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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Farmers need remunerative prices, not debt waiver, to end rural distress -TK Arun

Farmers need remunerative prices, not debt waiver, to end rural distress -TK Arun

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published Published on Jul 13, 2017   modified Modified on Jul 13, 2017
-The Economic Times

Farmers are agitated. Loan waivers have not stemmed protests or farmer suicides. This is a multidimensional problem and also a huge political opportunity for parties that can think constructively.

Waiving loans is bad policy. It adds to the fiscal stress of states, straining under the electricity utility debt they have taken over. The states would undo the Centre’s hard-wrought fiscal discipline, scaring rating agencies.

Waived loans bring little benefit to farmers. Only loans taken from commercial or cooperative banks can be waived, not loans from moneylenders. Many so-called farm loans go to people who own land but have leased it out to others to do the actual farming. When these loans, subsidised and used for cultivating anything but a crop, are waived, it ends up swelling unaccounted wealth in the hands of absentee landlords, while the actual wretch, who borrowed money from the local moneylender to grow a crop that turns out to be worthless, eats his heart out.

Remunerative prices are what farmers need, not subsidies and loan waivers. Demonetisation played a role in the recent wave of farmer unrest. Traders who normally purchase the harvest or finance such purchases had a cash crunch and could not come up with the money. Alternate buyers did not materialise.

Farmers threw away onion and tomato by the ton, rather than cart it back home to rot. But this problem is one-off, whereas farm distress is perennial. The solution is necessarily multipronged but consists, in essence, in creating missing market linkages between the farmer and the end-consumer.

Missing Market Links

Policy on agricultural trade is adhoc: export is banned now and then, imports face unpredictable bans or duties. Farmers are denied the higher price often available in export markets.

For all such restraints, Indian farm prices move in sympathy with global prices. This is one reason why it did not make sense for the current government to raise the minimum support price as often and as sharply as the UPA government did. Global commodity prices have been falling or subdued, unlike in the boom period of UPA’s price revisions. India cannot have rice, wheat and lentil prices out of sync with global prices while being part of the interdependent global economy.

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The Economic Times, 12 July, 2017, http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/cursor/farmers-need-remunerative-prices-not-debt-waiver-to-end-rural-distress/


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