Peasantry’s
neglect
Some 80,000 peasants
and agricultural labourers have marched on the Indian parliament on November
30, 2018 demanding debt waivers and higher crop prices. They comprise 200 peasant
groups and have the support of leftist parties, especially the Communist Party
of India (Marxist). This mass rally is the latest bid by the peasants to put
pressure on the Modi government ahead of the 2019 elections. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi had promised to double the income of peasants by 2022, but the protest
marchers say nothing has changed in their lives. In March 2018, a similar march
by thousands of peasants swamped Mumbai as one of a series of protests for
several decades. Peasant organisations say poor irrigation (implying farmers
being left at the mercy of the monsoons), failed crops and inability to repay
loans have resulted in the suicide of over 300,000 peasants in the last two
decades. The crisis in agriculture has turned twice as bad in the last five
years, according to the marchers’ spokesmen, resulting for example in Punjab
state, known as India’s rice bowl, in cultivators losing money on every grain
of rice they produce. The current march has demanded a special session of
parliament to discuss their issues, where they can hope for support from the
opposition, especially the Congress Party. Nearly 55 percent of India’s 1.25
billion population is directly or indirectly dependent on the agriculture
sector, which contributes 15 percent of the country’s economic output. Things
have got so bad that peasants are complaining they are no longer able to feed
themselves or their families.
Pakistan’s
peasantry may not be in quite such dire straits but the problems afflicting our
agriculture sector are similar. Whereas industrial labour is protected to a
large extent by laws regulating management-employee relations, including the
Industrial Relations Act, social security, EOBI, Workers Welfare Fund, etc,
neither adequate legislation nor any meaningful safety net is available to our
peasantry. The pressures that impinge on the lives of our tenant and landless
peasantry run from lack of credit for seeds, fertilizer and other inputs, a
situation that ensures continuation of the age old peasant debt problem. Major
crop prices are regulated by governments, but whether these managed prices afford
the grower a living wage is open to question. In the absence of legislation to
protect their rights and institutional arrangements to facilitate cultivation,
poor peasants fall victim to informal money-lending arrangements that are
prohibitively costly and lead to much hardship and even sometimes tragedies. For
example, although Pakistan has a minimum wage law, there is no implementation
of this or any other formal arrangement to ensure peasants get fair wages for
their labour. In most of the rural areas, age-old arrangements of crop sharing
leave tenants at the mercy of landowners whose holdings they till. One
manifestation of the crisis in our agricultural sector is the rapid rate of
urbanization in Pakistan, reported to be the highest in South Asia. Although
part of this phenomenon could be explained by the pull employment and other
urban facilities exert, at the other end of the scale rural families, which
tend to be large, are unable to sustain themselves through agriculture alone.
Hence the waves of migration to the cities for educational facilities, jobs,
and the temptations and relative comforts of a city lifestyle. Our government
must wake up to the visible trends in the agriculture sector before we reach a
crisis of India’s proportions. Whatever remains of legislation such as the
Tenancy Act must be implemented in practice and fresh legislation drawn up to
provide protection and facilitation to tenant farmers and agricultural
labourers. Not to do so would condemn the majority of our people to a
precarious existence and this will in turn affect our economy generally, our
food security in particular. Industrialisation is of course the road to modernisation,
but agriculture still retains the status of the backbone of our economy and
employer of a huge workforce. It needs urgent attention before an India-like
crisis overtakes us.
No comments:
Post a Comment