the global economic thinking shifted to shrinking agriculture and boosting industry. World Bank/IMF and the international financial institutions began to propose that economic growth can only take place when fewer people are left in agriculture. In 1996, the World Development Report of the World Bank suggested moving 400 million people, equally to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany, from the rural to the urban areas in India in the next 20 years, by the year 2015.

Meanwhile, the emergence of World Trade Organisation in 1995, also shifted the focus to trade. The mainline economic thinking shifted to reducing support for agriculture and importing highly subsidized cheaper food from the developed countries. Subsequently, the World Bank and Multinational Corporations have been pushing for land acquisitions, contract farming, creation of super markets or in other words paving the way for corporate agriculture. In other words, the neglect of small scale agriculture is part of a design. It is part of a pre-planned economic strategy that is being imposed. 

In a country where 52 per cent of the 1.27 billion people are directly or indirectly engaged in agriculture, the thrust of the economic growth paradigm is to push farmers out of agriculture. Since the younger lot among farmer’s don’t know anything except farming, the World Bank had suggested a network of training schools across the country to train them to become industrial workers. That is being done. In other words, farmers have now become a burden on the country. The common thinking is the sooner the country is able to offload farmers,  the better it will be.

Q: Every year the government announces support for agriculture in its annual budgets. You think that is enough? 

In 2013-14, farmers produced a record harvest of 264.4 million tonnes of foodgrains. Production of oilseeds reached a record high of 34.5 million tonnes, a jump of 4.8 per cent. Maize production increased by 8.52 per cent to reach a level of 24.2 million tones. Pulses production reached an all-time high of 19.6 million tones, an increase of 7.10 per cent over the previous year. Cotton production too touched a record high.

With such record production, the nation should remain indebted to the virile and hardworking farmers. But last year, in 2013-14, when farm production recorded a quantum jump, agriculture received Rs 19,307-crore from the annual budget kitty, which is less than 1 per cent of the total budget outlay. This year, only Rs 22,652-crore has been provided for agriculture and cooperation departments. Again the outlay for agriculture remains less than 1 per cent of the total budget. In all fairness, the apathy towards agriculture continues.

Q: Is the neglect continuing? 

The neglect of agriculture has become more pronounced since economic liberalization was introduced in 1991. I recall the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh famous budget speech when he showered all the bounties on industry and in the next paragraph said that agriculture remains the mainstay of the economy. But since agriculture is a State subject, he left it to the State Governments to provide the much need impetus to farming. But what he forgot to say was that industry too is a State subject and should have been left to the State governments. The bias therefore was clearly visible.

Although agriculture grew at an impressive rate of 4.1 per cent in the Eleventh Plan period (2007-8 and 2011-12) it received a dismal financial support of Rs 1 lakh crore. For a sector which directly and indirectly employs 60-crore people, Rs 1 lakh crore outlay for five years is simply peanuts. In the 12 Plan period (2012-13 to 2017-18) agriculture is projected to receive Rs 1.5 lakh crore. Compare this with the Rs 5.73 lakh crore tax exemptions showered on the industry in 2014-15 alone. Since 2004-05, Industry has received tax concessions (computed under ‘revenue foregone’ in the budget documents) to the tune of Rs 36.5-lakh crores or Rs 1,100 crore per day for the past 9 years. It’s therefore a matter of priorities. In fact, as I have been saying for long, farmers have disappeared from the economic radar screen.

Despite the neglect, the fact remains whatever India has been able to achieve in economic and military terms is primarily because of food self-sufficiency built so assiduously over the past five decades. But the tragedy is that the country is deliberately destroying the agricultural foundations, and pushing it back to the days of 'ship-to-mouth’ existence. Over the past few years, India is busy adopted the same economic policies that were existing at the time of Bengal Famine. #