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India’s farm ordinances: fuelling a famine

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India’s countless farmers have rallied together en masse over the past few months to protest farm ordinances imposed by the Indian government. These ordinances may have severe implications for agriculture in India, including reduced state support for agriculture, the increased domination of corporate interests, and a threat to food security, land rights, and livelihoods of the farmers. The intersection of this development with already tenuous conditions may fuel a famine and further increase vulnerability of the agrarian classes, writes Karishma Shelar.

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Starting late November 2020, millions of farmers have marched to and gathered on the outskirts of New Delhi, India’s capital, where they have been met with water cannons of the riot police, barricades, tear gas and lathi charges (the police-led beating of protesters with clubs). Defying COVID-19 restrictions and the bitter cold, the farmers are protesting newly passed national government farm ordinances[1] that seek to dismantle former regulations and legislations protecting the farmers from laissez-faire price and purchase mechanisms. This blog attempts to break down why the ordinances will escalate in a famine-like disaster while discussing the debt-cum-groundwater crisis in the state of Punjab which lies at the heart of the ongoing protests.

Paving the way for corporate farming

Simply put, the farm ordinances, if passed, pave the way for full-fledged corporatisation of India’s agricultural sector through free market price mechanisms and the eventual withdrawal of all forms of state support for agriculture. This spells disaster for nearly 60% of India’s households directly or indirectly relying on the agricultural sector for jobs or survival, of whom 86% are small and marginal landholders (holding plots of land of less than two hectares).

The farm ordinances can have three devastating impacts:

  1. It is a step towards disassembling mandis (state-regulated marketplaces where agricultural produce is traded) to make room for agro-business-driven open market trading.

The mandis are not flawless systems of trade. They are limited in number and geographically favourable to certain regions and class groups. Nevertheless, these are important systems of price discovery and signalling. The mandis are supposed to assure farmers a minimum support price (MSP) declared by the state for their produce. What is required of the government, then, is to strengthen and expand procurement through the mandis and to legalise MSP than abolish the system and shrug off its responsibilities.

  1. No legal assurance of the MSP in the ordinances leaves the farmers vulnerable to the whims and fancies of agro-businesses and other private players.

Such firms are more concerned about making profit than ensuring accessible and affordable food to the public. While the ordinances allow for farmers to enter pre-determined contract farming arrangements with private entities, the former’s financial precarity and no protection against potential discrepancies on part of the latter compromises the farmers’ bargaining power.

In addition, over the past three decades, the increased privatisation of agricultural inputs has resulted in a rise in input costs that has now spiralled into a debt crisis for agrarian households. Private entities with their enormous financial capacity will have free reign to dictate the terms of exchange, pricing, type of produce and inputs, enslaving the farmers to market dictates and furthering the debt crisis in the country. A recent report also suggests that 45–60% of India’s rural households are unable to meet their daily nutritional requirements. Securing the interests of private players in agriculture will only escalate a famine-like crisis in the country.

  1. The ordinances allow for the unregulated storage of harvests, with limited regulation thereof by the state except in the case of extraordinary circumstances such as war, famine, or excessive price increases (exceeding 100%).

This move is aimed at providing private entities freedom to stockpile and control the storage and distribution of harvests. It threatens food and nutrition security to millions of people and particularly those dependent on one of the largest state-run public distribution systems (PDS) in the world. Under the National Food Security Act of India (GoI, 2013), 65% of the households (or around 800 million people in India) are legally assured a right to food at subsidised rates from the PDS and through welfare programmes such as the Integrated Child Development Services and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme.

Additionally, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is legally mandated to maintain a central pool for procuring, storage, transportation and maintenance of food stocks in the country to which the mandi system and the PDS are closely linked. Besides, as per the Government of India’s estimates, the PDS supported food security for 750 million people during the COVID-19 lockdown (PIB, 2020). The ordinances indicate the intent of the government to downscale the role of the FCI and the PDS by promoting open-market food procurement, thereby dismantling the existing state structures that ensure nutrition security.

Punjab: a case in point

The state of Punjab is one of the major benefactors of the state-based system of procurement through the MSP. In the 2019-20 agricultural year, it contributed 28% and 21.5% of the total wheat and rice produced in the country to the central pool of procurement (FCI, 2020b, 2020a). Therefore, while the farm ordinances are being opposed by farmer unions across the country, the Punjab farmers have become the face of the protests around New Delhi.

It must be noted that Punjab was one of the leading states to adopt the assemblages of Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought about prosperity to farm households in Punjab and self-sufficiency from food imports to India. However, this dramatically shifted the traditional cropping patterns of the state. In 1966, rice occupied around 5.2 million hectares (MHa) of land in Punjab (Mann, 2017), spiking to 23.39 MHa by 2012 and displacing other food crops that occupied over 50% of Punjab’s area under cultivation in the pre-Green Revolution period to around just 10% in 2012. Over time, the ecological impact of the Green Revolution has become visible in the form of deteriorating groundwater tables and soil quality that have led to stagnating production levels (Sarkar and Das, 2014).

The period also witnessed the average debt per cultivator household in Punjab increase to INR 216,524 in 2014–15 from INR 7,125 (USD 97.21) in 1991–92 (NSSO, 1998; GoI, 2014). Literature on the agrarian crisis in Punjab also acknowledges an increase in landlessness, with small and marginal farmers resorting to wage labour and forced to sell their land and other assets to pay off. Often, the income earned from wage labour is so meagre that it becomes impossible to pay off incurred debts. The unremunerative nature of agriculture further impoverishes households when they are forced to take on a debt to meet social obligations and cover health-related expenses(Padhi, 2009; Singh and Bhogal, 2020).

While it must be acknowledged that the agrarian dynamics of caste, class and gender differ greatly across geographies in India and also in Punjab, the current farmer protests mirror the larger agro-ecological crisis that has penetrated the country. The farm ordinances will only aggravate indebtedness, escalate land degradation, open the floodgates for corporate landgrabbing, and further deteriorate the socio-economic situation of the landless.

References

FCI (2020a) ‘Statewise Procurement of Rice for RMS 2019-20’. Food Corporation of India. Available at: https://fci.gov.in/app/webroot/upload/Procurement/Statewise%20Procurement%20of%20Rice(KMS%202019-20)_56.pdf (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

FCI (2020b) ‘Statewise Procurement of Wheat for RMS 2019-20’. Food Corporation of India. Available at: https://fci.gov.in/app/webroot/upload/Procurement/Statewise%20Procurement%20of%20wheat_57.pdf (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

GoI (2013) The National Food Security Act, 2013. Available at: http://www.egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2013/E_29_2013_429.pdf (Accessed: 12 October 2020).

GoI (2014) Key Indicators of Debt and Investment in India – NSS 70th Round 2013. New Delhi, India: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation – National Sample Survey Office, Government of India. Available at: http://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/KI_70_18.2_19dec14.pdf (Accessed: 10 May 2020).

Mann, R. S. (2017) ‘Cropping Pattern in Punjab (1966–67 to 2014–15)’, Economic and Political Weekly. Economic and Political Weekly.

NSSO (1998) ‘Debt and Investment Survey: NSS Forty Eight Round (January – December 1992)’. National Sample Survey Organisation, Department of Statistics, Government of India. Available at: http://mospi.nic.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/419_final.pdf (Accessed: 12 July 2020).

Padhi, R. (2009) ‘On Women Surviving Farmer Suicides in Punjab’, Economic & Political Weekly, 44(19), pp. 53–59.

PIB (2020) ‘Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana Phase-I: April 2020 to June 2020’. Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Government of India. Available at: https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1643542 (Accessed: 5 December 2020).

Sarkar, A. and Das, A. (2014) ‘Groundwater Irrigation-Electricity-Crop Diversification Nexus in Punjab: Trends, Turning Points, and Policy Initiatives’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(52), pp. 64–73. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24481208 (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

Singh, S. and Bhogal, S. (2020) ‘Punjab’s Agricultural Labourers in Transition’, Economic and Political Weekly. Economic and Political Weekly.

[1] These are the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance of 2020, the Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance of 2020, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the authors:

Karishma Shelar has recently graduated with a MA in Development Studies from the ISS, part of Erasmus University. Her dissertation focused on the agro-ecological crisis in rural India and investigated the interlinkages between agro-ecology and indebtedness at the level of the state, agro-businesses, and households.

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Low-hanging fruits are sometimes the sweetest: how tree-sourced foods can help transform the global food system

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The global food system is dominated by a limited number of actors and mainly focusses on the production of only a handful of relatively innutritious foods. The system in its current shape threatens livelihoods of small-scale farmers, does not meet the nutritional needs of the majority of the global population, and is causing severe environmental impacts such as deforestation and biodiversity loss. A recent study shows that the elevation of small-scale tree-sourced food systems can help contribute to a transformation of the global food system that would lead to improved environmental and human well-being.

The global food system in its current form is dysfunctional and destructive. Not only does the production of a select few agricultural products that dominate the global food market require vast swaths of land, it is also leading to environmentally destructive agricultural production practices and the erosion of traditional ways of rural life and small-scale farmers’ livelihoods. Despite an emphasis having been placed on sustainable food systems within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with SDG 2 that aims to ensure food security and adequate nutrition through sustainable food systems, hunger and malnutrition compounded by climate change-related challenges are threatening the wellbeing of populations across the world. Especially the most vulnerable are feeling the effects of this intersection of global challenges that to date have been inadequately addressed. 

To reverse these trends, we need to understand what’s wrong with the current global food system and which foods have the potential to simultaneously provide environmental, nutritional and livelihood benefits at local and global levels that can drive a global food system transformation. Trees may hold the key.

What’s wrong with the global food system?

The global food system is unsustainable in so many ways. First of all, food systems occupy enormous amounts of land. This is likely to increase even further in the future: food production is one of the main drivers of deforestation, especially in the tropics. Consequences of these large-scale changes in the use of land include the loss of biodiversity that is happening more and more rapidly, substantial carbon dioxide emissions, and an increasing risk of droughts and wildfires. 

At the same time, the global food system is not producing enough fruits and vegetables to meet human nutritional requirements, partly because the current system is mainly based on just a few energy-dense and nutrient-poor crops such as wheat, rice, sugar and maize. This extraordinarily low diversity within our global food system is causing long-term health problems affecting especially the poorest populations in the Global South who have limited access to micronutrient-rich diets, education about nutrition and basic health services.

In addition, dominant food and agricultural development approaches focus on industrialisation and international trade, leading to the creation of a few global food corporations that dominate the global food market. These transnational food corporations in many cases exercise their power to undermine the rights of food workers and smallholder farmers in order to produce a limited number of crops at the lowest possible price. Food producers get only a fraction of the total amount paid for food products ranging from tea and coffee to other crops produced in the Global South and North alike. 

These developments have led to the massive transformation of small-scale and multispecies tree-based agrarian production systems (often traditional) into large-scale annual crop production. Yet these tree-based systems are vital: a recent perspective article argues that tree-based foods could play a critical role in the transformation of food systems such that it becomes more sustainable, provides more nutritious foods, and provides better livelihood opportunities for smallholder farmers.

Making space for trees…

There are many clear opportunities to incorporate food-producing trees into landscapes. The majority of global cropland does not contain trees, but has a high potential for doing so. Especially in the tropics, where large-scale forest areas are still being cleared for agriculture and then abandoned once soils are exhausted, restoration efforts could include the establishment of sustainable, locally-managed agroforestry systems. Such agroforestry systems have been shown to provide multiple environmental benefits, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and the provision of several other ecosystem services, especially when they are based on diverse, multi-species systems. 

This could also mean that the hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across the world could have a more prominent role in improving local diets through the production of tree-sourced foods. With the right incentives, investments and involvement, smallholder farmers could scale up agroforestry systems to produce more and healthier food, while simultaneously diversifying their income sources and consumption. 

Yet doing so would be challenging in several ways. To make increased tree-based food production a more integral part of food systems, several challenges have to be addressed. An increased demand for certain tree-sourced products like cacao and palm oil have led to large-scale deforestation for the establishment of industrial monoculture plantations, which provide very few environmental benefits, harming biodiversity and increasing carbon dioxide emissions in the process. Thus, monoculture plantations are not the way forward – we need to combine different types of trees in one area to ensure multiple ecosystem services.

In addition, severe negative social impacts are associated with such large-scale commodity production, such as people working under abusive labour conditions. Land grabbing has also become a serious problem as the profitability of certain tree species is becoming recognized and the sector commercialised. Furthermore, for smallholders, dependency on a single commodity for their income increases their vulnerability due to risks of crop failure caused by plant diseases and sudden prices crashes. Diversified production systems play therefore an important role in securing income sources, but also in diversifying diets, especially local diets.

…and making space for smallholders

So how can we address these challenges? Strategic actions and interventions for local market development can create a context that incorporates biodiversity in food systems as examples show in Brazil. Besides, focussing on diversifying local consumption provides opportunities for production directly linked to regional skills, preferences and needs and could increase the resilience of local food systems, which has been proved important in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, production for consumption in high-income countries could in some cases provide additional income streams as in many of those countries, the willingness to pay for sustainably-produced food is higher.

Other steps to be taken to facilitate the incorporation of sustainable tree-sourced food systems into the global food system are:

  1. Securing the tenure rights of rural populations. This will allow them to make long-term investments which are particularly important since tree-crops can involve high initial costs and return on investment can take years. 
  2. Developing inclusive supply chains for potentially popular products. This is essential for rural communities to adopt diversified agroforestry systems and access markets in which realistic business opportunities to smallholders should be key.
  3. Creating diversified income opportunities by engaging in different markets through a combination of production of commodities and non-commodities, intercropping multiple tree species with annual crops, payment for ecosystem services, but also by redirecting annual crop subsidies and providing micro-credits. These will create incentives for farmers to adopt tree species in their production systems, can help alleviate high investment costs and long pay-back times, and avoids the risks of price shocks, crop diseases, and other pitfalls associated with monoculture systems. 
  4. Investing in the conservation of genetic resources that underpin diversity so that crop tree systems to flourish. Additionally, reliable seed sources and seedlings need to be available for the establishment of tree crop farms. 
  5. Guaranteeing sustainable production, which will require a combination of interventions by states, markets, and civil society across the supply chain in which consumers can play an important role in demanding and consuming sustainably produced and deforestation-free products. Sustainable food systems require radical social action to alter conventional trading and production systems.

The time is ripe

Although the scale of these mentioned challenges seems to be too complex, in the face of increased shocks from events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming global food systems is not just a desirable outcome, it is urgently required to ensure greater resilience both locally and globally.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the authors:

Julia Quaedvlieg is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies, where she researches tropical deforestation policies and the impact of interventions on smallholders’ livelihoods. Her research interests lie in natural resource management, rural development policies, and rural communities, with special focus on Latin American countries.

Merel Jansen is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Her research focusses on the sustainable use and restoration of tropical forest resources, in particular non-timber forest products. Currently, she is working on a project in which she aims to evaluate the potential of agroforests to mitigate deforestation related drought in southwest Amazonia.

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

A green revolution using frugal innovation: crop insurance for Tanzanian farmers by Meine Pieter van Dijk

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What is the best way to help traditional small maize farmers in Tanzania to increase their production? A crop insurance project in Tanzania showed great success in decreasing the vulnerability of these farmers to drought through a simple frugal innovation called Weather Index Insurance. However, a transition from traditional to hybrid seeds is recommended to further decrease vulnerability and increase agricultural productivity.

What is the best way to help traditional small maize farmers in Tanzania to increase their production? Droughts occur more frequently in Tanzania, but the core problem is low agricultural productivity. Local extension services are not functioning properly (Lamek, 2016), while farmers are still using traditional seeds instead of hybrid seeds, which could contribute to achieving food security in the country. A non-commercial private sector initiative is helping these farmers by providing crop insurance. Between 2011 and 2014, the Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) financed by ten Swiss insurance companies, funded four training projects in Tanzania aiming to familiarise maize farmers in the Iringa, Mwanza and Arusha regions with crop insurance.

No new technological options were introduced to reach as many farmers as possible at minimum cost. Instead, the project used a Weather Index Insurance (WII) based on existing satellite images to determine whether drought prevailed in the area concerned during the seeding, germination or ripening period. If the signal is less rain than normal, the farmers registered through their mobile phones are compensated for the damage, ideally by topping up the amount available for calling or making mobile phone payments. This is a frugal innovation (using existing technology), because farmers can insure as little as one bag of hybrid seed bought from the seed company (SeedCo) using their telephone, covering only the germination period), or through signing up for a package for one acre of land through NGOs.

The training projects were carried out by Acre Africa (AA), an international NGO, with a local affiliate (Acre Tanzania). The project contributed to the training of thousands of farmers in the three regions studied. In total, more than 20,000 farmers are insured in the Iringa region and more than 10,000 in the Mwanza and Arusha regions taken together.

Assessing Weather Index Insurance

To assess the effects of Weather Index Insurance for Tanzanian maize farmers, a survey has been undertaken by the author in the Arusha, the Mwanza and Iringa regions. A total of 200 farmers were interviewed using cluster sampling with the villages as sampling units and then selecting farmers’ households per village as randomly as possible. The objective was to analyse the effects of the crop insurance introduced with the support of SCBF on household’s income and assets and on agricultural productivity.

Different ways of supplying insurance were compared. Farmers supported by a local NGO, the One Acre Fund (1AF), showed that insurance is particularly useful if it is embedded in an institutional support structure that is non-commercial and close to the farmers; not using a profit-oriented intermediary (SeedCo) or a combination of a commercial and non-commercial organisations also led to greater success. All modalities re-insure the final risks with a local commercial insurance company and a re-insurance company.

Most farmers did not know how much they pay for the insurance, but were generally positive about it, since the insurance offers a feeling of security and the intermediary organisations reduce the loan in case of a crisis. However, some farmers were critical because no payments were made despite limited rains, or the payouts were too low. They wanted support to find better markets for their produce and more transparency concerning payouts.

Transition from traditional to hybrid seeds required

Supporting the transition from using traditional to hybrid seeds is recommended to increase rural incomes and food supply and contribute to food security in the country. It is important to select the intermediary carefully and to consider crop insurance as part of support package, which should also include fertilisers and additional inputs like pesticides and access to water. There is scope for making the innovation more frugal by really using only mobile phones for registration and payouts, which was currently not always the case. There is demand for this service from other regions, for other crops and risks (like caterpillars). More information and training should be provided to farmers and the insurance needs to be made more transparent. Complaints of farmers should be taken seriously.

An extended version of this article has been published on researchgate: “Going for hybrid maize: the importance of land for the success of maize crop insurance in Tanzania”. Contribution to a World Bank conference on Land and Poverty, Catalyzing innovation in Washington, March 25-29, 2019.

References
Wilfred Lamek (2016) Agricultural extension in Tanzania, PhD, Free University Amsterdam.

Image Credit: ICRISAT on Flickr.

About the author:

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Meine Pieter van Dijkis economist, em. professor of Water Services Management at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, visiting professor at the Beijing University for Civil Engineering and architecture, and em. professor of Urban management at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and the Institute of Housing and Urban development Studies (IHS) of Erasmus University.