The Farm Bills are designed to benefit the rich corporations. Farming in India is a Rs 4 Lac Crore Industry that employs 42% of the population. If Modi’s draconian & ill-conceived farm laws are not repealed there will be mass poverty, hunger & unemployment in India.

Except Modi and his supporters, no sane person around the world has ignored that the millions of Farmers are protesting practically all over India since Nov. 2020 against Modi’s anti-farmer laws to favor the rich. This protest is joined by millions of farmers across caste, creed, religion and region to fight for their rights and their livelihood. Rather, it has become a mass movement to restore democratic republic character of the nation that is being eroded under Modi’s watch.

Indian farmers have been exploited for centuries and, even after independence in 1947, the successive regimes never provided them support and facilities that are available to farmers in other democracies of the world. It is a shame that even after 73 years of independence there is hardly any investment made on irrigation and flood control facilities to save farming lands and the farmers. Instead of improvingtheir lot, in 2015, Modi   made it easier for politicians and corporate to take over Farmer’s land at throw away prices in his Farmland Acquisition Act. Now he has come up with another scam by calling it ‘Reforms in Agriculture”.

Modi has pushed through what he calls, long pending reforms in agriculture, in the form of three Farm Acts without any due consideration of the ground realities and comments from the stakeholders – the “Indian Farmers”.

(1) The Farmers’ Produce Trade And Commerce (Promotion And Facilitation) Act, 2020

(2) The Farmers (Empowerment And Protection) Agreement On Price Assurance And Farm Services Act, 2020

(3) The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020

Farmers are not against private Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) aka Mandis. They are mainly fighting for Minimum Support Price (MSP) for their crops and Modi administration does not want to make it mandatory for the private buyer to pay the MSP.

The farmers want that it should be made a criminal offense for the buyer if they pay less than the MSP. The other thing they want is access to Courts in case of dispute in “Contract Farming”. In Modi laws the final decision is with the bureaucrats that can be influenced easily by big Corporates especially when they are running the government by proxy by influencing the Ruling Class of India.

Modi is forgetting that the backbone of economic activities in India is closely linked to development of agriculture and allied sectors for its significant links with food and nutritional security. How can he forget that there are more than 42% Indians directly involved in agriculture?

How can Modi ignore the plight of farmersin Bihar- a State which abolished APMC and madeMSP a talking tool only in 2006 by CM Nitish Kumar supported by his party-theBJP?

Modi has access to a 2019 report authored by a team led by Professor Sanjib Pohit of the National Council of Applied Economics Research (NCAER), which studied in detail, the impact of Bihar’s farm policies on ground. It clearly states that not only did prices of farm produce crash, but unregulated middlemen and traders forced farmers to pay for their crops to be offloaded and sold.

Economist Abdul Qadir said, “Before the scrapping of the APMC Act, farmers would sell their produce to the market committees where minimum price was guaranteed. But after the repeal of this system, they indulged in distress sale lest their produce would go to waste because they had no storage facility.” He further added that farming has turned out to be a non-viable profession in Bihar over time. “Farmers from Bihar have now been working as laborers in Punjab and Haryana.”

Another Economist DM Diwakar,the former director of Patna-based AN Sinha Institute of Social Studiessaid: “The Modi government says the new farm bills won’t adversely impact the farming community. Given the logic, the financial condition of 94 per cent of farmers in Bihar — who didn’t go to mandis or were not covered under minimum support price (MSP) — should have improved in the past 14 years. But their condition has deteriorated.”Paddy was sold for Rs 900-1,000 a quintal in Bihar, almost half the Rs 1,868 fixed by the Centre as MSP. He further alleged, “nearly half the farmers can’t even recover their investments.”

“In 1968-69, wheat was sold at Rs 76 a quintal while the salary of a schoolteacher was Rs 70-80. That meant a teacher would not be able to buy a quintal of wheat from his one-month salary. In the past five decades, a teacher’s salary has climbed to average Rs 70,000, but wheat price is only around Rs 2,000 a quintal.”

Since 2014 PM Modi has been going to every country in the world and telling investors: ‘Come to India, we will give you cheap land and labor’. PM Modi is telling the truth to them after robbing the farmers of their land, the farmers and their family members have no choice but to become cheap laborers for his financial supporters aka MNC’s and local industrial houses.

Modi’s farm laws will make majority of the Indian farmers bonded labor of rich corporations. The Indian farmer is refusing to be marginalized any more. Their protest has become a historic & largest ever protest in the world that is being supported by non-farmers in India as well as across the world. It has gained wide international support from Farmer Unions, Labor Unions, Human Rights organizations, Celebrities & Politicians.

According to Modi & his supporters; there is nothing wrong if only 4-5 Companies, or just Ambani& Adani control the India’s Food Supply Chain.India with 80% poor & 42% population engaged in agriculture, cannot be compared with USA. There are more than 150 million farmers in India that directly own land and use it for farming. The fact is every country supports its farmers. In2019, USA gave $22 billion in subsidies to 1.3% population (2.6 million) employed in agriculture & India gave a paltry $11 billion to42% population (590million), employed in agriculture. On top of that majority of the subsidy went to Corporations for seeds & fertilizers.

Modi & his supporters must stop preaching what is good for USA; when Farming laws are concerned; it is good for India also. If Modi wants to do that then first, he should come up with similar farming subsidies like USA along with Social Safety Net for farmers like Social Security, Medicare, Financial Aid for students, Unemployment, Food Stamps, Rent and Utilities Assistance for the poor families. Modi & his supporters should know that 40 years ago when Farming was opened for Corporates the Social Safety Net was already in place and marginal farmers could find a job in manufacturing. Where are the jobs in India?

Manufacturing generated 17.4 percent of India’s GDP and employed 26.2% of the population whereas Service sector employs 32.3% with a share of 31% in GDP. Agriculture is the Indian economy’s backbone with 19.9% share in GDP and the largest employer. In 2019 India’s Global Share in manufacturing was 3% vs China’s 28.4% being the biggest manufacturing hub in the world. Has Modi done anything to improve Agriculture or Manufacturing or Service Sector? The answer is big “No”. In the last 7 years Modi has done nothing but killed the Indian economy, jobs and the worst is he has been killing the communal harmony of India for a “Hindu Rashtra” that is nothing but a bonehead idea to disintegrate India.

A new Pew Research Center analysis in Feb. 2021 finds that the middle class in India is estimated to have shrunk by 32 million in 2020.  Meanwhile, the number of people who are poor in India (with incomes of $2 or less a day) is estimated to have increased by 75 million. Now India has 850 million poor, the largest in the world. 3,700 PhD’s, 28,000 Postgraduates& 50,000 Graduates applied for 62 Peons post in UP, India in Feb. 2021. This is the extent of job crisis in India today that was never seen before since 1950’s.

The demonetization & GST with multiple slabs was done to benefit rich Corporates so that they can control the retail & wholesale food industry. In the same way, theFarm Bills are designed to benefit them. Farming is a Rs 4 Lac Crore Industry that employs 42% of the population. If Modi’s draconian & ill-conceived farm laws are not repealed there will be mass poverty, hunger & unemployment in India.

The American experience of Big Agriculture should be a lesson for India. Did monopoly power reduce food prices in USA? In the past 40 years, average food prices in America have shot up by more than 200%, while the earnings of the bottom 90% have increased by less than 25%. Joe Maxwell, who leads a campaign group called Family Farm Action, said about entrenched rural poverty, child hunger, and food-insecure homes. Not what you’d expect to hear about the most powerful nation. Today, rural America feels abandoned, its dignity stripped away. As we drove home, one thing had become clear to us: far from being a panacea, the opening up of US agriculture, the elimination of MSP-like parity schemes, and the rise of contract farming has been a lose-lose proposition for everybody other than Big Agriculture.

“This is an eye opener for the majority of India’s middle class who are being fed the narrative that “Big Agriculture” is the panacea for Indian farmers’ difficult situation, and especially for small farmers. BJP’s late Arun Jaitley had argued against Congress initiative bringing in corporate investment to farming by quoting American farmers’ plight! Why are we still so adamant to bring in these new farm lawsthat will only bring mass poverty, hunger & unemployment in India?

Modi must answer.

(Compiled & edited by Dave Makkar, from various sources on the internet. The author can be reached at  davemakkar@yahoo.com)