CHENNAI: Expressing the hope that the National Policy for Farmers (NPF) will be launched on August 15 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Independence, Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers M.S. Swaminathan stressed the need for placing agriculture on the Concurrent list.

Delivering the New Year lecture on "Serving farmers and saving farming" at a meeting held by The Hindu Media Resource Centre of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, he said, the revised draft NPF, which had won the broad agreement of the State Ministers of Agriculture and allied sectors at a recent meeting, would be placed before a special meeting of the National Development Council in March.

The draft NPF has urged the Central and State Governments to consider seriously the question of including agriculture under the Concurrent List, as important policy decisions relating to prices, credit and trade were taken by the Centre and the developmental policies were managed by the States.

Stating that working to end farmers' distress must be the common minimum programme for all political parties for 2007, he said all the Government departments should work in unison to safeguard the farmers' welfare.

In the globalised scenario, modern industry promoted only jobless growth, while agricultural growth would be a job-led one, he said. A growing farm sector, better rural infrastructure, assured and remunerative marketing, easy availability of credit and trained manpower could help in developing the rural non-farm sector and creation of more job opportunities, Prof. Swaminathan said.

Referring to the decline in profitability of agriculture during the 1990s and less than one per cent growth in rural employment between 1993-94 and 1999-2000, he called for integrated on-farm and non-farm employment generation through a pan-Government of India programme to establish rural business hubs on the lines of China's township and village enterprise programme.

One of the key recommendations of the NPF related to attracting and retaining youth in farming.

Awards

Steps such as instituting genius awards for young scientists, ensuring technology development, promoting genome entrepreneurs to undertake genome mapping work and aiming to become a global agricultural outsourcing hub in the areas of bio-technology, information technology and seed technology would make farming intellectually stimulating and economically attractive to youth, he said.

Prime farmland must be conserved to safeguard food and livelihood security as well as nation's sovereignty, he said.

Improving viability of farming by ensuring that agriculturists earned a "minimum net income," mainstreaming the human and gender dimension in all farm policies and programmes, giving explicit attention to sustainable rural livelihoods and completing the unfinished agenda in land reforms were among the major goals highlighted by the draft NPF, he said.

The NPF also recommended that the role of the Ministry of Agriculture at the Centre and in the States should be enlarged by restructuring them as Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, he said. Active farm women and men should be inducted in senior positions in Government for specific periods and specific tasks.

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