Farm Laws 2020's provision could be modified for corrections without being needed to be repealed

 

Our farmers always want a higher price for their produce, but higher food prices can also bring pains to poor consumers. The art of policymaking is to balance the interest of producers and consumers within reasonable financial resources.

 In such a charged environment, rationality often becomes victim to anger and hatred, which does not serve anyone’s purpose, including the farmers’ therefore it is required to look for corrections without repealing all together.

A major study at ICRIER conducted with OECD showed that over the period 2000-01 to 2016-17, Indian agriculture was implicitly taxed to the tune of almost 14% of its value, primarily due to restrictive trade and marketing policies, ranging from export controls and stocking limits to the restrictive mandi system.

The way to improve farmers’ price realisation, therefore, was to liberate agriculture from these various controls. This has been a long-standing demand of one of the tallest farmer leaders, the late Sharad Joshi, since 1991 reforms.

But, a fear has been created that these farm laws will rob farmers of APMC markets, MSP, and they may even lose their lands to big corporate houses through contract farming.

No doubt APMC markets and MSP will face competition from private markets and out-of-APMC mandi transactions but it can be opportunistic in nature since farmer will have the discretion of where to sell their produce.( Even when fruits and vegetables were de notified from APMC Mandi, farmer continued to bring it to APMC ).

The creation of an additional 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and the promised Agri-infrastructure Fund of Rs one lakh crore will aid benefit to Farmers at large.

As per NSSO’s Situation Assessment Survey (70th round) , Only 6% of farmers sold their produce at MSP  And a majority of them were from the Punjab-Haryana belt. 

MSP and APMC system particularly help those who have large surplus, mainly large farmers ( because of Quality condition, transportation costs etc.) are benefited from it and the right approach to help small and marginal farmers is through FPOs at village level. 

About 86% of Indian farmers are small and marginal ( less than 2 ha land) operating roughly 47% of total operated area in the country.

Way forward to dispel fear in agitaing farmers:

1. Govt. should give in writing that the existing system of MSP and APMC will continue and will be strengthened.
2. Govt. should give in writing that the contract will be for produce and not for land.
3. farmers could take disputes to district court if they like.
4. Govt. can also commit to creating a fund of Rs 25,000 crores under the Price Stabilisation Scheme, which can be used to support market prices of specified commodities that take a dip of more than 10 per cent below MSP, akin to NAFED's or CCI's operation to support market price of pulses and oilseed or cotton respectively.
5. Announcing diversificaation package to the farmers.

credits Indian Express Article