The Hindu Business Line : Now for the non-resident farmer

CANADA is rolling out the red carpet for Indian talent. No, not for software experts but for the wheat and paddy farmers of Punjab and Andhra Pradesh. The news will cause considerable consternation in India. So far, only doctors, engineers and software specialists were considered "importable" by the first world. But doctors and engineers have a declining market in the Western world.

The software engineers have a market that is widely fluctuating. There were times when they were courted and at others told to pack up.

Many non-resident Indians have done well and purchased luxurious houses, flats and mansions in the US and elsewhere in the Western world, but they could do this — become real-estate owners — after slogging for a long while.

The farmers from Punjab, on the other hand, have the possibility of purchasing land in Canada and starting farming operations immediately on their entry into the host country. They would naturally enjoy the right of permanent citizenship given their property status. A large number of farmers from Andhra Pradesh have already migrated to Africa and Canada. It is the farmer from Punjab who is being assiduously courted now.

A large number of them are reportedly preparing to go, and are even thinking of selling off their land in India. The Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) has even started special courses that familiarise the intending immigrants with the agro-climatic conditions in the host countries.

People have long migrated from India. Hordes of labourers were shipped off to the Caribbeans and Africa as indentured labour to bring virgin land under cotton and sugarcane. But for the first time, the Indian farmer would be migrating as proprietor farmers and landowners. Rich countries have faced, for some time now, the problem of keeping their land green and keeping people on the soil.

This was sought to be achieved by massive subsidies to agricultural inputs, exports and incomes. The subsidies have reached the order of billions of dollars. The agriculture subsidies put a heavy burden as much on thedomestic consumers as on the taxpayer.

The rules of the World Trade Organisation require that the rich countries such as the US, Canada, the European Union and Japan reduce their subsidies to agriculture. The domestic political pressures are still largely in favour of continuation of agricultural subsidies. But this is not expected to last long. Sooner or later, the taxpayer and the consumer will prevail and the agricultural subsidies will have to be seriously curtailed. Any reduction in agricultural subsidies would cause serious social strife if the farmers belonged to the rich countries themselves. The move to encourage immigration from Third World of proprietary farming population to Canada would greatly facilitate the inevitable task of reducing agricultural subsidies without hurting the agricultural production and the environmental balance.

What would be the consequence of this migration in the Third World countries? In Punjab, the immediate effect may be a fall in land prices. A large number of those who find it extremely difficult to sustain the pressures of new epoch of globalised agriculture propelled by genetic engineering, remote sensing and e-marketing in the environment of callous governmental policies would rush to get out of a vocation that, sooner or later, brings the farmer to the brink and in extreme cases, even suicide. In a way, the immigration would be a golden shake-hand or a voluntary retirement scheme for the farmers who find their hard work and enterprise going unrecognised.

This might facilitate the redistribution of land and land reforms that the UPA Government places so much value on. Indian agriculture will pass from traditional land-holding communities to groups that have little experience or knowledge of agriculture as a vocation. The rural poverty will decline as measured by the index of property holding per head. But the production and the productivity will decline seriously.

The National Common Minimum Programme of the UPA Government seeks to ensure employment through such plans as the Employment Guarantee Scheme. These latter will be immensely successful. In a not-so-distant future, we may see the richer countries, already well endowed in capital and technology in agriculture, also enjoying the benefit of skilled and hardy labour. On other hand, countries like India, poor in capital and technology, would lose their valuable human resource. The ill portents of farmer migration would be worse than the much feared brain drain. The non-resident Indian farm proprietor is bound to become politically influential in the host country. Consequently, even the political differences with India will narrow. In the WTO negotiations, the richer countries have serious reservations about welcoming manpower from the developing countries. The move to attract farm proprietors from the Third World is a new and welcome step that would remove the stumbling blocks in the process of globalisation and make the rules of the world trade work more smoothly.

(The author, Founder of the Shetkari Sanghatana, is a Member of the Rajya Sabha and can be contacted at sharad.mah@nic.in)

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