Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

The Hindu

Date:19/03/2008

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/03/19/stories/2008031953011000.htm

India´s agricultural condition poses fundamental challenges to its credibility as a democracy. A number of related themes have been articulated recently in these pages, and this article is a shortened version of a paper presented at a recent national seminar on food diversity, part of a series on diversity hosted by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla.

The facts are terrifying. Between 1980 and 1997, agricultural growth averaged 3.2 per cent, but since 1997 has averaged 1.5 per cent. Among Indian farmers, 40 per cent want to quit. Agriculture fell from 56 per cent of GDP in 1950-51 to 18.6 per cent in 2006-07. Two-thirds of India´s population depend on agriculture. Agricultural holdings declined steadily in size in the four decades before 2003 — but from 1991 to 2001, the number of agricultural labourers increased from 86 million to 106 million. The concentration of land ownership is intensifying, and rural opportunities in non-agricultural work are severely limited.

Policymakers seem to think farming will be rescued by high-tech, high-value floriculture and horticulture for export. That may be why, between 1990 and 2005, the respective cropped areas under cereals and pulses fell from 103.3 mha and 24.7 mha to 97.7 mha and 22.5 mha; the daily per capita availability of food grains fell from 510 grams to 438 grams. But the Agriculture and Commerce Ministries have both said their hope of fair international trade has been nugatory; 36 industrialised countries retain the right to block agricultural imports lest these ‘distort´ their domestic markets. Indian farming, however, has been damaged by the importation of subsidised United States cotton, price-fixing by Indian corporates has been documented, and phytosanitary regulations have restricted Indian agricultural exports.

About half of all farming households are indebted, on average by about Rs.25,000. The small and marginal category comprises 84 per cent of farmers, 75 per cent of whose debts are to unofficial lenders. Nearly half the households which have incurred debts or sold assets have documentedly done so to pay for medical treatment. Unofficial interest rates can reach 30 per cent, and the vicious circle is that malnutrition exacerbates susceptibility to disease, which means lost earnings, ruinously expensive treatment, and so on.

The cycle of entrapment is intensified because farmers increasingly have to buy hybrid seeds rather than use home-grown ones. Secondly, increasing fertilizer and pesticide use damages soil quality and generates resistant pests. So technology makes the farmer´s knowledge redundant, and creates supplier-promoted, not user-induced, demand. Thirdly, some commercially acquired seeds have produced plants but no produce — which may indicate that genetically-modified terminator seeds are being sold, almost literally sub rosa.

Central government policy has even caused harm; gross fixed capital formation in agriculture fell from 3.1 per cent of GDP in the Sixth Plan period, 1980-85, to an estimated scaled 1.9 per cent in 2005-06. Other problems are poor extension and advice services, and declining public investment in agricultural research, development, and infrastructure.

Certain policies defy explanation; under a policy intended to facilitate private corporations´ entry into foodgrains, surplus grain was exported between 2001 and 2004 at prices below the Public Distribution System prices for families defined as above the poverty line. With the state permitting foodgrain speculation, agribusinesses can hedge stocks and make windfall profits; the Futures Exchanges are documentedly more interested in volumes of trading than in the effects of price fluctuations on marginal farmers or landless labourers. The Indian state is now a food speculator itself; after failing to meet its own reduced procurement targets, the government now imports wheat at higher prices than it would pay Indian producers. With world foodgrain stocks already depleted, inter alia by shifts from food production to biofuel crops, the advent of another international buyer will raise prices.

One major international image of India for half-a-century after independence was that of starving children. Now India is once again a food importer and its hungry are getting hungrier. Among the poorest 30 per cent, average daily consumption fell from 1830 Kcal per person in 1980 to 1600 in 1998; this group spends 70 per cent of its income on food. In 1999-2000, almost 77 per cent of the rural population ate less than the international daily minimum of 2100 Kcal; cereal intake among the poorest is also declining. Among the poorest classes, Dalits, members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and — above all — women and children consistently suffer more than others. Malnourished children number 57 million of the world´s 146 million such, and 47 per cent of Indian children are underweight.

Within the Targeted Public Distribution System, theft and corruption continue; the vulnerable have not gained food security under the TPDS, and cash handouts are useless when prices are rising. In addition, the current discourse around food-price subsidies is seriously misleading. In 2000, OECD countries paid agricultural subsidies totalling $363 billion — before the Bush administration awarded a further $180 billion in subsidies, mainly to agribusiness corporations. India, in contrast, provided about $1 billion in subsidies to 550 million farmers in 2001, and is obliged by the World Bank and the IMF to eliminate even this. Meanwhile, subsidised cotton produced by the United States, in particular, causes international cotton prices to fall, so Indian cotton imports rise, thereby causing rises in indebtedness and suicide among Indian farmers.

The many calls for better state management, though understandable, are in an important sense technical, as they omit justifications for public intervention. Successive governments´ strategies have been largely technical, and are put in terms of raising productivity, connecting producers with markets, and so on. These conceal the ideological commitments behind technical policies. For example, the Ford Foundation, now known for having been a CIA front, established technical, not institutional, change as the keynote for Indian agriculture as early as 1959. Land redistribution and the punishment of usury were ignored in favour of seed-technology, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides; rich farmers in irrigated areas received subsidies, generous credit terms, and price incentives — with World Bank approval. The phenomenon of ‘cherry-picking´, or selecting initial recipients who are likely to succeed anyway, is widely documented. But the initial growth rates slowed, and average agricultural production has risen more slowly than it did before the Green Revolution.

Secondly, the colonial government introduced a transport system in the 19th century and encouraged farmers to grow cash crops such as cotton, indigo, poppy, and sugarcane, for export. The area under foodgrains shrank, and in the early 20th century other cash crops added were foodgrains, jute, oilseeds, and opium. Famine in later colonial times was episodically warded off by further reducing the already low per capita cereal consumption.

The 1960s agricultural crises did generate better policy; one success has been the prevention of serious famine, even during the drought of 1987, which affected nearly 155 million hectares. Yet the Green Revolution, which resulted from strong state action, including controlled grain prices, was a technical instrument. It covered only 30 per cent of cultivated land, and amounted to cherry-picking. The 70 per cent of cultivated land which it did not cover accounts for 40 per cent of India´s food, and is extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in rainfall.

Some of the responses since then have been nothing less than an insult to the poor. The price-based poverty line maintained since 1973-74, on the basis of a daily adult intake of 2400 Kcal, now corresponds to a daily intake of 1800 Kcal. The U.N. says the cost of a minimum food basket in India does not reflect the actual cost of food. India´s poor are not fed but only redefined. Even the dead have been insulted, with certain State governments initially not defining farmers´ suicides as suicides if, say, the land was owned in some other person´s name or if the dead person was landless.

Significant philosophic issues arise here. Indian agricultural policymakers seem to assume that economic incentives will generate the desired actions and results. There is some evidence for this, like the Union government´s protection of Green Revolution farmers against market fluctuations. Similar assumptions may underlie the idea that high-profit cash crops and the corporatisation of agriculture will benefit all Indian agriculture.

The idea, however, of the human actor as a rational economic being involves the assumption that the rational being is capable of decisions. As Raymond Plant and others have shown, the idea of rational agency is unintelligible if the preconditions for agency are absent. If people are starving or severely indebted, or if they simply die when they fall sick, it is hardly intelligible to see them as rational autonomous actors.

This goes beyond a right to food or a basic income. It is central to reasoning by citizens — a concept central to democracy. At worst, anyone so hungry and desperate that he or she cannot intelligibly make reasoning decisions is on the margins of humanity, not just the margins of democracy. Policies and conditions which prevent the establishment of the preconditions for agency and reasoned decision by all citizens both exclude India´s poor — 500 or 600 million people — from substantive citizenship and treat them as less than human. That is violence on a colossal scale.