Agriculture offers lifeline amid pandemic

Devinder Sharma

Food and Agriculture Specialist

This was unexpected. The world’s leading global business publication, the Financial Times, wrote in an editorial: ‘Radical reforms — reversing the policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table.’ After four decades of following a policy direction that relies extensively on free markets, it took a brutal assault by the coronavirus pandemic for the world to realise that it wasn’t working well. The fault lines are clearly visible.

Historically, the aftermath of pandemics has led to a changed eco-system. Once the coronavirus pandemic reduces in intensity, and the world returns back to its daily routine, it is expected that the government will be back on the table with renewed emphasis on human welfare. With markets tottering in the wake of the pandemic, decades of underfunding of public health and education, for instance, will now receive priority. It may also radically overhaul the urban landscape with working from home becoming increasingly becoming the norm, more because it reduces the overhead costs for the companies.

But whether the post Covid-19 period will see a perceptible change in the neoliberal economic policies that the world has continuously followed for four decades, which has acerbated income inequality and led to a massive destruction of natural resources, is something that we will have to wait and watch. More importantly, whether the reduction in air pollution levels leading to clear blue skies, the cleaning of Ganga and Yamuna rivers which seemed almost impossible, the return of the birds in our balcony we had almost forgotten about, and numerous other subtle but substantial changes that people had begun to cherish during the lockdown, will disappear once it is back to business as usual, is again a question that only time can answer.

The coronavirus outbreak has brought economies to a virtual standstill, with only agriculture serving as the lifeline. At a time when aggressive consumerism the world has witnessed over the past few decades was down to a trickle, it is the abundance of global food reserves — and more importantly in India — that kept the war against the pandemic focused. With overflowing food stocks, totalling 77 million tonnes, three times the public distribution system requirement, India is in a much comfortable position. Despite the efforts, as part of the market-driven economic reforms, to dismantle public procurement, limiting it to the food needs of only 20 per cent of the population (from 67 per cent served under the National Food Security Act), the redeeming feature is that India’s food supplies can last for over a year.

At a time of burgeoning food stocks, the tragic images of lakhs of migrant workers, carrying their children in laps and their meagre possession on their head, trudging back to their villages had filled media spaces. Walking hundreds of kilometres at a stretch, and that too without any assurance of food, these migrant workers are in reality agricultural refugees, who were driven out of their villages when agriculture failed to provide them enough to survive. Migrating to the cities with the hope of making a decent living, these workers were in reality living only by their daily wages; whatever they earned, they spent. And when the cities disowned them after the lockdown was imposed, they were desperate to return home because that is where they belonged to.

Again, a fall out of the faulty economic policies. Agriculture has been deliberately kept impoverished to enable farmers to abandon farming and move to the cities. Over the years, agriculture is being sacrificed to keep the economic reforms viable. This is what the World Bank had prescribed. At a conference I attended in 1996 at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, the then vice president of the World Bank, Dr Ismail Serageldin had said that the bank estimates the number of people migrating from the rural to urban areas in India in the next 20 years, which meant by 2015, to be equal to twice the combined population of the UK, France and Germany.

Given that the combined population of the three countries is at 200 million, 400 million people were expected to move out of rural areas in India. This is the price the poor were made to pay to keep the economic reforms viable. And when even that didn’t work for them, they preferred to return home.

Now that the avalanche of migrant workers returning home has struck a strong visual in our minds of the

large number of agricultural refugees walking home, Covid-19 provides an opportunity to re-imagine a New Normal — where agriculture becomes economically viable and sustainable, where farming is not stifled to prepare a workforce for the industry, where

agriculture becomes the pivot of the economy, providing the rightful income into the hands of farmers. This will only be possible if along with public health and education, revival of agriculture too receives a priority in policy planning. A regenerating agriculture alone has the ability to reboot the economy, protect nature, bring back birds and butterflies, and save the planet from the catastrophic effects of climate change that awaits us.

Reversing the policy direction of the past four decades, as the Financial Times had said, is an urgent necessity. It requires bold decision making along with the courage to redraw a new development pathway. It also requires immense political backing to thwart the lobbying pressure from the market players, both in the media as well as academia. It requires an exceptional ability to challenge the dominant economic thinking, to disband the model of economic growth which has relied solely on wealth creation. It has sucked income from the bottom to the top, enabling the rich to amass wealth. But to expect the present dispensation of mainline economists to make an attempt towards an everlasting change — so as to prepare for a new normal — is perhaps asking for the impossible.

There is no dearth of saner voices. It is time to find them, and acknowledge their role. After all, as someone rightly said, it is the normal we don't want to return to.

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