New farm laws, the path to destruction of our way of life

here’s the thing

America has for some years now been witnessing something most of us think happens only in India – a large number of farmer suicides. One study said that farmer suicides in 17 US states were at twice the rate of suicide among the general population. And it did not even take into account farmers’ suicides in some major agricultural states, such as Iowa. In a December 2018 report, The Guardian said that the US farmer suicide crisis is part of a larger, in fact global, farm crisis: One Australian farmer ends life every four days; one UK farmer takes his or her own life every week; in France, a farmer kills himself or herself every two days; more than 270,000 farmers have ended their lives in India since 1995.

Farmers’ incomes have been falling since the 1980s, a trend that has accelerated in the last decade. Since 2013, net farm income for US farmers has fallen by 50%. The median farm income for 2017 was estimated at minus $1,325. The Guardian report noted that “without parity in place (essentially a minimum price floor for farm products), most commodity prices remain below the cost of production.”

This is a global phenomenon, and a big part of the reason for the low prices for farm produce is the fact that big businesses have taken over every aspect of food production in most parts of the world – from the farm lands to what crops are grown and for whom, food processing, logistics, marketing and sales. The ‘food industry’ is a set of large vertically-integrated enterprises. When the Walmarts of the world go and contract with farmers – even the large farmers in America – they drive prices down to the barest minimum, and they have to in order to be able to offer you, the urban consumer, “everyday low prices” at their vast supermarkets.

In such a situation, Narendra Modi has brought in his farm laws, and wants us all to believe that farmers will get better prices from private buyers of farm produce outside the mandi system, where there is no minimum price floor (or Minimum Support Price, MSP).

The new farm laws may prove to be good or bad for farmers, that only time will tell. It has been the experience worldwide that once big businesses come into agriculture, farmers, who were until then subject only to local forces, suddenly find themselves at the mercy of food speculators and hoarders, who store up grain and wait for the prices to go up. That the so-called farm reforms have been accompanied by the scrapping of the Essential Commodities Act is not by accident.

But what the farm laws will certainly do is to destroy our way of life. Food, the way we grow it, process it, cook it, eat it, celebrate it, is at the very heart of our culture. The new farm laws are historic, as Modi has claimed they are, but not in the way he wants us to think they are. These laws will upend a civilisational mindset that has evolved over thousands of years.

The farm laws push Indian agriculture towards greater formalisation, financialisation and contractualisation. The effect of these will be, in one word, the industrialisation of our food. The Hindutva of razing mosques to build temples may be proceeding to the satisfaction of its proponents and their bhakts, but the Hindu lived way of life – the foundation of those temples and the temple that’s our nation as a whole – will be destroyed from the inside.

Why do I say that? Think about these: At one end of our food experience, we are not a people who are given to standard mathematical measures of size and weight in our foods. For us, food is art, food is variety. We love our chaats, for instance, because they taste different and tingle our taste buds differently in each bite. The magic is in the hands of the maker, not in a standard measure of ingredients – like in an industrialised burger – or temperature. It’s the difference between the improvisations in an Indian classical music performance and the strict adherence to musical notes in the Western tradition. The industrialisation of food will, by its very nature, kill that with its demands of standardisation and repeatability.

At the other end is the civilisational mentality behind the fact that the offerings we make to the gods is all about food. Even the annual ritual of remembrance of our dead ancestors is one of inviting them to accept an offering of food. Would we be willing to offer them items of food obtained from an industrialised system, with all that it entails? Why is it that we are unwilling to import dairy products from America? But with industrialisation, will we be able to resist them further? Modi’s may not be an evil suit-boot ki sarkar, but it certainly does not seem to have the wherewithal to think at this deeper civilisational level about our food system.

Even America today bemoans the industrialisation of food, especially after the realisation that its obesity crisis, and all its accompanying ills, is the child of that phenomenon.

Macaulay may have filled our heads with English in his attempt to make us “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” but he succeeded only partly. Modi’s farm laws will stuff a quintessentially alien way of life into our mouths – industrialised food. If language is the mind of a civilisation, food is its heart. The mind is partly colonised already, now Modi’s farm laws will ensure that the heart is, too.