-Livemint.com The positions of two non-official members representing farming community and one official member have been vacant for 2 years New Delhi: Following years of low crop prices and protests by farmers, the centre in its budget for 2018-19 promised to ensure remunerative prices for farmers through higher minimum support prices (MSPs). However, in the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, or CACP— an office of the agriculture ministry mandated to recommend...

-Livemint.com The finance minister’s clarification that the government will use the A2+FL measure to determine MSPs for crops is likely to disappoint farmer organizations Finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday that farmers would be provided 50% returns over and above what they spend on inputs such as seeds and fertilizers and an imputed value of family labour, clearing the confusion over which measure of cost of cultivation would be used to...

-Livemint.com While trade policy is skewed against farmers, rural schemes lag behind targets, say the organizations New Delhi: The Union government has overlooked the spectre of rural distress and gone back on its promises to ensure remunerative returns to farmers, several farmer organizations claimed on Tuesday while releasing a paper on the state of Indian agriculture, ahead of the Union budget. Titled Green Paper on Farmers, Farming and Rural Economy 2018, the document...

-TheWire.in In a green paper, organisations have pointed out how a number of promises made to farmers have not been kept. New Delhi: Terming the Narendra Modi government as the “most anti-farmer government in the history of independent India” for reneging on its “core” promise of revising minimum support prices (MSP), a ‘green paper’ on agriculture says the Bharatiya Janata Party’s pledge to “double farm incomes by 2022” remains a distant dream. “The...

-Livemint.com Union Budget 2018 may be able to offer sops for big farmers but it would not be able to deal with the structural challenges facing India’s rural economy The results of the Gujarat elections, in which the opposition Congress outperformed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in rural constituencies, and the growing number of farmer agitations in the country have focused attention on rural India ahead of this year’s budget. But...