NEW DELHI: With both the BJP and the Congress going all out to woo farmers ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, farmer leaders say cash transfers are fine, but the main issue is low agricultural prices which make farming unremunerative in large parts of the country.
“The farming crisis has deepened. That is why farmers' issues have become so crucial in this election,” says Rakesh Tikait, Bhartiya Kisan Union leader and son of legendary farmers’ leader and BKU founder Mahendra Singh Tikait. “Both parties (BJP and Congress) are promising doles and other sops, which is good. However, the main crux of our problem lies in pricing. Most farmers sell below the Minimum Support Price and most crops have no price support system. Look at vegetable farmers who sold their harvest below cost through most of this winter. How will we survive,” he asked.
Year-on-year vegetable consumer prices in March this year have shrunk by 5.88 per cent for fruits and 1.49 per cent for vegetables, according to data released by the government on Friday. “The net effect of this price fall has been that middle and large farmers who can afford to do it, have been sowing less, preferring to retain fallow land rather than suffer losses as farm prices remained low this year,” said Biswajit Dhar of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Data released earlier this February by the government at the end of the winter sowing season and just before harvest showed the area under crops is down 4.05 per cent compared with a year ago. While the area under pulses fell 9.35 per cent, rice area was down 5.83 per cent, and wheat 2.10 per cent. What is of more concern is that coarse cereals, the staple food of the poor, have seen their acreage shrink by 7.58 per cent.
The fall in this year’s rabi crop acreage follows a disappointing kharif or monsoon season. Agricultural distress saw tens of thousands of farmers blocking the streets of Delhi last winter. A record number of farmer suicides over the last few years and rural anger over farm distress have consequently become major political issues.
“Our burning issues are just two – apply the Swaminathan Committee report on agriculture prices and come up with a one-time waiver of crop loans,” said V M Singh, National Convenor of the All India Kisan Coordination Committee. The Swaminathan committee set up by the previous UPA government had sought a crop price equal to one-and-a-half times the actual cost of production including the imputed cost of labour, land rent and interest on loans, also called the C2 formula.
That has not happened as yet. Instead, a subsidy scheme on the lines of a universal basic income was announced for poor farmers with less than one hectare of land by the BJP-led government. The opposition Congress has promised a larger basic income scheme for the rural poor, who they reckon to account for 20 per cent of India’s rural population.
Tikait who along with Maharashtra’s Raju Shetty and Singh had led a summer of farmers’ discontent against the government two years ago, said the problem was not only the rate at which MSP was fixed “but the fact that most crops are not covered by it at all.”
Although the government announces MSPs for about two dozen crops, it mostly buys only rice and wheat. That procurement programme too is largely confined to parts of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, limiting the benefit of higher crop prices to only 7 per cent of the country's farmers. However large numbers of crops, including all vegetable and fruit crops as well as commercial crops where price fluctuations have been high, are yet to be covered.
“The farming crisis is a deep-rooted one and without structural changes, many crops are at risk of becoming uneconomical affecting the viability of the farming business altogether,” added Dhar.