Introduction
In September 2020, Modi's government enacted three neoliberal farm bills. The bill immediately aroused the enthusiasm of Indian farmers, and the protests continued for more than a year. The migration of capital to the countryside, the debt trap, the industrialization of agriculture, neo-feudalism, neoliberalism and global capitalism are intertwined in this massive movement. In November 2021, Modi announced the repeal of the controversial law.
However, in recent days, tens of thousands of Indian farmers have marched to the capital to demand guaranteed crop prices, which is the resumption of the demonstration movement two years ago [1]. On February 13, police used tear gas, detained some farmers, and set up barricades at border checkpoints to prevent protesters from entering New Delhi. Authorities are determined to rein in new demonstrations to avoid a repeat of the 2021 protests, when thousands of farmers camped outside the capital for more than a year, experiencing a harsh winter and a devastating COVID-19 surge. The farmers arrived in tractors and trucks from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Punjab. They said the government had failed to meet some of the key demands they had made in previous protests, such as guaranteed crop prices, doubling farmers' incomes and loan forgiveness. Demanding a guaranteed minimum support price was at the heart of their protests.
In this article, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will take a look at how India's peasants came to where they are today, and how Indian agriculture emerged from the long night of colonialism through the creation of new states, the repression of imperialism, the expansion of the Green Revolution, and the liberalization frenzy that followed the further rise of pro-capitalist forces in the country.
This article was originally published on the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research website on August 14, 2021, and the link is attached at the end of the article.
Translation: Katyusha, Jiajia, Shouchou, Impurities, Cai Caizi, gdsoiss Yaowen
Proofreading | Ding Ding curls with smoke
Editor-in-charge|Ding Ding Hou Di
Background editing|Fairy tales
A farmer marches in a tractor procession at the GT Karnal Outer Ring Road, Delhi, on Republic Day, January 26, 2021
These are portraits of peasants, not "thugs, parasites, terrorists and separatists" as the mainstream media calls them, and they are not faceless thugs.
These are portraits of people with names, who dare to fight, who have aspirations, who have their own way of life.
These are portraits of a class.
These are portraits of historic protests.
The photographs in this article were taken by Vikas Thakur, a member of the art department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. During December 2020 and January 2021, Vikas was based in Delhi and visited two key protest sites on the border of Simhu and Tikri on a weekly basis. He used a Xiaomi Note 6 mobile phone to record the peasant rebellion at that time. "In the beginning, I just wanted to take some pictures for archival," Vikas said. These portraits of peasants, mainly from Haryana and Punjab, show the anger and joy of the peasants who braved the bitter cold to drive tractors, read poems in vans, and celebrate religious festivals. These portraits are portraits of peasants, portraits of a class, a picture of humanity in the midst of historic revolt.
Women farmers from Punjab and Haryana join a protest at the Tikri border in Delhi on January 24, 2021.
India is gripped by a second wave of the pandemic. The health system is paralyzed by more than 400,000 daily confirmed cases, hospital beds are saturated, and medical oxygen tanks are depleted. The soaring mortality rate has caused long queues at crematoriums. As the public spotlight turns to Delhi and other urban centers, silent deaths are spreading in rural northern India. People die of "fever" and "difficulty breathing," which are common words used to describe COVID19 symptoms. Since many people have not been tested for Covid, they are not included in the official death figures.
In September 2020, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), passed three bills that directly affect agriculture. The three bills were neither first consulted with farmers' organizations nor discussed in Parliament. The peasants immediately realized that these three bills would make them semi-serfs of big business in India. So they launched a wave of protests that continued for months despite the coronavirus outbreak.
Three Farm Bills
First: the Agricultural Trade and Commerce (Promotions and Services) Act. The Act provides for tax exemption for agricultural products traded outside government-controlled bazaars, which means that agricultural sellers will abandon regulated markets and move to free markets. In some states with regulated markets, such as Pubang, the bill has already had a direct impact.
Second: Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Price Guarantee Agreement and Agricultural Services Act 2020. The Act allows agribusiness to negotiate directly with farmers on specific crop prices, purchase quantities and crop types. The Act does not impose any restrictions on contracts between enterprises and farmers, and oral agreements are considered valid. At the same time, this law provides that all disputes related to such contracts will be excluded from the jurisdiction of civil courts, and farmers will be at the mercy of enterprises and bureaucrats.
Third: Essential Goods (Amendment) Act 2020. With this bill, the government removed four key crops: cereals, legumes, potatoes and onions, from the list of essential commodities. Under the Essential Commodities Act 1955, extensive hoarding and speculation on such crops is not permitted. The Essential Commodities Act of 1955 was designed to prevent food price inflation, but the 2020 amendments allowed businesses to access the grain exchange market and freely stock agricultural products, further exacerbating speculation in the market.
In November 2020, farmers and agricultural workers who participated in the protests first marched to Delhi. Blocked on the outskirts of Delhi, protesters set up protest camps along the national highway. The massive mobilization began in Punjab but soon spread to Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. Within weeks of the first wave of marches, waves of protests swept across India, from Maharashtra in western India to Bihar in eastern India and then to southern India. On 26 January 2021, Republic Day, farmers and agricultural workers stormed the nation's capital, New Delhi, making it clear that 1950 was also their day of remembrance.
The corporate-controlled media denigrated the peasants, attacking their personalities as thugs, parasites, terrorists and separatists who hindered India's development. But the peasants did not flinch, because they knew that they represented the entire class. For them, the struggle is a matter of survival: to accept the government's new policies is to strangle and destroy the livelihoods and lifestyles of the peasants. They understand that the passage of these three bills means that more control of India's agriculture is being ceded to big capitalists, such as the Ambani and Adani families. A series of farmers' organizations, from the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) to the Bharatiya Kisan Union, have reached out to farmers and agricultural workers across the country, forming a national coalition to protect farmers' rights and demanding that the three bills be repealed.
Although farmers are cautious about the coronavirus, the protests have not abated. They were determined to hold on because the BJP government refused to budge. Whatever the outcome, Indian agriculture is undoubtedly teetering on the brink of collapse, and the Modi government is hell-bent on pushing it off a cliff. The struggle of Indian peasants for survival will continue in the protracted agrarian crisis caused by three decades of neoliberal reforms. Modi's three agricultural laws will destroy the existing way of life of farmers and replace them with large-scale production and global supply chains controlled by corporations.
It is a chronic disease with a variety of symptoms: uncertainty in agricultural production, including low profits and even losses due to crop failures, high production debt ratios, unemployment, loss of land, and suicide. This article will trace the causes of this crisis, and it is not difficult to explain why, starting with the series of failures of the British colonial period and the new India after independence in 1947. The development of agriculture in India is like that of a giant turtle, moving slowly and stubbornly sticking to its course. In the last 75 years, its state does not seem to have changed, and even if new factors appear, the old ones remain. So, in order to understand why this turtle is now perched on the edge of a cliff, we have to trace its entire journey.
A farmer who participated in a protest in his truck at the Sinhu border in Delhi on December 5, 2020.
1. The past
When the British East India Company first took control of India in 1757, it began to dismantle and restructure its old economic relations so that the East India Company could extract tribute. Although different parts of India were treated differently, the main ways of plundering were the same. The land was transformed into marketable property and thus stripped from the peasants, and new intermediaries, such as the Zamindars, Indian landlords, charged the peasants exorbitant rents. In 1770, Bengal, the first part of India to be ruled by corporations, experienced a famine in which a third of its population died, while the British stood idly by. Although rural society was not a paradise before the reign of the East India Company, during the reign of the East India Company and the crown (after 1858), the countryside became a hell for the peasants.
Economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that from 1765 to 1938, the East India Company and the British crown extracted $45 trillion (at today's prices) in less than two centuries of colonial rule. In other words, this wealth is equivalent to 20 times India's current gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.5 trillion.
This severe loss of resources has left Indian farmers with little to eat to survive even in good harvest years. And in poor harvest years – when the rainy season is delayed – farmers can barely scrape together enough money to pay their taxes and then fall into a months-long famine. Due to the heavy tax burden, farmers are unable to save money and grain in good harvest years, so they become extremely vulnerable in the event of a poor harvest. When there is a drought or a crop failure, farmers have no buffer to avoid the ravages of famine.
Between 1850 and 1899, Indian peasants suffered 24 famines, one every two years. These famines killed millions: 10.3 million died in the famine of 1876-79 and 19 million in the famine of 1896-1902. William Digby, a journalist who had covered the 1876 famine in Madras, wrote in 1901: "When historians fifty years later evaluate the role played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century, the needless death of millions of Indians will be its main and most notorious 'great cause.'"
The memory of these famines – particularly the Bengal Famine of 1943 – led the new Indian government to abolish taxes on farmers, thus eliminating the possibility of falling into famine, allowing farmers to invest their income in the land to increase food production. In times of drought, the government ensures that farmers have access to food in case of famine. While hunger still exists, famine has been eradicated.
However, the Indian government, controlled by the big bourgeoisie and landlords, retained the agrarian economic hierarchy of the British. Unlike the Soviet Union and China, independent India did not break down the socio-economic hierarchy of the countryside. It was only under pressure from strong left-wing movements in some areas that the Government of India had passively implemented land reforms, and the redistribution of land was negligible, and restrictions on land holdings were not implemented because landlords controlled the politics of their territories. The tenancy legislation in different states had an impact as farmers in some states acquired ownership of the land they cultivated. However, land remained highly concentrated, while new feudal exploitation of small peasants and landless agricultural workers, mainly from oppressed castes, continued.
Instead of modernizing agriculture, India's ruling class undertook public-sector-led industrialization, including the construction of huge dams and irrigation projects. By the end of the 50s of the 20th century, the advancement of industrialization in India was hampered by unreformed agriculture. Agricultural raw materials are needed in the growing industrial sector, and the expanding industrial workforce has increased the demand for food. As a result, food shortages have become more frequent, leading to higher food prices, and inflationary pressures have slowed the pace of industrialization. At the same time, India's foreign exchange reserves are almost depleted, limiting the government's ability to import food.
As a result, in 1956 the Indian government requested the United States to provide food under the Food Assistance Act PL (480), and by the end of 1965, the United States had become a major exporter of grain to India. Under this program, India imports mainly wheat and pays it to the United States in Indian currency, which averts India from falling into a deeper foreign exchange crisis. The United States used the Food Aid Act (PL) (480) to pressure the Indian government to change its policy, especially the non-aligned foreign policy. A U.S. diplomat said that the grain shipped to India was of poor quality and could be used as poultry feed, but not for human consumption.
As a result of the Indo-Chinese War (1962) and the Indo-Pakistani War (1965), India's foreign exchange reserves fell significantly. The drought of 1965 reduced food production by 20 per cent in 1965-66. As a result, Indian politicians and diplomats asked Washington to increase grain deliveries, but the amount of food aid provided by the United States was far from what India needed, and the purpose was to pressure the Indian government to change two policies: first, to eliminate the import substitution model of economic development and open it to foreign investment and trade, and second, to weaken relations with the Soviet Union and stop criticizing the United States for waging the Vietnam War.
In 1966, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, she agreed to U.S. and World Bank conditions to lift import restrictions, revoke licenses for a range of industries, allow U.S. investment in fertilizer production, and devalue the Indian rupee by 57 percent. As a result, India's inflation has soared and it has plunged into a deeper economic crisis. The Indian government believed that the United States would provide food to India and that the World Bank would agree to the monetary package, but neither the United States nor the World Bank had fulfilled their commitments. This is a humiliation for the Indian government, a disguised recognition that it is still a "vassal" of imperialism.
In the midst of this crisis, India's elites realized that for a country as large as India, importing to feed its people would not work. This is not only an initiative to invite imperialism to intervene in India's sovereignty, but at the same time, it will lead to a serious domestic crisis by making the food security of millions of people in India continue to depend on supply and price fluctuations in the international market. This realization has forced the Indian government to look for internal ways to ensure food security and defuse the crisis.
A farmer attends a truck preparation rally on the Sinhu border in India on January 7, 2021
Second, there are two ways out of the crisis
The Indian government has two paths to defuse the crisis:
1. Land redistribution
The Indian government could have implemented land reform through land redistribution to hand over land to landless farmers. The over-concentration of land has limited the increase in agricultural productivity. The new feudal relations meant that the landlords could receive both high rents from the tenants and free labour from the tenants for their own personal use. Landlords used the rents they received from renting out their land to usury, rather than investing in land and production technology. Tenants who rented land also did not use their meager income to improve the land, and the high rent also depleted most of their income. The lack of investment in agriculture has hampered agricultural development. Land redistribution, as well as public investment in agricultural infrastructure, could have promoted socio-economic equity and economic growth, which in turn would have led to increased productivity and increased peasant consumption, which would have spurred rural industrialization.
2. Green Revolution
In the early 60s of the 20th century, the agronomist Norman Bolauge developed dwarf-stemmed, high-yielding wheat, which required chemical fertilizers and industrial irrigation conditions to grow. This new agricultural technology variety is much more productive than existing indigenous technologies. Therefore, a "green revolution" is a satisfactory option for the Indian ruling class, which they believe will increase agricultural productivity without land reform.
In fact, the combination of agrarian reform and Green Revolution technologies is not an either/or relationship, and the combination of the two can create higher agricultural growth rates and greater benefits for farmers. However, the Indian government has chosen to avoid reforming rural land relations and focus on the green revolution.
In 1961, 12 per cent of rural households owned more than 60 per cent of rural India's land. Since the government's goal is to increase agricultural production and promote food self-sufficiency in order to serve industrialization, it makes sense to say that the implementation of Green Revolution technologies primarily benefits the big capitalist farmers, since improving the livelihoods of the vast rural population and achieving socio-economic equity are not the primary considerations. The Government of India envisages that these benefits will gradually benefit other rural households as productivity increases and kulak incomes increase.
To help farmers, the government has strengthened its agronomic mechanisms by establishing a national agricultural research system with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) (established in 1929) and creating a large network of specialized research institutes, agricultural universities, extension centres and field research stations. These institutions provide technical support for the use of Green Revolution technologies.
New high-yielding varieties require large amounts of water as well as the application of pesticides. Because of this, Green Revolution technology can only be implemented in areas with canal irrigation systems, such as the coastal plains of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and southern India. While 70% of India's farmland is not using Green Revolution technology, these villages continue to maintain a subsistence agricultural model.
To extend the Green Revolution technology to the rest of the country, the government has invested heavily in surface irrigation. Between 1951 and 1991, the area irrigated by the canal more than doubled, from 8.3 million hectares to 17.5 million kilograms. Banks lend money to farmers to help them increase irrigation by drilling tube and borehole wells. Between 1961 and 1991, the area irrigated by tube wells increased from scratch to 14 million hectares. With the expansion of canal irrigation, even smallholder and poor farmers began to use the Green Revolution technology of combining high-yielding seeds and fertilizers.
The government agencies responsible for agricultural development are well aware that farmers cannot invest in productivity on their own. The scale of investment required in some core areas, such as irrigation, flood control, land development and the construction of market infrastructure, is considerable beyond the reach of individual farmers, and these tasks can only be done by the state. In addition, agriculture is accompanied by variability of natural factors (floods, droughts, hail and pests), which is exacerbated by the uncertainty of the capitalist system. Market prices are also volatile, especially since smallholder farmers are unable to negotiate lower input costs and influence the market price of their products. State support is needed for access to credit, subsidies for inputs, market infrastructure, and a system of paid prices to sustain final output. The State, through its institutional mechanisms, has taken on a number of risks that have enabled the implementation of agricultural development.
These systems were further developed in the sixties of the twentieth century and gradually integrated into the agricultural production process and rural life. Although these institutional instruments have benefited large farmers, they have also supported the entire rural economy and even provided some relief to landless agricultural workers. No government was able to completely dismantle these institutions until 1991, when India's economy began to liberalize, a testament to the resilience of the institutions themselves. Modi's three-part agriculture law is a direct attempt to eradicate these institutional arrangements. Therefore, the struggle of the peasants was a political struggle, not only to protect these institutional tools, but also to protect their way of life.
3. Credit and prices
India's most important economic policy after independence was the nationalization of banks in 1969, a decision that played an important role in providing credit support for agricultural development. Prior to nationalisation, India's banking system was dominated by private banks and the government-controlled State Bank of India (SBI). The offices of these private banks are located in urban centres and do not operate in rural areas.
A group of farmer couples spend a winter night in their van at the Delhi border on December 28, 2020
The board of directors of the bank is made up of industrialists, whose nature is to lend money to the industrial sector, not to the agricultural sector. In 1961, 70 per cent of the labour force was employed in the agricultural sector, which generated 40 per cent of GDP but received only 2 per cent of commercial bank loans. Commercial banks refused to heed the government's call to lend to farmers, because in the eyes of commercial banks, loans to rural areas could never achieve the same rate of return as industrial and commercial loans. As a result of the failure of these banks to invest in the agricultural sector, the State nationalized them in 1969, took over 14 private banks, and placed 80 per cent of banking operations under public control.
The Government has instructed the newly established public banks to allocate at least 18 per cent of their credit to agriculture. As a result, these public banks began to set up branches in rural areas, mainly in areas where Green Revolution technologies were implemented.
After the nationalization of the banks, millions of peasants were able to obtain loans from institutions other than rural moneylenders for the first time, which greatly facilitated investment in agriculture. Banks use their profits from industrial and trade credit to lend low-interest loans to the agricultural sector in the form of cross-subsidies. Farmers received loans not only for seasonal crops, but also for long-term loans for the purchase of agricultural machinery such as tractors and sprayers. Although credit is also available to small landowners, loans are granted according to the size of the land and are therefore more beneficial to farmers who own more land. At the same time, the government sells subsidized agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilizers, and it also subsidizes private fertilizer manufacturers to compensate for the reduced sales prices. In general, the nationalization of banks accelerated the development of agriculture.
In 1960, the government established the Minimum Support Price (MSP) scheme, and five years later, the government established the Food Corporation of India. The aim of the Lowest Price and Food Company is to solve a fundamental dilemma in the agricultural sector: if food prices are too low, farmers will suffer, but if food prices are too high, workers will suffer. The minimum price for any crop is fixed so that the price of the crop that farmers receive covers the cost of their cultivation and provides farmers with a reasonable income.
Food companies, on the other hand, procure food from farmers who are guaranteed minimum prices and provide it to workers at a reasonable price. The entire mechanism is subsidized by the government, thus balancing the competition between them. Through the Public Distribution System, the government sells the food it procures to workers and farmers. Excess grain is stored in the warehouses of food companies as a buffer in the event of successive poor harvests, and is used in the market as a counter-cyclical measure to protect the working class from high food inflation.
However, not all produce grown by farmers is purchased by food companies. The rest is sold to traders, who have an advantage over individual farmers because traders are able to lower bids, delay payments, and manipulate scales to defraud farmers. In the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, Indian states set up Agricultural Marketing Boards (APMCs) to regulate the purchase and sale of bazaars, establish warehousing infrastructure in bazaars, and regulate the behavior of traders. Food companies buy grain from warehouses managed by farmers' marketing clubs.
However, due to the narrowness of the policy objectives themselves, the effectiveness of the government's green revolution and rural credit policies is limited. These new technologies are mainly beneficial to states with irrigation guarantees, which means they can access more agricultural credit. Most of the food purchased through the lowest prices comes from only the following regions: such as Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Although the list of lowest prices lists only 23 agricultural products, such as cereals and legumes, rice and wheat are the most commonly purchased. The unfairness of this decision means that farmers who grow other crops in semi-arid areas do not receive full government support. This preference has also been followed by the establishment of the Agricultural Marketing Association, which has enabled the three regions of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh to enjoy better market infrastructure. In Punjab, there is a regulated market for every 116 square kilometres, but in Andhra Pradesh, a single bazaar serves villages within 853 square kilometres. The proximity of the market has a significant impact on small and poor farmers, as closer markets mean lower transportation costs.
Fourth, the rigidity of classes
Soon after the Green Revolution, India's Home Ministry began to worry about the social and political consequences of rising inequality in rural areas. Their fears are as common as the Minister of the Interior, Y.B. Tswantrau Chavan. Chavan, as Chavan said, could well have turned into a red revolution. The report produced by Chavan's department, The Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions (1969), provides a clear assessment of the problem from a bourgeois perspective: first, the new strategy of the Green Revolution is largely based on outdated agrarian social structures. Nor did the interests of the so-called agrarian classes reach a consensus on a set of generally accepted social and economic goals. Second, the primary objective of new technologies and strategies is production, and the secondary objective is social demand, which creates a situation in which factors of inequality, instability and instability are becoming more prominent and have the potential to exacerbate tensions.
It was this policy that exacerbated the class divisions in the countryside and created a job that the Ministry of the Interior did not want to face, namely dealing with rural rebellions. The 1969 Home Office report wrote that the intricate social divisions of rural India would have the potential to provide the soil for peasant organization, leading to an outright outbreak of social conflict. Debt traps must be used to demoralize the peasants and the kulak class's grip on the countryside must be strengthened to prevent the outbreak of conflict.
Affluent farmers are better able to make use of the institutional mechanisms established by the state. The system was established to provide more bank credit to those who own more land and greater advantages in terms of minimum support prices and fertilizer subsidy policies. Since the government was more interested in increasing agricultural productivity than improving inequality in rural India, these policies ultimately benefited the kulaks.
A farmer who participated in an initial protest sits in his van reading the works of Punjabi revolutionary poet Pash on the Delisinhu border on December 10, 2020.
Since the kulaks monopolized the credit of the government banks, the small and poor peasants had to continue to seek private loans. According to the latest Rural Household Situation Assessment Survey, 80 per cent of the loans of the rich peasants come from institutional loans, while only 50 per cent of the loans of the poor peasants come from institutional loans. Half of the credit of the poor peasants comes from non-institutional loans, such as usurers; The situation remains bleak for agricultural workers, who borrow 80 per cent of their loans from the private sector.
Many landless and poor peasants had to become tenants or lease land from other families (usually non-working landlords) in order to gain access to the land. Official figures underestimate the size of tenant farmers in India. Surveys show that tenant farmers make up a large proportion of farming households. For example, in some coastal areas of Andhra Pradesh, as many as 70 to 80 per cent of farmers are sharecroppers, and in Bihar, 26 per cent of cultivators are sharecroppers. Poor peasants often increase their land holdings by entering into lease contracts, which they exploit their family labour.
Lease contracts are mostly informal verbal agreements, as landowners (non-working landlords) want to circumvent the rights of tenant farmers to cultivate the land that are granted by law. Without ownership, landless peasants – like poor peasants – have no access to institutional support, whether for crop loans or long-term loans. In order to obtain credit, these tenant farmers sought loans from landlords, kulaks, private moneylenders, and merchants. Interest rates are high, and tenants are often forced to provide non-financial returns, such as free labor. When crops fail, farmers fall into a deeper debt trap. After paying rent, the incomes of small tenant farmers and poor peasants are so low that any shock, including medical bills or crop failures, will force them to take informal loans, further deepening the control of local creditors over their land and labor. In the absence of a lease contract, a sharecropper cannot sell to the lowest price system. Not only cannot, but they are often forced to sell their crops to traders at prices well below the minimum price.
These problems existed before India began to liberalize in 1991, before the entire credit and price system began to be disrupted.
5. Liberalization and the agrarian crisis
In 1990-1991, the Indian government faced a severe foreign exchange crisis. Foreign exchange reserves fell to $1.2 billion, barely enough to cover two weeks' worth of imports. The Indian government airlifted 47 tonnes of gold to London as security for a $400 million short-term loan from the London Bank. India has turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help. In November 1991, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh said: "Negotiations with the IMF are difficult because the world has changed. India is not immune. India must survive and thrive in a world where we cannot change our image. Economic relations are power relations. We don't live in a morality drama. ”
As some economists have pointed out, there are still other options for India to emerge from the crisis. However, the Indian government has chosen to accept loans from the IMF and the World Bank on harsh terms. Under these conditions, India was forced to implement neoliberal reforms within the framework of structural adjustment programmes, which were enthusiastically supported by the metropolis and Indian capital. This reform agenda means that government policies will no longer seek to protect the Indian people from the worst effects of unregulated capitalism.
The government began to deregulate the banking sector by licensing new private banks, which then competed with public banks. This has had a negative impact on the agricultural system. At the time, liberalization spokesmen advocated the (often unsubstantiated view) that the banking sector had suffered as a result of the imposition of agricultural credit quotas, the capping of interest rates at ABC and the establishment of a network of rural bank branches. Public banks have found it difficult to compete with new private banks and have therefore cut their rural sector. Credit that would otherwise be used for agriculture has gone elsewhere, including the slow-growing financial sector. Agricultural credit has shrunk, and farmers have once again had to rely on exploitative informal sources of credit.
On 1 January 1995, India joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), thereby easing quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports. Indian farmers – many working on only a few acres of land – are forced to compete with multinational agribusinesses and farmers in advanced industrial countries, which operate thousands of acres of land and receive huge subsidies from their governments.
The government has not only opened the door to agricultural imports, but has also squeezed Indian farmers by cutting subsidies. For example, the price of fertilizer has risen, which means that the cost of planting has increased. Private companies use large-scale public relations campaigns to advertise crop yields and profits, inducing farmers to buy expensive seeds and pesticides, driving up the cost of planting, with little commensurate increase in yields. This is evident in cotton cultivation in the semi-arid areas of the Deccan Plateau, where government incentives for farmers to grow cotton for export have led to the sale of substandard seeds and the misuse of pesticides, which have not protected farmers from successive poor harvests caused by pests. Years of falling international cotton prices have triggered a severe agricultural crisis in the region, and farmer suicide rates have risen. In addition, public investment in rural areas has shrunk sharply. After 1991, surface irrigation was no longer expanded. Due to the lack of repairs and dredging, the canal cover has been reduced by 1 million acres. As a result, in the two periods 1993-1994 and 2004-2005, peasant incomes increased by only 1.96 per cent per year.
Women decorate the Sikh building, Palki Shahib, on the Delisinhu border on December 31, 2020.
Rising costs, low prices on the world market, and crop failures have combined to trigger a persistent agricultural crisis. Since 1991, the government has scaled back food subsidies to consumers, negatively impacting food security for millions of Indians. Between 1995 and 2001, the number of undernourished people in India increased by nearly 20 million. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's State of Food Insecurity in the World (2003), 214 million of the world's 842 million undernourished people at the time, or a full quarter, lived in India. In the same decade, at least 250,000 farmers lost hope of survival due to financial debt and eventually committed suicide.
However, the agricultural crisis does not affect society as a whole, it mainly affects small and poor farmers. Kulaks, who were often engaged in a variety of operations such as horticulture and aquaculture, were able to cushion the crisis by taking advantage of international markets in these key industries. They have ample money to invest and the ability to absorb losses in a bad year. Liberalization was not as ruthless to large farmers as it was to other members of agrarian society.
After 1991, the mares of liberalization began to affect field and factory workers, the unemployed and slum dwellers, and riots and revolts ensued quickly. These include the grief of peasant suicide, mass protests against the encroachment of commons (such as the social movement against the encroachment of betel nut plantations by the foreign-owned Pohang Steel Company in Odisha, India), and the farmland protection movement against land grabbing in the special economic zone in the village of Bhatta Parsaul. Every state in India has experienced turmoil as the standard of living of many has deteriorated and employment prospects remain stagnant.
In order to create value for the industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie and the transnational corporations and national enterprises associated with them, people's lives have been shattered. The cost of social development weighs heavily on indigenous communities and Dalits (oppressed castes), whose land is the material basis on which capitalist exploitation can begin, and Dalits (oppressed castes), who work in the fields under unimaginable existential pressures. But in today's India, the brutality of everyday life is hardly translated into politics. The lack of social security, dangerous temporary work, fragmented communities, long-distance migration and long daily commutes make it difficult to organize political action, but at the same time they further increase the urgency of political action.
6. Temporary reprie
In 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by the Congress Party, won parliamentary elections and formed a government. The United Progressive Alliance was supported in parliament by left-wing parties, which advocated a break with the neoliberal reform agenda and demanded that the government support agricultural producers, and the two sides reached an agreement on this. These agreements are contained in the Governance Minimum Framework, which outlines the objectives of the coalition Government. One of the six basic principles of the programme explicitly states that the Government should "improve the welfare and well-being of farmers, agricultural labourers and workers, especially those from the informal sector, and ensure a secure future for their families in all respects".
Agricultural credit disbursement and rural public investment have improved. In 2005, the Government launched the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), which promises to include a 100-day job for all agricultural workers, funding for rural infrastructure improvements, and raising the water table in drought-prone areas through watershed development projects. These projects have spurred agricultural expansion, particularly the production of cash crops such as cotton. Farmers diversify their operations to meet the needs of the urban middle class by developing horticultural crops and poultry farming. This series of policies by the Indian government has helped to keep global agricultural prices high, domestic GDP to maintain an annual growth rate of 7 to 8 percent, and public and private investment to grow. Between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, farmers' incomes grew by 7.6 percent per year, compared with 1.96 percent in previous years.
But, despite pressure from the left, the United Alliance for Progress government has turned to neoliberalism in many areas, allowing the Indian bourgeoisie to flourish. This shift was particularly evident during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (2009–2014), when it was in power no longer dependent on left-wing support. During this period, the government further deregulated the fertilizer industry, relaxed land leases, opened up agricultural futures trading, and initiated agricultural market-oriented reforms. In other words, in its second term, the United Alliance for Progress paved the way for Modi's overall acceleration of neoliberalism.
India's big capital, in close collusion with the political class, has used privatization policies to seize public resources (including lucrative public sector assets), relocated villages and forest tribes to gain vast tracts of land, controlled the country's mineral resources, and undermined public banks through a series of frauds, non-payment and other means. This process – including privatization, trade liberalization, and deflationary policies – is what Prabhat Patnaik calls "appropriation accumulation," the action of capital to seize all spheres of human life with the full support of the state. Since 2008, industrialist Mukesh Ambani has been on the Forbes billionaires list every year, and in 2008, his net worth reached $20.8 billion, making him soon the richest person outside of Europe and North America. And when the coalition government was re-elected in 2009 and ruled without left-wing support, the stock market stopped falling and recovered, boosting Ambani's company by $12 million in five days.
7. Modi's plague
In 2011, India's big capitalists, including Mukesh Ambani, attended a secret meeting called Vibrant Gujarat, at which they praised the state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, set aside allegations of Muslim genocide in 2002 and responded positively to his premiership's statement. Hungry for neoliberal reforms, these capitalists want to use Modi to push their demands for "labour market liberalization" (e.g. the elimination of trade unions) and "land reform". Three years later, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won parliamentary elections and became India's prime minister.
As soon as the Modi government came to power, it had to deal with the impact of a collapse in international prices for export crops such as cotton, two years of drought and a slowdown in agricultural growth. But instead of addressing the crisis that has already occurred, the Modi government has added three other economic disasters to India:
First, deflation (2016). Modi has taken more than 80 percent of his currency out of circulation without warning, forcing demand to shrink, including for agricultural products. When farmers found that the cash in their hands was worthless, they had to throw away milk and vegetables.
Second, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) (2017). The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) has cut into the already meagre profits of small traders and retailers. As a result, the agricultural market was affected, and monopolies expanded and replaced diversified markets.
Third, the outbreak of the pandemic (2020–2021). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has failed to respond effectively to the rapid spread of the pandemic. The sudden lockdown in March 2020 forced millions of migrant workers to leave their urban jobs and return to rural and small towns. When infection and mortality rates rise, demand for agricultural products declines;
At the very beginning of the coronavirus crisis, the government took the opportunity to introduce three farm bills to parliament in June 2020, which were passed and signed into law in September 2020 without parliamentary debate. These three laws give the green light for giant agricultural companies to enter the agricultural sector. While the government claims that these laws will give farmers the best market prices, in fact they are putting smallholders in direct competition with agribusinesses that control market information and enjoy the advantage of scale.
A farmer from Haryana protests at the Tikri border in Delhi on December 12, 2020.
These three farm bills further weaken the government's limited regulation of the agricultural market. These existing market regulations, which have been suppressed since 1991, will eventually die out under the onslaught of new policies.
Farmers immediately recognized that the three bills meant that the giant corporations would take over the agricultural sector. In India, farmers already earn very little from the market for their crops: they earn less than half the retail price for rice, and only 35% of the retail price for onions and potatoes. Once agribusiness controls agricultural trade, smallholder incomes are bound to shrink further.
In addition, farmers are well aware that as long as regulated markets are closed, the next step for the government will be to reduce the share of cereals purchased, and may even eliminate the minimum support price policy (MSP). The Indian government has said that instead of providing fertilizer subsidies, it would provide cash transfers to farmers. Farmers point out that the cash subsidies provided by the government are likely to not keep pace with inflation and may eventually be eliminated. Once subsidies are stopped, farmers will face high production costs, and the removal of the minimum support price will also mean that farmers will be isolated in the volatile agricultural market.
A farmer from Punjab marches in a parade of tractors on the GT Karnal Outer Ring Road in Delhi on January 26, 2021, Republic Day, India.
The arguments defending all three bills argue that fertilizer subsidies and government purchases of basic commodities contribute to the misuse of fertilizers, which in turn leads to soil degradation and overdraft of groundwater resources (especially the environmental impact of rice and wheat cultivation expansion). But this defense is not enough to prove that big business cares about soil health or excessive water use. The best way to deal with these problems is not to abolish the existing system, but to improve it. For example, farmers have been calling on the government to expand crop purchases to increase yields of crops other than rice and wheat. If this initiative is implemented, it will extend the government procurement mechanism to areas that have not been affected by the Green Revolution and ensure a more balanced crop cultivation pattern. Agricultural inputs can be optimized by improving agricultural extension services and providing technical assistance to farmers. Reliance on agrochemical companies' recommendations on fertilizers and pesticides does not optimize the use of chemicals. Strengthened public extension services can significantly reduce the overuse of harsh agrochemicals.
Clearly, the problem with Indian agriculture is not that there is too much institutional support, but that the support institutions are inadequate and unevenly deployed, and that these institutions themselves are inherently incapable of responding to the inherent inequalities in rural society. There is no evidence that agribusiness develops infrastructure, strengthens agricultural markets, or provides technical support to farmers. The peasants are well aware of this.
The farmers' protest movement, which began in October 2020, is a clear picture of India's farmers' attitude towards the domestic agricultural crisis and the three bills that have deepened it. All the measures taken by the government, including attempts to provoke contradictions among the protesters in a religious way, failed to break the unity of the peasants. A new generation of Indian farmers has learned how to resist, and they are ready to let the protest sweep across the country.
任教于旁遮普邦的阿姆利泽纳那克大学（Guru Nanak Dev University）的Sarbjot Singh Behl教授为此创作了题为“农人颂”（Tale of a Farmer）的诗歌一篇，以反映农民的斗争精神。
Ode to the Peasants
Cutting seeds and heirlooms, crops do not stop
But I swear one
Exchange it for a piece of fertile land
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
My sweat turned to the smell of earth
My chest pounded in the wind and rain
No matter the middle of winter, no matter the summer night
There is no need to fear, no matter how to retreat
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
At four o'clock, the blessings were returned, and the powerful offered cruelty
A statue that mocks the soul dwelling
Just like that, the grass mustard is ten thousand
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
The firmament is firm, and the four fields are mangs
I once remembered the fertile fields vertically and horizontally, and the wheat waves turned fragrant
Now I am sad
There are a few thin fields, and the debts are getting worse
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
The wheat is covered with long, and the seedlings are full of eyes
Even though it has been fruitful
Hope is also crushed by the market
And just like that, I went my way
Until death comes
Help me free myself
The child is hungry
The body is tired
The soul is tired
Dreams are like scattered rubble
Shattered
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
The baht is gone, leaving the body and mind alone
I will still get rid of this hunger
Serve this greed
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
The ears of wheat in the cart are as bright as gold
Bustling businessmen don't care
Heavily indebted, full of blood and tears
There is a block, and it is difficult to calm down
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone
I go my way
But where is the way out?
The gallows is rising
The peasants wanted a revolution
The hoe sickle used to be a farm tool
Nowadays it's weapons
And just like that, I went my way
Until life is gone.
On January 26, 2021, a tractor broke through a roadblock on Karnal Highway into Delhi, sparking clashes between protesters and police.
—END—
Resources:
[1] New Time, 2024-02-14, Why Thousands of Indian Farmers Protest Again,
https://browser.qq.com/mobile/news?doc_id=23065cbda1588752&s1=111&s2=11102&s3=11102010&ch=2
原标题：The Farmers’Revolt in India
Original link:
https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-41-india-agriculture/