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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Farm subsidy to loan waivers: A race to compensate farmers for their losses -Ashok Gulati

Farm subsidy to loan waivers: A race to compensate farmers for their losses -Ashok Gulati

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published Published on Feb 19, 2019   modified Modified on Feb 19, 2019
-Financial Express

With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6% of their annual income. This level of support, unless augmented further, may not go far to win farmers’ confidence. Majority would agree that farmers have been under stress for quite some time, and have not got justice so far.

While the Modi government claims that its record of overall growth (GDP) is better than the UPA government (notwithstanding the suspicion that many have on the GDP revised series), the nature of growth matters as well. In a country where 47% of the workforce is engaged in agriculture, it is the growth of agri-GDP that is even more critical for the alleviation of poverty and providing nutritious food. The average annual agri-GDP growth in the first four years of Modi government, for which data is available, is just 2.5% compared to 5.2% in the last four years of Manmohan Singh’s government. The exports of agri-produce have fallen since the peak of $42.5 billion achieved in 2013-14, giving a negative growth in agri-exports during the Modi period.

On the other hand, agri-imports have consistently increased, reducing the net export surplus (exports minus imports) from about $25 billion in 2013-14 to less than $10 billion in 2017-18. This has led to a glut of agri-produce at home and, consequently, agri-prices have fallen, reducing profitability ratios significantly across most of the crops since 2013-14. And so is the case in dairy. The government is saddled with massive stocks of grains, way above the buffer stock norms. For example, rice stocks with government agencies touched about 37 million metric tonnes (MMTs) on January 1, 2019, as against a buffer norm of only 7.6 MMTs for that date. This speaks of massive inefficiency in the grain management system.

Needless to say that agriculture has been crying for wholesale structural reforms, especially in agri-marketing, from abolition/pruning of the Essential Commodities Act, to reforming the APMC, to futures trading, to negotiable warehouse receipt systems, to building commodity-specific value chains on the lines of Amul’s milk model, etc. But the time for structural reforms has run out. And, now there is a race to compensate farmers for their losses, an admission of the failure of the agriculture policy followed so far, which has a massive in-built consumer bias.

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Financial Express, 18 February, 2019, https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/farm-subsidy-to-loan-waivers-a-race-to-compensate-farmers-for-their-losses/1490664/


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