Demand for MSP Guarantee Ignores Agricultural Labourers and Widening Class Divide
The public procurement infrastructure must be overhauled. Expansion must be even and penetrate deeper into the stratified rural economy.
Representative image of a farmer at work. IWMI Flickr Photos/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Rights25/Jan/2021
The notoriously brief 11th round of talks between the Union government and the protesting farmersâ unions ended without offering any solution to issue of the three farm laws and a legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price. In the earlier rounds,
a
apsi razamandi, as Union Agricultural Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has dubbed it, was reached on two of the four issues discussed. The two issues were: decriminalisation of stubble burning and dropping the relevant provisions of the draft Electricity Amendment Bill, 2020.
Ensure farmers’ right to remunerative prices
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Farmers’ organisations are right in seeking legal backing for MSP. The price deficiency payment scheme should be implemented
Due to certain peculiarities of agriculture, farmers as producers, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, are not in a position to decide the price of what they produce. Price discovery through sheer free play of supply and demand that rarely exists elsewhere, prevails in agriculture. That, unfortunately, relegate the farmers to price ‘takers’ rather than ‘makers’, and that is the root cause of the problem.
Keeping this serious deterrent in view, the government of India has been ‘intervening’ by declaring Minimum Support Price (MSP) to put a check on ‘free market forces’ so that the prices of farm commodities are not pushed below that benchmark level.