The Nainital conclave of Congress Chief Ministers, among other things, discussed the continuing reports of farmer suicides in the Vidarbha region and elsewhere.
These self-inflicted deaths by Vidarbha farmers persist even after the announcement of a liberal financial package when the Prime Minister visited the region a few months ago.
Suicides are not just by the poorest farmers; they are also mostly by farmers who have small holdings and can provide the collateral for loans from banks and private money-lenders.
Suicides are mostly in agriculturally advanced states, among farmers who have taken to single-crop farming, and not where they still follow an integrated farming system comprising a mix of crops, horticulture, livestock, poultry etc.
The apparent reasons are the cost of credit and farmers' indebtedness, the fluctuations in fortunes year after year especially in the rain-fed areas, the shrinking size of land holdings, deterioration in soil fertility because of nutrient depletion, use of low efficiency of input like pesticides, poor post-harvest management and value addition and above all inefficient marketing.
There are also other issues like the wisdom of growing cotton which requires a lot of inputs bought with cash in a rainfed area that is drought-prone.
Cotton growers here are also denied the returns their counterparts elsewhere in the country get, because of Maharashtra's monopoly cotton procurement scheme.
Current measures such as providing credit at low interest rates, waiver of past interest, raising protectionist walls and undertaking state procurement of produce at guaranteed prices are good but not good enough to save the present grim situation.
The solution to this problem would be two-fold. The short strategy should be to provide short-term relief measures, while the long-term strategy has to focus on productivity by getting more people off the land and into non-agricultural occupations.
marketing@alchempro.com
