The Hindu Business Line : Courage, Mr Rajnath Singh!

The new Agriculture Minister has his task cut out for him. Besides tackling the festering problem of cane and cotton growers, the other imponderables are the fate of the monsoon, the WTO pressures, the GM food issue, and the looming elections. He has a heavy and complex agenda, says Sharad Joshi.

The Agriculture Minister, Mr Rajnath Singh, has a tough task ahead.

RAJNATH SINGH is a much-harried man. As the new Minister of Agriculture at the Centre he is under great pressure. He has had a fairly chequered and turbulent political career.

Years back, the BJP made him the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The BJP faithful believed that they had finally found the right man for dealing with a particularly difficult State like the Uttar Pradesh.

The hopes came crashing and the once-tom-tommed hero became an embarrassment for the party.

The results of the Uttar Pradesh elections brought in the BJP-BSP alliance and it looked as if Mr Rajnath Singh's political career was at an end.

He has now come back on rebound with redoubled strength. He has now been brought back as the Minister of Agriculture in the place of Mr Ajit Singh who was completely at a loss to fathom the situation of the Statutory Minimum Prices (SMP) for sugarcane in Uttar Pradesh.

When the big boss in charge of ensuring the operation of Support Prices and the Statutory Minimum Prices himself had to advise farmers from Uttar Pradesh to take recourse to law in order to secure the SMP for sugarcane, he could not be continued ("The tragi-comedy in agriculture," Business Line, May 16, 2003).

The Prime Minister obviously thought that the replacement had to come from Uttar Pradesh since Mr Ajit Singh himself comes from that State.

In the past, the performance of Ministers of Agriculture from the North has been generally far from satisfactory and that of those from Uttar Pradesh even more so.

It is C. Subramaniam, Panjabrao Deshmukh and Annasaheb Shinde, all from south of the Narmada, who have a better record of performance.

One explanation for this may be that unfavourable geo-climatic situation in the South has made the farmers there more hard-working and innovative.

Mr Rajnath Singh will need all the good wishes and a full quota of prayers to see him through his formidable task.

To add to his difficulties, the leaders of the BJP have, apparently, decided to hold the general elections in about six months and, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee has publicly declared that the coming elections will be fought under the leadership of L. K. Advani, his deputy.

Mr Rajnath Singh has less than six months to produce a miracle by initiating substantive projects that will soften the none-too-happy farming community.

It would appear that the agitations in Uttar Pradesh are influencing disproportionately Mr Rajnath Singh's mind. He, apparently, is less bothered about the even more aggressive agitations on the same subject in Maharashtra, which is the largest producer of sugar in the country.

Some months back ("Enough politics, some sugar economics please," Business Line, January 1, 2003), the Prime minister was persuaded to raise the Statutory Minimum Prices. But to no avail because the sugar factories were, in the present situation of international markets, unable to pay even at the earlier lower rates.

The problems of the private sector sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh and those of the cooperative sugar factories in Maharashtra are different in nature and would need different solutions.

In Maharashtra, the opening up of sugar factories by way of distribution of political bonanza has been the principal cause of the present imbroglio. If you distribute licences to sugar factories the same way as you do petrol pumps and gas agencies it just cannot work.

The farmers' movement in Maharashtra has been warning of this impending crisis for over two decades. It had provided abundant proof that the cooperative factories had brought in, apart from inefficiency and corruption, a technology stagnation, which had made most of them non-competitive.

Rationalisation, that would include substantial slashing of labour force, would be the right medicine but no government will have the courage to administer it.

The situation has come to a pass where government properties may be seized by the creditor financial institutions. As in cotton monopoly, so in sugar cooperatives. The Government of Maharashtra finds itself in a terrific bind.

The sugar industry in Uttar Pradesh, predominantly in the private sector, calls for a substantially different prescription that would start from cane production itself and go up to the financial management of the factories. The remedies are all known. Unfortunately, they suit the political interests of no party — neither the BJP nor the Congress.

With a bit of luck, the new Minister for Agriculture may be able to manage the sugarcane crisis.

But that is unlikely to turn the farm vote any more favourable for the BJP.

The Indian farmer is facing a year of unprecedented bad drought and a shortage of even drinking water, not to mention the crop irrigation.

If the monsoons, that have broken at long last, turn out to be scanty, the BJP may be forced to rethink on the decision to advance general polls.

Even if the rain gods turn favourable, the Indian farmer is still stymied by the fact that the opening up of the world trade in agriculture is not bringing him any substantial advantage. The richer countries continue to disregard their commitments under Marrakech agreements and are, to make things worse, hiking, rather than lowering, agricultural subsidies.

The Doha round is itself bogged down due to disputes between United States, on the one hand, and Japan and Europe on the other.

The indications are that the rich countries will launch aggressive policies against each other by recourse to non-trade barriers and sanitary and phyto-sanitary measures.

New Delhi has done nothing up to now to make up for the decades of bleeding Indian agriculture through negative subsidies.

Its preoccupation with international terrorism and its hope that somehow the United States will help it in its fight against terrorism are forcing the Centre to pull its punches in pressuring the US to scaledown its farm subsidies.

India would need to get closer to such arrangements as the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC).

Further, at home, it will simply have to have to abolish all restrictions on agricultural trade, scrap both the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), and put a moratorium on all coercive recoveries from the farmers.

The Government will have to take measures to create a retailing network system that would eliminate the middleman-dominated APMC network.

Indian farmers are badly in need of information and laboratory facilities that will allow them to take advantage of the opening up of the global trade and the world recession.

A heavy and complex agenda. Not only Rajnath Singh but also the ruling alliance itself will need to produce a series of miracles to manage that.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. He can be contacted at sharad@mah.nic.in)

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