Asia’s Peasantry Ruined with No Alternatives

By N. GUNASEKARAN

In India, tens of thousands of farmers are protesting against farm laws introduced by the government. They are camping on the outskirts of New Delhi for more than two months, braving severe rain and cold.

The farm laws will structurally change India’s agriculture, strengthening the grip of big corporations in agrarian sector. Among the total population of 1.3 billion, about 70% of India’s rural households depend upon agriculture and its allied sectors for their livelihoods. The farmer leaders claim that more than 85% of farmers, being small and marginal, are in danger of losing their livelihoods and lands, if the new laws are implemented.

The Indian Parliament passed these contested farm laws last year. The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) law, through dismantling the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Agricultural Produce Market (APMC), would do away with the state protection of farmers for trading and distribution of their produce, including the existing Minimum Support Price fixation by the government.

The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services law would facilitate contract farming through verbal or written contracts with the farmers by the companies. The farmers fear that this law would pave the way for corporations to control the agriculture for their own profit-interests. The amendment to the Essential Commodities Act of 1955 would deregulate essential items, such as cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, onions and potatoes. Farmers and people at large fear that this law would allow private players and hoarders to gain profits through increasing prices of these essential food grains and it would endanger the food security of the people.

Many rounds of talks between farm unions and the Indian government did not break the deadlock. The farmers did not agree with the government’s offer to put the laws on hold for 18 months, and demanded for a full repeal of three laws.

The three laws are the part and parcel of the neoliberal free-market drive by corporate elites with the collusion of state players. Such liberalizing and deregulating of the market for the agrarian sector has been going on in Asia for more than three decades. Its outcome was mainly witnessed in the inequality in land possession and the higher level of increase in landless population in Asian countries. In many Asian countries farmers losing their lands while giant corporations capture the lands through all kinds of means, legal and illegal, as coercion and violence have become common phenomena. Currently the top 10% of landowners grabbed about 75% of agricultural land and the bottom 50% own less than 2%. The governments’ development narratives have helped the corporations grab the land, disposing of the livelihoods of the agriculture-based rural livelihoods. The neoliberal regime of dispossession that had been in peak in the mid-2000s accelerated the process of handing over agricultural operations and lands to private corporations.

Asian countries, such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, had among the highest levels of inequality in land ownership. The loss of land among peasantry is an increasing phenomenon in several Asian countries. With the deprivation of land, the landless population is increasing. Income inequality among agricultural population is compounding the agrarian crisis.

In many countries, after their liberation from colonialism, the agrarian reforms were undertaken with the promise of distributing land to the landless and ensuring ownership to cultivators. But, the agrarian reforms actually benefited the upper strata of the rural population.

Today, the largest 1% of farming communities have been operating 70% of the agricultural land. The food production system has changed according to the needs of corporate food marketing. About 84% of farmland, smaller than two hectares, could only operate only in 12% of land. In contrast to advanced countries, where large farms are getting larger, the number of small farms is increasing in most low income countries in Asia. Large populations of rural families are dependent on these small farms for their livelihoods. The neoliberal regimes in Asia were pursuing the policies that created mega-farms owned by domestic and international agri-business, destroying small farms.

In November 2020, Land Inequality Initiative report by the International Land Coalition, with the collaboration of Oxfam was released. It stated that the “top 10% of the rural population captures 60% of agricultural land value; the bottom half controls only 3%.”

Such growing land inequality is threatening the livelihoods of about 2.5 billion people who are smallholders in agriculture. The land inequality had cascading effects on other forms of inequality and it is a major cause for many global crises in economy, politics, society, environment etc.Such inequalities affect the rural women, indigenous people and local communities who have been the saviors of sustainable livelihoods, biodiversity preservation, bio-cultural conservation and social justice.

The big expansion of corporate agriculture, at the expense of communities of smallholders, had displaced the people from their land and livelihoods. They do not have alternative employment since the problem of rural and urban unemployment is already increasing unprecedentedly. Ruination of agricultural communities with no alternative livelihoods is the tragedy Asian agrarian sector.

N. Gunasekaran is a political activist and writer based in Chennai, India.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021

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