Prof Abhijit Sen, member of the Planning Commission, discusses Budget provisions related to the agriculture sector in an interview with Rajesh Bhayani and Sanjeeb Mukherjee. Sen feels, futures trading in essentials commodities like wheat and rice should not be allowed. According to him, India should follow China in having an agency for procuring commodities from the global market.
There seems to a renewed focus in this Budget on ancillary items of agriculture like millet, cereals, fodder, and protein-rich food items, like milk, eggs and chicken. However, isn’t it too late for that?
One thing needs to be kept in mind, as far as agriculture is concerned, there has been a shift towards income of farmers, rather than that on tonnage of production.
We are still committed to self-sufficiency in cereals, as we cannot forget it from the point of view of nutrition and food security of the population. And, we are too big a country to think that we can import these items. So, in other words, it is good that the government is thinking on these lines now.
The government seems to be adopting clusters for increasing farm production. Does it not lower the role of the states in determining what is best for them to grow?
Here the point is that one has to have a proper mix between the priorities that the Centre might think are important at a particular point of time and the flexibility that should be given to the states to do what they think is right at that point of time.
Finance minister soon after the Budget said we need to have another Green Revolution. How far is it achievable?
It is very easy to raise slogans like that, but we need to understand what was Green Revolution. Green Revolution was something which happened elsewhere, in two research institutions in Philippines and Mexico, and we got some dwarf varieties of wheat first and then rice, which were ably supported by inputs in the form of fertilisers and also marketing support. Today, there is no crop in which you have got this sort of technological help. Second, farmers’ income is going to come from growing other crops also. Hence, the one single factor is missing. Moreover, the world has changed a lot. With intellectual property rights coming in, you can’t get anything from the world without paying for it. Hence, it won’t be possible to have a repeat of the first Green Revolution. Rather, we in India should try to achieve higher rate of agriculture growth in per capita terms.
A committee headed by Narendra Modi on improving agriculture marketing infrastructure has recommended banning futures trade in essential commodities. You yourself chaired a committee on the same. Do you think the issue has become relevant again?
My view is very simple, in commodities like rice and wheat where there is minimum support price (MSP), government procurement and food security issues, what government does will determine the price of the commodity, so the futures market is not trying to predict supply and demand, instead it is actually predicting what will be the change in government policy. That creates a chaotic situation because on one hand proper market in not functioning because of government’s intervention, on the other hand you have something (some market) which is trying to guess what government is doing. Hence futures in commodities like wheat and rice is not advisable.
But the dominant view is that whenever commodity price rise, there is talk of speculation in the futures markets and it dies down as soon as the prices fall?
That’s very natural as it is directly related to the people who get affected by the rise and fall. When prices rise very sharply, consumers complain and if they fall unusually, then producers complain. Commodity futures markets come into the picture, unnecessarily. It is like we blame the government for everything that is wrong. In a similar manner, we blame futures markets for the rise and fall of commodity prices.
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We import a lot of essential items. So, why can’t we allow our public sector trading agencies like MMTC, PEC and STC to hedge their risks in oversea exchanges?
Hedging is happening, but might not be at the scale at which it could have happened. What we need is being in global physical markets consistently like China’s state sponsored agency. This agency can keep on buying, selling various commodities on commercial bases. However, India being a process driven country when we have to import or export some thing the whole world knows as before any commercial decision, the proposal goes for several stages of approvals.
We somehow don’t have a system like what there is in China. What we should do is going about of purchases or sales quietly and at our own time. we have suggested this to the government, to which everybody agrees, but as you know, we are a process-driven country.