Corporate farming is the funda and all political parties subscribe to this view. More so in the case of the two anti-national parties viz Cong and BJP, the darlings of seths.
Subsidy for corporate sector at Rs 5 lakh cr in each union budget is welcome but not to food producers! Nation lives in spite of these corporate criminals. And why subsidy to this 5% tiny minority? In return, they hardly provide 7% employment.
There is not a single nation in the world which is not subsidising agriculture. It is a profitless and thankless job.
No free lunch please. You have to pay the price for nutritious and healthy food. Why should the farmers subsidise you and me when most of them are BPL? It is the state's responsibility to take care of those sections which cannot afford the market prices.
MSP is the sine qua non for survival of farmers. No ifs and buts; Wal-Marts are no solution as Uncle Sam, the birth place of Wal-Mart, spends the maximum public money in the form of subsidy to farmers even violating WTO norms.
US and EU knows nothing about agriculture. So also Nero's guests, I mean the pundits.
The state, industry, university and every other organised section should be subservient to farm sector. It is just the reverse now.
M K Gandhi warned those who dreamt in terms of industrialization of agriculture by large-scale application of steam and electricity that trading in soil fertility for the sake of quick returns would prove to be a disastrous, short-sighted policy. It would result in virtual depletion of the soil. Good earth called for the sweat of one's brow to yield the bread of life.
"People might criticize that approach as being slow and unprogressive. It did not hold out promise of dramatic results. Nevertheless, it held the key to the prosperity of both the soil and inhabitants living on it. Healthy, nourishing food was the alpha and omega of rural economy."
Sankara Narayanan
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 8:42 PM, Sanjay Pattnaik <skp1569@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sankar ji... good evening.Appreciate the data of production and per capita per day if we normalise the distribution over the present population. The production of 240 million tonnes must be inclusive of produces from technologically advanced and indigenous production. Can we extrapolate it and normalize the production to indigenous one and generate a data for a simple calculation what would be the shortfall / excess depending upon present land available in India ( let us take same Punjab as sample ). I am not sure whether we will have excess tonnage available for contingencies. However, the data will definitely help.With the present use of chemicals and no sustainability study and implementation in modern technology in agriculture the results are bringing in fiascoes in life itself. Technology is not bad, are we overdoing or over stressing it????I feel amenities, facilities and infrastructure is the strength of national economy and its recognition.Adequacy in MSP is must and should be controlled with no bias. Subsidy???? In my view subsidy is a catalyst for negative mindset, many times subsidy is taken into account before it is actually realized in kind or money, and there lies a big disconnect. Don't we think that in place of subsidy if incentive for good and no incentive for bad will work better for the disorganized sector to become more organised ???Regards,Sanjay
From: Sankara Narayanan <psn.1946@gmail.com>
To: bharat-chintan <bharat-chintan@googlegroups.com>; IHRO <IHRO@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: group <Chennai@yahoogroups.com>; samukhya@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, 1 December 2011 4:00 PM
Subject: [samukhya] Revamp Nero's guests
Friends,Gourav Vallabh, a professor of finance at XLRI Jamshedpur, has come out with an article
'Revamp agriculture sector' in The New Indian Express/ 01 Dec, 2011.
(http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/revamp-agriculture-sector/338741.html).
As is the norm, the professor concentrates on the requirements of consumers and rarely touches the needs of the hapless producers. The nation now produces 240million tons of food grains annually. It works out to 550gms of food grains per capita per day. Then where is the shortage? Production of pulses, milk, fruits and vegetables stagnates because of the non-remunerative prices. If only a part of the benefits passed on to the foreign producers is given to native farmers, they will deliver them. A litre of milk fetches a lesser price than a bottle of drinking water!"States like Punjab and Haryana, which have used 'modern' agricultural inputs to a large extent, currently have a crop yield of over 3,000 kg per hectare," observes the pundit. It would have been better if he had portrayed the current situation prevailing in Punjab. The state has 2% of the landscape and uses 18% of the nation's chemical fertilizer and pesticide use. Villages in many districts are up for sale due to the waterlessness. Punjabis are haunted by increasing health problems related to reproductive health, declining immune capacity, early ageing and cancer. Animals are unable to conceive and if they conceive they abort frequently or deliver prematurely. A few more gifts from the modern agriculture: Falling agriculture productivity, increase in external inputs and rising debts, growing disconnect between farmer and his land and farmers selling their farms. Manifold increase in usage of chemical fertilizers is making agriculture more expensive now. Not a single acre of land is free from loan. Punjab is going to be a state of sick people highly dependent on medicines.The writer never touches the basic necessities like adequate MSP, bank credit at low interest, insurance cover, health & education to farm families etc. No professor is worried about a farmer losing his crop due to natural calamities or the price crash after a bumper harvest. He is critical of the subsidies given to the farmers. But these pundits welcome the gigantic state subsidies given to the organized sectors year after year. Agriculture in America is sustained only with state subsidies. In OECD countries, a group comprising 30 richest countries, the situation is no different. In just one year in 2009, these industrialised countries provided a subsidy of Rs 12.60 lakh crore to agriculture. Despite this, every minute one farmer quits agriculture in Europe. But pundits are envious of the farm subsidies in India even while an Indian farmer enjoys a negative subsidy and already a quarter million farmers killed themselves feeding you and me.
Sankara Narayanan
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