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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Neither govt nor protesting farmers recognise challenge of depleting natural resources and climate crisis -Richa Kumar, Nikhit Kumar Agrawal, PS Vijayshankar and AR Vasavi

Neither govt nor protesting farmers recognise challenge of depleting natural resources and climate crisis -Richa Kumar, Nikhit Kumar Agrawal, PS Vijayshankar and AR Vasavi

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published Published on Dec 7, 2020   modified Modified on Dec 7, 2020

-The Indian Express

If we truly want to ensure the livelihoods of our farmers and provide safe, healthy, nutritious food for our consumers, it is imperative to make policies that go beyond the productivity trope and populist posturing.

Proponents of the three new farm laws have claimed that they will engender competition in agricultural markets and will give farmers a choice to sell wherever they like. The opponents of these laws, including many farmer groups, have forcefully argued that these policies will strangle the mandi system, spell the end of the Minimum Support Price (MSP), and lead to oligopolistic buying by large agribusinesses.

These debates, however, have remained restricted to the realm of agricultural marketing and the economics of livelihoods. They miss the fundamental reality of today’s times — that the current agrarian impasse reflects the fatigue of dominant approaches to agriculture, which assumes growth is limitless and resources are inexhaustible. Added to this is India’s agrarian structure, closely aligned with the caste structure, thereby marking the whole system with tremendous inequality in access to natural resources, capital and markets. A combination of all these is reflected in the multiple ecological, economic and social crises that beset rural India. To tackle all these challenges, we require alternative policies that address these foundational deficits and go beyond the dominant paradigm of high-external-input, high-cost agriculture.

The recognition that agriculture is embedded in nature and that the agrarian economy is constrained by the limits imposed by nature and by social rules is fundamental to making policies that can benefit farmers. Instead of a resource-based approach, the need is to develop a relationship-based approach towards the environment. The challenges towards adopting such an approach have ecological, sociocultural, political, techno-scientific and economic dimensions. Reducing this complex maze to either economic or techno-scientific or a combination of both is highly problematic. This reductionism is the primary reason we are now suffering the consequences of runaway climate change, to which the contribution of modern agriculture is significant.

Moreover, the destruction of our rich agricultural biodiversity, the growing toxicity of our air, water and soils, the over-extraction of groundwater and growth in pesticide resistance have led to farming becoming a high-risk venture, in addition to threatening human health. The link between factory farming of animals and the growth of zoonotic diseases is now well-known, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.

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The Indian Express, 7 December, 2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/in-farm-debate-a-green-reality-check-7094384/


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