Bhogtoram Mawroh and Gennifer Meldrum
One of the key promises of the NDA government was doubling farmers’ income by 2022. There are only two years left for that promise to materialise and it seems to be destined for failure unless something drastic happens. Now something indeed drastic has happened. While the country was reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, three important laws were introduced by the Government: The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, and The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill.
These policies are part of the Government’s strategy to ostensibly bring profitability in farming operations and raise farmers’ incomes, driven by the logic that the market and not the government should take a leading role in managing agriculture in the country. These laws are part of a greater trend of the State moving away from various sectors of the economy and facilitating the entry of private players who bring with them the much-touted efficiency and dynamism of market forces. Yet these forces have been found to be inimical to the plight of those with limited resources, as is aptly demonstrated by the rising inequality in nations embracing free market economies, with the starkest example being the USA. The majority of India’s farmers are small and marginal and these reforms have been perceived as a death knell to their protests; hence, the nation-wide outcry.
In Meghalaya, there does not seem to be much of a debate on the issue. Not surprisingly, the NPP-led Government of the State supported the reforms while the opposition party, i.e., the Congress is following the national directive. The Hill Farmers Union extended moral support to the protest but could not bring about much enthusiasm for the ‘Bharat Bandh’, which highlights its lack of reach among the farmers of the State. A lot of it has to do with the fact that though majority of the workforce in the State are engaged in agriculture, Meghalaya’s contribution to the national production is miniscule. That does not mean that the effects of the three laws will be in any way insignificant.
The first law The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, has stated that controlling the supply of food stuffs can only be done only under extraordinary circumstances, while giving criteria in case of a steep rise in price rise. An exemption is made for holders of private stocks whose limit has not exceeded the ceiling of installed capacity and through this clause, the law has basically made hoarding legally tenable. Meghalaya is not self-sufficient when it comes to the major staples like cereals and pulses. This makes the local consumers highly vulnerable to any stocking of these items. The argument of regulation only during extraordinary circumstances is highly flawed. Extraordinary circumstances are by definition ‘extraordinary’ but daily life is lived in ‘ordinary’ situations. The essential items, cereals, pulses, potato, onions, edible oilseeds and oils are required on a daily basis and for those who are of low income, they constitute a major proportion of their income. Meghalaya comes in 28th place in terms of per capita income among the States and Union Territories in India meaning that purchasing power of majority of the people in the State is already very low. This means that ordinarily the common citizens of the State are already in a precarious situation and the promise of protection during extraordinary circumstances means nothing to them. It is likely that consumers will be left to fend for themselves in any case, as per the Amendment, private stocking is allowed even during extraordinary times if it does not exceed the allotted limit.
The second law ‘The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill’ is basically about encouraging contract farming. Private companies/players will be encouraged to get into agreement with farmers for buying their produce. This will entail farmers producing the crop under the agreement and following the conditions as laid down, which will include management of the whole farming operation (seeds, land preparation, inputs, etc.,). In order to ensure that the produce is of the requisite quality such control is inevitable. Contract farming is not alien to Meghalaya (or for that matter India) with quite a few farmers already engaged in it. But with this law there will be greater push for it. Since the State will not be able to compete in terms of food crops, the focus will be on cash crops. This can have tremendous implications for the agrobiodiversity of the State.
Though Meghalaya may not be able to compete with the other parts of the country in terms of production, it can rival any in terms of agrobiodiversity, i.e., the variety and variability of animals, plants and micro-organisms that are used directly or indirectly for food and agriculture, including crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries. An average of 202 food plants per village were documented derived from the diversity of land uses practised by indigenous farmers in the State during a participatory mapping exercise done in 28 villages by the North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society (NESFAS) as part of the project “No One Shall Be Left Behind Initiative: Biodiversity for Food, Nutrition, and Energy Security, Meghalaya and Nagaland, North East India” supported by the Rural Electrification Corporation. Among the diversity of land uses in Meghalaya, bri (plantation) is an example of a traditional cash cropping system that is mostly associated with arecanut and mandarin orange cultivation in the Khasi-War areas (Southern Slopes of Meghalaya). This cropping system has existed alongside jhum plots, homestead gardens and harvesting (flora and fauna) from the local landscape as strategies to meet family needs. An important feature of the traditional cash cropping system is that it is not a complete monoculture. In the bri, jackfruit, bay leaf, wild pepper, taro and pineapple can also be found. In the modern contract farming system, such diversity could be lost. As the Central Government is pushing for expansion of palm oil cultivation in the North Eastern States, including Meghalaya, there is a good possibility that palm oil will be pushed as a substitute crop. The environmental catastrophe that palm oil plantations effect is thoroughly documented, while similar devastation could result with the promotion of other cash crops as well.
The expansion of the Banana export industry in Central America in the early 20th Century led to soil exhaustion and the spread of Panama disease throughout the plantations. The companies who had entered into agreements with local communities abandoned the plantations leaving the communities to deal with the cost of landscape degradation. One could read about this case in more detail in the chapter titled ‘Altered Landscapes and Transformed Livelihoods: Banana Companies, Panama Diseases, and Rural Communities on the North Coast of Honduras, 1880-1950’ by John Soluri in the book ‘Interaction between Agroecosystems and Rural Communities’. Meghalaya has very little arable land. In search of profitability the limited arable land could be exposed to large scale degradation. The expansion of broom cultivation, for example, has been reported to degrade land quality for food crop production by Rabi Narayan Behera and colleagues in their paper ‘From jhum to broom: Agricultural land-use change and food security implications on the Meghalaya Plateau, India’. The diversion of land from food crops to cash crops risks adversely affecting household food insecurity because of increased exposure to price volatility, limited rural market infrastructure, and reduced self sufficiency in food staples. With hoarding being given legal protection this could exacerbate the difficulties of low income households, which include the farmers, in the State.
The Agriculture Produce Market Committees (APMC) and Minimum Support Price (MSP) for crops have been strategies to improve the state of agriculture and farmer incomes. However both of these strategies are under attack under The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill. In the name of giving choice, this law is laying the ground work for dismantling of this system. With the state of market infrastructure in Meghalaya, it can be argued there is a need to expand APMC and bring more farmers, not the other way round.
As a large number of farmers in the State are subsistence-oriented with limited access to roads and state markets, it is unclear how these new laws will help to boost farmer incomes. Whether the stakeholders in Meghalaya appreciate the gravity of the issue, the potential harm from the three laws on the farmers of the State is very real and it will require vigilance as they are implemented to avoid negative repercussions.
About the writers
Bhogtoram Mawroh is a Senior Associate, Research and Knowledge Management at NESFAS and can be reached at [email protected]
Gennifer Meldrum is a consultant with Bioversity International and can be reached at [email protected]