Punjab Chief Minister warns against the tyranny of markets.

Harvesting in progress in Punjab

You can feel the anguish when Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal talks about the plight of farmers. Recently at a New Delhi conference (See the link here: http://bit.ly/1848rxW) , he spoke about the conspiracy to ‘destabilize Indian agriculture’ and warned policy makers to be doubly cautious of the “advocates of the tyranny of the free market economy.” They will end up destroying India's food self-sufficiency, he warned. 

Food security is no less important than national security, and therefore he wants agriculture to be treated at par with defence services. 

A few days before the New Delhi conference, he was speaking at the Vibrant Gujarat Global Agriculture Summit that Narendra Modi had organized in Ahmedabad. Deviating from the written text, Mr Badal had lashed out at the votaries of the free market economy saying that if agriculture is lost, everything is lost. Amidst a loud applause, he said that many experts are being planted in India to undo the remarkable achievements of the Green Revolution, and once again make the country stand with a begging bowl. 

Several decades back, I remember Mr Badal’s loud warning against the continuous neglect of agriculture and the apathy towards farming. He was addressing a national conference. “This is a sleeping elephant,” I recall his words: “You ignore them at your own risk. Once the elephant wakes up, it will make you all run for cover.” And during the NDA regime when the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wanted to decentralize foodgrain procurement, Prakash singh Badal led the group of chief ministers who opposed the move vehemently. Mr Vajpayee had to drop the proposal considering the strong opposition from chief ministers of the frontline agricultural states.

The Punjab’s agriculture story is well known. As a student of agriculture, and then as an agricultural journalist, and finally as a policy researcher and analyst, I have had a ring side view of the remarkable strides taken in agriculture. Once the pride of the country, Punjab’s farmers have now turned into a national burden. So much so that the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) leads a campaign to dismantle the food procurement system that has sustained Punjab’s agriculture ever since the days of the Green Revolution. Under the premise of making agriculture market-friendly, CACP chairman Mr Ashok Gulati, is actually finding fault with the higher and assured procurement prices Punjab farmers get every season.

In its Kharifreport, CACP has even listed States according to its market-friendliness. These are Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal among others where paddy farmers for instance get a price of not more than Rs 900 per quintal. Punjab is at the bottom of the chart since farmers get an assured procurement price which is relatively high. CACP’s argument is that in a market economy, the assured procurement prices should be withdrawn. This is what has irked Mr Badal, and he has made it clear that any effort to dismantle the procurement system will destroy the very foundations of food self-sufficiency.

Interestingly, while Dr Ashok Gulati has been opposing wheat and paddy procurement prices, he has been advocating introduction of a procurement price for maize so as to shift the acreage from paddy under the recently launched crop diversification programme in Punjab. Intriguing, isn’t it? What is not good for wheat and paddy is being projected as savior for maize farmers.

At a time when it is generally believed that the era of price policy is over, the policy thrust is to move farmers away from the assured income through procurement prices to building entrepreneurship and linking farmers to the markets. This is where Mr Badal has time and again expressed his concerns. And, rightly so. But what I still don’t understand is that despite chief minister’s warning, the State’s agricultural policy is still designed on the same market economy pattern that he finds fault with. The ‘sharks’ in the free market economy will therefore continue to prevail.

I am often asked as to what a land-locked state like Punjab can do to prop up its economy if it does not shift farmers out of agriculture? Farming cannot sustain the economy, nor can the average household incomes go up. Land acquisition for the sake of industry and real estate therefore is being aggressively pursued. Perhaps this is what Mr Badal has been time and again told. But what is not being told is that if a tiny European country like Holland can emerge as the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world, and where average farm household incomes are 265 per cent higher than the national average, why can’t Punjab do the same? I am not advocating the industrial farming model that Holland had once adopted (but is now moving to LEISA -- Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture practices) but certainly Punjab can make suitable modifications to ensure that it doesn't repeat the same mistakes. 

Switzerland too is a small country. It hasn’t adopted the industrial pathway to development. It hasn’t therefore done any irreparable damage to its nature and natural resources. So Punjab certainly can carve a niche for itself by ushering in a sustainable model of development linking environment-friendly agriculture with rural-based industry. 

Unfortunately, while the Chief Minister is concerned, the kind of farm experts the State has are coming from the same school of thought that brought in the crisis in the first instance. Punjab therefore needs experts/leaders/advisors with vision and wisdom rather than free market ideologues. A little more imagination in planning, and a determination to build an agriculture-based economy which does not suck the groundwater dry, does not pollute with chemical pesticides, and which does not lead to farmer suicides is what is desperately needed. # 

Not crop diversification, Punjab needs to diversify from existing intensive farming system.

Several decades back, soon after economist Dr S S Johl had submitted his report on crop diversification in 1986, I asked late Dr Norman Borlaug, the Nobel laureate, during one of his visits to Punjab, as to what he thought about the debate on crop diversification. I remember vividly his reply: “This is a wrong move. Punjab is doing exceedingly well in wheat and rice, and this equilibrium should not be disturbed.”

“It is like in athletics,” He tried to explain. “If you have a sprinter who is a record–holder in let us say 100-metres dash, you don’t ask him to slow down and diversify into steeple chase and high jump. You expect him to better his record in race. ” His suggestion therefore was that instead of Punjab shifting to other crops, it will be much better if Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and eastern Uttar Pradesh are encouraged to cultivate other crops.

That was some three decades ago. Meanwhile, reeling under over-exploitation of ground water, Punjab has enacted a ‘Contract Farming Act’ and announced a 5-year programme to diversify the cropping pattern. Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal has urged the Centre to allocate Rs 5,000-crore for crop diversification in Punjab on the lines of the financial package doled out to eastern states for ushering in Green Revolution. But take a closer look at the strategy being proposed, and you will find that for the reasons that crop diversification is being desperately promoted, the new array of proposed crops suffer from the same problem but in a still bigger magnitude. In fact, most of the alternative crops that are being launched, except for pulses, are environmentally more damaging than rice.   

In the backdrop of the shocking revelations tumbling out about the rise in cancer deaths all across the state, and the steadily rising graph of farmer suicides, I had expected a much greener programme that could restore soil health, help raise groundwater and turn farming into a profitable proposition. Unfortunately, the crop diversification programme fails to imbibe any enthusiasm. In my understanding, it will surely help the agri-business companies but leave behind dying fields and crying farmers. Therefore, before we exacerbate the existing farm crisis and taken it an unmanageable level, it is time to step back and rethink.   

First, let us look at groundwater. A very interesting study by a Nawanshehar-based researcher Kuldip Singh Herian has shown the water requirement, based on the same parameters as quoted in several crop diversification reports, for paddy at 60,20,000 litres per hectare. Now let us look at the crops being suggested as alternatives. Sugarcane requires 1,60,00,000 litres, cotton 78,50,000 litres, sunflower 65,00,000 litres and winter maize 61,00,000 litres. In addition, kharifmaize requires 46,00,000 litres per hectare. It is therefore quite obvious that the alternative crops do not provide any saving on groundwater usage. Interestingly, his research shows that water requirement for producing 1 kg of rice comes to about 1,131 litres against 1,691 litres for kharif maize, 6,217 litres for cotton and 5,612 for sunflower.

Considering that rice gets an assured price every year, farmers are wise enough not to shift to any other alternative. Even though Chief Minister has appointed the Punjab State Warehousing Corporation to act as a nodal agency in procuring maize, undertaking scientific storage and set up mechanised drying units, I don’t see much possibility of an area shift. In any case, maize cultivation offers no incentive when it comes to water efficiency.  It will however provide a huge market for sale of hybrid seeds for the private sector, which appears to be primary reason for the clamour for maize as replacement.

In case of chemical pesticides, I see no reason why Punjab cannot drastically cut down on pesticides usage on rice. Studies by International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have conclusively shown that ‘pesticides use on rice in Asia was a waste of time and effort.’ Farmers in several parts of the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India produce better rice crop without the application of pesticides. Wonder, why Punjab has never taken this advice seriously? In the case of bananas, olives and roses, the pesticide requirement is several times higher.

Similarly, there are several known methods of restoring soil health, inter-cropping and mixed cropping with leguminous crops being the common crop rotations to be followed. Crop rotation is the best way to get out of the monoculture that Punjab has lived with and thereby limit the damage to soil health and environment. All it needs is to redesign the package of practices. In other words, Punjab needs an urgent diversification of the existing farming systems – from highly intensive to more ecological -- to make it more viable and sustainable.

Coming back to groundwater, I asked Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar a few months back on how he intends to ensure his state does not end up mining groundwater like Punjab. His answer was simple. “I am aggressively promoting System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation which reduces water consumption by 50 to 60 per cent.” He has provided a cash incentive of Rs 1200 along with improved seed to those farmers who adopt the water saving technology. I wonder why Mr Badal cannot direct the department of agriculture as well as the Punjab Agriculture University to promote and train farmers, as well as provide cash incentive. Direct seeding, saving 30 per cent water, is another option, already in vogue.