The Hindu Business Line : Whither National Farmers Commission?

AT THE fag end of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime, on the initiative of the former Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a National Farmers Commission was set up to look into all aspects of agriculture vis-à-vis the farmer under Mr Som Pal, a former Minister of State for Agriculture and Member of the Planning Commission.

When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) assumed office, Mr Sharad Pawar, Union Minister for Agriculture and Food, replaced Mr Som Pal as Commission chief with Dr M. S. Swaminathan More than six months after this change, neither the country nor the farmer has the benefit of knowing exactly where the Commission is going and what its terms of reference and recommendations are.

According to an October 15 press note, the Commission would be made more market-oriented. According to the media, some briefings were made. And that was about all. Farmers continue to commit suicide; inflation is up; prices of important farm commodities such as pepper and cardamom — the mainstay of States such as Kerala — are sliding; the minimum support price cover to the paddy growers in the "rice bowl" of Kerala — Palakkad and Kuttanad — by the State government is not being adhered to by the government; and the farmers are `distress selling'.

Then, there are the disturbing international developments such as the near-disaster at the Geneva WTO session over the vexed question of farm subsidies because of the "divide and rule" tactics of the US and European Union, and the soaring oil prices. All these affect India's agriculture, directly or indirectly, but New Delhi is yet tounfold a clear strategy.

The spate of farmers' suicides in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and even in Punjab is due to the failure of farm technology and not just the lack of availability of rural credit and indebtedness, as it is made out to be. There has been no breakthroughs in farm technology, be it in the production of very superior yielding crop varieties, or impact producing crop or soil management practices. This is clearly brought out in a recent analysis by the Hyderabad-based Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS).

A technology fails when it does not meet the local needs. The "high input technology" of the so-called Green Revolution failed on account of innumerable constraints, funds being an important one.

An April article "The World Bank' s high risk hypocricy" by Mr Peter Bosshard, Policy Director of International River Network, notes that "Senior World Bank staff in its India office indicated that they neither know nor care about procedures that are supposed to make its infrastructure lending socially responsible.

The Bank management appears to have no interest or political will to follow its own best practice guidelines and make minimal steps to challenge the vested interests of governments and corporations which often dominate when infrastructure is built". A very serious indictment, the country can ignore only at terrible cost to its sovereignty and welfare.Linked to agriculture is another important issue — the role of biotechnology, in particular the planting of genetically modified seeds. For instance, rice.

India, the homeland of rice, is being nudged to grow the transgenic variety. In Orissa and the North-East, there are extensive and unpolluted rare rice germplasms, which form the most important reservoir of rice biodiversity.

Once we start growing transgenic rice, these rare rice germplasms will face the irretrievable biological pollution and the country risks losing invaluable plant wealth, the consequences of which the future generations will have to bear.

Mexico in the backyard of the US, had the courage to ban growing of transgenic maize and put an embargo on maize research. Thailand, though close to the US politically, has said no to transgenic crops. In Europe, there is tremendous consumer resistance to genetically modified foods and seeds.

Yet, India seems to be succumbing to the pressures to grow GM crops, forgetting that the rich and varied biodiversity is in danger of outcrossing. Conditions in the US and Canada, which are at the forefront of the GM technology, are so very different, because they practise monoculture and have little biodiversity like in India

Food availability has come down dramatically in the past one decade. Between 1999 and 2003, India's population rose from 986.4 million to 1,068.2 million, up 7.2 per cent, an average of 1.8 per cent per annum. The per capita availability of cereals — principally staples rice and wheat — dropped from 429.2 gm to 409.9 gm — down 4.5 per cent and that of pulses — the main protein supplement of vast majority of poor Indians — fell from 36.5 gm to 28.2 gm. Total food availability decreased from 465.7 gm to 438.2 gm — down 5.9 per cent. Clearly, Indian agriculture is on a downhill. The arable land to total land area is 51 per cent while the world average is 11 per cent, which means that there are enormous land mass that can be brought under the plough.

In other words, for every acre in the country, only half is farmed. Both the US and Europe (the OECD countries) put together have about 10 million farmers who get a farm subsidy of $1 billion a day. India has ten times this number engaged in "subsistence farming".

One is not talking of the land- and capital-rich farmers of Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, but the one-two-acre farmers who are under the debt burden and are unable to sustain a high input technology. What is the Farmers Commission going to do about all this?

The farm fraternity has, thus, neglected farming as a viable economic activity for the poor and the disadvantaged and, therefrom emerge misplaced state policies. The next thing is the lack of innovation.

In India, commissions have a strange way of coming into existence, often with much fanfare, and as often fading out of public memory.

The National Farmers Commission seems destined to go the same way, following our national dictum that when a problem area crops up, the best way to ignore it is to constitute a commission. And there are willing persons to aid this futile exercise that leaves a big hole in the national kitty.

(The author was a former National Science Foundation Professor, Royal Society, Belgium. He can be reached at nair_kpp@yahoo.com)