Why Farmers Now Dread A Normal Monsoon

No major agrarian reform has happened in the 50 years since the Green Revolution. A normal monsoon cannot be assumed as the only incentive for farmers to sustain productivity. It's time India offered its food producers a new deal

- Richard Mahapatra

THERE IS no end to the woes of Indian farmers. They have not been cheered by the forecast of a second consecutive normal monsoon. Rather, they have taken to the streets, demanding a new deal from the government. Farmers in more than 12 states have been protesting for the past eight months, spanning two major crop seasons (see ‘Farm rut’ p20). But their demands offer a picture of contradiction. In southern states, which reel from the worst drought in over a century, farmers are demanding agricultural loan waiver and government assurance on better prices for their produce, while those in northern and western states are demanding the same despite a historic harvest. For the latter, this is the second normal monsoon after three years of deficit rainfall and travails of severe agrarian crisis. Yet, not a single day has passed in the recent past without farmers’ protests. The killing of six farmers by the police in Madhya Pradesh was just a brutal turn of events in this never-before-seen agrarian unrest.

Ideally, at this time farmers and governments should have been out in the street celebrating two milestones the country has achieved in recent times: a record food grain production in 2016-17 and the 50th year of the Green Revolution that propelled India to food self-sufficiency. Instead, farmers dumped potatoes, tomatoes, milk and other produce on the roads to protest the “historically lowº prices they got. The starkest example is onion, a vegetable whose high price has always triggered political storms. Arguably, this is for the first time that farmers and politicians are worried about the dipping price of onions. It is also a sign that there is something seriously wrong in the agriculture sector that we either do not care about or prefer to dismiss conveniently.