-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...

-The Indian Express Implicitly taxed through restrictive marketing and trade policies, farmers need a stable income policy. The Narendra Modi government is entering its proverbial “last 10 overs”. All the stops are being pulled to win over targeted segments of society that could potentially bring the BJP/NDA back to office. One important segment, perhaps the largest one, is that of farmers. The attempt to woo them by announcing higher minimum support prices...

-The Hindu Business Line India has been the world’s top rice exporter since the beginning of this decade. But this boom has benefited only merchant capitalists, not consumers and producers India emerged the world’s largest rice exporter in 2011-12, displacing Thailand from its leadership position. Two factors played a role in this. The first was the government’s decision in February 2011 to lift a four-year ban on exports of non-basmati varieties of...

-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...

-Down to Earth Farmers and cold storage owners pay the price of producing and storing bumper crops as wholesale prices dip by 39-50 per cent in December Hit by low wholesale prices, potato farmers in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have not been able to recover even the production cost of the crop as market price of potatoes crashed by 39-50 per cent in December 2018, shows the latest report on the crop...