Counting farmers146; suicides

8216;They are not victims of stagnant subsistence farming of the kind caricatured by those who want to switch land away from traditional farming8217;

1,011 farmers have committed suicide so far and there is still no end to the count. The solution is in getting to the essentials. I am glad that Rokkam Radhakrishna of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research has been asked at the highest levels to detail the steps necessary. He encouraged Sripat Misra to carry out the field study which gave us insights into the problem and we cannot evade the facts anymore. This column has been repeating them but given the cause, putting them across once more is not too much.

First, it is not only small or marginal farmers who get into trouble with debts. More often than not, they are peasants with a degree of education and have some assets in the farm business. They are not victims of stagnant subsistence farming of the kind caricatured by those who want to switch land away from 8220;traditional farming8221;. They are, in fact, at the centre of the vortex of commercialised and globalised farming. There is nothing wrong with agricultural markets. In fact, the last year was one of respite. The global crop was bad and prices for Indian cotton were good. By March this year, the signs of falling prices were there in the Indore market and the Malwa and Saurashtra crop have always been a good watch for the market savvy. This page and column was warning of the coming problems, but no one out there was listening.

A few weeks ago, Sanat Mehta as Gujcot chief was to angrily hold forth on emerging problems in Saurashtra. I don8217;t know why the best work on cotton markets and faith in them comes from socialists in India. The great Dantawala8217;s Cotton Marketing in India, more than 60 years old, is still a classic and he may have written it while going to jail from the HL College of Commerce of the Ahmedabad Education Society, as a part of the Congress Socialist Group or maybe by that time, the PSP was there.

Sanat Mehta of the same political breed learnt his cotton marketing while a stringer for Vyapar, a newspaper which was the foundation of reform literature in India and our source for daily quotations of the black market rates of the dollar and DRCs and effective rates of protection.

Knowing his markets, Mehta, like Dantwala, is a cooperator. I taught at Wharton, but am proud to say that my heroes don8217;t come only from the Ivy League, but the cotton markets of Saurashtra. Gujcot is powerful. I remember Praful Bhat, its energetic chief, always convincing all and sundry that the Maharashtra monopoly procurement was wrong. Fortunately, we saw some action when cotton prices fell below Rs 4000 a quintal at Gondal, Rajkot and elsewhere, but in Vidharbha, prices are falling below Rs 1500 a quintal.

Yes, there are quality differences. Gujcot recommended the Bharat Agro BT seeds even after the government banned them because pesticide costs went down and quality was kept up. But the market is crashing and the government has to be there. This is important because newspaper reports suggest that recommendations of economists like me and the CACP arguing for a variable tariff rate with automatic setoffs for industry have been rejected by the reform economists of the government.

Nobody, however, has so far explained why variable tariff rate with automatic setoffs for industry, as recommended in government reports, is rejected. No one tells us either why the government is not there when prices are falling below the MSP.

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Being an optimistic kind of blighter, I was happy that the Biotechnology Council of the Ministry of Agriculture was to come but now I am told that is just a proposal. If you don8217;t do anything for the farmer8217;s seed and for the price of his produce, all talk of paradigm shifts in agriculture will do nothing to redeem the situation at the grassroots.