Rediscovering agricultural India

After the early seventies when India stopped depending on large scale grain imports, agriculture ceased to be a salon subject. But according...

After the early seventies when India stopped depending on large scale grain imports, agriculture ceased to be a salon subject. But according to a recent expert report, there are 19 countries in the world where quot;foodquot; for a salon party even today cannot be purchased from quot;market suppliesquot; and needs to be procured with special quot;influencequot;. And when wheat prices went up by over 20 percent in 1996, the razor8217;s edge between quot;surplusesquot; and quot;deficitquot; was knocking on the memories of thoughtful Indians.

The Swiss economist Gilbert Etienne, one of the more perceptive observers of Asian agriculture for the last three decades, showed recently how neglect of real agricultural investment and thoughtless financial quot;globalquot; adventurism in the sector contributed in a big way to the Asian meltdown. He said that if there was quot;a really nasty monsoonquot;, the warnings of people like Hanumantha Rao and Alagh would make quot;headlinesquot; which quot;advance action could avoidquot;. But India will probably not become a basket case, because food isstill a part of its quot;memoryquot;, coming from its shared past which is what culture is all about. In any Hindu yagna, the sacrifice of rice, sugar, gur or honey, dahi or milk and cloth remind you of agriculture. For the Sikh the langar is heritage. For the Christian, the quot;daily breadquot; apart, the Lord is the quot;unseen guestquot; in every meal.

In my home state of Gujarat, the women of the Chuwhal the land of 44 villages in North Gujarat sing of the rains failing, the seed not sprouting and their beloved not coming back from his city job. In Western Rajasthan the ethnographer shows the great connection between the language of poetry and famine.

Anyway, once in every month, I will walk you through a village to share the joys and pains of farmers from the different corners of this land and another time in the month through a sarkari bhavan in India or abroad to see policies and programmes which do or do not reach.

The big picture of agriculture in India is quite clear. For the last tenyears we had a series of average or above average rainfall years 8212; a very unusual meteorological phenomenon. In eight years rainfall was 101 to 119 percent of average and in the remaining two, above 90 percent 90 to 110 percent is the quot;normalquot; range. Agricultural credit growth was either not there or was less than inflation in the period and fixed capital formation as a share of agricultural output stagnated. Net area sown stopped growing according to the patwari, although the satellites are not quite so sure.

Now domestic demand and export needs are being met mainly from yield growth or more intense use of land. Export growth was high in the 8217;90s at around 12 percent annual in dollar terms but stagnated last year since East Asian food demand has melted down and food riots cannot pay for more supplies. Indian agriculture is diversifying with grains growing at less than two percent, non-grain crops at around five percent and non-crops like dairying, poultry and forecast crops at around sevenpercent annually.

The transition to a market-friendly system for the farmer is still spotty with government even this month interfering in exports if home prices rise, stopping domestic movements of groundnut when prices rose and in some cases stopping farmers, for example, from shifting land from rice to fish. India has put non-grain crops and non-crop agricultural products like poultry and fish on OGL and imports will compete intensely with agricultural economies in India which are diversifying fast, like Gujarat and Maharashtra in the West, Karnataka and other states in the South and West Bengal.

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The present preparation for facing such competition is abysmal but the challenge can be met if a concerted plan is drawn up and acted upon. In the 8217;90s in some of the big states per capita agricultural growth is negative. Area under canal irrigation has stopped growing. There is evidence to suggest that earlier systems of input, marketing and technology support for the farmer through governmental or parastatalagencies are not coping with the rapidly diversifying, land scarce rural economy, but there are examples of private and newer cooperative institutions succeeding in modern input and technology supplies.

Forty percent of foreign direct investment is in agro-processing or marketing, but has a limited impact, with very little effort at infrastructrual and training links with India8217;s farm population. These are bald statements. We will walk once a fortnight through villages and quot;policiesquot; to see the excitement behind them.