Farm tech being pushed to benefit corporates

Devinder Sharma

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Food and agriculture specialist

A New York farmer, who also works as a lawyer, tweeted this the other day: “Headed home, I tried to work in the law office today, but my head is full of the disasters I am seeing on the dairy farms and in rural areas. Even longtime farmers in my area are trying to sell land to save the rest of the farm. Where is this headed? I don’t know.” Well, if such a deepening farm crisis should dominate one of the most productive agricultural systems in the world, it’s time to pause and rethink.

The question that needs to be asked is whether the US agricultural policy is deliberately aimed at decimating the farm sector? And, in that sense, whether Indian agriculture, too, is intentionally (or unintentionally) moving in that direction? To say that the landholdings in India are too small to be economically viable is understandable, but why is it that even in the United States, where the average farm size is 444 acres, small family farms should be on the way out? Why is that in Australia, where the average farm size is 4,331 hectares, should agriculture become unviable? Going by the economy of scale, there seems to be no plausible reason why farmers in America and Australia should be quitting farming. If small holdings are unviable, how come even large holdings are becoming uneconomical? Unless, of course, policymakers refuse to admit that farmers everywhere in the world, not only in India, are being denied realtime prices, depriving them of their rightful income.

First of all, let’s be clear. The US has always been for pushing small farmers out of agriculture. Even at a time when US agriculture is passing through turbulent times, American Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue unabashedly acknowledges: “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.” This echoes what former US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had famously said: “Get big or get out.” This was followed by a cleverly drafted narrative of “feeding the world”, pushing farmers to produce large surpluses that actually dipped prices. Such a deliberate policy has left US small farmers struggling. Many of them are going out of business and quitting agriculture in desperation.

The policy to get big serves as an invitation for an increasing corporate control over agriculture, which is also becoming an unwritten policy for the developing world to follow. In addition, whether it is the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) treaty, trade policies have been very conveniently tweaked to provide an enabling environment for big agribusiness giants to step in. As competitiveness has become the market mantra, developing as well as least developing countries are being increasingly forced to open up for cheaper agricultural products, thereby displacing millions of small farmers in the bargain.

To illustrate, the biggest dairy farm in China is spread over 22,500,000 acres, an area equal to that of Portugal. According to worldatlas.com, this farm houses around 1,00,000 cows. The second biggest dairy farm, spread over 11,000,000 acres, is also in China. The remaining eight of the top 10 big dairy farms are situated in Australia, which despite the size are under stress.

No wonder, the push for seeking an unfettered access into India through the regional mega RCEP treaty, which India has, for the time being, rightly decided to stay out of. Considering that 10 million people are involved in dairying in India, imagine the destruction of livelihoods from cheaper dairy imports from Australia, New Zealand and China.

Returning to agriculture, rural America, like rural India, is faced with a severe agrarian crisis. Like in India, where the average income of farming families in 17 states, which is roughly half the country, stands at a paltry Rs 20,000 a year, the US agriculture is not doing good either. More than half of US farmers have a negative income. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, 91 per cent farmers and farm workers face distress. Besides affecting their mental health, the severity of the crisis is such that 87 per cent farmers fear they will have to abandon farming. Accordingly, farm debt in 2019 is expected to soar to $416 billion, the highest since 1980. For several decades, farm gate prices have remained frozen when adjusted for inflation. The prevailing onion prices, for instance, are no different from the prices farmers received 30 years ago. Corn prices have remained static for almost five decades.

If such a worsening farm crisis is happening in a country which applies state-of-the-art technology in agriculture, and is often touted as an example to be followed by the rest of the world, isn’t it time to examine how inappropriate is the argument for pushing in more sophisticated technology (often unwanted) in Indian agriculture? No one is against technology, but it has to be relevant, depending on the needs, and not pushed to benefit commercial interests.

If in a country which is completely high-tech in agriculture, the suicide rate in rural areas is 45 per cent higher than in urban areas, isn’t it time to redesign Indian agriculture, focusing more on sustaining small farms, thereby reducing the rural-to-urban migration? Shouldn’t the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, therefore, embark on a fresh strategy to bring in policies tuned in more to domestic needs and those that make farming environmentally sustainable and economically viable?

An OECD-ICRIER (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development-Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations) study has shown that Indian farmers have been suffering a loss of 14 per cent every year in farm incomes for almost two decades, between 2000-01 and 2016-17. This has largely benefited the consumers who paid 25 per cent less for all agricultural commodities every year. In other words, it is the farmers who have been subsidising the country all these years. An outcome of the global economic design which aims to deliberately keep farm prices low, farmers’ anger is brewing across the world. As farm protests spill on to the streets in Germany, Holland, Canada, America and India, the reason for growing farm anger was best summed up by Ian McLachlan, President of the National Farmers Federation of Australia, who while recently addressing a 45,000-strong farmers’ rally, said: “We’re sick and tired of subsidising the rest of Australia.”