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With special reference to Punjab State, India.
The book argues that an increasing corporatisation of agriculture in India that is enabled by its neoliberal State, in the name of ‘development’, is contributing towards deepening of inequality in the rural India. It says that Contract Farming (CF) acts as a conduit that enables the coming together of myriad production relations (mercantile, finance, productive) to sell agri-commodities to the capitalist peasant. It is an accumulation strategy that brings together various factions of domestic and foreign capital together. It shows that CF as an accumulation strategy is enabled by an active interventionist state and this neoliberal Indian state mediates the relation between the agri-capital and Indian peasantry. The book further analyzes contract farming as a part of the totality of the capitalist mode of production in context of developing countries with a large agrarian base--- asking three fundamental questions – what is CF, how and why is it done and what are the implications of it.
The book covers Indian agricultural development from the colonial to the present period. It examines how ruling class political ideology determined the agricultural policies from colonial rule. It considers both quantitative and qualitative aspects in all periods: colonial period to pre-green revolution phase, post-green revolution phase (early and late stages) and post-globalisation phase after 1991. India has achieved the ability to maintain food security, through enough food grain buffer stocks to meet the enormous public distribution system. But, with India’s entry into WTO in 1994, euphoria has been created among all types of farmers to adopt commercial crops like cotton cost-intensive inputs. Even food grain crops are grown through use of costly irrigation and chemicalised inputs. But they lacked remunerative prices, and so farmers began to commit suicides, which crossed 3.5 lakh. Government of India attributed this agrarian crisis to the technology fatigue and gave scope for second green revolution (GR-II). GR-I was achieved by public sector enterprise, whereas the GR-II as gene revolution is a result of private sector enterprise/MNCs. There is fear that opening up of the sector may lead to handover of the family farms to big agri-multinationals. GOI’s proposal to double farmers’ income by 2022 is feasible only when the problems, being faced by small, marginal and tenant farmers, are addressed in agricultural marketing, credit and extension services. Now, it is time to go for suitable forms of cooperative/collective agriculture, as 85 percent of total cultivators are the small and marginal farmers. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
This book evaluates the relevance of classical debates on agrarian transition and extends the horizon of contemporary debates in the Indian context, linking national trends with regional experiences. It identifies new dynamics in agrarian political economy and presents a comprehensive account of diverse aspects of capitalist transition both at theoretical and empirical levels. The essays discuss several neglected domains in agricultural economics such as discursive dimensions of agrarian relations and limitations of stereotypical binaries between capital and non-capital, rural and urban sectors, agriculture and industry, and accumulation and subsistence. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of agriculture, economics, political economy, sociology, rural development and development studies.
Wracked by poverty, famine, and drought, Africa is typically represented as agriculturally stagnant, backward, and crisis-prone. Living Under Contract, however, highlights the dynamic, changing character of sub-Saharan agrarian systems by focusing on contract farming. A relatively new and increasingly widespread way of organizing peasant agriculture, contract farming promotes production of a wide variety of crops--from flowers to cocoa, from fresh vegetables to rice--under contract to agribusinesses, exporters, and processers. The proliferation of African growers producing under contract is in fact part of broader changes in the global agro-food system. In this examination of agricultural restructuring and its effect upon various African societies, editors Peter Little and Michael Watts bring together anthropologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists to explore the origins, forms, and consequences of contract production in several African countries, particularly Kenya, the Gambia, Zimbabwe, and the Ivory Coast. Documenting how contract production links farmers, agribusiness, and the state, the contributors examine problematic aspects of this method of agrarian reform. Their case studies, based on long-term field work and analysis on the village and household level, chart the complex effects of contract production on the organization of work and the labor process, rural inequality, gender relations, labor markets, local accumulation strategies, and regional development. Living Under Contract reveals that contract farming represents a distinctive form in which African growers are incorporated into national and world markets. Contract production, which has been a central feature of the agricultural landscape in the advanced capitalist states, is an emerging strategy for "capturing peasants" and for confronting the agrarian question in the late twentieth century.
Agricultural policy reform is one of the major challenges facing India today. Such reform is required to reduce poverty through faster agricultural growth and to promote more sustainable use of natural resources while ensuring food security. Subsidy policies that promote the use of fertilizer and of electricity for groundwater irrigation are in particular need of reform. While subsidies for these two inputs played a crucial role in achieving India's Green Revolution, they have been criticized during the past decade for benefitting large-scale farmers more than smallholders, placing a fiscal burden on the state, and having negative environmental effects. By analyzing the evolution of these input subsidy policies and examining the political processes involved in efforts to reform them, this study throws new light on the factors that have so far prevented a move toward more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable agricultural input policies in India. The authors show that electoral politics, institutional factors, and policy paradigms or belief systems all play an important role in blocking reform. They identify several policy reform options as well as political strategies that can overcome past obstacles to reform. Community-based policy solutions, new coalitions for policy reform, fresh approaches to the policy debate, innovative and consensus-oriented forms of deliberation, and effective use of research-based knowledge can all make positive contributions to Indian policy reform. The analyses and proposals presented in this study will be a valuable resource for policymakers and stakeholders concerned with the politics of agricultural development.
From the John Holmes Library collection.
After five years of debates, consultations and negotiations, the European institutions reached an agreement in 2013 on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the 2014-2020 period. The outcome has major implications for the EU’s budget and farmers’ incomes, but also for Europe’s environment, its contribution to global climate change and to food security in the EU and in the world. It was decided to spend more than €400 billion during the rest of the decade on the CAP. The official claims are that the new CAP will take better account of society's expectations and lead to far-reaching changes by making subsidies fairer and ‘greener’ and making the CAP more efficient. It is also asserted that the CAP will play a key part in achieving the overall objective of promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. However, there is significant scepticism about these claims and disappointment with the outcome of the decision-making, the first in which the European Parliament was involved under the co-decision procedure. In contrast to earlier reforms where more substantive changes were made to the CAP, the factors that induced the policy discussions in 2008-13 and those that influenced the decision-making did not reinforce each other. On the contrary, they sometimes counteracted one another, yielding an ‘imperfect storm’ as it were, resulting in more status quo and fewer changes. This book discusses the outcome of the decision-making and the factors that influenced the policy choices and decisions. It brings together contributions from leading academics from various disciplines and policy-makers, and key participants in the process from the European Commission and the European Parliament.