Reducing Farm Distress During A Pandemic

The government has an opportunity to help farmers who are battling declining demand and lower prices

- Himanshu

Social distancing and living under a lockdown appear to be the only effective ways of dealing with the pandemic. As India lacks the resources to significantly ramp up testing, imposing a lockdown was the government’s preferred option. Although there is limited evidence to suggest that this strategy may be working in containing the spread of the virus, its after-effects on thousands of migrant workers is already out in the open. Distrustful of the government’s promise of providing support, most migrant workers decided to walk back to their home States despite efforts by the state machinery to prevent them from moving out.

Impact on agricultural income

Migrants are not the only ones who are facing the after-effects of the lockdown. With the economy coming to a complete halt in most of the informal and formal enterprises in urban areas, the lockdown is also likely to affect the large population in rural areas, a majority of whom are dependent on agriculture. At a time when the rural economy was witnessing declining incomes, both for casual workers and self-employed workers, even before the pandemic broke out, this lockdown is only going to hurt the agricultural economy further. Even before the lockdown, rural wages were declining in real terms but there were hopes for agricultural incomes rising with food prices rising until January 2020. However, recent data on prices suggest that the trend is reversing with the decline in agricultural prices in most markets.