Andhra Pradesh - Guntur   

Farmers against giving up land rights

— Photo: T. Vijaya Kumar

KEY ISSUE: Communist Party of India district secretary Muppalla Nageswara Rao speaking at the round-table conference in Guntur on Saturday. Also seen are MLC Rayapati Srinivas and former MP Yelamanchili Sivaji.

GUNTUR: A round-table conference on cooperative farming expressed a view of stakeholders to limit the cooperation only to supply of inputs and marketing of the produce to provide better price to farmers.

The conference, presided over by Communist Party of India district secretary Muppalla Nageswara Rao, was attended by a large number of farmers from small, medium and tenant farming community and all of them vehemently opposed the proposal to make them lose the right over their land for at least five years first. “Who will determine which is our land if the experiment fails after five years,” said M. Satyanarayana a small farmer.

All the tenant farmers were also against giving up of land rights and said that despite not having own land, they were able to earn some income by tilling the land taken on lease and that facility would be lost forever for them.

Former Rajya Sabha member Yelamanchili Sivaji told the conference that it was wrong to show Amul and Mulakanooru as example for cooperative farming as they were limited to marketing support, he observed. At the input level, credit, fertilizers, seed and water could be on cooperative basis and production individually, he said.

Government could step into forming these cooperatives and provide them good marketing support by initiating strategies for value addition also. Maize could be converted into pop-corn and processing of dal could be taken up so that farmers get better price and have the assurance of having landed property for any exigencies.

Communist Party of India does not support giving up of ownership rights, said Mr. Nageswara Rao. If the collective farming becomes sick the government would handover the land to the companies, hence there was ulterior motive behind all these moves, he opined. Demanding immediate withdrawal of the proposal, the CPI wanted the government to make crop specific input cooperatives so that they could be subsidised directly.

All India Rythu Sangham vice-president Kolli Nageswara Rao and Alapati Satyanarayana opined that historically the collective farming had failed and agriculture was part of Indian culture or way of life, hence could not be separated by resorting to collective farming. “Let us not look towards America and other countries,” they added. Congress MLC Rayapati Srinivas said that the government would not go ahead with the proposal even on experimental basis without the consent of farmers.

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