This article has a good class-based analysis of the peasant agitation against the proposed farm bills. I recommend reading it in its entirety but I will copy paste some portions to provide an overview. At the very least, try to read the last section which is a good overview of how imperialism destroys food sovereignty and security.


The threat posed to the peasantry

The immediate aim of the peasant agitation is the scrapping of the three farm Acts (these bypass the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) mandis (mandi means trading post), do away with limits on stocking agricultural commodities, and facilitate contract farming). The Government claims it is giving peasants the “freedom” to sell their crops anywhere to anyone, they will not be compelled to go to the mandis. In fact most peasants in India already have that “freedom”, and as a result they face much worse exploitation. In direct opposition to the Government’s claim, what peasants want is not this bogus “freedom”, but the security that their crops will be procured by state agencies at the Minimum Support Price (MSP). Rice and wheat growing peasants of certain states, have had such a guarantee. That is now being taken away, under cover of “liberating‟ peasants from the APMC mandis.

These Acts will lead to a situation where corporate firms will procure crops from peasants at unregulated prices, hoard stocks, and control agricultural trade. (Besides, the Electricity Amendment Bill will result in a steep rise in electricity costs for agriculture, squeezing the peasantry. So the peasant organisations have demanded that it too be scrapped.)

As the food supply chain comes under greater and greater corporate control, the working peasantry stand to lose their landholdings in one way or the other. Since it is cheaper for corporations to deal with a few, large standardised suppliers than to handle a large number of small suppliers, it will become increasingly difficult for small peasants in the surplus-producing states to survive. Small peasants constitute the overwhelming bulk of farmers, even in Punjab. Already struggling between the scissors of input and output prices, they may be forced to part with their holdings. (Those who survive may come under tighter corporate control and supervision over the production process, so that in effect they hold only the paper rights to the land.) Larger, more mechanised farms will require a smaller labour force. Thus, while the agitation is described as a “farmer” agitation, it represents principally the interests of poor and middle peasants, not all “farmers”.

While those agitating at Delhi are toiling peasants, they may not be the most downtrodden and impoverished of India‟s peasants. These most downtrodden can be found in the agriculturally backward regions of our country, and their crops are never procured by any official agency at the MSP. However, the present peasant agitation is in the interests of the latter peasants as well. (Because public procurement at MSP in any region provides a benchmark without which prices in other regions would fall much more steeply.)

Depression of wages and aggregate demand

Since the situation of even industrial employment is bleak, the peasants displaced from agriculture cannot be absorbed in any other sector. India’s labour force is much too large for emigration to absorb a significant share, and anyway such opportunities abroad are vanishing fast. So the displaced peasants will join the reserve army of labour, and this rise in the reserve army will depress the general level of wages, as desperate labourers compete for scarce jobs. The process of shrinking employment and depressed wages will depress aggregate demand, in turn further reducing employment.

Rendering the country even more vulnerable to imperialist pressure

A country that does not ensure its food security will remain vulnerable to arm-twisting by imperialist powers. During India’s mid-1960s food crisis, the cash-strapped country was compelled to import large amounts of wheat as food aid from the United States (which was trying hard at the time to export its wheat surpluses). The US used this “aid‟ as a lever to dictate India’s economic and foreign policy.

In recent years India has faced severe pressure to open up its agricultural markets. It has been the target of concerted campaigns at the World Trade Organisation by various exporting countries, who have termed India’s policies regarding rice, wheat, pulses, cotton and sugar as violative of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). The US has been spearheading this drive, contesting India’s claims that its support to Indian agricultural producers is in keeping with the AoA. At the Bali conference of the WTO in 2013, India’s food procurement and public stockholding programme was condemned by developed countries.

With the support of some other Third World countries, India won a temporary reprieve, a “peace clause” (in exchange for conceding something else), suspending any punitive action till a resolution was achieved. However, the developed countries have been unwilling to resolve this issue, and instead have kept up the pressure on India to withdraw support to its farmers. At a virtual WTO meet May 25 this year, at the height of the Covid crisis, food exporting countries criticised the new aid packages being provided to farmers by some governments in response to the crisis claiming they would “distort” global food trade.

Even as India put up a display of opposition at the WTO, the Government’s steps towards winding up public procurement in essence unilaterally concede the substance of the dispute – in favour of the developed countries. The developed countries know well that, once the FCI no longer exists in its present form, India’s seeming self-sufficiency in grain can get eroded quickly. Further, without the weapon of large physical buffer stocks of foodgrains, the Government will be powerless to intervene against profiteering private corporations. And so the crisis of India‟s agriculture and food system in 1965 is still relevant to India today.

India in the mirror of Mexico

The above warnings are not speculation or scare-mongering. They are simply conclusions drawn from observation of the worldwide pattern of the impact of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation on agriculture. For example, this is precisely the model imposed on Mexican agriculture since the 1990s, and more particularly since 1994 (the North American Free Trade Agreement).

  • Mexico’s state trading agency (its equivalent of FCI) was dismantled.
  • All state measures to support agricultural production were slowly wound down.
  • Subsidies on its staple food (corn) were slowly wound down, and these were replaced by selective cash transfers to peasants and consumers.
  • Imports of US corn (to Mexico, which is the very home of maize and the world‟s great treasury of maize varieties) tripled.
  • Family farms in Mexico collapsed by well over half.
  • Total agricultural employment fell sharply, without adequate growth in other sectors to absorb the displaced peasants.
  • Thus unemployment nationwide rose.
  • The number under the poverty line rose.
  • More than half the population cannot meet basic needs and one-fifth cannot meet food needs.
  • The resulting demand depression caused Mexico‟s GDP growth rates to fall, to near the bottom for Latin America.
  • Emigration rose by nearly 80 per cent as desperate unemployed peasants tried to enter their northern neighbour.
  • The prices of the staple food (tortillas made from corn) rose steeply.
  • And the entire market for maize flour is controlled by just two Mexican firms (Grupo Maseca controls 85 per cent) – a position that Ambani, Adani and Walmart would like to occupy in India today. (We will provide details of this in a later blog post.)
  • T34 [they/them]
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    fedilink
    23 years ago

    This was really useful, thanks.

    The Government claims it is giving peasants the “freedom” to sell their crops anywhere to anyone, they will not be compelled to go to the mandis. In fact most peasants in India already have that “freedom”, and as a result they face much worse exploitation.

    It’s ridiculous that capitalists are still making this “freedom” argument 150 years after Marx deflated it. Freedom for what, exactly? Freedom for your soul to find a new body after yours has starved?

    There’s a Samir Amin article linked from one of Muad’Dibber’s posts that puts the question in a global perspective:

    Under the circumstances, agreeing to the general principle of competition for agricultural products and foodstuffs, as imposed by WTO, means accepting the elimination of billions of noncompetitive producers within the short historic time of a few decades. What will become of these billions of humans beings, the majority of whom are already poor among the poor, who feed themselves with great difficulty. In fifty years’ time, industrial development, even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth rate of 7 percent annually, could not absorb even one-third of this reserve.

    • lemmygrabberOP
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      fedilink
      33 years ago

      Honestly everything about what the government is trying to do is stale as hell. Privatisation of agriculture, disinegnously lying about the motives and outcomes, blaming the ensuing protests on outside forces (Khakistani separatists). It’s very annoying to see this but thankfully the resistance to it is quite significant. So far all talks between the Modi government and the protest leaders have failed because the latter want no compromise, nothing less than completely scrapping the bills. The protestors also have decent material support so they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. All attempts at violent suppression have failed so far. This is pretty good because of the COVID handling and these protests, Modi’s party (BJP) is losing credibility. The bad part is that no communist party has a nationwide presence to win a general election and the parties like Congress which do have national influence are inept and neoliberal. They have tried to fuck over the farmers in similar ways when they were in power. Socialism is the only way out of this fuckery but it’s not on the horizon at the moment. Hopefully soon.