-The Indian Express The existing MSP-based procurement system is fiscally unsustainable. The time has come to consider market intelligence-based regulation of crop production Farmers are always in distress when prices of their produce are subdued. The response of governments, obviously prompted by political pressures, has been to sharply hike minimum support prices (MSP) of crops or declare loan waivers. Thus, the current government at the Centre has significantly raised the MSPs of...

-The Indian Express To address farmers' woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach. The two main policy interventions repeatedly discussed in recent months to tackle farmer distress — loan waivers and minimum support prices (MSP) — treat all farmers (large/small, male/female) alike. But farmers are heterogeneous. They differ especially by income, land owned and gender. And farmer dissatisfaction is...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

-Financial Express Forget the fanfare about the PM-AASHA scheme that is designed to lend greater price support to farmers, procurement of pulses and oilseeds by the public sector is likely to drop by more than a third in the kharif 2018 season from the year-ago period. The decline in procurement comes after two consecutive kharif seasons in which it surged and reached a critical mass, compared with very small quantities earlier. Just...

-The Indian Express The unprecedented procurement of pulses and oilseeds in the last couple of years has created problems — and opportunities. If there’s one area in agriculture where the Narendra Modi government has probably broken fresh ground, it is in the procurement of pulses and oilseeds.   During the 2016-17 and 2017-18 agricultural years (July-June), the Central agencies — National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (Nafed), Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC)...