National Agriculture Code A Bizzare Idea For India Which Has Multi-Climate Zones

There couldn’t be anything more shocking. While a Press Information Bureau (PIB) media release talks of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) working out a National Agriculture Code (NAC), I wouldn’t be surprised if in the days to come it gets into formulating a National Eating Code.

In a country, which has 15 well-defined agro-climatic zones that can be further divided into 75 sub-zones, to even think of beginning an elaborate exercise to layout the outlines for perfecting a uniform NAC is by itself a bizarre idea. Despite the erudition, there is no way Indian agriculture can even theoretically conform to the idea of being made to fit into one size.

For instance, at the time of presenting Budget 2024, the Union Finance Minister had talked of introducing 10 million farmers to natural farming practices in the next two years. There is no way the principles of natural farming can be brought under any future standardisation. It only means that the BIS is either unaware of farming realities or perhaps the left hand does not know what the right is doing.

Try to read the idea behind setting up NAC in consonance with the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) latest demand for banning cultivation of ‘home-grown food’ as it has a bigger environmental footprint that is ‘destroying the planet’, and the direction in which the proposal is moving towards, becomes quite apparent. While the WEF strangely maintains that garden-to-table produce causes a much greater release of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions than conventional agriculture; the PIB release says the proposed NAC envisages incorporating emerging agricultural technologies, novel farming practices across the diverse regions for promoting efficient and sustainable agricultural practices.

So what and where the link is, you may ask.

Obviously, it means that home gardens must be banned, and the food needs can be met by an efficient industrial farming system. Over the past few years, climate catastrophe that the world finds itself in is also coming in handy to launch an assault on farming. Quite possibly, what is, however, coming in the way to a smooth takeover of farming in developing countries like India is the large number of small landholdings using diverse forms of cultivation practices. Unless these are aggregated in a way that it makes it easy for agribusiness, the penetration of the huge market that India offers for agriculture business, will not be realised. Trimming the farming systems and bringing it under appropriate standards and regulations to suit the agribusiness interests therefore becomes absolutely necessary.

That’s what the NAC will eventually help the agribusiness industry with.

Nevertheless, ever since the three contentious farm laws were withdrawn, the hidden effort to bring agriculture under corporate control by the backdoor has been quite talked about. Investigations by the Reporters’ Collective have been quite sharp on this.

Whether it is through the budgetary support for digitalisation and newer technologies in agriculture or through direct investment measures, the focus has remained on providing a fillip that enlarges private business control. It is in that direction that the NAC not only helps layout the fundamentals of future farming but eventually what will end up strengthening corporate control. Why I have earlier brought in the latest WEF demand seeking a ban on home gardening, which in any case is gaining popularity, is to explain where the future of farming is headed. Further, drawing from the successful experience of demonstration farms that were set up at the time the high-yielding wheat varieties were introduced, to show case the improved yields, the NAC is also proposing to set up ‘Standardised Agriculture Demonstration Farms’ for which select universities/institutes are being roped in. These will serve as experimental centres to make farmers aware of the latest technical innovations being introduced.

Like at the time of Green Revolution, those farmers who were quick to take on the technology were called as progressive farmers, and those who showed reluctance were dubbed as ‘laggards’. It is, however, another matter that the ‘laggards’ of the Green Revolution days are now the guiding spirits for an agro-ecological revolution. They are ones whose role in preserving and conserving the traditional farming practices, including preserving folk seeds and protecting traditional farming practices, are now being nationally and globally applauded.

Even the United Nations (UN) has called for transiting to a new paradigm of agricultural production based on diversified, resilient and sustainable agro-ecological system which works simultaneously to achieve economic, environmental, and social and health outcomes. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for fixing the broken food system wanting member countries to focus on people and not companies when the emphasis is to rebuild food and farming systems. While the UN is asking for diversified and resilient farming systems, the NAC is essentially trying to come out with an exclusionary framework with uniform crop-specific standards for main crops like paddy, wheat, oilseeds and pulses besides laying out a general outline to cover all agricultural production processes as well as for post-harvest operations.

Subsequently, the 2023 UN Forum on Sustainability Standards (UNFSS+2 as it is called) that came out of the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, identified six priority areas, but a critical assessment by civil society groups that comprise FAIN International, Corporate Accountability, Focus on the Global South and the Food and Nutritional Observatory of University of Brasilia, in October 2024, has found one of the priority areas to be problematic.

“Promoting increased engagement of businesses, including through public-private partnerships, to shape the sustainability of food systems and establish and strengthen accountability mechanisms, recognizing their centrality for food systems,” is being seen as a bogus initiative in the name of corporate accountability.

The point I am trying to make is that the corporate control over food is tightening globally. With Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) having signed a series of collaborations with agribusiness companies, the focus is increasingly on how to allow the industry to tame the shrew, as Shakespeare had popularly put it. The shrew in this case is India’s diversified and resilient agriculture.

There is no need to give a ‘haircut’ to Indian agriculture (if I were to use the popularly used banking term) but feel proud of the latest WEF recognition that finds India’s food consumption system to be most sustainable globally (among the G-20 countries).

Instead, the G-20 should redraw its commitments in agriculture based on sustaining a diversified farming system rather than aping the industrial farming model. The need is to learn from India.

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)