The free marketers- media-academia nexus killing farmers across India

Sometime back delivering a talk at a national conference of economists, I had said that it is not farmers, who have failed, but agricultural economists who had failed the farmers.

I thought this would evoke a strong reaction from the esteemed economists who were present but it took me by surprise when a senior economist, who was the next to make a presentation, actually endorsed my viewpoint. In fact, he started his talk by saying that he was in agreement with me. This set a new agenda for the two-day conference.

When I look at the debate that is happening following the farmers protest, it clearly shows how right I was.

As a retired Army General with whom I had a conversation on video, remarked: “One thing is clear, almost everyone is okay with the farmers remaining poor and on the margins of the development models.”

This is a statement that I think should put the society to sit back and think and ascertain why is it that the people who put food on our table have to sleep either hungry or remain perpetually in poverty. With an income level that is bottom of the pyramid, the Situational Assessment Survey for Agricultural Household (2018-19) clearly shows that the income from farming is below that of MNREGA workers. The income levels would even match or be lower than the income that a number of household workers get in posh and upmarket residential complexes.

Shouldn’t this make the urban population question its own biases that have been drilled into their thinking by an equally contemptuous media? Day-in and day-out the cacophony that a section of the media blares out calling protesting farmers as militants, rogue, khalistanis and even anti-nationals, is reflective of the venom they carry against farmers.

Personally, many sensitive journalists say how ashamed they are at what is being said by the media, Still worse is that hardly a few voices that speak on behalf of the farming community are invited to panel discussions, and if invited they are given less time to air their views. Some are even stopped in between and not allowed to even complete the sentence.

Anyway, let’s go back to know how the flawed economic thinking rules the roost. First, when I said that agricultural economists are responsible for the prevailing farm crisis, I didn’t mean every economist. There are many sensitive and environment and development economists whose voice gets lost in the din and noise that mainline thinking creates. Secondly, there still is a question to be asked. After all, if it was all hunky-dory as we as students (I too have been a student of agriculture) have been made to believe, why is it that almost 60 years after the Green Revolution took off, the average farm family’s monthly income is only Rs. 10,218, at the lowest level. This is the average but a majority of farmers somehow survive on less than Rs, 5,000 per month.

But when was the last time agricultural economist as a community ever raised concern at the declining farm incomes? Why did they fail to alert the policy makers that all is not well in agriculture?

I say this because farm income is not to be seen as another set of statistics. It involves livelihoods, impacting the survival of at least the other half. Perhaps we have forgotten to draw any lessons from Susan George’s monumental work: ‘How the Other Half Lives’.

With such low income levels, I wonder how the other half lives in India. While the media narrative is that farmers are a pampered lot, and get free electricity and don’t have to pay any income tax, the fact is that the OECD (Organisation for Cooperation and Development), the richest trading block, has tabled a study that says Indian farmers have been continuously incurring losses since the year 2000.

The moment you question the flawed economics that has kept agriculture deliberately impoverished, a battery of mainline economists are up in arms arguing for the same kind of blinkered economics that has failed farmers everywhere in the world. If markets were so benevolent, there is no reason why farmers in India and in 16 countries of Europe are on protest. US farmers too had protested in the past asking for income parity, another term for guaranteed prices.

In fact, I find the free marketers have monopolised the economic thought process to such an extent that along with media and the academia they have, in reality formed, a cartel. All dissenting voices who call for an alternative system are silenced. This is what had prompted a well-known American economist to say the need is to change the dominant thinking.

To illustrate this better, you have to see a Twitter thread by a French economist, Cesar A Hidalgo, who works on economic complexity. Citing several chilling examples of how the bias in economics prevails, he said that when he made a presentation in a seminar series at the Harvard University, another professor from Cambridge MA University had whispered in his ears “I would have liked so much to be the reviewer of your paper, because I would have enjoyed so much rejecting it.”

The thread has more than 2000 comments, with a majority sharing how the dominant economic thinking is shutting out public opinion and even research analysis that challenges the inherent bias. He also cites how someone who went on to win the Nobel Prize had ganged up with the department heads to run down junior faculty’s probing analysis that is “changing the face of development economics.”

The nexus that prevails protects the ‘mainline economic thinking’. It is so deep rooted that it is becoming not only difficult but almost impossible to penetrate the fortress. The same kind of economic thinking, which obviously backs business and trade, has protective layers and needs to be peeled layer-by-layer. This holds political parties of all hues captive to the domineering but an outdated economic thinking.

It is heartening to see some economists daring to say that the 21st century economics cannot run on 20th century economics. Indian agriculture too is a victim of the same outdated economics. By demanding MSP to be made a legal right, protesting farmers are actually calling for a course correction to bring about a systemic change in agricultural price policy.

It is not the time to rubbish farmers’ movement but to see it as a call for bigger economic reforms that will perhaps help in changing the overweighing perception about farming.

Give farmers the right income and farming will no longer be a burden but generate enormous wealth.