The harvesting of votes in agriculture

By S. Swaminathan

The bedlam in the Lok Sabha recently on the aborted attempts of the Congress to fault the NDA Government for reported distress sales of agricultural commodities in some parts of the country shows how the winds are blowing in the electoral calculations of the leading political parties. That the farming community represents a huge electoral constituency is no new discovery but its significance as an emerging critical segment in vote-bank politics has to be gauged in the context of a democratic process which seems to have reached a point of fatigue where ideology has quietly yielded place to the pragmatism of the ``cash and carry" type! The frantic efforts made by almost all political parties in the Opposition - from the Congress, the progenitor of the reform process, to the Left parties which have swung all the way from land reform in favour of the kulak class - to play up the so- called ``agony and misery" of the farming community arising from the decline in market prices of agricultural commodities, need to be set in perspective rather than be misconstrued as a critique of whatever passes for agricultural policy.

Why are agricultural prices sliding?

In an economy where inflation is ruling around 7.5 per cent (based on wholesale prices), it is indeed intriguing why the prices of agricultural commodities overall have shown not more than a one per cent rise (April-October 2000). Open market wheat and rice prices have declined by 1.8 and 7.6 per cent respectively, according to official data. Jowar, bajra, ragi and maize have suffered a worse decline in prices.

Copra has fared worst of all with more than a 40 per cent decline in prices over the first seven months of the current year. A gross generalisation of the situation would be to say that the terms of trade have abruptly turned against agriculture during the last two years, meaning that price recovery for farm produce has not been commensurate with the escalation in input costs. (Of the latter, there could be different verdicts depending upon whether zero power tariffs and ridiculously low water charges continue to operate in different regions).

When it relates to cash crops such as sugarcane, tobacco and plantation crops, the issue of mismatches between production and demand in the domestic markets as well as in export markets (in terms of fluctuations in global supplies), becomes a crucial matter for policymakers intending to provide corrective measures.

Farmers' suicides

Traumatic stories of how farmers, unable to come to terms with the harsh realities of plummeting market prices for the produce they raise, were believed to have committed suicide, do add a poignant dimension to the whole situation. Nevertheless the tendency to magnify these episodes into a deep-rooted national agricultural crisis, apart from being erroneous, constitutes a form of distraction from the real dilemmas of agricultural policy. It is well-known that in quite a number of cases of suicide, the acute moral crisis of individuals oppressed by the burden of indebtedness not always derived from farming commitments is the real cause. The agony is all the greater when the individual is prone to unsustainable social habits or to the cultivation of crops contrary to the logic of the agronomic conditions of the land or whatever. The point is that instances of suicide of farmers, here and there, ought not to be politicised or portrayed as the vicious manifestations of a market culture.

Policy correctives - at what price?

At the political level, there would appear to be two different perspectives on the phenomenon of declining prices of agricultural commodities. The first is to blame it all on that universal whipping boy - the World Trade Organisation. An example of this absolutist anti-WTO approach is the recent reported statement of Mr. Vilasrao Deshmukh, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Of course, as a leader of the Congress, Mr. Deshmukh has no doubt about the anti-farmer policies of the Union Government.

The irony of it is that the NDA Government, despite all its pretensions about shaping a new agricultural policy, has been showing a degree of fidelity to the policies of the Congress governments at the Centre in the Seventies and thereafter, which makes a true mockery of the ``reforms mindset." But Mr. Deshmukh believes that farmers and ``growers" (of sugarcane?) are in distress because the Centre has decided to ``sign the WTO and other agreements which allowed unrestricted flow of products." Is it true that India is now importing rice, wheat and sugar? That horticultural products from Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. are offered for sale in the supermarkets in the metropolitan cities of India, is a fact, however. If this argument about the WTO ruining the Indian farmer is valid, how about our agricultural exports - of basmati rice, of wheat, vegetables and fruits?

The second perspective on the agricultural price debacle is that it is the result of the failure of the NDA Government to protect the farmers through the inherited policy of guarantee of remunerative prices. If tobacco prices crash, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu would like the Centre to buy the crop and lodge it in the cramped godowns of the State Trading Corporation! When tea prices hit the bottom, the solution is for the Government to purchase the commodity at reasonably attractive prices and debit the accounts of the tax-payers!

And so with every crop which farmers would raise depending on how they read their own destinies! Is it at all sustainable - a Government policy that seeks to insulate the agricultural economy from risks of various kinds through a universal course of support prices?

What began in the Sixties as a buffer stock policy for stabilisation of agricultural prices has today grown into a Frankenstein monster. WTO or no WTO, such a politically-driven agricultural policy cannot but negate the rudiments of agricultural progress which lie in rational crop selection, food security linking availability with access, enhanced productivity and effective management of scarce water resources and above all transforming agriculture from a traditional occupation into a vibrant growth-sector of the national economy.

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