There is something terribly going wrong with agriculture. While nearly 40,000 farmers in P unjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir have defaulted on the repayment of Rs 600 crore to the State Bank of India alone, hundreds of farmers in the rice bowl of Andhra Pradesh, comprising the fertile and irrigated East Godawari and West G odwari districts, have refused to cultivate paddy this year, declaring a \'crop holiday\'.
What may appear to be two completely disconnected events in two different geographical regions is in reality a wake-up call. Whether it is the northeast or the more productive northwest, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Orissa, agriculture is in the throes of what appears to be a perpetual crisis for survival.
What is not realised is that it is actually a crisis of sustainability and economic viability.
It all began from the fertile Konaseema region of East Godawari, where a small farmer owning six-acres, Suryabhagwan, voluntarily announced he would prefer to work as a “coolie“ than undertake paddy cultivation.
Already under heavy debt and conscious that another season of paddy would only add to his indebtedness, his call for a “crop holiday“ soon found reverberation. Within a few weeks, the idea spread like wildfire in the ongoing kharif season, and more than 1 lakh hectare in the two irrigated districts today lies waste.
Andhra Pradesh is a paddy growing area. While the production has been steadily on the upswing, adequate infrastructure for procurement has not been created. The result is that while there is high production, there is little space for storage. When Chandrababu Naidu was the chief minister, he made a statement asking farmers not to produce more rice in the kharif season, as he had no space to stock the surplus grain. It is, therefore, not a surprise that from the previous rabi season (2010-2011) alone, an estimated 50 lakh tonne is lying with farmers, still to be purchased.
Much of the unsold stock of paddy is stored with farmers in East and West Godawari. Suryabhagwan, therefore, is absolutely right in deciding not to grow another crop.
This brings us to another thought being promoted by economists, policy makers and the private trade, that the government needs to withdraw from procurement and allow private players to procure the grain. Were the Andhra Pradesh government to withdraw from procurement, and knowing how private trade exploits farmers, more crop holidays should not be a surprise.
As in Andhra Pradesh, the ministry of food and agriculture announces procurement price for 25 crops every year, but effectively procures only wheat and rice. Unlike Punjab and Haryana, where state government agencies procure more than 90% of the grain, the Food Corporation of India has in other states outsourced its procurement operations.
Such an arrangement has allowed private trade to exploit farmers, and more often than not forces them into distress sale. Minimum support price (MSP) thereby loses its significance and farming becomes unviable. It is primarily because the farmer is unable to get a remunerative price that more than 40% of the farmers, as per an NSSO survey, want to quit agriculture if given a choice.
Even in the frontline agricultural states of Punjab and Haryana, where massive quantities of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and groundwater are used, farming has become economically unviable. Despite abundant irrigation and subsidised loan to farmers, if nearly 40,000 farmers have defaulted on repayment to just one bank State Bank of India to the tune of Rs 570 crore (HP and J&K have defaulted by Rs 30 crore only), it clearly is an indication that agriculture in the Green Revolution belt has lost its sheen. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have certainly not opted for a crop holiday, but by defaulting on loans they too have made a powerful statement.
The agrarian crisis is the outcome of continuous neglect and apathy. Over the years, agriculture has been deliberately pushed downhill.
While the economic and scientific prescription to bail out the farming community invariably hinges on providing improved and sophisticated technology, it is the declining income that is hitting the farm sector. The tragedy is that instead of providing more income in the hands of farmers, what is being offered is more credit, which only adds to indebtedness. No wonder, two-thirds of the MNREGA workers are landowners, an indication that small farmers are unable to survive solely on agriculture.
Setting up yet another highlevel committee is not the answer. What is needed is to provide farmers with an assured monthly take-home package. At a time when the monthly wages of government employees after the Sixth Pay Commission have gone up 150%, education and health expenses have gone through the roof, and BPL families are getting the benefit of health insurance and PDS, it is only the farming community that has remained at the receiving end. What the farmers need desperately is a “farmers income guarantee act“ that may determine the monthly income package a farm family must receive.
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Davinder Sharma (COURTESY HINDUSTAN TIMES, September 12),
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