How farmers’ movement embodies a politics of hope

 

Indrajit Roy writes: The farmers’ protests remind us that hope is not delusional. It is attentive to the difficulties of the present moment, but appreciates the possibility that something unexpected could arise

The triumph of the farmers’ movements against the unpopular farm laws holds important lessons for those hoping to politically defeat the BJP. After all, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s climbdown on the farm laws represents the most significant political retreat by his government in its two terms, despite its crushing dominance in Parliament. The success of the farmers’ movement is testimony to the audacity of hope.

Hope is, first and foremost, about not giving up. When the farmers’ unions first called for a Bharat bandh back in September 2020, few had expected the government to listen, much less repeal the farm laws at any point soon. But the farmers did not give up. Through the chilly north Indian winter, they persisted in their protests. Despite unfavourable media coverage and hostile state governments in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, they continued their agitation. Harbouring hope is no easy task. It involves struggle. Living in hope means taking the next step despite being confronted by oppression.

The farmers’ protests remind us that hope is not delusional. It is attentive to the difficulties of the present moment, but appreciates the possibility that something unexpected could arise from the wreckage of the present. When sections of the protesting farmers turned violent in Delhi on the eve of Republic Day earlier this year, the movement recognised the danger in which it was. They recognised that the government, supported by a pliant media, would use this opportunity to paint them all as anti-national, seditious and traitorous. Rakesh Tikait, the farmers’ leader, broke down on national television in anticipation of their forceful eviction from the protest sites by the central government. His tears taught us yet another lesson about hope: It accepts the reality of grief, loss and uncertainty.

As we now know, Tikait’s tears turned the tide. The farmers did not give up their agitation, but expanded their footprint to small towns and villages across the country. For example, September saw a massive mahapanchayat in Muzaffarnagar, Tikait’s home ground, in which almost 5,00,000 people participated.

The uncertainty that farmers faced did not prevent them from thinking through and taking action. As the feminist bell hooks reminds us, living in hope is linked with a basic trust in life that motivates the “next step”. It is about believing that our families, cultures and societies are important, and for whom it is worth living and dying. Far from being a hindrance to action, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt feared, hope is about confronting oppression and believing that there’s a way out. The farmers dispersed their protests across towns and villages, often at great peril to their own lives, as the ghastly incidents in Lakhimpur Kheri showed.

Living in hope demands that we carefully and sensitively craft novel alliances that could open new possibilities. Building and sustaining social coalitions was another lesson the farmers’ movement taught us. Without a doubt, the protests originated in the anxieties of the big Hindu and Sikh farmers of the Jat community, dominant castes in their respective villages. These narrow social origins have since diffused to include support from such diverse social groups as the Dalit Army, the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Samiti and the Khet Mazdoor Unions. Furthermore, the Hindu Jat farmers appear to be seeking reconciliation with their Muslim neighbours in western Uttar Pradesh, almost a decade after communal violence ripped the social fabric of that region.

The alliances demanded by the political practice of hope broadens people’s horizons. Writing in the shadows of Nazism, the historian Ernst Bloch makes exactly this point in his epic three-volume study The Principle of Hope. “The emotion of hope goes out of itself,” he writes, “makes people broad instead of confining them”. Like the protests against the CAA-NRC, the farmers’ movement teaches us the crucial importance of building solidarities across social divides to the politics of hope.

Our world is plagued by crisis, uncertainty and prospects of a catastrophe. Under such circumstances, it is tempting to fixate on collapse rather than focus on repair. A politics of hope is indispensable to confronting the social, economic and political troubles of our time. The farmers’ movement reminds us how we might practice it in trying times.

Source: Indian Express, 7/12/21

How to define a farmer

 

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

Revealing India’s actual farmer population

 

Harish Damodaran, Samridhi Agarwal write: It may be closer to 40 million than the consensus range of 100-150 million. This has great implications for agricultural policy.

The last Agriculture Census for 2015-16 placed the total “operational holdings” in India at 146.45 million. The Pradhan Mantri-Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) scheme has 110.94 million beneficiaries who got their Rs 2,000 income support installment for April-July 2021. And now, we have the National Statistical Office’s Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households (SAAH) report for 2018-19. It pegs the country’s “agricultural households” at 93.09 million. In short, India officially has anywhere from 90 million-plus to almost 150 million farmers.

This wide variation has largely to do with methodology. The Agriculture Census looks at any land used even partly for agricultural production and operated/managed by one person alone or with others. The land does not have to be owned by that person (“cultivator”), who needn’t also belong to an “agricultural household”. The SAAH report, on the other hand, considers only the operational holdings of agricultural households. Members of a household may farm different lands. While the Census treats each of them as separate holdings, the SAAH takes all these lands as a single production unit. It does not count multiple holdings if operated by individuals living together and sharing a common kitchen.

Accounting for only “agricultural households”, while not distinguishing multiple operating holdings within them, brings down India’s official farmer numbers to just over 93 million. But even this figure is an exaggeration, given the SAAH’s own rather expansive definition of “agricultural households”. The latter covers households having at least one member self-employed in agriculture and whose annual value of produce exceeds Rs 4,000. Such self-employment needs to be for only 30 days or more during the survey reference period of six months (in this case, the two halves of the July 2018-June 2019 agricultural year).

What we have done is take the SAAH figure of 93.09 million — which is, at best, an upper limit — and estimate from it the agricultural households that are significantly farm income-dependent. They would, in our view, constitute “serious”, “full-time” or “regular” farmers.

The SAAH report gives data on agricultural household income from farm and non-farm sources, both state-wise and across different land-possessed/operational holding size classes. Non-farm income includes that from wages/salary, business, leasing out of land and pension/remittances. For farm income, we have factored in net receipts from crop production as well as animal husbandry (dairying, poultry, goat/sheep rearing, piggery, beekeeping, aquaculture, sericulture, etc).

We would categorise “full-time/regular” farmers as those households whose net receipts from farming are at least 50 per cent of their total income from all sources. The farm income dependence ratios have, accordingly, been worked out for all states and across holding sizes (from below 0.01 to 10 hectares and above). The SAAH report also has state-wise estimates of agricultural households for each land-possessed size class. By taking only those size classes in which the dependence ratios are higher than (or close to) 50 per cent, and adding up the corresponding estimated number of agricultural households, we are able to arrive at the total “full-time/regular” farmers for each state.

Using the above methodology, the number of “full-time/regular” farmers has been calculated for all states (see table; a more detailed note with charts is available at the CPR website). Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has 31.59 lakh agricultural households. But the 50 per cent farm income threshold is crossed only for households possessing more than two hectares of land. They number just 7.46 lakh, or 23.6 per cent of the state’s total agricultural households. India’s “serious” farmer population, in turn, adds up to 36.1 million, which is hardly 39 per cent of the SAAH estimate. The 36 million-plus number — or, say, 40 million — is also close to a previous 47-50 million estimate of “serious full-time farmers” made by one of us (https://bit.ly/3CLmc7S).

If the actual number of farmers deriving a significant share of their income from agriculture per se is only 40 million — as against the official, also popular, consensus range of 100-150 million — a host of policy implications follow. To start with, one must recognise that farming is a specialised profession like any other. Not everyone can or needs to be a farmer. “Agriculture policy” should, then, target those who can and genuinely depend on farming as a means of livelihood.

Minimum support prices, government procurement, agricultural market reforms, fertiliser and other input subsidies, Kisan Credit Card loans, crop insurance or export-import policy on farm commodities will matter mainly to “full-time/regular” farmers. Even PM-Kisan would be more effective if directed at these farmers, whose quantum of income support can be enhanced to encourage them to remain in or expand their agriculture business.

Secondly, land size matters. The SAAH report reveals that the 50 per cent farm income dependence threshold is crossed at an all-India level only when the holding size exceeds one hectare or 2.5 acres. This is clearly the minimum land required for farming to be viable, which about 70 per cent of agricultural households in the country do not possess.

It links up with the final point: What should be done for this 70 per cent, who are effectively labourers and not farmers? Their problems cannot be addressed through “agriculture policy”. A more sustainable solution lies in reimagining agriculture beyond the farm. Crops may be produced in fields, but not everyone needs to engage in cultivation. The scope for value-addition and employment can be more outside than on the farm — be it in aggregation, grading, packaging, transporting, processing, warehousing and retailing of produce or supply of inputs and services to farmers. All these activities legitimately fall within the realm of agriculture, even if outside the farm. Agriculture policy should aim not only at increasing farm incomes, but also adding value to produce outside and closer to the farms.

This column first appeared in the print edition on October 4, 2021 under the title ‘Counting the kisan’. Damodaran is National Rural Affairs & Agriculture Editor, The Indian Express and is currently on sabbatical as Senior Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research. Agarwal is Research Associate with CPR.

Source: Indian Express, 4/10/21