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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Ensure no trading takes place below MSP -Devinder Sharma

Ensure no trading takes place below MSP -Devinder Sharma

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published Published on Sep 24, 2020   modified Modified on Sep 26, 2020

-The Tribune

With APMC markets heading towards a collapse, the new set of reforms is aimed at encouraging corporatisation, with big business moving into agriculture, storage and marketing. As the experience of US/Europe shows, when unregulated markets become dominant, small farmers are the first to be pushed out of agriculture.

Reiterating what former US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz (during Ronald Reagan’s rule) had declared: “Get big or get out,” Sonny Perdue, US President Donald Trump’s Agriculture Secretary recently said: “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out. I don’t think in America, (as) for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”

Wherever agriculture is being opened to markets, the big capital has successfully managed to push out the majority farming population and concentrated its control over food. That’s how the markets behave, with its own set of logic and ethics. As the big get bigger, the small farms struggle to survive. In America, after decades of market reforms in agriculture, only 1.5 per cent of its population has somehow managed to survive on the farm. Despite providing for $867 billion support under the Farm Bill 2018 over the next 10 years for agriculture, nutrition and conservation programmes, rising suicide rate, worrying trends of depression in rural areas, declining milk and farm commodity prices, and the mounting bankruptcy in farming — estimated at $425 billion — will make it tough for the family farms to survive the transition.

With the suicide rate being 45 per cent higher in rural areas as compared to urban America, low prices and mounting debt has pushed much of the rural population in the grip of stress and depression. What happened in America is no exception. It has in fact become an international agricultural design, with agribusiness gaining strongholds over the food value chains across the globe, in reality their competitive strength depending on the huge subsidies received. In Europe, farming too is in a severe crisis despite an annual subsidy support of $100 billion, of which nearly half goes as direct income support. Low prices and mounting debt has gradually pushed small farmers out of business. In the UK, 3,000 dairy farms have closed down in the past four years. In France, a study had shown that nearly 500 farmers commit suicide on an average in a year.

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The Tribune, 24 September, 2020, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/ensure-no-trading-takes-place-below-msp-145671?fbclid=IwAR3yL9Q8iPyKCkxqbEepeEG3Xkacl_g_dOL5SLcVcxC-ursX7ghI3qjn6zY


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