A farmer’s shopping list

The best way to respond to the global crisis, we have argued, is to protect yourself to the extent you can, and take domestic initiatives. One area to do this is agriculture. There are two advantages. The fall in global prices will probably help agriculture. We are not a major actor in primary agricultural exports, and in the areas we specialise in — like spices and so on — prices will not be so adversely affected; in fertiliser cheaper imports will help us. The Eleventh Plan chapter on agriculture begins with some points this column pioneered: slowing growth, technological and input stagnation, badly organised globalisation with dryland crops suffering, urbanisation affecting crop land are highlighted as are falling profitability and consequent decline in private investment. It notes the pickup in the last two years. That the country is in a new phase of demand expansion as it crosses the divide of a per capita income of three thousand dollars is only dimly hinted. Retail initiatives without linkage with primary agriculture don’t help much and futures are not properly policy-designed.

Some breast-beating is good, but the focus has to be on what we can do. Here the emphasis on investments in marketing and processing infrastructure is not as sharp as it should be. This is the time to do it on a large scale. In addition to recognising urbanisation as being more rapid than conventionally understood, we have emphasised the need to focus policy and investments on the rural-urban continuum as the FAO has called it in their recent work on India. There is a crying need to recognise, expand and modernise the vast trading centres on agriculture, many of historical origin, most having expanded enormously in the last few years and almost all breaking at the seams. The Golden Quadrilateral needs to be connected with rural networks in each agro-climatic region and the farmers will fund the companies who do it. Communication links need the first push: as soon as I cross the great urban spread my wife’s mobile which she insists I carry when I travel, probably to keep tabs on me, gets out of range or is weakly connected.

Energy for Indian agriculture is falling by official statistics. This is a clear policy failure where just giving sage lectures on subsidy reduction doesn’t go far. We need policy reform pushed with tenacity. Ministers instead of gracing inaugurals and cancelling the initiatives of project sanctions by their predecessors should get down to the difficult job of wearing down resistance from their state-level counterparts. The farmer always responds to energy supplied and pays a price for it: an hour’s flight from Arunachal, in Kunming, investments of eight billion dollars in rural roads, water and energy have shown the way.

... contd.

Ads By Google

Message*	Maximum characters allowed

Name*		Email ID*
Subject*		Country*

TERMS OF USE:
The views, opinions and comments posted are your, and are not endorsed by this website. You shall be solely responsible for the comment posted here. The website reserves the right to delete, reject, or otherwise remove any views, opinions and comments posted or part thereof. You shall ensure that the comment is not inflammatory, abusive, derogatory, defamatory &/or obscene, or contain pornographic matter and/or does not constitute hate mail, or violate privacy of any person (s) or breach confidentiality or otherwise is illegal, immoral or contrary to public policy. Nor should it contain anything infringing copyright &/or intellectual property rights of any person(s).

I agree to the terms of use.