Farm laws are women’s issues, too

It’s been two months since I met Kalyani. She was sitting with six other women on the footpath in front of the Town Hall in Tumkur. They were bargaining with the masala groundnut seller -- a typical Bengaluru belt scene – even as Kalyani untangled the cable of the microphone she was holding. Their union, the Akhila Bharatiya Mahila Samskrutika Sanghatane, was there to express solidarity with the farmers’ community.

Talking about the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020 (ECA), Kalyani said that the removal of cereals, pulses, potatoes and onions among others from the purview of the law, would further worsen the already poor nutrition levels among rural women. “The women in poor rural families do not have a good share of food. They usually end up eating leftovers. Now, this amendment will cause a price hike in the basic ingredients of our staple diets. We won’t be able to afford them, and that will impact our nutrition levels,” she explained. The government should listen to the voices of women, too, on the matter of food and nutrition. But will it?

The amended ECA states that the central government may regulate the list of essential commodities under extraordinary circumstances. Surprisingly, having brought in the amendment in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, the pandemic does not constitute an extraordinary circumstance for it!

The inexpensive availability of staple crops has, over the years, reduced the problem of hunger. Removing them from the essential commodities list will mean that they would not be available for the poor under the Public Distribution System (PDS) once the market forces kick in. That means, increased hunger and malnutrition, especially among rural women.

The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020 claims to create an efficient, transparent and barrier-free framework for electronic trading of farmers’ produce. This Act is hailed for its potential to break through physical boundaries of a market and allow a farmer to directly sell her produce, without middlemen in the picture. It looks neat on paper. Here is the ground reality in three numbers: According to the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch, 74% of the rural female workforce is in agriculture. The National Council of Applied Economic Research says that women constitute over 42% of the total agricultural labour force in India. And according to a global survey, 15% of women in India own smartphones, mostly in the cities.

The digital divide is real, and gender-based digital divide is even more so. A woman who could be the landowner or a sharecropper without the privilege of owing a smartphone or having access to electronic trading has to depend on a third party for transactions. Though this is not an exclusive challenge created by the new Act, it still does not address it. If it deepens the existing gender disparity, it cannot be called ‘reform’. It will force women to drop out of the labour force, or worse, they will have to continue what they are doing without a voice.

The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020 provides a framework for contract farming agreements. Going back to the statistics, 73.2% of rural women workers are farmers but only 12.8% of them own land.

The Act will mean that women farm labourers will have no agency whatsoever. But it also worsens the structure by keeping the women away from decision-making positions. The quality, time, standard, price, etc., of the produce will be decided by a corporate giant and by the landowner. Women who are farm labourers, tenant farmers or sharecroppers, will have no say in this agreement.

In the rare scenario where the woman is the landowner, she still won’t have enough agency to fight the middlemen or the bureaucracy in case of force majeure or disputes. Any dispute arising from the agreement must be resolved in a conciliation board set up by the sub-divisional magistrate. A small landowner fighting a group of corporate and bureaucratic entities, which are mostly filled with men – won’t that be overwhelming?

Needless to say, that there’s no provision of a conciliation board that a woman farm labourer can go to if she’s not getting her share or money. Landowners’ burden and risk is inevitably transferred to the women labourer.

In addition to these three Acts, the Karnataka Assembly passed a land ‘reform’ Act in the midst of the pandemic. Talking about the same, Nalini Gowda of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) said it would damage the entire rural structure. “Small and medium farmers will be pressured to give away their lands to IT/privileged professionals who want to ‘try’ farming. Debt, alcoholism and other rural realities will eat away whatever money farmers get by selling land. Men will end up migrating, and rural women will be stuck with the burden of running their families,” she feared.

(The writer is a Communications Studies and Electronic Media graduate)