Cancun demands leadership

From Dholka, on the way to Bagodra, 5 km from the highway, you have the village of Trasad. It is a village of around five hundred families, half of whom are farmers. This is Patel peasantry. There are some Thakurs and Harijan and Muslim families. Around a tenth of the farmer families own tractors and have their own borewell.

The village has a solid tradition of local leadership. They have a high school, a health centre, paved roads, a nice panchayat ghar and a functioning cooperative credit society, drinking water, village ponds which work, all pushed by their own people. They maintain peace in the worst of times.

Somji Bhai Patel, a highly respected person in the village is an old friend who has prepared a luxurious meal for me, with the delicacies which are really for the gods in this month of Shravan.

The laddus remind me of the Kot Ganesha, a Sidhi Vinayak not very far away. We are happy this year for the rain gods have been kind. Two more big rains and the temple bells will ring with joy. How do we cope up when the rains fail?

This happened in the last three years. We don’t cope up. We lose. Less than a tenth of the Patels have borewells. There is some sharing, but the kharif crop for the others is lost. Even the irrigated fields lose, for they grow dangar (paddy) and it needs a lot of water.

They grow paddy in the kharif and wheat in the winter. Some alternate with bajri and castor. There is very little area under vegetables. But we were growing cotton here and switched away from rice and bajri a long time ago, I ask.

These are savvy farmers, by now Himmat Bhai, Kanti Bhai, Ratilal, Amrut Bhai, Balchand Bhai and Narsibhai, all Patels have joined us. But you know there is no money in cotton any more and we gave it up.

But cotton needs much less water, I say weakly. Shanker 6, the technologically advanced variety they grew also needs less pesticides. There is no money they say and it turns out that the farmers without tubewells growing paddy really suffers with the rains failing. In every way we are worse off switching away from it.

Income is less, the poorer peasants are worse off. They are not adjusting well from the knocking that trade is giving them, although they don’t know.

This is milk territory and the Bais have the spare time to tend to the the cattle. They get between ten to twelve rupees a litre depending on the season. It can be around a third of the income in a good crop year and a big fall back in times of crop failures.

With some mental arithmetic I work out a post-Cancun pessimistic tariff exchange adjusted scenario, a few years down the line. They are appalled. At these prices we will all go to Ahmedabad.

I tell them farmers in Chittorgarh were willing to sell ghee to compete with imported butteroil. They are not impressed. I tell them they can’t do this to me. They have always fought the invader and shown us the way out. They must do so now. We promise to meet again, when they are better prepared.

The issue is not just about cutting down subsidies as the policy adviser of a major political party and a former finance minister argued recently. We must negotiate a fair marketplace for ourselves. According to WTO statistics, the cotton subsidy is 320 billion dollars.

The strategic alliances India is building up with other developing countries are terribly important. The EU—US initiative could under some variants make poor countries worse off than the Harbinson proposals, which we have discussed in this column earlier as a reasonable base for negotiations.

Now is the time not only to dig in our heels, but also show leadership in the ways out, for us and for them.