Categorising farmers based on dependence on farm income and land ownership has strirred debates.
What is the categorisation about?
The Agriculture Census for 2015-16 placed the total operational holdings in India at 146.45 million.
National Statistical Office’s Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households (SAAH) report for 2018-19 pegs the country’s agricultural households at 93.09 million.
This wide variation has largely to do with methodology.
The Agriculture Census looks at any land used even partly for agricultural production and operated/managed by one person alone or with others. The land does not have to be owned by that person (cultivator), who needn’t also belong to an agricultural household.
The SAAH report considers only the operational holdings of agricultural households.
While the Census treats each of them as separate holdings, the SAAH takes all these lands as a single production unit.
Those households whose net receipts from farming are at least 50 per cent of their total income from all sources are categorized as full-time/regular farmers.
The mention of minimum land (more than 1 hectare or 2.5 acres) required for farming to be viable excludes about 70 per cent of agricultural households in the country which they do not possess.
There is a suggestion that the agricultural policy should target only serious/regular farming households as they genuinely depend on farming.
What are the flaws of the above mentioned categorisation of farmers?
The categorization of farmer based on a single ratio of farm income dependence and a threshold of 50 per cent ignores the differential historical trajectory of development and livelihood diversification in diverse regions of India.
For example, while remittances often constitute a major portion of household income in states like Kerala, it does not make small-scale spice cultivators or rubber growers any less serious.
Farmers are not a homogenous category and a more realistic category of rich/middle/poor farmers or capitalist/petty-producer/agricultural labour is needed to identify those engaged in agriculture.
The contribution to national production of 70 % of farmers possessing less than 1 hectare of land is under question.
Forcing marginal farmers out of agriculture would be disastrous from the perspective of household-level food and nutrition security.
Withdrawing state support to smallholders will have a disproportionate impact on the socially marginalised groups and would further push them into asset poverty.
If 70% of agricultural households are identified as non-serious farmers, there lies a question of who should be moved out of agriculture and what happens to their land resources.
Huge land reserves will be immediately opened for corporate grabbing laying the foundation for agribusiness monopolies.
Agriculture functions as a social safety net in providing a source of sustenance to millions and thereby providing conditions of relatively stable growth in productive sectors of the economy.
The crisis faced by migrant workers during the lockdown and the phenomenon of reverse migration is a testimony to the fact that agriculture continues to provide a buffer to millions who face intermittent unemployment.
What will be the solution to the problem of Indian farmers?
The SAAH data also shows a fall in real average crop incomes between 2013 and 2019 which is driven by rising input prices and dwindling output prices.
Smallholders rely more on informal sources of moneylending, which adds to indebtedness.
Forced destruction of the livelihoods of millions of smallholders by withdrawal of the little they receive by the way of state support will be a recipe for disaster.
The solution to the problem of Indian farmers needs a serious rethink of the economic policies and surely cannot lie in simply excluding them by redefinition.
