In the last post we discussed how the arthiya – commission agent – being villainized now is not the real villain. Even if you want to consider them so, they are within the 2.5 per cent of the MSP.

So, who are the real villains? Look at it from your own point of view as consumers.
Extract from PANJAB: Journeys Through Fault Lines, page 50-52

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Look at farming from our dining table point of view: What do we pay for the wheat flour and what do the farmers get for the wheat they grow? The MSP for wheat in 2015 was Rs 1450. But that does not mean every farmer sells his produce for that much. Or that the MSP is a commitment to buy. It means the MSP is a guidance figure. Though the heavily mechanised farming process in Panjab aspires to work with factorylike precision, the quality of wheat or paddy, the time of sowing, the watering of fields, the sprinkling of chemicals, the time of harvesting, the rainfall, the moisture content, the probability of disease, the grade of produce, all play a role in how the rates of grain are fixed. The wheat could vary in moisture content and quality. The produce could even be rejected for being surplus, for lack of funds, or because private players corner produce and do not release it to government agencies. In the farmer’s ecosystem, money rarely changes hands, as almost everything is through a system of slips and credits, and rotates around the arthiya, the commission agent, who serves as the farmer’s conduit to the market and the local bank, extending loans and credits, often at short notice.

Calculating backwards from Rs 1450 would mean Rs 14 for a kilogram, much lower than the Rs 45 per kilogram of wheat flour that we pay — three times lower. In this gap of what the farmers earn and what we pay lies the ordinary man’s complicity in the disaster of the agrarian sector.

The argument thus is not about increasing the price of food but understanding where the Rs 31 (the difference between Rs 45 and Rs 14) goes. It is this Rs 31 per kilogram that we pay for agro-processing industries located in other states, transportation across the country, above the basic procurement price of wheat that gives the corporates control on governments by bank-rolling political parties.

Governments, usually beholden to corporates for election funding, remain under the influence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which pushes for a free market, thereby complicating any possible government-subsidised arrangement for the farming sector. This is not a crisis of Panjab or India alone. In the last few years, in South America, Europe and Africa, farmers have been protesting the lack of state support — an indigenous system to maximise their trade potential.

For the last decade, political parties have been talking of implementing the Swaminathan Commission report on the basis of which they will ensure that the MSP doubles by 2022. But the report also calls for land reforms by redistributing ceiling-surplus land, substantial investment in irrigation through canals, drainage and the million well scheme, soil testing laboratories, a cap on interest rates levied on farm loans, primary health centres and suicide prevention facilities, and a food guarantee programme through local self-help groups, and so on. This second set of proposals is rarely spoken about. Whether it is professors, thinkers and commentators, everyone is clear: small and marginal farming is untenable as it does not produce enough income. It needs to change, but to what form? Should corporates or landlords buy the land and dispossess the farmers? There are no clear answers.

It is no wonder then that activists and ordinary farmers and labourers consider Panjab the ‘food-producing colony of the nation’ faced with myriad problems that barely register on the national consciousness. This non-listening, non-acknowledging violence of the state through colonial capitalist practices based on neo-liberalism has paralysed Panjab’s agriculture.

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Adding an observation. Test it.

In a deficient monsoon year, when exactly in the cycle do we learn that it will be a deficient monsoon? In the last decade, each year I have noticed the Metrological Department of India always projects a healthy monsoon in April/May. When the South-West monsoon does not make appearance on Kerala coast towards end of May, they call it minor glitch.
The Met Dept admits to failed monsoon by mid-August. Ask yourself why?

Does the Met Dept not have sophisticated instruments to track? Are satellite reports not available? How then does Japan know in January itself about the quantum of rain in Indian sub-continent that year?

This is where agro-processing industries come in. They are precious on the Sensex. If they tumble, lakhs of investors will loose money, stock indices will go down. That is not good optics for a country where all growth in recent years is only on the Sensex and not on Human Development Indices. This is not good for political parties who are funded by the agro-processing industry. This year India is 97 out of 107 countries on World Hunger Index.

Ask yourself what answer can we give to the north Karnataka farmer who plants crops and waits for rain and monsoon fails? Or to millions of farmers across India in various states? We need to ease the hold of the agro-processing industry on the ‘Farm to Table’ food chain.
By removing ECA, the new Farm Laws actually encourage unlimited stock-piling by this section. By allowing corporate farming, the new Farm Laws allow encourage a vice-like grip by this section on the agrarian sector. It is the agro-processing industry who are the real middle men.

Both suffer, farmer and consumer.

Tags: agri-business, middle men, weather report