India's nationwide lockdown has confined a record 1.3 billion Indians to their homes since Mar. 24, and one of the hardest hit communities has been that of Indian farmers. Crashing prices and transport bottlenecks due to the lockdown has resulted in the media filled withimages of Indian farmers standing amidst swathes of rotting vegetables, fruits and grain. March and April mark the peak harvesting season in India when crops like wheat, chickpea, barley, flax seed, pea, potato, mustard plant, cotton and millet are reaped and sold. But the current pandemic means this cannot happen. Nearly 700 million people of the country’s 1.3 billion rely directly or indirectly on an agriculture-derived livelihood. Agriculture and allied sectors sector contribute 16.5 percent to the country’s $2.6 trillion GDP, according to the Indian government’s Economic Survey 2019-20. As per International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) statistics, the share of agriculture in India’s total workforce was 43.9 percent in 2018. Of the total agricultural workforce in India, 45.1 percent are cultivators (farmers with land or self-employed in agriculture) and the rest, 54.9 percent, are agricultural labour (or landless), as per the Pocket Book of Agricultural Statistics of 2017.
"We take our produce to the mandi (market) but there are hardly any buyers these days. I was forced to sell four quintals of chilli at Rs 10 per kg as against a normal price of Rs 40. But I was desperate to clinch the deal, else the transportation cost of bringing all that produce back would have broken my back,” Lekhi Ram, a smallholder farmer from Khairpur village of west Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, told IPS. Unable to harvest his crop in time, Ram’s neighbour, also a smallholder, set his fields on fire. The leftover vegetables were fed to the sheep and goats.
"We take our produce to the mandi (market) but there are hardly any buyers these days. I was forced to sell four quintals of chilli at Rs 10 per kg as against a normal price of Rs 40. But I was desperate to clinch the deal, else the transportation cost of bringing all that produce back would have broken my back,” Lekhi Ram, a smallholder farmer from Khairpur village of west Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, told IPS. Unable to harvest his crop in time, Ram’s neighbour, also a smallholder, set his fields on fire. The leftover vegetables were fed to the sheep and goats.
“We were hoping to reap a rich harvest of rabi (spring) crops due to a good spell of rains. But God clearly had other plans,” Balbir Singh Rajewal, President of the Bharatiya Kisan Union in Punjab, a representative organisation for small farmers that protects their interests, told IPS. “Urban demand has been minimal during the lockdown. Even online grocery stores, whose orders we normally can’t cope with, have stopped calling.” Grain farmers with larger land holdings are experiencing greater struggles under the combined effects of low demand and acute paucity of migrant farm labour. This has severely interrupted agricultural patterns especially harvesting activities in the northwest northern breadbasket states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana where wheat and pulses are grown, said Rajewal.
Farmer suicides have been reported from some villages.
According to Jagdish Singh, President, Bhartiya Kisan Union, Madhya Pradesh, a representative body of 0.3 million farmers, bureaucratic apathy has hurt farmers most.
“We didn’t get any combined harvesters from Punjab due to transport restrictions due to which we weren’t able to harvest our grain on time. Lack of farm labour and bad weather last week only made things worse.” Singh rues the state government made no efforts to operate local mandis to enable farmers to sell whatever grain they were able to harvest.
Transportation has proved to be an issue. Keeping supply chains functioning seamlessly will be vital for future food security, warn experts, for which farmers must have continued access to markets. According to Pravin Paithankar, president of the Maharashtra Heavy Vehicle and Inter-State Container Operators’ Association, as urban areas are reporting more coronavirus cases than rural ones, truck drivers and container operators are preferring to stay in their villages.
“They won’t be back until May-June,” Paithankar told IPS.
The current crisis will also have a domino effect on agricultural output during the kharif (winter) season as good quality seeds, fertilisers and other inputs are not available, a senior official of Uttar Pradesh’s food, civil supplies and consumer affairs department.
Indian Institute of Technology (Gandhinagar) scientists who analysed 150 years of drought data have highlighted in a report that 2 to 3 million deaths in the Bengal famine of 1943 were due to food supply disruptions—not lack of food availability. According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), among other middle income countries India has an above-average score of 65.5 out of 100 when it comes to sustainable agriculture.
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