SOURCE :
(A) https://www.mvnadkarni.com/files/Farmers%20Movements%20in%20India.pdf
( B ) https://spontaneousorder.in/so-musing-the-shetkari-sanghathana-and-history-of-farmers-movements-in-india/
PART 1 of 2
FARMERS'
MOVEMENTS IN
INDIA
M.V. NADKARNI
To
GANGA
For what you are
and do for me
no exchange is equal,
exchange it can't be
—this is just yours
you made it possible.
1. FARMERS AND INDIA'S POWER STRUCTURE ...........1
Introduction.. ..................................................................I
Movements and Power Structure ..................................4
Peasants' Movements and Rise .....................................13
2. AGRARIAN STRUCTURE AND AGRICULTURE IN
NATIONAL ECONOMY ...........................................................28
Agrarian Structure ..........................................................28
Agriculture in National Economy ...................................41
3. THE COURSE OF THE MOVEMENTS -TAMI L NADU.
MAHARASHTRA AND PUNJAB.............................................58
At the National Level........................................................ 58 .
Tamil Nadu .........................................................................60
Maharashtra 69
Punjab.................................................... 75
4. THE COURSE OF MOVEMENTS IN KARNATAKA .......82
Before Malaprabha.............................................................. 82
The Malaprabha Agitation ..................................................84
The Rise of Rudrappa's Ryota Sangha ..............................95
Farmers' Demands and Government Response. 1980 ......100
Post-1980 Issues and Developments.................................... 111
Postscript ...............................................................................134
5. POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE MOVEMENTS .........136
Spatial Dimensions................................................................ 136
Mass Movement or Class Movement?................................. 139
Dalits and Farmers' Movements.......................................... 148
In Inter-Sectoral Perspective................................................ 156
6. PRICE POLICY ISSUES ......................................................162
Introduction ............................................................................162
Terms of Trade....................................................................... 162
Cost of Production: Conceptual Issues .................................178
A r e Costs Covered?............................................................. 189
World Prices ...........................................................................197
Procurement and Public Distribution ...................................203
Market Instability................................................................... 210
7. PRICES AN D DEVELOPMENT- A CONCLUSION ...... 215
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PART 2 of 2
The Shetkari Sanghathana and the History of
Farmers’ Movements in India
The crisis facing India’s farmers has been as old as time itself. And throughout history, there have been numerous struggles and demands for reforms by Indian farmers against all dispensations. The demand for reforming the agricultural sector, giving access to open markets and de-regulating the economic freedom of farmers has been time and again raised in the past decades.
While the debate surrounding the current agri-reforms refuses to settle, it is pertinent to go back in time and to recall the rise of the Shetkari Sanghathana spearheaded by Sharad Anantrao Joshi. The Shetkari Sanghathana mobilised one of the largest farmer’s movements in the country and their demands were clear, a freer and liberal market to allay the plight of India’s farmers.
Produced below is the excerpt from a booklet titled ‘ Visionaries of a New Bharat – Shetkari Sanghathana’ which traces the evolution, the ideology and the vision of the Shetkari Sanghatana and elaborately lays down their demands with their rationale.
The Shetkari Sangathana (SS) in Maharashtra functioning since 1998 is a true representative of the present epoch of the farmer’s movement. The SS has been spearheading the developmental and ideological debate. The SS was kick-started in the late 1970s by Sharad Joshi. The SS is a non-political, non communal and non-pastoral union of peasants with a single point-programme – “Securing remunerative prices for the agricultural produce.” The single point may seem to be extremely simplistic, but, according to the thought of SS, it is the key to the economic development of India.
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COMMENTS ON
VISIONARIES OF A NEW “BHARAT”
“SHETKARI SANGHATANA”
By
Sharad Joshi
The Farmers’ Organization in Maharashtra
The Shetkari Sanghatana (SS) in Maharashtra
functioning since 1978 is a true representative of the
present epoch of farmers’ movements.
The SS has been spearheading the
developmental and ideological debate. The SS was
kick-started in the late 1970s by Sharad Joshi (For
bio-data see Annexe1). The SS is a non-political,
non-communal, non-violent and non-pastoral union
of peasants with a single point programme -
“Securing remunerative prices for the agricultural
produce”. The single point may seem to be
extremely simplistic, but, according to the thought
of SS, it is the key to the economic development of
India.
HISTORY OF FARMERS’ MOVEMENTS IN
INDIA
Movements, agitations, uprisings and revolts
by peasants are as old as history itself. The primary
objective of the farmers’ uprisings, agitations and
conquests during the period of British Rule was to
seek abolition of the Zamindari as against the
Ryotwari (lease holder) system. In the long tradition
of Indian history, the land in the village belonged to
the village Panchayat. The division of agricultural
labour continued from generation to generation
between the cultivators and the artisans. The British
brought in their own revenue system based on
private ownership of land. Land was measured,
numbered and allotted to prominent villagers who
undertook to collect their revenue for the
government or to those whose traditional role came
closest to that of the cultivator/accountant.
The British land tenure system had two effects. ONE The invasion of the Indian domestic market by
cheap products of the British industry, particularly
textiles, crippled the village artisans and dried up
the money inflows into the village economy. TWO Under
these circumstances, levy of land-taxes payable
strictly in cash, drove even the relatively well-off
farmers to borrow money from whoever happened
to have some spare cash, howsoever paltry. In very
short time, indebtedness mounted and the
mortgaged lands passed on to the
moneylenders/zamindars. The resultant discontent
was directed at the moneylenders and revenue
collecting landlords instead of the prime villains i.e.
the Colonial State. The newly English educated and
articulate nationalists movement blamed the state of
Indian agriculture on the internal contradiction
between the rich farmers and the small peasants.
Till the independence in 1947, the poverty of the
countryside was attributed to either the weaknesses
of the cultivator or to the exploitation by the
landlords and the moneylenders. The independence
in 1947 brought in the abolition of both the revenue
collector zamindars as also the moneylenders. The
despised institutions were replaced by a rigid credit
and bureaucratic institutions and that did not
attenuate the level of exploitation but carried the agricultural surplus away from the countryside to the urban areas.
The independence and the partition marked the
beginning of the years of food shortages and
famines. The new national State started taking
draconian measures calculated to take-away food
surplus from the villages to urban industrial areas.
The commonly prevalent notion, at the time, was
that the poverty of the farmers was due to low
productivity, illiteracy, poorer health conditions and
age-old social customs. The generally pervading
spirit of nationalities did not permit the emergence
of any farmers’ movement directed against the
State.
The Green Revolution of 1960s changed all
that. The agricultural productivity in most areas and
crops multiplied manifold. The farmers found,
nevertheless, that their income was inversely
proportional to the yields they obtained. India had a
“Green Revolution” producing abundance of crops
but leaving the farmers indebted and poor.
This signaled the right moment for the
emergence of a Nationalist farmers’ organization.
The blame for the poverty could no more be put on
the moneylenders or on the landlords. It was no
more possible to blame the illiteracy, the indolence
and wasteful social customs. The time survived for
the emergence of the Shetkari Sanghatana.
The articulators in the Shetkari Sanghatana
propounded a new thesis drawing lessons from the
scissors debate on of the Stalinist epoch and established an innovative normal genesis of the
problem.
The abysmal poverty in India of agricultural
region was caused by the fact that the proceeds
of the crops did not cover even the bare
minimum cost of production. The situation was
caused by deliberate policies followed by the
national government under the banner of “low cost economy”. The policy, in brief, amounted
to a deliberate neo-colonial exploitation of the
agriculture in order to provide the cheap
primary capital for the Indian industry.
THE NEW AGRARIAN MOBILIZION
Though it manifested in full strength in the
early 1980s, the new agrarian mobilization was
launched in the early 70s. The farmers’ agitations
did not start in the poorest of the states but in the
more developed and progressive ones such as
Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu in 1970 and
Ludhiana district of Punjab in 1972. Unlike many
parts of the country having subsistence agriculture,
these districts were well endowed with irrigation
facilities and their agriculture, by the late sixties,
had already become heavily market-oriented. The
leaders of agitations in Maharashtra and Tamil
Nadu showed a remarkable capacity to formulate
effective political strategies and articulate powerful
idioms for rural mobilization. Sharad Joshi, in
Maharashtra in particular, stood out as the strategist
and communicator, whose imaginative slogan of the
‘Bharat-India’ divide became a new idiom of rural
mobilization
With “remunerative agricultural prices” and
“Freedom of access to markets and Technology” as
its principal slogans, the Shetkari Sanghatana and
other associated farmers’ organizations led many
successful agitations under the banner of the Kisan
Co-ordination Committee (KCC), which attracted
farmers in numbers ranging between 1,00,000 to
5,00,000 on successive occasions over the last three
decades
By 1982, over 36 farmers were shot down by
the police for the ‘crime’ of demanding fair prices.
At the global level, this was far more massive
movement than the one lead by Lech Walesa in
Poland. The farmers’ cause is not a popular one in
the urban intellectual milieu. Consequently, the
farmers’ revolt in India went largely unnoticed.
THE ROLE OF SHETKARI SANGHATANA
(SS)
SS underlines five distinguishing features of
the new agrarianism.
First, the new agrarianism dose not put on a
pedestal lifestyle as being particularly virtuous for
its blissful simplicity and spiritual richness.
Second, it does not glorify the
pastoral/agrarian pattern. Rather, the new
agrarianism is aimed at ensuring, for the farmers,
highest possible degrees of freedom as also a life of
self-respect on par with that of the non-farming
communities.
Thirdly, The SS recognizes that capital
formation of the new industry needs to come out of surplus from agriculture. In the Soviet Union, the
matter was debated in during the Stalin reign, to the
conclusion by Stalin sending tanks against farmers.
In India, the debate was resolved by establishing a
complex of economic system which encouraged
higher production but denied the farmer
remunerative prices.
Fourthly, unlike peasants’ movements of the
past, which pitched tenants against the landlords,
the lower castes against the higher castes the SS
farmers’ movement was not ‘divisive’ of the rural
community. The significant line of internal
contradiction was between “Bharat” and “India”.
Mahatma Gandhi as also Marx have emphasized the
conflict between the town and the country. Sharad
Joshi’s view does not make a geographical division.
As he states it,
“Bharat is that notional entity which continues
to be exploited by the same policies as those of
the Colonial Rule even after the British left;
while India is that notional entity which has
obtained the inheritance of Colonial
exploitation.”
The misery in the village is not caused by the
“slightly” better-off farmers in the neighborhood
but by an “outside exploiter” - the urban India.
“Transcontinental imperialism” represented by the
British has been replaced by “internal colonialism.”
Finally, since surplus in agriculture
expropriated through a policy of cheap raw
materials and artificially depressed prices constitute
the main technique used by the exploiters (the
government) the agenda of the SS has been to bring
in a one-point programme of “Remunerative
prices”
The remunerative prices for their agricultural
produce are to be acquired not through a hackneyed
system of Agricultural Produce Marketing
Committees (APMCs), Commission for
Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Food
Corporation of India (FCI), and Public Distribution
System (PDS). These four institutions have been the
basic instruments of exploitation of the farmers. A
genuinely free market assures a price that
adequately covers the cost of production. Freedom
of market and opposition to all forms of State
interventions in the market mechanism becomes the
basic plank of the farmers’ movement.
The rationale for the remunerative price agenda is
as follows:
1. Farmers respond rationally to price
movements; they will react to price incentives
by increasing acreage and investment and by
adopting improved technology.
2. Farmers’ response will increase demand for
labour and, hence, wage earners will benefit
even more than the cultivators.
3. As a consequence of additional income so
received, farmers will undertake nonagricultural activities; thus, creating
employment and the incremental income that will bolster secondary, tertiary as also service
sector growth.
4. Trade and the exchange are beneficial for
attaining higher levels of production and
higher standards of living. Self-sufficiency is
the virtue of less cerebral species. The system
based on self-sufficiency will often be exposed
to lists of droughts and famines
5. The cerebral character of the human species
would sit in a separate category. Human
societies have ruled many Bloomsbury
forecasters wrong through innovation and
technology. The history of mankind shows that
the good of the masses comes not so much
from social or political institutions as form
advancement of technology.
6. All technologies have their good aspects and
bad aspects. Societies accept technologies
when their benign expressions are more
relevant. Societies tend to question the use of
those very technologies when the times change
and the less savoury aspects thereof manifest
themselves.
7. The advancement of human societies has been
achieved not by going back into obscurantist
past but by innovating higher technology that
will limit the bad effects of the old ones.
Thus, the overall philosophy of the Shetkari
Sanghatana is that price incentives in agriculture
and a “natural” process of capital accumulation
driven by an agriculture revolution can benefit the
entire economy and break the vicious circle of
poverty. As opposed to this, an accumulation
process driven by industrial revolution (before
agricultural revolution takes place) is always
premised upon a coercive expropriation of
agricultural surplus.
The SS is the only farmers’ organization in
favour of an uncontrolled market in agriculture
produce and international free trade in both inputs
and outputs in agriculture. Though regional in base,
the Shetkari Sanghatana has been able to force a
debate on the developmental path chosen by India
in the context of its demands at the highest level.
The organization has played a crucial role in
shaping the ideology and the demands of the largest
coalition of farmers’ organisations in India.
In the 1980s, Sharad Joshi, the founder of the
Shetkari Sanghatana, put forth his theory that, the
primary contradiction in the country was between
“Bharat” (primarily the villages but also including
the unorganized urban sector: “refugees from
Bharat in the cities”) and “India” (the westernized
industrial bureaucratic elite, inheritors of colonial
exploitation.).
The issue raised by this radically different
farmers’ organization was one of exploitation, in
which surplus was being extracted from the
peasantry via the market mechanism and unequal
exchange. The key to fighting this exploitation was
the demand for higher prices to meet the costs of
production for their crops, i.e. the “remunerative
prices”.
In January 1982, the Shetkari Sanghatana held
its first Plenipotentiary conference in a small taluka
place in Nashik District, with 18,000 delegates
representing more than half the districts in
Maharashtra and a concluding rally of over one
lakh. The one-lakh figure became the defining
standard to gauge the success of major farmers’
agitations and rallies for years to come.
One of the issues consistently raised by the SS
has been the Government’s imposition of negative
subsidies. For over forty years since independence,
the Indian planners maintained that Indian
agriculture was highly subsidized, while the
industrialists and the traders stood on their own feet.
The big lie was exposed by the submissions of
Ministry of Commerce, regarding agricultural
subsidy, to the WTO in 1989.
It now stands recognized that Indian industry was
the most protected in the whole world and that the
Indian agriculture suffered from the worst negative
subsidy estimated at - 87% (1996-997). Even the
Government of India admitted that the so-called
subsidies on farm inputs like water, electricity,
fertilizers etc. have benefited everyone but the
farmers for whom they were originally meant.
Planning in India was based on strategies
calculated to deny farmers legitimate price through
deployment of a large number of tactics including
bans and restriction on commodity export, dumping
of agricultural produce form abroad in the domestic
market, restrictions on trade, movement and
processing, compulsory levy procurement at prices
at inadequate levels and high exchange rates. The
planners and the established economists spread the
message that low agriculture prices are good for the
Country, for the farmer and finally, for the
consumer. But, the experience of the post independence period has shown that higher prices
and better terms of trade in agriculture benefit not
only the surplus producers but also the agrarian
community as a whole. The Dunkel proposals and
the GATT treaty completely vindicated the stand of
the Shetkari Sanghatana and demolished the
doctrines of Indian planners.
The above-mentioned anti-farmer polices in the
last six decades caused erosion of agricultural land,
capital and high levels of income disparity between
the agrarian sector vis-Ã -vis the non-agrarian sector.
In 1951, the ratio between the per capita agrarian
and non-agrarian income, at constant prices, was
1:1.4; now it stands at 1:10.6. In 1950-51,
Agriculture contributed 63% of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) and supported 74% of the
population. Today, agriculture contributes only 27%
of the GDP but the proportion of agrarian
population, nevertheless, persists at about 70%
The SS proved beyond any reasonable doubt that
the Essential Commodities Act was used
deliberately as an instrument of depressing
agricultural prices and obstruct the progress of
Indian agriculture. This act was designed to deny
the farmer access to latest international
technologies, purchase of quality seeds and other
inputs. The Act also encouraged dumping of
imported commodities in the Indian market, thereby
causing further losses to Indian farmers. A replica
of the World War II days, this Act has been
extended indefinitely from year to year. It gives the
government parental powers to play mayhem under
the guise of ensuring public distribution of essential
commodities, but surprisingly omits really essential
things like medicines, etc.
NEED FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN
AGRICULTURE
AS early as 1991, Sharad Joshi had stated in
his book “Answering before God” that:
Establishment of an alternative package of
technologies and practices is a matter of utmost
importance and urgency. The research needs to
be carried out in a highly professional manner,
in a scientific spirit, as regards both the
technical and economic aspects of exploitation
at micro and also macro levels. This again
emphasizes, the forward-looking attitude rather
than the Luddite attitudes of environmentalists.
New technology creates some problems, but
they cannot be avoided by shutting down the
doors of new technology but rather by
welcoming future strides in technology, which
resolve the problems of the past epoch.
FORMATION OF A UNIFIED FARMERS’
MOVEMENT
On 31 October 1982, an Interstate Coordination Committee (ICC) comprising of farmers’
organisations from twelve states was formed at
Wardha (Maharashtra state). It was a historic step
by itself, because until then most farmers’ agitations
in the country arose on purely local issues and died
down without spreading into surrounding regions.
ICC was the first attempt at creating an all India
representative body of farmers of divers states
producing different crops. An earlier attempt to
create a more unified All India body under one
banner and one leader had floundered on the
question of the role farmers’ organisations had to
play in active politics. Bharatiya Kisan Union
(BKU), in spite of diversity in thought and names,
could have under one banner, one leader and one
name, but floundered miserably because the
convener himself gave up apolitical position and
formed a political party.
In 1989, some difficulties arose, because in
certain states no one organization could claim a
substantial following of the farmers. The ICC,
therefore, was reconstituted as Kisan Co-ordination
Committee (KCC) with 55 member-organisations
coming from 14 states.
The KCC has often mobilized its strength to
lend support to farmers agitating in one state by
mobilizing farmers from other states. For example,
in 1984, the agitation of farmers in Punjab was
dragging on for years without any solution. The
ICC organized a Gherao of the Raj Bhavan in
Chandigarh in which 80,000 farmers form different
states participated. The Government was forced to
appoint an expert committee on the dispute, which
finally resulted in a solution acceptable to farmers.
In 1990, the farmers in Punjab were agitating
against Government’s dumping of imported wheat.
Over 50,000 farmers from other states came to
Punjab and Haryana to lend their strength.
Ultimately, the Prime Minister was forced to call
the leaders of the KCC for discussion to seek the
solution.
The KCC is, on the lines of the SS, a nonpolitical, non-communal, non-violent and nonpastoral organization. It represents farmers from all
across the country who demand free trade as a sinea-quo-non for progress in the next millennium.
Shetkari Sanghatana has been the most active
element in the agitations and advocacy of the
KCC’s philosophy. The KCC acknowledged the
fact that it cannot completely solve the problem of
negative subsidy, but it could definitely ensure that
whichever government came into power, it could
assure that farmers were not affected by the change.
TIME FOR A CHANGE IN INDIAN
AGRICULTURE:
THE ERA OF LIBERALIZATION. The 1990s was been a momentous decade. It
witnessed great strides in India’s progress towards
true freedom. Statism, Apartheid and Racism went
on the retreat. Pre-1990s farmer had been the
scapegoat for all repressive regimes in India. After a
millennium, the farmer was finally able to hear the
sound of his shackles cracking. The beneficiaries of
the old regime are upset at the new trend and are
still trying to prevent economic reforms. The
beneficiaries of the old statist socialist regime
include politicians, bureaucrats, organized labour
and those producers who lack confidence in their
capacity to survive in a free market without
governmental intervention. Most of these groups
have identified themselves by coming out openly
against the Dunkel proposals and economic reforms
in the field of agriculture. The anti-liberalization
groups of NGOs and the protectionist farmers’
groups have demonstrated a sizeable capacity of
misinforming and misleading the farmers and the
general public against the benefits of liberalization
in agriculture
The SS and the KCC are probably the only
farmers’ organisations in this country to defend
Dunkel proposals. In spite of opposition to the
Dunkel proposal by the politicians and the
economists, the Shetkari Sanghatana was successful
in convincing the government to adopt the same.
Today it continues to be the most articulate
proponent of freedom of economy and technology
in India.
In the year 1991, Shetkari Sanghatana chose
the Educational Approach to reach out its message
to the farmers in the country.
The educational approach had a four-pronged
program to achieve the same.
1. Farmer-level experimentation on appropriate
technology.
Experiment on our own on technological
possibilities e.g. Marigold grown around green
chillies reduces the impact of diseases (Seeta
Sheti).
2. Agri-Processing
Raw agricultural produce should not be taken
to the market from the farms in its brut form.
But it should, at least, be cleaned thoroughly,
be graded and then packaged adequately to get
appropriate prices (Majghar Sheti).
3. Marketing
The Sanghatana believed in the corporate
movement of farmers. It propagated the
concept of “Entrepreneurism” within the
farming community (Trading and Domestic
Marketing i.e. Vyapar Sheti).
4. Export market for domestic produce.
To undertake these operations the SS
encouraged farmers to start joint stock
companies for their own business and not lend
themselves to the bureaucratic co-operatives,
which were controlled exclusively by the State.
(Niryat Sheti).
(The SS opened a path-making initiative but
questioning the pluralism as regards the forms of
business organisations in agriculture and industry.
Joint Stock Company is the most common form of
business organization in the urban area. On the
other hand, most agricultural business including
banking and credit comes under the cooperative
sector, which is largely State-dominated. Most of
the farmers’ agitations were fought against the
injustices inflicted on the farmers by the
cooperative sugar factories, the cooperative banks
as also the cooperative marketing agencies. A large
number of farmers who committed suicide between
1995 and 2008 had borrowed money from the
cooperative banks. In an epoch where cooperation
was supposed to be the only pathway to progress,
the SS launched a movement for formation of
farmers’ joint stock companies. The normal feature
of the farmers’ companies was formation of the
equity capital by conversion of land, labour into
share capital. This conversion of immovable land
into movable equity also proved to be a major boost
to the cause of the women’s property rights. The
Shetkari Mahila Aghadi had even earlier promoted
the cause of women’s property rights by launching a
campaign for voluntary transfers of family’s land
into the name of the domiciliary women.)
Shetkari Mahila Aghadi
Sanghatana is that it recognizes the principal role of
women as toilers in the field and organized a
separate Women’s Front of the Shetkari
Sanghatana, the Shetkari Mahila Aghadi (SMA). It
encouraged all farmers to participate in its Laxmi
Mukti programme. The programme was a voluntary
movement of farmers to transfer share of their
landholdings and assets in the name of their wives.
At least 2,00,000 documented transfer of land in
name of their wives were registered during the
period from 1991 to 1996. Sharad Joshi, the founder
of the organization is the most revered farmer leader
among the rural women folk. This is clearly evident
from all the public gatherings organized by the
Shetkari Sanghatana where the percentage of
women was always more than 40%
The Shetkari Sanghatana does not look upon
government intervention as being beneficial to
farmers at all. This approach created a lot of
resentment from political leaders who were against
the opening up of the system.
As put in the words of Sharad Joshi,
“The quality of life of an individual, as also of a
community is to be assessed by the degrees of
freedom it enjoys. The four degrees of freedom
are:
1. Number of occasions available for making a
choice.
2. Number of options available at each point of
choice.
3. The range of the spectrum of the options.
4. Novelty of the options for choice.
The larger the number and the variety of means at
disposal, the higher will be the degrees of freedom.
Hence, material opulence is desirable in itself not
for the enjoyment and happiness: it brings increased
production, higher productivity and accumulation of
capital form the very core of all social and
economic activity.
The Shetkari Sanghatana, over the past 30 years,
has become the mainstream source of research
information in the Indian agriculture sector. It is
non-pastoral and does not glorify village-life. It
always keeps a distance from environment lobbies
as it feels that they do not understand the ground
realities of agriculture
SS VIEWS ON ‘FARMERS AND
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS’
The attitude of farmers on the IPR is
diametrically opposite to that of the urban
intellectuals, Luddite environmentalist groups and
nonsensical NGOs. According to the SS, farmers
have reason to welcome the breakdown of the
license-permit Raj, the trade restrictions and
subsidies. They appreciate that if all kinds of
subsidies are being abolished, obviously,
advantages of free R&D cannot be claimed as a
right by any party. India lags behind the most
advanced countries in the field of agricultural
technology by 100 years. If the farmers can have
immediate access to frontier technologies on
payment for a period of twenty years and free of
cost after that, we ought to be grateful to the
developed world for that. The farmers are confident
that they will be able to ensure that transfer of
technology does not remain a one-way traffic. The
third world countries have a natural advantage due
to its rich bio-diversity. The advanced countries
have substantial lead in the field of biotechnology,
which permits invention or a new discovery or
process. They will continue to make breakthroughs
and farmers will be willing to pay for any
worthwhile technological innovation rather than be
forced to pay, not much less, for the shoddy wares
of the ‘local peddlers’.
Challenges in the future
The SS started 30 years back like a thin rivulet
demanding improvement of road linkages between
villages and remunerative prices for onion. Over
three decades by pursuing strenuously agitations for
remunerative prices of onion, sugar cane, tobacco,
Milk, paddy and wheat, it advanced logically with
the generalized demand for abolition of all
agriculture loans as being both illegal and immoral.
It also became the front ranking articulator for
economic performance, liberalization as also
globalization.
Today it’s postulate that the government
deliberately depressed agricultural prices, which
had the effect of keeping agriculture a losing
proposition and generating poverty has been widely
accepted.
More recently, SS has been confronting the
agricultural policies followed by the UPA
government under the influence of its leftist parties
aimed at reviving the old policies of imposing
negative subsidies as also discouraging the most
open of the free markets i.e. the spot and the future
commodity markets.
SS has spread its wings to support a number of
agriculture related industries like pesticides, micro
and macro sprinkler irrigation systems, plantation,
crop processing industries whenever these latter
came in difficulties because of the protectionist
anti-dumping policies of the government.
The SS has steadfastly supported the WTO
rules of multilateral trade, disinvestment in
nonviable public sector units, after giving them a
chance to prove themselves by exposure to
competition. It also supports generalized entry for
foreign direct investment (FDI) as also the foreign
institutional investment (FII). It holds that entry of
electronics in future commodity markets has made
them accessible even in far off villages. It is
necessary to augment the level of liquidity and
depth of these markets by opening them to the FDIs
and FIIs. This will end all the problems of shortage
of investment and credit in agriculture.
Unfortunately, the UPA government under the
strong influence of its leftist allies tends to promote
the stock markets but hesitates to give similar
opening opportunities to agricultural marketing
institutions.
Unfortunately, the UPA government under the
strong influence of its leftist allies tends to promote
the stock markets but hesitates to give similar
opening opportunities to agricultural marketing
institutions.
Contrary to a number of other farm outfits
who oppose special economic zones (SEZs) for the
development of industry in the country, the SS
supports the formation of the special economic
zones with the reservation that the land that they
require there for should not been forcibly acquired
from the farmers. It recognizes that almost 40 per
cent of the farmers find agriculture not worthwhile
proposition and are, therefore, seeking opportunities
for a decent exit. The SS has always defended the
fundamental right to property and opposed forcible
acquisition of land. Nevertheless, under the present
circumstances when the sale prices of land are
going high, the SS has strongly supported both the
farmers right to property as also their freedom of
choice of vocation. A farmer has a right to continue
agriculture as he has been practicing cultivation in
some of the hardest epochs. The government can
not claim the right to acquire the lands of such
farmers. On the other hand, if farmer is unwilling to
continue agriculture in future he will have the right
to dispose of his land to any person, at any time and
at any price that is acceptable to him.
The soaring of international prices of crude oil
has opened up the possibility of yet another
revolution in agriculture. The development of the
technology to extract bio-Diesel, bio-fuels from
sugar cane, sugar beet, molasses, corn and almost
any form of wet biomass is putting agriculture in an
entirely new perspective. The peasant is now on par
with the oil sheik of the middle-east. The farmer’s
might yet to become the most preferred vocation in
the society. The traditional enemies of the farmers
have already started working to deny the farmers
this opportunity. The government is trying to
introduce a license-permit system for the
manufacture of bio-fuels and keep in hand the right
to decide the proportion in which the bio-fuels can
be mixed with petrol/diesel as also the right to
control the price regime thereof. The main
confrontation of the farmers movement in the near
future may not be for the freedom of access to
markets/technology relating to agricultural produce;
it may very well be for the freedom of bio-fuels.
Yet another area in which the agriculture will
face serious difficulties, is the manifold
consequences of global warming. The global
warming might accentuate food shortages and
defeat the gains made over the last century in
respect of the food grains, milk and food
processing. The mankind with its infinite capacity
for ingenuity and innovation has, in the past,
overcome the constraints of land and resources that
the environmentalists had threatened humanity with.
Global warming cannot be overcome by going back
into obscurantist modes of production. It will call
for a further and more rapid advance of technology
that will counter all suggestions of a retreat on the
technology front. Recent discovery of water and
possibilities of agriculture on planets that are not
too far from the planet earth, has also added yet
another dimension for the expression of human
ingenuity and innovation.
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