Future of Farming in India

Context: Changing the status quo should not merely disrupt but guide farmers to the future.

Policy Targets for Inclusive Future in Indian Farming:

• Reduce wastage due to supply-demand mismatch: India struggles to collect only 17% of GDP as taxes, half the average for the rich country and therefore.
  • When we produce and stock, at public expense, more wheat and rice and sugar than what we need either to consume or as insurance against hard times, we waste resources.
• Beneficiaries should not be blamed but the policy: While the policy seems to benefit a small section of farmers in northwest India, they helped end abject dependence on food imports and were trained to abandon traditional farming, launching Green Revolution.
• Change in crop mix: The same policy instruments deployed to embrace high-yield crop must be brought to enable the switching of crops without causing largescale economic and social disruption.
  • For training farmers in new kinds of crop farming, universities and agro-service companies should supply high-yield seeds and saplings of varieties India is short of.
• MSP is red-herring: Open-ended procurement at MSP matters, not just MSP, to help the farmers benefit from subsidy and prevent their exploitation such as smuggling of rice from Bihar to Punjab.
• Crop diversification through Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs): While it is difficult for the government to promise indefinite, open-ended procurement it must promote FPOs.
  • E.g. Amul and New Zealand’s Fonterra model cooperatives, free from the clutches of political agenda.
  • Market share of cooperatives in agriculture is 83% in the Netherlands, 79% in Finland, 55% in Italy and 50% in France. In the US, around 2.8 million people are organized into over 3000 cooperatives.
• Climate-controlled storage: Fixing the power sector shall make available stable power in rural areas round the clock to run food processing plants.

Conclusion: Sustained dynamism of the economy will draw people into industry and services in towns, and rural populations will dwindle. Farming will become more mechanized, organized and efficient.

• The new farm laws will fit this world, but do not lead to it, which calls for more work.