Millions of Indian farmers will be benefiting from the country’s new agribusiness laws, Salvatore Babones, an Australian-based scholar, has predicted in a statement at the weekend.
This has the advantage of increasing farm yield and reducing food prices, growing the industry and also improving household income of small-holder farmers in this agriculture-based country where over 50 percent of the population is dependent on agriculture.
Babones, an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, noted however that India’s rich farmers are holding up reforms designed to help the poor.
In an article for Foreign Policy, the scholar pointed out that Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, offered the farmers limited price supports but held the line on loan waivers.
The Prime Minister, instead, promised to implement structural reforms after the election, but the opposition Indian National Congress countered with a promise to “waive all farm loans” across the entire country–an expensive solution decried by economists as a populist magic wand.
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“Despite what activists and Western celebrities supporting the protests would have us believe, most of those who’ve been protesting the new laws since September aren’t drawn from the ranks of marginalized subsistence farmers driven by debt and despair to the edge of suicide,” the scholar added.
He stated that these farmers fear that the laws will help large agribusinesses, undermine the current state-directed system for buying farm produce and ultimately lead to the dismantling of the price support system on which they depend.
The protesters are demanding that the government repeal the reforms and guarantee the future of price supports.
He explained that “the overall goal of the reforms is to transform Indian agriculture from a locally managed rural economy into a modern national industry. They will allow small farmers to specialize in niche crops that can be marketed nationwide through large-scale wholesalers. They will also create new risks as farmers are transformed into entrepreneurs.”
Babones noted that when authoritative Western media outlets “uncritically buy into the poor farmers” narrative, the result is pure misinformation.
Articles suggesting that new farm laws threaten the livelihoods of as many as 800 million people must wrestle with the reality that in a country where 52 percent of the working population is engaged in agriculture, only 6 percent of the population actively disapproves of Modi’s performance in office.
