Vijay Jawandhia is a farmer in Vidarbha, the region which brought home to us the crisis that is compelling farmers to kill themselves. He is also a farmer leader. Recently, he spoke of new challenges: “In our village, we are hiring vehicles and bringing people from cities to work in the field.” Sounds bizarre, but news stories from across farming regions suggest a similar trend.
What does this mean for food security? The fact is, labour shortage, in part, is about the wages farmers can pay. It is for this reason that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has often been accused of taking away labour from farms. But, the scheme pays a subsistence wage at best for hard work involving digging ponds and breaking stones for making roads. So, it provides alternative work, thereby improving farm labourers’ bargaining power. Moreover, if the assets — ponds, check dams, soil conservation structures and roads — being built under the scheme are indeed built, they will improve farm productivity and incomes. It is another matter that as yet the quality of rural assets is poor because the scheme focuses on jobs, not work.
The reasons for the growing shortage of farm labour are not understood adequately but implications are obvious: Higher prices will have to be paid for farm work. This is good news, for it will increase the income and purchasing power of the poorest in the country, as market economists will tell you. Market economists will also tell you that this will place more money in the hands of poor farmers, who themselves are consumers of food. So, everyone will grow richer. This is begging the question.
The bulk of Indian farming — over 60 per cent — is rain-fed. Farmers have no option but to depend on an increasingly erratic rainfall. They grow crops for subsistence; their very existence is threatened. One bout of poor rain or flood, or rain at the wrong time can push them down the vicious spiral of poverty and destitution. They cannot afford expensive food.
So, there is no easy way ahead. It is time policy-makers recognised two critical facts. One, growing food will cost money; and two, we cannot afford expensive ways of growing food. If the Western world has flooded the food market, it is not because its ways of farming are more efficient or its farmers are more learned, but because governments there pay obscene amounts as subsidy to underwrite the costs of growing food. The European Union doles out $51 billion each year to its farmers to keep them in the market. European sugar farmers — whose produce is often imported by our government — are paid four times the world market price. Then the surplus is dumped in the world market using an additional $1 billion in export subsidy, which depresses global prices. The situation in corporate-run US farms is similar.
But as yet, Indian policy has been caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side are the poor farmers who need to be paid for growing food, on the other side are a vast number of people (also farmers) who cannot afford the price of that food. So far, the policy has been to subsidise food, not pay farmers. The public distribution system is designed to buy vast quantities of foodgrain and supply them to people. This system depends on keeping the price of procurement as low as possible. That’s what the minimum support price is all about.
This will not work in the future. India will have to design policies to pay farmers the real cost of growing food, and to pay them directly. Today farmers pay for building irrigation facilities — more than half the irrigated land is groundwater irrigated. Some 19 million wells and tubewells have been built with private capital. This cost must also be accounted for in the food bill. This means revamping the horrendous fertiliser subsidy, under which companies are paid to make fertilisers, while farmers are not paid to buy them.
The challenge of making cheap food available to vast numbers still remains. That’s why the policy must recognise the need to cut the cost of growing and distributing food as well. So far, we have been obsessed with crop yields, not realising that high-input agriculture is based on just one principle: increased cost of production. This can work where consumers are affluent enough to pay the price or governments are rich enough to subsidise farmers. It will not work in India.
India has to find ways of valuing agriculture, which is low-input but gives relatively low yields. It is here that policy must be innovative. We must invest big time in marginal agriculture. This means carrying out watershed development to recharge groundwater and decentralised water harvesting to improve irrigation. This also means better seeds and procurement of locally grown food at good prices for food distribution programmes. This will build local food sufficiency.
These are real game-changer steps. Let’s try them for once.
