-The Tribune The economic argument in support of market reforms, claiming that farm incomes go up when the number of farmers recedes, has turned out to be untrue. America has lost more than 5 million farms in less than 100 years, and Australia 25 per cent of its farms between 1980 and 2002. The speed at which farmers across the globe have got out of agriculture hasn’t increased farm incomes, but...
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Tax exemptions and incentives for the corporate sector continue despite reduction in corporate tax rates
Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...
More »Farming in Araria, cutting cane in Karnal -Parth MN
-RuralIndiaOnline.org Ramesh Sharma is among lakhs of farmers from Bihar who earn more by working as farm labourers in Haryana than by harvesting the maize they grow at home Ramesh Sharma can’t remember the last time he spent an entire year at home. “I have been doing this for the past 15-20 years,” he says, while cutting sugarcane in a field in Gagsina village in Haryana’s Karnal district. For half of the year...
More »What India’s farm crisis really needs -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker
-The Indian Express To solve India’s deep agrarian crisis, more public investment and government support are needed, not the new farm laws The farmers’ movement invites us to revisit the trajectory of India’s agriculture so as to understand its real problems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, India and, especially, Punjab experienced a massive productivity boom as a result of widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies. This transition was driven by public investment in...
More »Lessons in direct income support from Odisha -Varad Pande and Shilpa Kumar
-The Indian Express Governments can learn much on how to construct a social welfare system for farmers from Odisha's KALIA scheme for DIS. The recent farmer agitation has brought the issue of farmer distress front and centre in the public consciousness. The time seems ripe to find new solutions to the structural challenges facing farmers. One promising step is the shift from non-targeted agriculture subsidies towards direct income support (DIS). A key...
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