Farmers may turn refugees in a big way; help them

By O.J.George
When farmers’ suicide cases were mounting in Maharashtra, particularly in the Vidarbha region, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala etc, I noted a comment made by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

He said something like this. The economy would be dependent on the farm sector for some more time. Those days, the IT sector was in the heydays.

What I feel is, farm sector holding the cards of the economy or life matrix in India would not be for some more time, but for all times to come.

No administrator can ignore roughly 70 per cent of the population making a livelihood from farm operations.

When the livelihood was not forthcoming thousands of farmers took away their own lives.

The corporatisation of farming operations would only drive out the farmers from their means of livelihood.

Agribusiness is the catchword in the corporate sector. In the globalised set-up, governments are prepared to give any amount of assistance to agribusiness.

The thinking is that group farming, leasing of farms, direct procurement of farm products etc would make farming operations profitable.

In effect, these measures would kill subsistence farming of our traditional ryots who would all be driven out from their farmland.

According to one study, about 400 million farmers would be offloaded from their traditional farming operations by 2015, and they would become farmer refugees.

Think of the situation, the comined population of UK, France and Germany is only 200 million. Double the figure would be agricultural refugees who may migrate to cities for some sort of livelihood. Would the cities be able to absorb these refugees as well, when these are already struggling to wipe out the urban slums?

The attempt may be to transform the prevalent food chain replacing traditional farming with the agribusiness.

European Union has been providing massive levels of subsidy to its farmers. Even then the number of farmers are decreasing. Even in the US, there are only an estimated number of seven lakh farmers; of course they use hi-tech equipment for undertaking farm operations.

We wail about free trade agreement with the Asean nations and demand inclusion of more items in the negative list. But that is only a temporary measure. Anyway after 2013, the situation would be level playing. There would be zero duty. We have to prepare ourselves now itself.

There may be zero duty structure, but there is nothing blocking the government from giving indirect assistance to farmers. Banks should be told to offload plenty of money to farmers. Even if there is default in repayment, the same should be borne by the government.

Totally ignoring the farm sector and bringing in agribusiness will not solve the problem, the essential thing is to keep people to maintain at least subsistence level farming, even as all measures are sought to increase production.