MUMBAI, India – As a growing industrial powerhouse, India is considered a country to watch in the future.
What isn’t clear is what will happen to India’s farmers.
A variety of government agriculture and rural development programs and incentives have muddied market signals to farmers about what to grow.
G. Chandrashekhar, editor ofThe Hindu Business Line,said India’s producers are efficient and the small size of their farms isn’t a handicap.
However, the mixed signals and scatter gun approach from government has left farmers floundering.
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“The government, in the last 50 to 60 years, has failed in its capacity among farmers to be competitive,” said Chandrashekhar from his Mumbai newspaper office.
Agriculture growth has hovered around 2.5 percent in the last 10 years, with no sign of improving.
Chandrashekhar said there is no easy way to make Indian agriculture more competitive.
Farmers need improved access to inputs, agronomic training and technology, better rural infrastructure, better price signals and information and better access to credit.
“All this will build capacity for farmers to compete. The farmers are no fools, they know what to do.”
Increasing pressure from India’s growing population is gobbling up good agricultural land and pushing farmers onto marginal land with less hope of good crops.
Wheat-rice is the most favoured rotation because the crops are resilient to weather challenges and are favoured in government support programs. Farmers are not willing to embrace hard to grow and less lucrative pulses.
Farmer Ranjit Singh said another problem is a lack of access to government subsidized fertilizer. Governments are supposed to ensure that adequate fertilizer is available to all farmers.
However, corruption is an accepted part of business and many tonnes of fertilizer go missing from local government warehouses each year.
“You have to pay a bribe to get fertilizer. What can you do? Nothing. You can’t go to the police. They give some to the police. You can’t do nothing,” said Singh.
Newspaper headlines such as “Scam” and “Corruption” regularly indict politicians from the prime minister’s office to judges and state and city officials.
Farmers also face a long list of problems that dog their daily life.
Roads riddled with potholes make it difficult to get produce to market.
A lack of on-farm storage and poor government storage means one-third of crops are lost to rot and rats.
Electricity in rural areas is free but sporadic. Many villages have power only four or five hours a day, making it difficult to run irrigation equipment.
No controls on water use means water tables are dropping dramatically. Small fields make it uneconomical to switch from bullocks to tractors.
A lack of mechanization makes it difficult to efficiently harvest or process crops. Weeds cut crop yields in half in some areas.
Researchers worry that climate change won’t allow existing grain and pulse varieties to survive the radical temperature swings.
A lack of clean water has created a litany of health problems throughout rural areas.
Gurbans Sobti, a Canadian trade commissioner, said co-operatives are becoming popular with dairy farmers as a way to pool farm resources, but it’s still not common among grain farmers.
Large companies such as Reliance and Bharti Del Monte have begun contract farming in some parts of northern India with mixed success. Sobti said some farmers prefer the assured returns of contracting production.
“However, this is fraught with issues. When the price goes beyond the agreed one, the farmers tend to back out and sell in the open market.”
S.K. Rao said moving from high-production varieties to “market-driven agriculture” will save Indian farmers.
The growing trend to processed food has also influenced what varieties farmers grow.
“It was not like this previously,” said Rao of Jawaharial Nehru Krishi Vishwavdiyalaya Agricultural University in Jabalpur.
“This will ultimately increase farmers’ income.”
