The Corporate Takeover Of Agriculture And Farmers’ Resistance
Bhabani Shankar Nayak
It was in 1991, when I was 12 years old and enrolled in 8th standard at my village high school, that the Government of India, led by the Congress Party launched new economic reform programmes. I vividly remember reading local newspapers which carried news on the reduction of agricultural subsidies on seeds, fertilisers, electricity and irrigation. It also started dismantling the universal approach to food security and the public distribution system in India. My father, an active farmer and the district leader of BJP (Secretary of Kishan Morcha) then had supported the liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation programme. His argument was that these policies would bring an “economic boom” with a “trickle-down effect” on sectors of the Indian economy, and that the agriculture sector and farmers would benefit from it. This was also the silent understanding of the BJP and RSS, and their opposition to the reforms was tokenistic. Most of the national-mainstream media heralded the reforms as the “best policy option for a powerful and developed India”. Evidently, the theological promise of neoliberalism is like deceptive salvation in Hindu religion.
Cut to Now
After three decades, my village is witnessing a steep decline in agriculture. The new economic reforms were slow poison for the agrarian economy, for they ruined the sector entirely — fertiliser corporations get subsidies, the industries get water and electricity subsidies, but the farmers in my village nearly abandoned agriculture as a source of their livelihood. There are very few farmers left in my village, due to lack of alternative livelihoods. As the Modi government follows the footprints of the Congress Party in implementing more ruthless agricultural policy reforms, my father today is fiercely opposed to these policies and he argues that “corporatisation” of agriculture will destroy the agricultural economy and snatch farmers’ livelihood in the short-run and farmer’s land in the long run. Such a drastic transformation in my father’s views is simply a result of what neoliberal policies have done to Indian farmers. His realization of that fact gives me hope and shows greater and better transformation awaiting India in political and economic terms.
Busting Some Myths
The claims made by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government and his Hindutva henchmen to implement agricultural reforms are many — to expand trade and investment in agriculture, to increase the wholesale agricultural market for the growth of agricultural exports, farmers will get greater freedom within the liberalised agricultural market and maximise their profit, higher standard of living and higher quality of life for Indian farmers.
It is important to bust these myths, for rather than bringing about such welcome changes, the reform policies would only make farmers vulnerable to market forces. The deepening of capitalist market forces have already ruined agriculture, agricultural communities, farmer’s lives and livelihoods in India. The market-led industrial approach to agriculture has already been driving farmers out of business and reinforces agrarian crisis, forcing them to commit suicide.
Let’s have a quick comparison. In the United States of America, farmers today are exposed to corporate exploitation and abuse because of similar reform policies. Liberalised agricultural policies have aided the growth of very few corporations that control American agriculture today. Such deepening penetration of market forces and the growth of industrial agriculture have led to the rise of four corporations that control around 40% of the agricultural market in the USA. It has destroyed the livelihood of small and medium farmers, rural communities and swallowed family farms there. This is because corporations, while suppressing the price of farm produce, have simultaneously increased its selling price. Both American producers and consumers are facing great difficulties due to such agricultural transitions and the situation has also destroyed small businesses affiliated with agriculture in the US. As a result, farmers in America too are resisting corporate control over their agriculture.
The European Union (EU)’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has created a system in which the large farmers and landowners in countries like the UK, France and Germany are the beneficiaries of its subsidies, whereas the small farmers are pushed to the margins. The system has created a wholesale agricultural market, where prices of agricultural products are different in different parts of the EU. The price fluctuation within the agricultural market is created by the market forces within the EU, and it is small farmers who are at the receiving end. The EU led-CAP has great negative impacts on developing countries like Africa – subsidised overproduction of food, milk and poultry is destroying local production and local markets. On the other hand, big farmers and agricultural corporations in Europe are benefitting from the new market-driven agricultural policies, while destroying the rural communities and livelihoods of small-medium European farmers. As a result, organisations like the Landworkers’ Alliance are not only opposing the CAP, but also demanding subsidies for small farmers and family farms in the UK. Moreover, they are demanding the British government to exempt agriculture from all free trade agreements. Many European countries have also realised that industrial agriculture, led by corporations, destroys the environment. Consequently, there are social and political movements against the corporate takeover of agriculture in Europe today.
India
Many developed countries have witnessed land grabs by big corporations and farmers with the growth of corporatisation of agriculture. In India, the Congress-led governments introduced such practices in the name of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Now with agricultural policy reforms, the Modi-led BJP government plans to liberalise land laws further by which corporate takeover of land from the small and medium farmers in India will be easy. The corporate-led industrial agriculture in India will create conditions of industrial feudalism and corporate landlordism on the one hand, and consumerist individualism on the other.
The corporatisation of agriculture will simply destroy the social fabric of agricultural and rural communities. Cooperative culture is converted into a competitive culture that would ruin rural communities with the growth of individualist consumerism. Market forces do not believe in diversification and they promote economies of standardisation dangerous for diversity within Indian agriculture. Market-led industrial agriculture dominated by corporations can never be an alternative for India and Indian farmers and the government needs to find ways to invest in agricultural cooperatives to empower farmers and generate employment by diversifying it. India and Indian farmers need socially responsible, environmentally sustainable and economically rewarding agricultural policies, and egalitarian land reforms to increase their income and where agricultural producers can directly interact with their consumers. Such an agricultural market economy would be really open, free and fair.
Dr. Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a Senior Lecturer in Business Strategy at Coventry University, UK. Read his piece on fascists’ love for animals and their politics of hate here.
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