The Hindu Business Line : Agriculture going to seed

The agriculture scene is decidedly dismal and the country can ignore it at its peril. The double-digit growth in manufacturing and service sectors will be nullified if agriculture remains a laggard.

THE AGRICULTURE scene is decidedly dismal and the country can ignore it at its peril.

The mid-term review of the economy clearly reveals that Rural India is lagging far behind. The double-digit growth in manufacturing and service sectors will offer little consolation — indeed this impact on the economy may be nullified — to agrarian India if farm sector continues to grow at the pitiable rate. At the turn of the Millennium, almost 80 per cent of the country's rural poor had to make do with much less than the calorie intake stipulated by the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad. As per the latest data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) for 2004-05, one-third of India's rural population, that is over 200 million, has to live on a monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) of just Rs 12 per day.

At this rate, the goal of halving hunger in India by 2015 is just a pipe-dream. The poor will eat much less, or simply starve, while the list of the county's billionaires will grow. A recent survey by the EPW Research Foundation in consultation with State governments and the National Accounts Division of the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) clearly shows that the share of the poor, as a percentage of GDP, for such slow-growing States as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, will fall from 20.5 per cent to 12.8 per cent in the first quarter century (2001-2021) of the millennium, while the share of the rapidly-growing States of Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, will rise from 34.1 to 39.6 per cent. Clearly more than 15 years after the launch of `reforms', the state of the poor in India is not getting any better.

Food prices sale

If anything, high food prices are here to stay. While the official wholesale price index (WPI) by mid-November was said to be rising at 5.45 per cent, consumers were confronted with food price rise of 200 per cent. Even if the country manages to harvest about 72 million tonnes of wheat in the rabi season, New Delhi will have no alternative but to import no less than five million tonnes. Maize will be next on the import list. If anything, there certainly will be a perceptible decline in summer oilseeds output. Pulses will continue to be imported to meet domestic output shortfall.

By all indications, India seems headed back to the "ship-to-mouth" era, notwithstanding the public pronouncements that "we are self-sufficient" in food. The heart of the matter is that the country simply does not produce enough to make food cheap. Almost 50 years after signing the UN Charter declaring food a "basic human right" (in 1958) the country has not been able to produce enough to feed everyone.

Farm and the market

At the centre of the agrarian crisis is thedeceleration of investments in agriculture. When the annual farm growth, more important, foodgrain production, averages less than 2 per cent with a corresponding 2 per cent growth in population, India's 9 per cent-plus GDP has little meaning. But the crucial question is, why has agriculture suddenly nose-dived? If, today, the pepper farmers in the once-flourishing Wayanad district of Kerala or the cotton farmers in Vidharba district of Maharashtra continue to commit suicide, there is more to it than meets the eye.

In 2001-02, when New Delhi in one fell swoop removed `quantitative restrictions' on more than 2,000 items, of which more than 90 per cent were of farm origin, none thought that the impact would be so serious on agricultural commodity prices in India. Dirt-cheap Vietnamese pepper flooded the Kerala market and the price of Malabar premium pepper crashed, ruining Kerala's economy in the process.

Though New Delhi talks about the unfair terms of trade in agriculture to Washington and Brussels expensive Australian apples, exorbitantly-priced oranges from South Africa and trendy fruit juices from the US and Europe flood the Indian market pushing the local producer further into the corner.

Islands of affluence

Rural India is headed towards chaos. Inflationary pressures have already taken away whatever little purchasing power the rural poor are left with. Land grab in the name of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) far from being answer to the real needs of the rural economy could turn out to be an exercise in land-grab. Ironically, little is heard of Agriculture Export Zones. The Rs 1000-crore-plus National Agriculture Technology Project (NATP) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has been re-christened the National Agriculture Innovation Project (NAIP) as though a change in name will act like a magic wand. The much-publicised National Commission on Farmers, set up three years ago at a huge cost to the exchequer, has not improved the lot of the farmer.

There are several technology missions flush with funds for crops such as cotton and oilseeds yet the problems remain just as they were decades ago. So what can a new `federation' achieve that the missions have not been able to? The same goes for soil testing. Without innovative ideas, the soil testing network, which has been in operation for scores of years now, still plods along with "text-book knowledge". .

At the height of the Doha Round talks, a number of States set up Agriculture Commissions but nothing has come off them either. The agriculture scene is decidedly dismal and the country can ill-afford it.

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

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