-Down to Earth A survey in Haryana last year found that 45 per cent of 218 organic farmers got yields for wheat better than the state official average yield  The relative merit of organic farming is recognised. Still, it is usually recommended only for areas of low chemical usage and not for intensively farmed areas such as those where the Green Revolution took place in the 1960s like Punjab, Haryana and western...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

-Down to Earth Sri Lanka has found itself in an economic crisis in pursuit of producing 100% organic food   ‘Lankan food crisis shows perils of organic farming’. This was the headline of a column by Indian economist Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar column published in a national daily recently. Aiyar’s article analysed the Sri Lankan food crisis, which has been triggered by the President’s recent decision to shift from chemical to organic farming. While the...

-The Hindu Business Line It observed that world pulses trade grew from 13 ml t to 17 ml t over the past decade The global pulse market that reached a volume of 92 million tons in 2020 - following an annual growth of 3 per cent during the previous decade – is expected to increase by 22 ml t by 2030, says OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2021-2030 released earlier this week. Almost half of...

In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...