Kulamadayil, Lys

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Informed dissent or misinformedrebellion? Making sense of India’sfarmer protestsLys Kulamadayil 2021-02-04T09:00:35“We are food: we eat food, we are made of food, and our first identity, our firstwealth, our first health, comes from the making, creating, giving of good food.”(Vandana Shiva)For months, millions of Indian farmers have protested the Indian centralgovernment’s 2020 farm bills that fundamentally change the country’s food systems.The bills came into force on 27 September 2020 and are meant to reduce publicinterventions in the agricultural sector, to remove trade barriers and to invite privatesector investment. The bills affect not only India’s farmers who constitute 43% of thecountry’s workforce, but also food security in India.In addition to the farmers’ mass protests in the nation’s capital, Prime MinisterNarendra Modi’s government also faces resistance to their farm bills fromsome of the country’s state governments, with the Kerala legislative assemblybeing the first to announce that it will not implement them and to challenge theirconstitutionality. An interim order by the Supreme Court of India temporarily stayingtheir implementation has not appeased protesters. To the contrary, tensionshave escalated since. To explain why the farm bills have triggered such profoundresistance, this piece will take a legal perspective to outline how they will restructureIndian food production.The APMC yard sale systemUnder the Indian constitution, the agricultural sector lies within the competence ofstates. Despite many reforms, the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC)yard sale system is still prevalent. Under this system, farmers must sell their produceon market yards run by each state’s APMC from where it is then sold on to foodtraders and processers. APMC market yards are essentially closely monitoredand not overly competitive wholesale markets with transparent pricing which isoften based on the produce’s government-set Minimum Support Price (MSP). Thissystem benefits and protects small-scale farmers (for more detail, watch this). Underthis system, they are not contractually bound to any particular trader but sell theirproduce by auction. This safeguards them against abusive bondage contracts andis meant to prevent price dumping by larger agribusinesses that can produce at alower cost than them. Furthermore, to prevent market-induced price fluctuations foressential food items, the amount that a corporation can stockpile is capped.In the last two decades, the APMC system weakened. As Prof. Himanshu notes, outof the 36 Indian states and territories, 18 states have introduced commercially-run- 1 -wholesale markets for the first sale of farm produce, 19 states permit direct salesbypassing the auction process completely (so-called sales at the farm gate) and20 states allow contract farming. While the APMC system is certainly not perfectand has not prevented the severe impoverishment and indebtment crisis of ruralcommunities, farmers in states where the APMC system is in place earn more thanfarmers in states where it effectively no longer exists.2020 farm billsThe 2020 farm bills will hollow out this system by eliminating many of the institutionalsafeguards of the current system and by creating a parallel one, which is entirelymarket-oriented. The Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on PriceAssurance and Farm Services Act introduces contract farming nation-wide. This caneither take the form of trade and commerce agreements, which tie farmers to onebuyer, or it can take the form of production agreements. Under such agreements,farmers contract out the labour and land. The Empowerment and ProtectionAct has no pricing transparency requirements. It only recommends that pricingshould be oriented after MSP and APMC produce prices. To some extent, the actacknowledges the manifest power imbalance that is at play in contract farming byprohibiting for instance contractual clauses that result in the transfer of land titles.The act also stipulates that any disputes arising from such farming agreementsshould be settled outside the judicial system, either through conciliation, or with thehelp of local officials.The Farmers’ Produce and Trade Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill lies thefoundations for a competitive national agricultural market. It removes any restrictionson inter-state and intra-state produce trade and permits commercial electronictrading and transaction platforms. This law is not only controversial because itcreates parallel and purely market-oriented agricultural trade venues that will putprice pressure on the APMC market yards, but also because the bill challenges theregulatory authority of state governments. It gives the central government the solecompetence to regulate virtual trading and also provides for a dispute settlementsystem outside the state judiciary.Finally, the Essential Commodities Amendment Ordinance limits the scope ofgovernment intervention into the pricing, storage and trade of many essential fooditems, such as cereals, pulses and potatoes. Under the 1955 Essential CommoditiesAct the pricing and storage of such items is subject to a number of measuresmeant to ensure their availability and accessibility. The Essential CommoditiesAmendment eliminates all storage limits and restricts government price interventionsto extraordinary circumstances such as natural disasters. The concern is that thisamendment will invite speculations on such essential items and threaten theiraccessibility to the poor.Legal challengesPetitions to the Indian Supreme Court (Bhartiya Kisan Party vs. Union of India &others) have challenged the constitutionality of all three farm bills. The petitionersclaim that their adoption violates the regulatory competence of state governments;- 2 -that they were adopted in an arbitrary manner; that they violate substantive andprocedural fundamental rights and; that their dispute settlement mechanismshinder access to justice. The unanimously adopted resolution of the Keralalegislative assembly echoes these concerns underlining that the central governmentoverstepped in its competences. In remarkably stark language, it reminds the Modigovernment that the pandemic has already pushed small-scale farming communitiesto their limits, and that they could simply not tolerate any additional strains.In response to the petitions, the Supreme Court issued an interim order (RakeshVaishnav vs Union Of India) temporarily staying the implementation of the 2020 farmbills. The order also installs an expert committee to review the bills and to submitpolicy recommendations. It jointly responds to petitions challenging and supportingthe farm laws as well as petitions asking for a court-mandated stop to the protests inorder to protect Delhi citizens from their disruptions. The court reasoned that while it“may not stifle a peaceful protest”, its “extraordinary order of stay of implementationof the farm laws will be perceived as an achievement” and therefore lead farmerunions to encourage their members to end their protests.Expertise or ideology?The recent storming of Delhi’s iconic Red Fort shows that this reasoning backfired,which is unfortunately not surprising. The interim order identifies farmers’ “hurtfeelings” and the bills’ rushed adoption process as reasons for the protests. It buysinto the argument that misinformation misled farmers into thinking that the billswill harm them and that they could be dissuaded from their resistance if the bill’sbenefits were communicated better to them. The purpose of the expert committee istherefore to “create a congenial atmosphere and improve the trust and confidenceof the farmers”. It composed its four-member expert committee accordingly. AshokGulati is a vocal advocate of export-oriented liberalization and publicly supports thefarm bills. Anil Ghanwat has also gone on record arguing that the farm laws do notgo far enough in protecting the agricultural sector from government interventionand Parmod Kumar Joshi considers that “[s]crapping the three farm laws will bedisastrous for the entire agriculture sector”.Their vision for India’s rural communities is well summarized in an article by Prof.Gulati on the impact of liberal globalization on small-scale farmers. He admits thatliberal globalization processes have hurt small-scale farmers in the past, but arguesthat this could be addressed through corrective government policies. Enablingpolicies should remove any obstacles for small-scale farmers to exploring theopportunities of globalization and coping policies should minimize globalization’sadverse impacts on them. Enabling policies include for instance removing creditconstraints and reducing transactions costs and coping policies are e.g., promotingopportunities in the rural non-farm sector (exit options), competition and technology.On other occasions he has also argued that a fundamental reform of the agriculturalsector was necessary in order to attract the private investment necessary to makeIndia agriculture more competitive and better integrated into global food supplychains. Prof. Gulati’s impressive publication record certainly attests to his expertise,but also to the belief which has shaped it, namely the belief in food capitalism asit is codified in the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture. This agreement peruses- 3 -to establish a market-oriented agricultural trading system, by reducing domesticsupport and protections, which correct or distort world agricultural markets.It is unfortunate that the court mistook informed dissent for misinformed agitation, asthe challenge to food capitalism is not less supported by expertise than the belief init. Anna Chadwick for instance demonstrates food capitalism’s catastrophic effectson hunger in the context of the 2007/2008 global crisis and the recent report of UNspecial rapporteur on the right to food finds that it has neither delivered adequatetrade results nor food security. It proposes to replace the Agreement on Agriculturewith rights-based food systems, structured by international food agreements whichare not cantered on profit, but also on respect for land and agricultural workers andwhich aim to ensure food security. The report advocates for accepting human dignityand not economic growth as the core value of agriculture and highlights the limits offood capitalism in responding to global hunger or climate change. Finally, an earlierreport of the special mandate on the right to food focussed specifically on agriculturalworkers underlines how globalized food capitalism has exposed and marginalizedfarm labour.ConclusionIndia’s farmers, it seems, are no longer only protesting the farm bills. They areprotesting India’s complete and unconditional absorption by global food supplychains. They are protesting for their dignity, their identity and to have their politicalsubjectivity recognized and respected. What is taking place on the streets of Delhiis the rejection of market patriarchy and an insistence that experience is morepersuasive than expertise. This post also appears on the author’s blog Riches and Laws.- 4 -

Informed dissent or misinformed rebellion?: Making sense of India’s farmer protests

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Informed dissent or misinformed rebellion?: Making sense of India’s farmer protests

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