A Field Amidst The Forces Of Market

Good monsoon or bad, glut or drought, boom or bust...it’s always fair weather for the range of middlemen who come between the farmer and consumer. An anatomy of the trade.

- Praghya Singh

One of fe axioms of logic is called the Law of the Excluded Middle. Something has to be eit­her true or false—there’s no middle ground. As we all know, economics works a bit differently. Facts can be fickle, data pliable, and different things true at the same time. A kilo of potato can be worth both 11 paise and many multiples of that. Of course, you need to look at both extremes of the food chain to see this. But there’s a zone of stable truth in all this, and for that you need to include the middle. Or personify it. We’re talking of the Middleman, the one with a 900 per cent mark-up.

That’s a bit simplistic, but see it like this. We could be in a raging hyper-inflation, with a kilo of onions going for Rs 150, and consumers getting teary-eyed enough to vote out governments. Or we could be in a crisis such as we see now, where farmers across half of India are so desperate that many consider death by pesticide (and some, by police bullet). But between consumer and producer, there’s a vast middle ground that’s relatively insulated from these cyclical shocks. This is the zone that soaks in the bulk of the mark-up—which could routinely be, say, a mammoth 900 per cent, as we shall see.

Start with Pawan Kumar on his 50-bigha, or 12-acre, farm in Tatarpur, near Hapur, western UP. Last year he sowed potato and, by February, reaped a rich harvest of 1,200 quintal. The prices were rather low at the time—touching Rs 6-8 a kilo, well below the comfort zone of Rs 10-12 he could have managed just before demonetisation. So he stuffed the entire produce into hundreds of 50-kilo sacks—altogether 2,200 such sacks—and packed them off into a cold storage. Then he waited for the summer’s demand spike. But in three months, he got burnt.