NEW DELHI: A group of senior economists wrote to Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar supporting the farmers’ demand of scrapping the agri laws.
While the experts agreed that “improvements and changes are required” in the agricultural marketing system, they wrote that the reforms brought by these Acts do not serve that purpose.
Citing their long engagement with India’s agricultural policy, the economists said the laws are based on wrong assumptions and claims about farmers not being able to get remunerative prices, not having the freedom to sell wherever they like and regulated markets not being in the cultivators’ interests.
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“A key problem with the Acts is the creation of a practically unregulated market in the trade area side-by-side with a regulated market in APMC market yards, subject to two different Acts, different regimes of market fees and different sets of rules. This is already causing the traders to move out of regulated markets into unregulated space,” it said.
The signatories include D. Narasimha Reddy, Professor of Economics (Retd), University of Hyderabad; Kamal Nayan Kabra, Professor of Economics (Retd.), Indian Institute of Public Administration, among others.
On contract farming provision in the law, they said the issue of huge asymmetry between small farmers and companies is not addressed to provide adequate protection to the former’s interests.