Today, Explained - India’s farmers strike

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

The world’s biggest democracy is contending with what might be the world’s biggest labor stoppage. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. One of the largest organized protests in the history of humanity is happening right now in the world's biggest democracy. A sight like no other has unfolded at border points by Delhi in India. The image you want in your head to begin to capture what's going on is the major roads and highways that lead into India's capital being completely shut off. Irfan Nooradin teaches Indian politics at Georgetown University. India's capital, New Delhi, is under siege by farmers who have made treks from their villages with trucks, tractors.

Some 200,000 farmers are estimated now to be on the streets. They're protesting agricultural reforms that they say will leave them at the mercy of big corporations. There are huge open kitchens that are being set up by those who are supporting the farmers to feed these farmers. They're sleeping on their truck beds and they're sleeping on the streets. But like with anything with India, it's so colourful, right? I mean, think of Sikh, all the turbans, right? I mean, it's just really visually quite powerful. The government is essentially saying that we don't want to be protecting you anymore by regulating the market.

You can interface with the markets all by yourselves and let's see what happens. Find for yourselves. You have an incredible vivid colour and noise sort of active, democratic, peaceful, nonviolent protests. The government has responded at times with force. Protesters have been met with water cannons along with tear gas, concrete barricades, and some were even beaten with batons. Farmers make up about, what, half of the country's workforce.

Why are hundreds of thousands of them protesting in the country's workforce, why are hundreds of thousands of them protesting in the country's capital? What's behind these protests? I think we're really getting at sort of the challenges of globalization, of market liberalization, of economic reform on a really micro scale. It's easy to talk about those big ideas of how do we reform an economy for the 21st century and sometimes forget that at the very end of those reforms are small farmers working the land in ways that their grandparents and their great-grandparents and generations before that do. So in many ways, this is India's historical economy coming face toface with India's aspirational future economy.

Okay, and they're protesting modernization through three new laws in particular, right? What are these new laws? So they were passed actually back in September, three laws that interlock to create maybe the largest change to India's agricultural markets since independence. What they do or aspire to do is to create a much more of a market mechanism through which farmers could sell their produce to any buyer, including in the private sector, to allow for larger investments and activity by industrial farming in India's agricultural markets, to change how the prices are set for farmer produce, and then finally to affect in ways that are quite subtle the ways in which grain and agricultural produce is stored

and can be transported across state borders. India's constitution defines different responsibilities and gives them to different levels of government. Farming is a state subject so the individual states get to decide what happens and so partly what the central government is trying to do is to create much more of a national market for agriculture so that farmers can trade across borders. The government is promising that if these reforms go through and are implemented properly, that farmers' incomes will double in the coming years. Which sounds like it could be at least sold to farmers as a positive development. Why are hundreds of thousands of farmers taking to the streets about this? Why are they so worried? Partly it is because there's a fundamental distrust of large-scale reform.

And the government, I suspect, miscalculated in not consulting farmer organizations and representatives of farmers fully. These laws came by surprise, which has become a bit of the Indian government's way of doing things. Some of us will remember, you know, in November of 2016, when overnight the Indian government deemed 90% of the currency no longer legal tender in what is called demonetization. Last year, there were protests because the government suddenly rammed through a complete change to Kashmir's constitutional status, to citizenship rules. Once again, we have a really big set of rules that were not passed with any real democratic deliberation and consultation. So fundamental distrust over here is a large part

of this. But beyond that, Indian farmers, for the most part, lead lives that are very close to subsistence levels. The bulk of Indian farmers have land holdings of less than two and a half acres, right? So what we're talking about here are small farmers who are desperately in need of some guarantee that what they produce will find a buyer and will fetch them a price that will allow them to keep body and soul together. Market mechanisms might be great in an economics textbook, but are terrifying for these farmers. But it's also worth remembering that these are not new in the sense of being innovative across the country. Lots of states, because farming is a state subject, have experimented and implemented versions of these rules before. And that is partly what

animates some of the concerns of the farmers who are now protesting, who basically point to innovations of these kinds implemented in other states that they say show that farmers are not actually benefiting from some of these rules. So take something like the minimum support price or the Mundi system. The state of Bihar, which is not very far from this, where a lot of these protests are occurring, over a decade ago had really changed its agricultural system. But the average farmer in Bihar is much, much poorer than the average farmer in Punjab, which is the epicenter of the current protests, where these rules had not been implemented. So farmers in Punjab can look across the state lines to other states that have tried versions of these reforms and say,

why on earth would we want that? We have got a much better situation than what is being promised to us. It's interesting. I mean, if this is being figured out at the state level, why did the federal government feel the need to step in and pass broader reforms? India's system of state governance is important because it allows for farmers and anyone, any workers to be closer to the leaders that represent them. But India is also a huge market. It's 1.3 billion people. And the part of this government's approach is to leverage India's huge population into a national market. So for instance, in America, right, farmers in Nebraska can sell their produce to buyers anywhere in the country. The MUNDI system, which is government procurement of produce in certain states, makes it essentially that those buyers have a monopoly or monopsonous sort of purchasing power over the produce in the states.

This allows farmers to sell to a single buyer that allows, guarantees them a certain price and provides some price stability. But trading across state lines in ways that would benefit a national market is very difficult under these rules. So partly the government is saying, why wouldn't we want farmers to have a choice? Instead of selling my stuff to these guys who have been my partners for the last 50 years, why wouldn't I want to put my produce on the open market so that anyone wanting to buy it, maybe paying me a higher price, maybe offering me other kinds of incentives, is equally viable as a customer as the current Mundi system. So, yes, it's a state subject, but the government would make the argument

that there's a lot of benefits to efficiency and productivity if we could nationalize the investment in farmers. This is a done deal, but that hasn't stopped people from protesting. They've been out there for weeks. But the protests intensified over the weekend, so this seems like it's ramping up. What comes next? At the end of the day, the government's advantage is that it can wait out the protesters.

And the government might argue internally that it has shown an ability to do that without much consequence. I mean, a year ago, we had huge protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that the government had passed. And three months later, those protesters were disbanded, largely because of the COVID lockdowns. But the government didn't really pay any real political costs because of that. So I suspect they will try and wait them out. The optics, though, are striking.

And as farmers mainly from Punjab and Haryana continue their protests at the border of Delhi, the internet is being flooded with songs of revolution and rebellion. We have peaceful protesters reminding everyday Indians where their food comes from. This is a sympathetic group of individuals who are not rich, they are not wealthy, they are average farmers who are sort of, you know, make for really good copy. Punjabi and Haryanvi singers are churning out one number after the other and garnering millions of views online.

The biggest names from the Punjabi music and film industry have lent their support to the farmers' agitation. And so this is playing on the national news, this is playing in every newspaper in India. I think the government is going to have to find a way to deal with these farmers on their own terms while of course maintaining the integrity of the laws that they thought were a good idea back in September. ਸਵ ਰਾਜਾ ਪੀਛੇ ਬੈਰੀ ਗੀਡ ਪਾਏ ਹੋਇ ਨੇ ਜਾਤ ਨੀ ਪੁਝਾਬ ਵੋਈ ਹੋਇ ਹੋਇ ਨੇ ਲੇਕ ਗੀਆ ਪਾਮੇ ਇਡੀਆ ਦਾ ਮੀਡੀਆ ਬੀਬੀ ਸੀ ਦੇ ਉਤੇ ਜਾਤ ਛਾਏ ਹੋਇ ਨੇ ਪੀਟ ਦੇ ਮੁਡੇ ਹੋਂ ਖੀਡ ਦੇਖਦੇ ਇਕੀਆ ਨੂ ਕਤੀ ਜਾਕੇ ਤੁ ਸੀਪਾਏ ਹੋਂ ਬੈ More with Irfan after a quick break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family,

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Irfan, you mentioned reforms like these have been occurring on the state level in India. How far back does this agricultural crisis in the country go? This is a crisis that goes all the way back to independence and before. One of the big efforts of the post-independence government was to implement meaningful land reform that would reallocate land, especially in North India, more equitably. It didn't succeed because landed interests fought back pretty vociferously. But the end result of this is that the average farmer in India, the mortal farmer in India, has very small land holdings. Less than one hectare, that's about two and a half acres of land. No agriculture anywhere in the world can be productive on that small piece of land.

I joke when I teach at Georgetown with my students that as an Indian, I sometimes think of, you know, the great agricultural states of America, Nebraska and Oklahoma, and as basically being one farmer on a giant combine going up and down the state, right? And that that scale of these huge farms allows for the implementation of huge technology of machine agriculture that allows for the tremendous productivity so that today in America, less than 2% of the American population makes its income directly from farming. And yet America is one of the most productive agricultural nations in the world, generating huge surpluses of agriculture that can be sold throughout America and around the world. In India, we did not get that land reform.

The downside of this has been that farmers have not had an infusion of capital that has allowed them to go out and innovate in terms of the technology. There's no real incentive to do that. And the money that they make is inadequate to really make a living in a 21st century world. How does all this translate on the ground? You're saying farmers are dealt a bad hand in India, plots of land that, you know, aren't productive.

Yet, unlike the United States, agriculture accounts for about half of the workforce in the country. What's life like for the average Indian farmer? The farmer distress is huge. In 2019 alone, over 10,000 farmers committed suicide. Wow. In the past decade, the estimate is that over 50,000 farmers have killed themselves. Imagine a person's life ending because of indebtedness caused by the fact that they simply can't make a living. I want to just go back to that 50,000 farmers killing themselves because of distress faced by drought, climate change induced volatility, but fundamentally the inability to make a

sustainable living and to pay their debts. So the notion that agriculture in India is sustainable in its current form is not viable. It needs a change. But what farmers would point out is that simply changing the market mechanisms to make them more vulnerable to price fluctuation is not enough. What about infrastructure? How do farmers get their produce to the buyers when they have broken roads, inadequate coal chain storage facilities? So much of Indian farming never makes it to market because it goes bad, it spoils. How do we guarantee that farmers who take a loan from a private sector bank won't and can't pay it back, won't lose their land, which is their only source of income?

So part of the picture here is that there's a much bigger situation facing Indian agriculture. And what the government has done over here is arguably tried to attempt to fix part of it, but without touching any of the rest of it. And what the government has done over here is arguably tried to attempt to fix part of it, but without touching any of the rest of it. And what the farmers are arguing right now is that that potentially makes the situation even worse. I mean, just to go back for a second to your comparison of Indian agriculture to American agriculture, where there's one farmer on a combine managing Oklahoma and Nebraska. I mean, you can't imagine 50,000 agricultural deaths by suicide in the United States. That would be a crisis of epic proportions. Does that speak to how few options Indian farmers have other than agriculture? Absolutely. I mean, it speaks to a level of desperation that is frankly unimaginable to me and I suspect to most, if not everyone, listening to the show. Where do farmers go if they're not farming?

40% of the labor force in India right now is employed in agriculture. Where do all of those individuals go to find productive employment if not doing what they know how to do and what they've done for generations? So the larger question over here is that we have an economy that aspires to be a 21st century leader, that is showing great signs of doing that. It's now the seventh largest economy in the world, but that still fails to provide meaningful employment opportunities to the bulk of its labor force. And this is especially exacerbated among farming communities that have limited access to education.

The urban-rural gap in education is huge in India. And so what we have to really grapple with as a society is that it's fine to aspire to a different agricultural sector, one that's much more efficient, one that has fewer people working on it. But what happens to those farmers? And unless we can answer that question, we don't solve the really deep-rooted issues

that we're seeing on the streets of Delhi right now. Has anyone asked the Indian government, just point blank, are you willing to take this risk to reform agriculture? Are you willing to even see an increased loss of life and livelihood right now? Because in the end, it might be the better move for the economy. The India of 2020 does not really allow for such kind of direct questioning of the government. I mean, we have a prime minister who is much admired by many Indians and yet has not held a press conference

in six years of being prime minister. So that kind of direct, accountable and direct questioning doesn't occur. But the opposition parties are raising exactly that set of issues. They're trying to paint a picture and saying that what the government is doing is to be cavalier, to be cruel about the fates of farmers by essentially selling them

pie in the sky, you know, good in economic textbooks, but really lousy in terms of implementation and on the ground. The government, I think, legitimately comes back and says, hey, don't pretend like farmer situations right now are very good. 40,000 suicides over the last 10 years is also an indictment of the current system. And so we need to have fresh thinking, we need to have change. And so maybe the big picture takeaway is not that these farm bills and farm laws are inherently misguided and inherently bad, but rather that a single silver bullet to solve India's agricultural wars does not exist. And what the government needs to convince farmers is that they are willing to take the big, holistic view of what ails farming and not throw them at the mercy of private sector

markets that may or may not work out for individual farmers. That's a risk-reward ratio that these poor, small farmers are unwilling to take, and that's why they're on the streets of Delhi right now. Irfan, thank you so much. Thank you, Sean. I appreciate it. Irfan Nooruddin is a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University.

He's also the director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.