THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The State Planning Board says that the agrarian crisis in the State can be tackled only through certain proactive steps on the part of the Government.

The peasantry in at least five districts face acute distress and one of these districts, Wayanad, has reported a large number of suicides, the Planning Board notes in its approach paper for Kerala's Eleventh Five-Year Plan.

The proximate causes for this distress include the price crashes in a number of cash crops in the world market, to which the peasants have become exposed with trade liberalisation and the downgrading of the State-run commodity purchase and marketing boards and the subsequent cornering of the purchases of cash crops by a small number of trans-national companies (which pay the growers much lower prices than what the global price warrants).

There are other identifiable reasons such as competition from Sri Lanka (and other countries using the Sri Lanka route) in cash crops such as tea and pepper under the Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement and the rise in prices of inputs, including credit, owing to the withdrawal of subsidies, financial liberalisation and other measures of liberal reforms.

The crisis is the result essentially of the withdrawal, in the era of liberalisation, of the support and protection the State had been providing to peasant production earlier. Even though the blame for the withdrawal of this support cannot be laid at the door of the State Government, an active policy would have to be pursued by the State Government to press for a reversal of this withdrawal and to nullify, to the degree possible, the effects of this withdrawal, the Planning Board says.

The most immediate measure required is the provision of debt relief, for which the State Government is setting up a Debt Relief Commission, which will approach the problem on a case by case basis, negotiate debt waiver by banks, fix the amounts payable to the private money lenders and recommend debt write-off in cases of destitution (where the State Government may take over the debt).

And agricultural production has to be made remunerative. While the immediate means of doing so would have to be through price-support, backed by appropriate tariff protection, this would have to be accompanied by longer-term measures. The State Government is setting up an Agricultural Commission to recommend such measures.

The State should give a re-emphasis on food crops, especially rice. The point is not that Kerala should become self-sufficient; but it should produce at least a certain share of its needs from the point of view of food security. Rice production is employment intensive and needs to be sustained to address the problem of rural destitution. Further, the risks from price fluctuations are less in the case of rice than in the case of many cash crops. It is significant to note that suicides have occurred mostly, if not entirely, among farmers growing cash crops.

The paper says that ensuring remunerative price for the produce will depend on the State's ability to introduce technological and organisational changes, not only in the rice economy, but also in agricultural economy in general. The period of the introduction of these changes may have to be covered by a transient and selective subsidy.

Corporate players

The main organisational change currently looming on the horizon is the entry of corporate players, including multinational corporations, into agriculture, whether as producers, or as providers of retail outlets, or as partners in contract farming. This phenomenon is an exploitative one that can further aggravate the agrarian crisis. Its adverse effects are already visible in crops such as tea, coffee and pepper. The paper cautions that, if corporate capital is at all allowed to deal in agriculture produce, then it should be asked to deal with the cooperatives rather than with individual peasants. For such a scheme to work, however, the cooperatives will have to be run professionally. The paper strongly argues the case for strengthening the cooperatives to encompass production, processing and marketing of agricultural produce.

Technological change in agriculture should be of the kind that does not lead to labour displacement, unemployment and destitution. If such change raises the yield per hectare and, while doing so, if it displaces some labour without causing unemployment, but only work-sharing within a cooperative framework, then it can very well improve the viability of cooperative peasant production without causing any concomitant destitution.

In addition, there must be diversification to complementary activities such as rice-fish cycle wherever possible, dairy production, goat rearing, poultry and pig rearing.

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