Enhancing Farmers’ Livelihood And Ways Of Doing It
We have had four successive seasons of below average rainfall and farm incomes have been in stress. When we talk about agriculture, we need to ask: why agriculture? There are two broad reasons why agriculture is so important in India.
There are intrinsic reasons and instrumental reasons.
Intrinsic reasons
1. Forty-nine percent of India’s workforce is in agriculture or gets its livelihood from it.
2. Depending on whether you are talking about agriculture or rural sector, somewhere between 40-50 percent of households derive their sustenance from agriculture.
3. Around 80-82 percent of India’s poor are in agriculture or/and rural sector.
4. Agriculture provides food security.
Instrumental reasons
1. Agriculture has the power to hold back the economy as a whole. For example, Inflation is affected by agriculture. Food prices are pushing up retail inflation. This affects the growth because had the inflation been lower, interest rates would come down.
2. Power pricing in agriculture affects the cost of electricity for manufacturing.
3. The credit we provide to agriculture affects the rest of the economy.
Why agriculture?
The attention on agriculture that we see has been determined by these proximate factors. We think of agriculture in these times from a gloomy perspective. But the story of Indian agriculture is not of failures. It is a story of many successes.
Successes
1. The Green Revolution: Imagine the days of drought in the 1960s and dependence on import for food. This revolution changed all that.
2. The White Revolution: The conventional wisdom has been that foreign aid, especially in the form of cheap food items has had very detrimental impact on poor and developing countries. But White Revolution experience repudiated this general rule where cheap food items like milk, milk powder were used to develop the local food sector. And the rest is history.
3. Six to seven years of commodity price boom induced dynamism. We know that in some ways agriculture had it relatively good because of high international prices from 2007 onwards.
4. There has been a real spread in geography and composition of agriculture dynamism. If one remembers, Green Revolution was all about Punjab, Haryana and some southern states, but in the last 10-15 years it has spread to Gujarat (cotton), Maharashtra (horticulture), West Bengal (maze), Madhya Pradesh and to some extent Bihar.
5. Our agriculture has become much more resilient. We had very little rainfall in 2015 but the food and agricultural production was good. This would not have been possible 10-15 years ago.
Challenges
1. To increase farmer incomes and improve their livelihoods you have to increase agricultural productivity.
2. China is 3.7 times, Brazil seven times, Europe 52 times and the US is about 100 times more productive than India. The distance we have to cover for agriculture to become a source of real farmer livelihood is vast.
3. People also have to move out of agriculture to other sectors. The story of development all over the world is a story of moving away from agriculture to much higher productive activities. There are certain limitations to agriculture in the long run. If you want people to become richer, they have to move to high productive activities; but they must move out of agriculture under good conditions.
For example, Rs. 1.1 lakh is the per capita GDP of the Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh. It is very low. Even a fertile place like the Krishna district, which is very well run, has average incomes which are low.
Farmers also need to be protected against volatility and risk. India and China are highly volatile but China has improved greatly in the last 10-15 years. Now, we have our work cut out. India has not only to boost productivity but also to cushion farmers against the downside. What the government is doing, in terms of crop insurance, is critically important for this purpose.
The Ghost of Malthus
India has to achieve these two objectives of higher productivity and insuring farmers against risks, against the backdrop of what we can call the ghost of Malthus. There is no question that basic agricultural resources like water, land, soil quality atmosphere are becoming scarce and scarcer. It’s partly because of climate change and partly self-inflicted.
What needs to be done
1. The Green Revolution and 2007 boom relied on getting more from more: You put more fertiliser, you get more output. But now because of the changing environment, we have to rationalise input whether it is fertiliser, land or power. Our aim should be to get more from less. It was the agricultural services as much as the technology which contributed to the Green Revolution.
2. We need to create one market. The National Agriculture Market (NAM) that the government is working on is moving in that direction.
3. We have to reduce the role of middlemen.
4. We need to strengthen crop insurance.
5. Small holdings of land come in the way of agricultural productivity. We have to work on land consolidation.
6. We should increase the role of science.
7. India needs a rainbow revolution in pulses.
8. Policy uncertainty should be done away with. When farm prices are low, we adopt a set of policies, etc. When they go up, we adopt a different set of policies. This uncertainty ends up hurting farmers.
9. We need to strengthen institutions – Indian Council of Agriculture Research, Food Corporation of India, etc.
10. We need to rationalise agricultural credit. Is it going to small farmers? Is it too much? Is it really going to agriculture? These are all very important questions and there is a lot of scope for improvement in these areas.
Meta-questions before solutions
Many people say we must have better water conversation and we must have policy certainty. But why has it not happened already? Why is a good agricultural policy not good politics at state level? In Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar and West Bengal agriculture did very well and the governments were re-elected. But why is it not happening more widely? These are simple-minded questions.
The bigger puzzle is that the wants and basic material well-being of millions of farmers need to be catered to. Why is it so difficult to phase out Agriculture Produce Market Committees when we know that benefits will accrue to lots of farmers? Why can’t the demonstrable success of BT cotton in Gujarat be extended? Why is there a fear of private sector despite the many successes which were private sector driven like maize, BT cotton, millet and bajra? We are still hesitant about embracing markets in agriculture.
Fertiliser policy in India ends up hurting the farmers because of black markets which hurt small farmers more than big farmers. What needs to be done in agriculture needs to be done through electoral politics.
Government and Talent
The result of the last two years and the general rule that crisis leads to change has been true. This government has spent a lot of time on how to spend on agriculture. We have been very mindful of the fact that we needed to incentivise pulse production. The opening up to FDI for agriculture, Krishi Sinchai Yojana, Crop insurance scheme etc. in some ways have led to a significant response in terms of addressing agriculture problems.
If we have two good monsoons, the temporary improvement in agriculture might lead to people forgetting problems in the long term.
Somewhere along the line, agriculture lost its significance and now it does not resonate enough as it used to. It may have to do with the talent attracted to agriculture. How do we attract the best talent? What happened to the icons like C Subramaniam, K N Raj, Raj Krishna, Verghese Kurien? Unless we get such talent back, we are going to struggle.
Resurrecting farmer livelihoods in India has to be a top priority as a whole – only the best talent can do it.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.