Maximum Support Policy

Context: Rural India needs reforms that will revive the health of its soil and water resources, provide employment for people and enhance quality of life

Challenges in Minimum Support Price (MSP)

• Issue of MSP relates primarily to cost-effective pricing.
• Rural India has largely been neglected economically while also being manipulated for votes: Mere pricing, marketing and distribution of agricultural products cannot be the panacea for the ailments inflicted on rural India by the larger political economy of the country.
• Division in Rural and Urban areas: Divide between the rural and agrarian, on the one hand, and the urban and industrial, on the other, is not tenable today.
• Issue of unemployment and migration.
• Band-aid approaches that seek to alleviate a range of problems caused by structural inequities and disadvantages.
• Subscribing to alien models of corporatized and industrialised agriculture, whose devastating impacts are manifesting in widespread tragedies across the world.

Way Forward

• Need to go beyond the fulcrum on which agriculture should be assessed as an enterprise, business, or means of livelihood.
• Maximum Support Policies package: Holistic policy needed to address the structural inequities, institutional and administrative deficits and political distortions of rural India will provide it a new lease of life.
• Moratoria on loans and populist pay-outs just before elections.
• Substantial and phased withdrawal from Green Revolution model of promoting subsidised agriculture: based on the use of industrial chemicals must be initiated. It will be cited as “zero-budget natural farming”. 
  • Combination of regionally evolved and established sustainable agro-cultures is required.
• Policies need to ensure equitable distribution of resources and access to a range of alternative economic practices and support structures must also be framed. 
• Payments need to promote the spread of “restorative agriculture”: Regenerates soil and water resources and promotes seed and agro-biodiversity. 
  • Made transition to sustainable agriculture and enable people to develop climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. 
• Supporting farmers to form collectives in which resources, labour, skills and knowledge are pooled for production, value addition and marketing. 
• Democratisation and decentralisation of agricultural planning can be linked to revitalising ecologically suitable cultivation, facilitating local collection and distribution and sustaining local food cultures that can alleviate malnutrition. 
• New seed policy required: Must be focus on enabling local seed banks. It can help farmers circumvent the problematic commercial seed industry.
• Promoting small-scale industries and processing centres that help rural areas to retain resources and skills along with providing employment. 
• Rural India requires a new economic deal that addresses years of neglect in healthcare, education and other avenues that enhance the quality of life. 
• Public institutions such as panchayats, anganwadis, schools and primary health centres require urgent reforms that de-bureaucratise state-citizen transactions and ensure that rural residents are treated as citizens, and not supplicants. 
• Need policies to address caste, ethnic, gender and class inequities.
• Need to reclaim the knowledge heritage of India’s diverse agri-cultures.
• Need to intensify solidarity towards a range of “maximum support policies” for rural and agrarian India. 

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