Categorising farmers based on dependence on farm income, land ownership is inappropriate
KAT reforms that are being pushed. Farmer unions are demanding withdrawal of farm laws, but also seeking mechanisms to ensure remunerative output prices.
In this context, Harish Damodaran and Samridhi Agarwal (‘Counting the kisan’, IE, October 5, 2021) use the 2019 Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households (SAAH) survey to argue that India’s farming population is much smaller than is usually estimated. Damodaran and Agarwal claim that while the official estimate of the number of agricultural households in India was 93.09 million in 2019, the number of “serious”, “full-time” or “regular” agricultural households was only 36 million.
Damodaran and Agarwal categorise as serious/regular those agricultural households that earn at least half of their total household income from crop cultivation. The authors go on to suggest that the agricultural policy should target only serious/regular farming households as they “genuinely depend on farming”. Their attempt to estimate the number of serious/regular farmers, and by implication, to differentiate them from the non-serious farmers is flawed on several counts, including the scant regard for the structural and historical context of farm-based livelihoods. We highlight some of the key problems with the Damodaran-Agarwal argument.
First, the categorisation of farmers as serious/regular based on a single ratio of farm income dependence and an arbitrary threshold of 50 per cent is an unwarranted and a non-serious exercise. Such identification based on a snapshot number for a certain year completely ignores the differential historical trajectory of development and livelihood diversification in diverse regions of India.
For example, in a rich state like Kerala, international migration and remittances has been a dominant household phenomenon for decades. While remittances often constitute a major portion of household income, it does not make small-scale spice cultivators or rubber growers any less serious in their pursuits. At the same time, in a poor yet mineral-rich state like Jharkhand, livelihood diversification may have been driven by poverty and local conditions of both farm and non-farm work, which may have intensified such coping mechanisms over time. Such a situation does not make the poor farmers who use their land for subsistence, and pursue other occupations in the lean season, any less dependent on farming.
This brings us to the second misclassification issue. Using the term “Kisan” to identify farmers obfuscates social and economic relations, including exploitative ones, that exists within agriculture. Farmers are not a homogenous category; they are differentiated into classes and castes. More realistic and useful categories of rich/middle/poor farmers or capitalist/petty-producer/agricultural labour are needed to identify those engaged in agriculture.
Third, according to Damodaran-Agarwal, their 50 per cent “serious farmer” threshold is crossed at the all-India level by farmers with more than 1 hectare of land. This is possessed by only 30 per cent of agricultural households. What about the contribution to national production of the remaining 70 per cent, that is, marginal farmers possessing less than 1 hectare of land? Research by one of us shows that the share of marginal farmers ranges between 19 to 30 per cent in the total marketed surplus for various food grains.
A significant proportion of foodgrain consumption among cultivators is from home-grown produce, particularly at the lower end of the land distribution. Forcing marginal farmers out of agriculture would also be disastrous from the perspective of household-level food and nutrition security, a serious challenge for several decades now.
The recommendations by Damodaran and Agarwal also have serious ramifications for socially disadvantaged communities. The historical and contemporary practices of caste-based exclusion and the failure of the state to undertake meaningful redistributive land reforms means that a large majority of the Dalit community remains landless. Withdrawing state support to smallholders will have a disproportionate impact on the socially marginalised groups and would further push them into asset poverty.
Finally, the elephant in the room is the land and natural resource question. If 70 per cent of agricultural households are identified as non-serious farmers who should be moved out of agriculture, what happens to their land resources? Huge land reserves are immediately opened for corporate grabbing, laying the foundation for agribusiness monopolies. The authors’ optimism notwithstanding, it is unlikely that agro-based industries will be able to create enough jobs to absorb the millions displaced from their lands.
The authors seem to be unaware of the function of agriculture as a social safety net in providing a source of sustenance to millions and thereby providing conditions of relatively stable growth in productive sectors of the economy. The crisis faced by migrant workers during the lockdown, and the phenomenon of “reverse migration” is a testimony to the fact that agriculture continues to provide a buffer to millions who face intermittent unemployment.
Damodaran and Agarwal do not discuss that the SAAH data also shows a fall in real average crop incomes between 2013 and 2019. The fall in returns from cultivation is driven by rising input prices and dwindling output prices. Marginal and small farmers face disproportionate hardships in acquiring subsidised inputs or getting remunerative prices from public procurement. Smallholders also rely more on informal sources of moneylending, which adds to indebtedness.
The fall in crop incomes and the crisis of economic viability has continued in Indian agriculture for myriad factors since the late 1990s. For several decades now, successive governments have pursued policies that have led to worsening agrarian distress. This has pushed millions into low-paying petty jobs and continues to plague those who are compelled to depend (even partially) on agriculture for survival. The need for creation of decent non-farm jobs is well-recognised, but this is unlikely to happen with the crisis-ridden farm sector. Forced destruction of the livelihoods of millions of smallholders by withdrawal of the little they receive by the way of state support is nothing but a recipe for disaster. The solution to the problem of Indian farmers needs a serious rethink of the economic policies and surely cannot lie in simply excluding them by redefinition.
This column first appeared in the print edition on November 5, 2021 under the title ‘Defining a farmer’. Anand, Banerjee and Dasgupta teach at O P Jindal Global University, Ambedkar University and South Asian University respectively.
Source: Indian Express, 5/11/21
