At a time when the country is faced with a massive unemployment crisis, the decision to invite BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa – to cultivate pulses and oilseeds and ship it to India will only end up pushing more and more farmers out of agriculture.
This will also add on to the growing unemployment crisis. With a minus 0.43% drop in job creation in the April-June 2016 quarter, India continues to be in the grip of what is called jobless growth.
Renowned scientist M S Swaminathan had once remarked: ‘Importing food is like importing unemployment.’ I had thought this was a loud enough warning and that the government would at least be careful in not deliberately destroying the tremendous potential agriculture has in creating gainful employment.
But agriculture doesn’t seem to be an area of concern for the government. Only a few days back, addressing the BRICS farm ministers meeting in New Delhi, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said ministers from these countries have agreed to promote production of pulses and oilseeds in their respective countries after India asked for help in meeting its shortfall in domestic production.
This offers huge business opportunities to the BRICS countries, he added. Earlier, Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan had also acknowledged India’s efforts to woo Brazil into cultivation of pulses to meet the growing domestic demand. Since Brazil has not been growing pulses, India even offered to provide improved seeds of pulses varieties.
The move to outsource production of oilseeds and pulses to the BRICS countries comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had about two months ago signed an agreement with Mozambique from where an import of one lakh tonne of pulses will hopefully begin in two years time.
He had promised to procure every grain of the legume that farmers would cultivate in Mozambique and at a price which would not be lower than Minimum Support Price (MSP). India had also been searching for a possibility to grow pulses in Myanmar and some other African countries like Ethiopia, Uganda etc.
As if this is not enough, the government has slashed the import duty on potatoes from 30 to 10%; on wheat from 25 to 10%; on import of crude palm oil from 12.5 to 7.5% and on refined oil from 20 to 15%. Lowering the import duty means opening the floodgates to cheaper imports. Although reduction of import duties is justified in the name of taming food inflation, when cheaper imports come in, it is the small and marginal farmers who are forced to abandon agriculture.
The growing reliance on cheaper (and highly subsidised) imports of agricultural commodities, including pulses, edible oils, wheat, apple, rubber, coconut, silk, fish, a horde of fruit products and juices, are linked primarily to the policy imperative that aims to drive farmers out of agriculture. This approach follows a directive from the World Bank way back in 1990s wanting India to move 400 million people from the rural to the urban areas by 2015.
To achieve this, successive governments have been systematically squeezing public investments in agriculture and by denying farmers a fair and remunerative price kept farming impoverished. Cultivation of pulses is a classic example. Although the area under pulses cultivation has increased in kharif by a whopping 57%, and the production in 2016-17 is estimated to go up to a record 20 million tonnes, there still would be a shortfall by 3 to 4 million tonnes.
Although the government has hiked the MSP for some of the pulses, the fact remains that it is the volatility in prices that discourages farmers to take up pulses cultivation. If the government can provide an assurance to farmers in Mozambique and in Brazil that it will procure whatever is produced I fail to understand why the same assurance cannot be given to Indian farmers?
It is the lack of assured procurement that is the primary reason why farmers have been reluctant to take up pulses cultivation. Instead of helping the domestic farmers, the government is now outsourcing pulses production to Africa, Brazil and Russia.
WTO dispute
After India lost the WTO dispute with America over import of chicken legs, the poultry industry should be ready to take a hit. The dairy industry too is under pressure to open up to cheap imports from the European Union, Australia and New Zealand. In fact, some mainline economists have been openly vouching for it.
They even want the sluice gates to be lifted for vegetable and fruit imports, endorsing the demand that the European Union is making under the Indo-EU Free Trade Agreement. Already, apple imports are coming in from 44 countries.
While on the one hand India is expected to protect its food security concerns as well as farm livelihoods at the international negotiations, the autonomous liberalisation that goes unheeded at the domestic policy level is likely to inflict a much bigger blow to the future of Indian agriculture.
For a country which has 600 million people dependent upon agriculture, and given that urban employment opportunities are fast drying up, the challenge should be on how to make farming economically viable.
Contrary to the dominant economic thinking, agriculture alone has the potential to reboot the economy. Outsourcing food production to BRICS countries, and opening up to cheaper imports will not only destroy food self-sufficiency but once again make India to stand with a begging bowl.
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