NEW DELHI: Agriculture activists have called the three agriculture reform ordinances which the government is planning to replace with Bills in the upcoming Parliament Session as “more about agri-businesses than farmers”.
It appears that insufficient analysis is happening from farmers’ perspective right now, and even here, the debate is getting limited to only one or two states which have had a well-developed mandi system over the decades. From farmers’ vantage, it appears that there is little to cheer about and there are many things of concern, says Kavita Kuruganti of Alliance of Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture.
According to a statement, the government has dubbed the ordinances as “historic developments” and the “1991 moment” for Indian agriculture but “these ordinances are not about farmers but about agri-businesses”.
The other points highlighted by the government include
- Farmers will have to contend with players bigger than local traders and their interface with markets is more unequal now than ever before
- In the immediate run, it would be the same traders who already are advantaged in various ways, who will operate outside of the mandi space in the ‘trade area’ and they are the most trade-ready in the changed scenario
- The government has now set up a system which will not even allow it to have any price or stock intelligence that will allow it to act on behalf of farmers and consumers
- The ordinances will not lead to better price realisation by farmers
- The ordinances will also disempower farmers from using mandis as a space for resistance and contestation from farmers and for them to seek justice
- The combination of ECA amendment (with exemptions to even the stocking regulation possibility that government kept for itself) with APMC bypass ordinance will mainly enable players like Adani enterprises
- FPOs which are in a nascent stage being asked to compete with established and big players is unfair and that they ought to have been exempted, to begin with