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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Markets have failed to prop up farm incomes -Devinder Sharma

Markets have failed to prop up farm incomes -Devinder Sharma

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published Published on Mar 19, 2021   modified Modified on Mar 19, 2021

-The Tribune

The economic argument in support of market reforms, claiming that farm incomes go up when the number of farmers recedes, has turned out to be untrue. America has lost more than 5 million farms in less than 100 years, and Australia 25 per cent of its farms between 1980 and 2002. The speed at which farmers across the globe have got out of agriculture hasn’t increased farm incomes, but has only worsened the agrarian crisis.

It’s difficult to imagine. At a time when free markets are generally believed to provide farmers with a higher price, thereby enhancing farm incomes, the farm gate price for wheat in Canada happens to be much lower in 2017 than what it was 150 years back in 1867. This is not only true for Canada. Even in the US, as per media reports, farmers say the price they receive for wheat is much lower than what was prevalent at the time the four-year American Civil War ended in 1865.

So what happened to markets? After all, wheat is a staple food and its demand, considering the population boom the world has witnessed in the past 150 years, has grown exponentially over the centuries. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), wheat production forecast is pegged at 780 million tonnes in 2020-21, an increase of 7.5 million tonnes this year. Given the food insecurity the world is faced with, FAO considers the cereal production estimates (including that for wheat) to be positive.

Now, before you wonder how this could be possible, given the fact that economic curriculum in colleges and universities teaches us that markets provide the rightful price, take a look at an analysis by the US National Farmer Unions (NFU) which explains how the continuously declining peanut prices since 1965 had pushed three out of four peanut farmers out of business in America, and that too, at a time when peanut consumption was on the rise. Defying the supply demand logic, the peanut prices slumped from $1 per pound in 1965 to less than $0.25 per pound in 2020, a drop of more than 75 per cent. And if you are still thinking it probably happened because of surplus production, a Washington Post report tells us how just three companies, controlling the entire peanut market, had actually fixed the purchase price. After a lawsuit filed by 12,000 peanut growers, these companies finally agreed to pay $103 million in compensation for deliberately keeping the prices low.

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The Tribune, 19 March, 2021, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/markets-have-failed-to-prop-up-farm-incomes-227289?fbclid=IwAR230FzlIzUe5Kujz4q-KhigaZCa2Y__qPSifl6hmouupwf-K9Y_PCeur68


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