The new law will flush out 20 crore people from cultivation, forcing them to depend on daily wage labour
The Union government has brought out a counter-narrative to the ongoing protest of the farmers against the farm laws. It released a 106-page book, titled Farmers First, showing how the laws benefit the farmers, in the process, showcasing itself as their benefactor. Leaving aside the optics, this comment addresses the counter-narrative on contract farming. India’s agrarian history is replete with different forms of contract farming practiced in the colonial period which forced Indian farmers to supply agricultural produce such as cotton, indigo, and tobacco to English factories in Manchester. Contract farming in sugar cane is prevalent in parts of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Contract farming in the modern sense perhaps began with Pepsi Food Ltd installing a tomato processing unit at Zahuria in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district in 1989. It has now extended to high-value crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, gherkins, basmati rice, and a seed variety of rice. This author had an opportunity to study contract farming in Obulakesavapuram of Janagam district in Telangana, and a farmers' organisation led by women of the same village, and oil palm farmers of Bandivarigudem of West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh as part of a study of the socio-economic conditions of villages on behalf of Sundarayya Vignana Kendra, Hyderabad. The first set of land reforms in India ended in forcefully vacating tenants and sharecropper farmers. Land under tenancy fell from 20.6 per cent in 1953-54 to 6.6 per cent in 2002-2003, attributable to the cultivator-centric agrarian policies of successive governments between 1952-1978. Subsequently, however, the operational area under tenancy grew. Nationally, the proportion of tenants among rural households increased from eight per cent in 2002-03 to 10.3 per cent in 2012-13. In 2002-03, 6.7 per cent of operational holdings was leased in; by 2012-13, it increased to 11.1 per cent.
The proportion of tenants among cultivators is an important benchmark to assess the impact of this new contract farming act. Tenancy among cultivators increased in the last two decades — the period of study -in all big states except Punjab. Andhra Pradesh and Bihar witnessed a 20 percentage-point growth in tenancy, followed by Telangana where the tenants among cultivators increased by 15 per cent The all-India average stood at 15 per cent. This implies that for 15 per cent of rural households, the tenancy is the basic source of livelihood. It ranges from a high of 32.8 per cent in Andhra Pradesh to a low of 4.9 per cent in Maharashtra. That translates to 20 crores of the population and five crore households. Eleven per cent of the land under cultivation is providing livelihood to these households. Model tenant laws prevailing in states like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are going to be nullified in face of the new central acts. The key point is the new contract farming law is going to exclude this population from its basic source of livelihood, that is, cultivation. The reason being the new set of contractors will offer a high price initially to push out the local tenants from tenancy. Farm landowners starved of resources will fall into their trap. Imagine how big a pool of rural unemployment this will lead to, depressing wages further. The new law will flush out 20 crores of people from cultivation, forcing them to depend on daily-wage labour or as security guards on the bunds of farms they once cultivated. Private contractors, arhatiyas, and processing industries will gain potential cultivation rights over nearly 10 million hectares of land. The new contract farming law will develop a new kind of landlordism just like the agrarian laws of colonial times that laid the foundations of modern landlordism.
(The writer is former CWC member, All India Agricultural Workers Union. The views expressed are personal.)
