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| Crisis
in the Farm Sector |
 Round Table Discussion
on "Crisis in the Farm Sector - Policy
Options" by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan - Distinguished Agricultural
Scientist, Padma Vibhushan, Member of Parliament and Father of India's
first Green Revolution in India International Centre, Lodhi Road,
New Delhi - 3.
20th SEPTEMBER 08
HIGHLIGHTS
Area Of Expansion
- Talking about the area of expansion, it first began in the last
century, in the late 1930s in the United States in the mid-west
United States in Iowa, with hybrid corn, called hybrid maize in
the US.
Current Crises
- Technology is the prime mode of change anywhere in the world.
But technology alone cannot strike roots and bear fruits unless
you have all the supporting services including extension, the
input supply and so on.
- The number one problem is ecology, i.e. environmental parameters,
land and water, agro biodiversity and so on.
Conservative Farming
- If you look at the American farm bill this year, the largest
amount of money goes to conservation farming, i.e. conservation
of land and water. In fact in the Farmers Commission, we recommended
a special ad hoc allocation of Rs1,000 crores to Punjab, Haryana
and Western UP which feed the rest of India now because they
are the anchors of whole of the food security system.
- In order to restore the soil fertility, and to eschew the overexploitation
of ground water, facilitate salination control and so on, conservation
farming is a challenge.
Adverse Economics
of Farming
- If you look at Singur, which I will come to a little later,
it is the tip of the iceberg. It's a wake up call for what's
happening there. You look at what over 1,100 farmers have got
as compensation for 937 acres or something, that doesn't make
even one acre per head, or between 2,200 to 2,300 farmers have
been given compensation, out of which about 200 have not accepted
that. That is the problem.
- So how do you give the power and economy of scale to very
small producers? One example is the dairy sector where we are
number one in the world largely because of the cooperative movement
started by Patel, Kurien and Amrita Patel and others. That of
course has worked very well in Gujarat and some parts of our
country. But cooperatives get bureaucratised; they will work
only when it is a win-win situation for all members of the cooperative.
- All public good institutions, in my view, should have a pro-small
farmer, pro-nature, pro-poor and pro-woman orientation.
- One of the problems today in the economics of farming is
with the escalation in the price of petroleum products.
- The prices of agricultural commodities are finally the determinants
of the interest of the farmers whether they would like to stick
on to farming.
- We recommended as summarised by Dr. Kartikeyan, total cost
of production plus 50%, the procurement price that is the support
price, should be the best available market price.
Hunger
- Globally, there are wholesome trends in hunger. On 25th of September,
the United Nations held a special assembly of heads of governments
to discuss the progress in the procurement of the Millennium Development
Goals. The number one goal is reducing hunger and poverty by half
by 2015.
- The economic cost of hunger: It is supposed to be 0.5 to 1 trillion
dollars per year globally in terms of total cost and the food
security goal is over 122 billion dollars, in terms of work efficiency,
work output, diseases and pests.
- The social cost of hunger leads to degradation, disillusionment
and upheavals like the Naxalite movement.
- We say we have made progress. For instance, production of 230
million tonnes of food grains last year and so on. But in the
last 10 to 15 years, we hardly find any improvement in the matter
of child malnutrition.
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