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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Research shows intermediaries’ role is misunderstood. Local market realities more at play -Shoumitro Chatterjee, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Devesh Kapur and Marshall M Bouton

Research shows intermediaries’ role is misunderstood. Local market realities more at play -Shoumitro Chatterjee, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Devesh Kapur and Marshall M Bouton

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published Published on Dec 18, 2020   modified Modified on Dec 22, 2020

-ThePrint.in

Researchers associated with Pennsylvania University’s India study centre looked at agricultural markets of Bihar, Odisha and Punjab. They found that intermediaries are a rational response to the dominant structure of Indian farming.

Most Indian farmers have tiny farms that yield meagre incomes. They face a multiplicity of risks, which jeopardises even these low incomes. These twin pressures are particularly acute in eastern India, manifest in the two states that were the focus of our study, Bihar and Odisha. With nearly 80% of the population in Bihar and 70% in Odisha still engaged in agriculture, increasing farmers’ incomes in these two states is critical.

Agriculture policies in India have largely focused on three policy tools to increase (and stabilise) farmers’ incomes: decreasing input costs through input subsidies, improving crop yields through better seeds and farming practices, and increasing output prices while stabilising incomes through the Minimum Support Price (MSP) and procurement. More recently, policy has begun to pay attention to getting farmers a greater share of the marketed surplus, which has led to renewed concerns about the state of agriculture markets, the focus of our study.

Markets

The prices farmers receive for their produce vary considerably across farmers and commodities. There is a range of factors (timing of sale, site, volume) and transaction processes (grading, quality assessment, price determination, weighing method, and timing and mode of payment) that impact the final price.

The site of first sale also varies substantially. While the village (and to some extent local periodic markets or haats and small unregulated wholesale markets) remains the predominant site for farmers’ sales in Bihar and Odisha, the regulated mandi is the near-universal site of sale for farmers in Punjab. Thus, a singular focus on mandis as market sites for farmers will miss out the actual physical sites of sales for most farmers in eastern India.

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Kindly click here to access the study entitled A Study of the Agricultural Markets of Bihar, Odisha and Punjab (released in 2019) by Shoumitro Chatterjee, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Devesh Kapur and Marshall M. Bouton, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia.


ThePrint.in, 18 December, 2020, https://theprint.in/opinion/middlemen-in-indian-agriculture-help-reduce-farmers-risks-that-govt-doesnt-study/569259/


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