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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The best of times, the worst of times -Mihir Shah

The best of times, the worst of times -Mihir Shah

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published Published on Jun 14, 2017   modified Modified on Jun 14, 2017
-The Hindu

Without government support, farmers pay the price for a bumper crop they labour so hard to produce

The ongoing farmers’ agitation has taken on a shockingly violent form. Discussion has revolved around an apparent paradox: why are farmers rioting after a bumper crop? But any student of economics knows that prices fall after bumper harvests, which is good for consumers but terrible for farmers. This is why the government needs to step in to buy from farmers at a minimum support price, while subsidising consumers so that they get affordable food. This is what we have done over the last fifty years after setting up the Food Corporation of India (FCI) in 1965.

If this system has been in place for so long, why are we still lurching from crisis to crisis? For long, we have said that the solution is to get people off farming. While there is no doubt we need to create more jobs in manufacturing, we must not forget that even in the year 2050, according to the latest projections, there will still be 800 million people living in rural India. And just one look at the state of Indian cities makes it clear that endlessly moving people from villages to cities could actually deepen the urban imbroglio. So solutions have to be found for agriculture — and fast.

Use and abuse of soil, water

The problem with Indian agriculture is that we are still stuck with the so-called Green Revolution of the 1970s. I use the prefix “so-called” for a specific reason. Yes, there was a dramatic rise in food production. And India no longer needs to beg for food in the world market. But this was primarily a rice and wheat revolution. It completely neglected two-thirds of Indian agriculture and crops grown and eaten by the poorest people of our country — pulses and millets. There is also nothing “green” about this revolution because, over the years, it has caused a deep crisis of sustainability, economic and ecological. Large-scale use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides has had an extremely adverse impact on our soil and water. Deep drilling by tubewells to grow these water-intensive crops has happened without any reference whatsoever to India’s unique hydrogeology, where nearly two-thirds of our land is underlain by hard rock formations which have very low rates of natural recharge.

This has meant that there is now a serious water crisis, with both water tables and water quality falling rapidly. We have arsenic, fluoride, mercury, even uranium in our drinking water, creating serious health issues. What is worse, to get the same increase in production, farmers have had to apply more and more fertilisers and pesticides over time. This dramatically raises costs of cultivation, without a proportionate increase in production. More than 3,00,000 farmers have committed suicide over the last two decades, which has absolutely no precedent in Indian history.

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The Hindu, 14 June, 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-best-of-times-the-worst-of-times/article19032989.ece


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