-Outlook Good monsoon or bad, glut or drought, boom or bust...it’s always fair weather for the range of middlemen who come between the farmer and consumer. An anatomy of the trade. One of the axioms of logic is called the Law of the Excluded Middle. Something has to be eit­her true or false—there’s no middle ground. As we all know, economics works a bit differently. Facts can be fickle, data pliable, and...

-Newsclick.in Forget 50 percent profit over the cost of production, the farmers were forced to sell their produce at well below the minimum support price and the cost of production, pushing them deeper into debt. Farming turning increasingly unviable across vast swathes of India, and the Narendra Modi-led government not delivering on the BJP’s election promise to “make agriculture rewarding” lie behind the massive protests that have rocked several BJP-ruled states in...

-Scroll.in Farmers complain they do not have any support from the state in terms of irrigation or price guarantees for their cash crops. On the morning of June 17, there was an uproar outside the office of Thaneswar Malakar, the deputy commissioner of Assam’s Barpeta district. Some 50-odd rice farmers, under the banner of the farmers’ organisation Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, shouted slogans and demanded to meet Malakar. The farmers were agitated...

-The Indian Express Agriculture cannot survive without them. But they are invisible in the current conversation on the agrarian crisis An ex-company executive-cum-economist turns to the anchor during a discussion on the farmers’ agitation. “Overpopulation is destroying the farming activity. There are simply too many mouths to feed and the farms are shrinking. We must look to the urban areas for creating new jobs,” he says. The man at the local paan...

-The Indian Express With a glut in agricultural production, prices have fallen below MSPs. The government needs to get the agri-market right to address the farm crisis The farmers’ protests in Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Maharashtra indicate that all is not well on the economic front, especially agriculture. If such unrest could happen in MP, which claims to have registered the fastest agri-GDP growth at 9.7 per cent per year during...