Farm policy reflects consensus

So now we have an agricultural policy document. Agriculture Minister Nitish Kumar has lived up to his promise and delivered a policy which...

So now we have an agricultural policy document. Agriculture Minister Nitish Kumar has lived up to his promise and delivered a policy which is a cogently reasoned consensus document. It is good that the policy has taken into account developments that Indian agricultural scientists and economists have been stressing in the last decade or so. Most government documents fall shortof professional standards. This one does not. The homework has been done.

Indian agriculture is at a defining point in its history. It is growing, diversifying and will now be more open. Its labour-intensive character, steeled through the centuries, its great agroclimatic diversity and its scientific backup give it an unbeatable advantage. But consensus stands in the way of a vision. Yes, Minister.

In my Lal Bahadur Shastri lecture of 1988, I said that Indian agriculture was meeting the challenge of a faster-growing economy and diversifying. Rokkam Radhakrishna and, more recently, Vijai Vyas have shown that this trend has sustained itself, with commercial crops growing faster than grains and animal husbandry, fish and forestry. It has also been shown that the land area has stopped growing and the policy is based on the understanding that the pressure of faster, more diversified and spread-out growth comes from both the demand and supply sides. Openness and trade only hastens the process. The policy is built on the sensible premise that productivity gains on grains, through mission-oriented research, will release land for diversification. It says all the right things on water, seeds, public investment in agriculture and market reform and infrastructural support.

How will we organise ourself for all this? Here, the policy is, at best, thebeginning of a debate. Newspapers tend to suggest that the policy wants corporates and multinationals to lease out land and encourages contract farming. The document has a completely different flavour. For one thing, on these important issues, it speaks in delectably brief, crisp sentences. Theseput it at the centre of the land reform debates in India.

In a seminal seminar on land reform at the Planning Commission in 1988, the late V.M. Dandekar had argued that land rights needed to be enforced through records and a lease market developed since small farmers were leasing land back to middle farmers. As the member in charge in the commission and for the organisers, I had supported this view, given the increasing prevalence of restored tenancy. But we were ruled out of court by the majority views of experts like B.D. Sharma, K.B. Saxena, B.K. Roy Burman and others. The Academy at Mussoorie carried on the burden of work with Yugandhar and Saxena. A more recent meeting there has come out in favour of recognising leasing as a major method of organisation and the establishment of land markets. The real issue here is updating and firming of land records. Exceptions have to be made for tribal areas. But the land market8217; principle is now being endorsed more. Doyens like P.S. Appu clearly back the leasing principle. The policy is loud and clear on this, but it alsohas a sentence on contract farming 8212; altogether another subject 8212; with few details.

There is very little on delivery systems. This is going to be the crux of the matter. All the right things are said on technology, credit and inputs. On technology I would have liked a vision statement, but I think the gene debate got the authors down. But there is still enough to build on. But the near-silence on delivery methods is a gap. To be fair, there is a mention of internal reform. Also, I should be happy since my committee which drafted a bill to allow cooperatives to become corporates has been given a boost. But this is only a part of the story. The organisational innovativeness which non-peasant agriculture is showing is mind-boggling. A recent ADB Vision of Asian Agriculture discusses several success stories 8212; of corporates, cooperatives, NGOs, and all kinds of combinations of these, also with the government. All this has to work with a state which keeps a discreet watch. One thing you know is that something will go wrong. At that stage you need a group, first to quickly know the problem andthen get remedial action going. Modern informatics helps to shorten response time. Also, I would have liked a much stronger statement on 8220;goods8221; and 8220;bads8221; and incentives for virtues and disincentives for sin, but then there would be no consensus.

The policy merely hints at a more aggressive trade stand at WTO. Recently, Jagdish Bhagwad told me at an IGIDR seminar on video conference that the staff work for the trade negotiations is done by the World Bank, since WTO does not have the bodies. The policy authors should have read the published World Bank reports which state unambiguously that Indian subsides to agriculture are intolerable. For a change, instead of old arguments, we would have liked a clear statement of what to expect when the music begins for us and how we will face it.