Political parties opposing the land acquisition Bill are claiming to be on the side of the farmers. They want the farmers to hold on to their land, howsoever small and unproductive it is. They are not well-wishers of the farming community
The acquisition of land, including farm land, to gain higher factor productivity in essential industrial/manufacturing, has always been problematic in developing countries where high moral value in agricultural production and non-monetary value to farmers’ well-being is attached implicitly in the polity.
However, data on the extent of crop land as a proportion of total land of comparable counties will show that, barring in a few nations like Pakistan, farmers in India have held on to the largest land chunks (60 per cent of the total), while producing a modest but invaluable quantum of grains that gives the country an operating surplus and strength to even contemplate a universal PDS. China, the US and Brazil have high grain output with smaller areas of land in agriculture, due to superior irrigation and overall farm technology. China for instance, produces 500 million tonnes and more (numbers are not very transparent there), with 55 per cent of land under crops.
larger areas under agriculture of non-irrigated sustenance category is symptomatic, conversely of low investment in agricultural productivity and resultant low per agricultural worker productivity. A comparison of per worker value created in agriculture in India, Pakistan, China, Brazil, Japan and the US, is revealing. India compares poorly at $522 (at 2000 prices to Brazil at $4,300, Pakistan at $614, China at $530, Japan at $40,000 and the US at $52,000. The countries having 100 times per agricultural worker productivity have farm land between 40 per cent and 55 per cent only. What is germane is speeding up the per farmer productivity so that the country is largely unaffected by the conversion of comparably low-producing non-irrigated land to expand the manufacturing base . The expansion of the base can in turn boost the farm sector, both directly and indirectly.
The debate, therefore, should be on why the US and the Japanese farmers are reaping many times the value that their Indian counterpart gets and has the capacity to feed a fifth of the world with 50 per cent land under agriculture. Then, one might look at the figures funding agricultural research and innovation in the country more closely. Those who do so will detect both stagnation in the public sector (the Indian Council of Agricultural Research) as well as the low incentives available to develop agricultural innovation by the private sector.
Confused and convoluted regulations, as seen in the case of GM crops, need reassessment. leadership befitting a leading innovation-driven country, must be ushered here.
Sadly, the farm sector in India has been debated at a much lower threshold of intellectual worth than it merits. Moving land across to manufacturing may look like depriving the farmer, but the policymaker must address the requirement of both farmers and the economy, by boosting per farmer productivity, than be pre-occupied over the crop acreage lost transiently.
Unleashing world-class research in crops all over once again while mitigating the negative environmental impact of intensive agriculture, is pertinent. It is not that manufacturing is polluting and farming is environmentally-delightful. There has been rampant abuse of farm inputs, especially pesticides. The impact of having 60 per cent of land value under semi and intensive farming has had a huge spillover impacts on eco-health and even human health. The high rate of human cancer in Punjab after the much heralded Green Revolution, is another case in point.
Nobody disputes the right of the farmer to be compensated or made a beneficiary of the project that takes over his farm land. A consensus on what constitutes timely fair compensation must not be difficult. But to argue that it is a development objective to farm the largest acreage in the world, wasting immense human labour using a relatively underdeveloped technology regime and without sound innovation, exemplified by huge losses in storage and transit (unofficially at 20 per cent) is fallacious.
The sound objective should be to maximise the productivity of both crop farming and manufacturing, and to also maximise per unit and per worker productivity. The inter-relationship of the farm machinery economics and grain productivity can show the way.
The ethics and distributor effects of the manufacturing industry need separate analysis, but the present slogan, that is being promoted by certain political parties and politicians, to protect the farmer from ceding any farm land at all, is in scant recognition of what drives the farmers to keep his farm land as farm land. It is higher factor productivity than comparable land uses like manufacturing or compensation for a new highway, that preserves farm land.
Putting public money in better-monitored agricultural research, would be the right step. But for this, political parties, that are loudly chanting the ‘Kisan mantra’ slogan in an attempt to rejuvenate their fortunes, need to introspect. Removing artificially erected barriers to cutting-edge research, can also help.