The Hindu Business Line : National policy on farmers: Missing out some key issues

The Department of Agriculture and Co-operation and the Ministry of Agriculture has brought out a National Policy for Farmers, 2007 based on the report of the National Commission on Farmers (NCF) under the chairmanship of Prof M. S. Swaminathan.

It would appear that while drafting this policy there was some kind of a consultation with the State Governments and the Central Ministries concerned. The document is published not to elicit public reactions but, rather, with an air of finality.

Massive report

The Chairman of the NCF is a scientist with worldwide reputation and recognised as one of the fathers of the Green Revolution. The NCF report is in five volumes. If its recommendations were accepted, the fact would have been reflected in the Budget of 2005-2006.

Reports by learned men often create problem for the executive. These reports are bulky and are prepared with the care not to miss any point. The result is that they tend to be encyclopaedic rather than analytical and precise. More often than not, the voluminous product adorns the shelves of libraries till age makes it fall apart.

The National Policy on Farmers 2007, undoubtedly, has to go into various kinds of agricultural occupations.

It cannot exclude fishery, horticulture and sericulture. It has to encompass the landowner, including the marginal and the small farmers, the landless labourer, the plantation workers as also the share-croppers.

The report needs to cover all crops, including food-grains, the cash crops, fruit orchards, dairy, bee-keeping and sericulture. Such an all-encompassing approach helps create a reputation for erudition but not for solving problems.

The NCF was appointed in a critical situation where the farmers were committing suicide in large numbers and an action-oriented study would have concentrated on why the farmer was being driven to suicide.

Who is a farmer? The NPF defines one as “a person actively engaged in economic and/or of livelihood activity of growing crops and producing other primary agricultural commodities and will include all agricultural operational holders, cultivators, agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, tenants, poultry and livestock-rearers, fishers, bee-keepers, gardeners, pastoralists, planting labour and various farming related occupations such as sericulture, vermiculture and agro forestry and will include the tribals, the shifting cultivators and collectors of forest produce.”

The National Policy for Farmers is not the most appropriate place for defining the word “agriculture”, which has been abundantly done in several other places. There is hardly any point in emphasising “active” engagement. A brief definition would have been “any person who lives mainly by agriculture.”

Specifics missed

After the term “farmer” is analytically defined, the question arises why do the farmers need a policy apart from the policies that exist for the rest of the population.

Dr Swaminathan and the Government could have resolved this problem on the lines of the report of the Sachhar Committee, which recently studied the problems of the Muslim minority community.

That committee went ahead to make a survey of various areas and the situation of the Muslims in each of them. Once the relative backwardness of the community was established to the satisfaction of Justice Sachhar, he went ahead and spelt out a precise description, including reservations and monitoring.

In most States, agriculture is not only a vocation but also a caste occupation. An analysis on the lines of Justice Sachhar would thus have been quite justified and certainly more productive.

The policy on farmers in jeopardy should confine itself mainly to an analysis of the causes for the crisis. The national policy on farmers is not the same thing as National Agricultural Policy and an analysis of the problems relating to land, water, inputs, investment and infrastructure is quite out of the place.

The farmers’ problem

It is quite well understood that any improvement in agriculture will directly or indirectly, sooner or later, benefit the farmer. That does not mean that the national policy on farmers should repeat in extenso what the government has done, intends to do or should be doing for the improvement of agriculture, as such.

The farmers’ problem is essentially this: In spite of the increasing burden on the land, and the erosion of soil and depletion of water resources, farmers have, largely through their ingenuity and with the help of the technology, increased the production and yields manifold.

All the same, most farmers are poor and debt-ridden. The economic crunch has resulted in social ramifications — for example, in the field of health, education and sanitation. The ramification is a secondary consequence of the basic farmers’ problem: that agriculture is an un-remunerative vocation.

It is indeed surprising that Dr Swaminathan, in his five-volume report, as also the National Policy on Farmers, does not mention the fact that India has been working under a situation of negative subsidies for the farmers, as established by the lexicon of the WTO.

What’s not prescribed

The prescription could, instead, have been very simple:

Suppress forthwith all restrictions on the transport, storage, marketing, processing, export of agricultural produce as also the governmental intervention in the production and distribution of agricultural inputs as also on the entry of technology.

Remove all restrictions that tend to impose any set pattern for organisation of farmers, farm credit and most harvest treatment of agricultural produce so that the farmers can bring about, at least in certain areas, a consolidation of landholdings for operational purposes in order to derive benefits of scale and technology.

Scrap the principle of eminence juris in order to vest the ownership of land in the farmer and obviate all possibility of coercive land acquisition so that the farmers will have the incentive to make long-term investments in the land.

Spell out an exit/entry policy for agriculture so that those who feel suffocated in agriculture can exit and those who have the willingness, the ability and the skills necessary can enter agriculture without any political bars.

Discontinue some of the recent initiatives such as Bharat Nirman and National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which are not only ill-advised but also affect agricultural production adversely.

Scrap the entire structures of the CACP, the FCI and the PDS and put in place an unrestricted futures market accompanied by the facility of warehousing, grading and substantial advance on the basis of negotiable warehousing receipts.

And give the futures market platforms and the forward markets commission the same kind of autonomy as is enjoyed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India so that FDI and FII will create a market with liquidity and depth that is necessary for attracting investment in agriculture.

It is a pity that the unfortunate suicides of over hundred thousand farmers did not result in a whole review and introspection of the agricultural situation and policy.

It is only to be hoped that the farmers will not be driven to take recourse to the methods that attracted attention to the problems of the minority community in this country.

(The author is founder, Shetkari Sanghatana and Member of Parliament — Rajya Sabha. He can be reached at sharad.mah@nic.in>; < sharadjoshi.mah@gmail.com)

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