Farming it out

The message is loud and clear. It is time the farmers start packing up. They are no longer required to produce food for the country.

First it was wheat imports. And now, the government moves a step ahead. It has offered to extend financial support to Indian companies that are willing to cultivate oilseeds and pulses in neighbouring countries like Myanmar and then import it into India.
The policy shift comes at a time when finance minister P Chidambaram has categorically stated that the country’s food requirement can be met by 20 per cent of the existing farmers. 

Farming is being gradually moved to foreign countries. The move spells a death-knell for millions of small and marginal farmers. Prime minister Manmohan Singh has time and again stressed on the need to shift large populations from the rural to the urban areas. Moving people out of agriculture and employing them in industry and service sectors is the official approach.

To make this possible, the government is first trying to make agriculture uneconomical to such an extent that farmers are forced to abandon farming and migrate.

Shifting cultivation of oilseeds and pulses, both being crops of marginal areas and abundantly grown in environmentally harsh dryland regions of the country, to neighbouring countries is one such flawed policy initiative.

Take the case of oilseeds. India has over the past few years emerged as one of the world’s largest importers of edible oils. But this does not mean that the oilseeds growers are in any way inefficient producers.

Between 1986-87 and 1994-95, they had recorded a spectacular increase in the production of oilseeds: from 11 million tonnes in 1986-87, to 22 million tonnes in 1994-95, thereby turning the country almost self-sufficient in edible oil production.

In 1984, the late Rajiv Gandhi had expressed concern at the growing import bill for edible oils. He couldn’t understand why India should be importing edible oils when the country’s oilseeds farmers can be made to produce more and thereby reduce the import bill.

So a technology mission for oilseeds was set up. It provided the right kind of technology for gearing up oilseeds production.

Within a few years, oilseed farmers turned the country almost self-sufficient in edible oil production. And then began the downslide.

Not because the farmers were unable to maintain the tempo of increased production but because the government deliberately destroyed the gains of the ‘yellow revolution’.

For reasons that remain unexplained, India began liberalising edible oil imports from 1994-95 onwards, as a result of which cheaper edible oil from Malaysia, Indonesia and the US flowed in.

Domestic production capacity dwindled as a result. The import duties are still being lowered periodically, making it uneconomical for the domestic industry to survive. With their livelihood lost to imports, more and more oilseed growers began to shift from oilseeds and some committed suicide.

Compared to an import of 1.02 million tonnes in 1997-98, India’s import of edible oils now averages about 5 million tonnes a year.

The import bill today stands at a staggering Rs9,416 crore. Instead, if the government had provided half the oilseeds import bill (Rs4,500 crore a year) to the farmers, millions of them in the rain-fed areas would have been pulled out of the crisis. 

The story of pulses is a little different. It is largely a case of neglect and apathy. Ever since the days of Green Revolution, agricultural scientists and policy makers have deliberately ignored pulses.

For 40 years now, production of the nutritious crop continues to hover between 13 and 16 million tonnes a year. And again, it is not the fault of farmers. Pulses with low productivity are a crop of the marginal lands and there is simply not enough incentive for the growers.

Australia had taken some 450 grams of pulses from India in the early 1970s and within a few years it had brought 9 million hectares under the crop. Similarly, Canada, which does not consume lentils, also brought a large area under pulses keeping the Indian market in focus. Both Australia and Canada are now the two major exporters of pulses to India.

Ironically, the policy to shift cultivation to neighbouring countries comes at a time when a Rs4,883-crore National Food Security Mission has been launched to increase production of wheat, rice, oilseeds and pulses.

Completely divergent policies in agriculture are being put in place probably to satisfy the interests of the lobbying groups. What happens to farmers and food security in the process is no longer a concern.

The writer is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst.