 I have dealt with issues as part of my work on agriculture, both looking at the larger economy of agriculture, as well as part of my work in villages, field-based work in villages across the country. I have had a chance to look at, in particular, look at economy from the perspective of farmers, much less from the perspective of traders. But so I thought, let me see what I can say. Let me start with just making some general points about to try and put the whole question of agricultural markets and agricultural marketing, agricultural prices in a larger context. And I think that's important because agriculture is a production system. And I feel that somewhere, particularly in recent debates, in particular related to agricultural prices and agricultural marketing, this is often forgotten. We often tend to talk about questions related to agricultural markets as if it's something that can fix the problem of a gradient crisis as if it's something that can be dealt with in isolation with the rest of the larger gradient question. And I think that is counterproductive. I feel particularly strongly about this because I think not only are the government's victims of this problem, I think even among the movements, even among the farmers' movements, increasingly, in their process of trying to sharpen their demands, they seem to be losing the focus. They seem to be losing the point that a lot of these things are part of larger strategy for agricultural development. And unless they are seen as part of larger strategy, you sometimes are actually making demands, making decisions which are not particularly correct. I think it's important to sort of situate the whole question of agricultural markets and agricultural prices in that larger context. Historically, if you look at the post-green revolution period, in fact, agricultural markets and policies related to agriculture markets and agricultural prices were really central pieces of the system of planning, in particular, planning for agricultural development. But in a larger sort of framework of planning, agricultural marketing was part of that whole context. These were central, not only to the strategy for agricultural growth and for achieving food self-sufficiency. These policies were also a crucial instrument to ensure that food was available to growing non-agricultural population. The policymakers were mindful of the fact that these were perhaps the most powerful determinants of cropping pattern changes, for example, sometimes desirable, sometimes undesirable that were taking place. The prices were not only a way of providing economic incentives to producers, but were also crucial determinants of food inflation. And that with all the inequality and access to land, food inflation was a problem not just for urban population, but also, actually, for a large majority of rural population. So when you talked about agricultural policy prices, when you talked about agricultural marketing, you thought of these as something that actually had repercussions on all kinds of aspects of the greater economy and not just about one or the other thing. Now, so that's one. And I think this is something that is quite central to the problem we face today. You see, when we talk of a gradient crisis, even the farmers' movements today spell out their demands in terms of, for example, wanting to have an MSP, which is 1.5 times cost to production. Now, how can you only talk of this? You see, this is a problem. When you talk about agricultural prices and agricultural marketing as the crucial core policy issues divorced from larger context of the gradient policies, you tend to fall into this trap, where you are basically demanding that MSP should be 1.5 times the cost to production without considering what cost to production itself is. Now, the point is that if you look at the post-liberalization period, you basically find that economic reforms policies, withdrawal of state in terms of providing subsidies, making investments, have first and foremost had an impact in terms of raising the cost to production. That's been the most important in some ways, the phenomenon. The impact of economic reforms in terms of withdrawing specific kinds of regulation. We were looking at data, for example, on fertilizers. The whole deregulation of non-uria fertilizers results in a huge rise in cost of fertilizers, which has a direct bearing on cost to production. Similarly, stagnation of state investment in irrigation has resulted in a situation where irrigation is increasingly privatized. Irrigation is increasingly done through private tuples, which has had a direct bearing on the cost of irrigation going up. Now, all of these things have meant that the cost of production has risen. Now, if one doesn't look at output prices in that context and merely poses the question as returns to farmers not being sufficient over and above the cost of production, you're actually missing a major point. So I think it's important for us to, when we ask the questions about agriculture marketing, when we look at agriculture markets, when we look at agricultural prices, to actually situate them in the larger agrarian context. And sometimes I think narrowing down the demand and the problems to one or two key things is actually rather problematic. Now, in this case, the problems are of multiple kinds. Now, one is to talk about output prices being 1.5 times cost of production. As I said, it is problematic because cost of production has been rising. So you are not talking about why the cost of production is rising. You're merely saying whatever the cost of production state should ensure 1.5 times that being received by farmers as prices. Now, two, you are posing it as a formulation where it's 1.5 times 50% of cost of production irrespective of what the crop is. Now, when you say 50% on top of cost of production, you're saying 50% over and above cost of production for sugarcane and 50% over cost of production for, say, urat. I mean, the cost of production is sort of one's talking of difference in terms of times of huge difference in cost of production. Now, if there is a huge difference in cost of production, then when somebody who is growing sugarcane gets a huge profit if he gets 1.5 times cost of production, while somebody growing urat gets peanuts. I mean, that doesn't even get urat for if the person is given 1.5 times cost of production. So that's not actually a great formulation, even in that respect, quite apart from the fact that cost of production itself has been inflated. The third thing is that, I mean, we've not really thought about what it means in terms of food inflation. Now, if you have a larger structural problem of land distribution being so highly unequal that a large majority of your rural population either does not have land or has tiny amounts of land, you actually have a situation where bulk of your rural population today for its livelihood depends on either wage labor, wage labor in agriculture, or wage labor outside agriculture. In fact, increasingly wage labor outside agriculture, which means that the problem of a substantial part of even your rural population being dependent on food purchases has actually even increased. Now, in that situation, higher wholesale prices of food would also translate in higher consumer prices of food. And we have not really thought about implications of that. So I mean, I think the point I want to make is that the questions of agriculture markets and questions of agricultural price policy have to be situated in the larger context. And unless that is done, we are actually going to compound our problems rather than solve them. The second point I want to make is that there is been a lot. I mean, I think we keep rediscovering the wheel. I mean, these are things that I thought were well known to the generation, at least two generations before me. So the fact that we are still talking about them shows that we keep forgetting basic lessons. There is a large body of literature that talked about imperfections in agricultural markets. Interlocking with credits and input markets, penetration of traders, and merchant capital in the system of agricultural production, and extension of land monopoly and landlordism into monopoly control over agricultural markets. Professor Zain talked about the whole sort of problem of agricultural Mondays as an institution, which has sort of refused to get reformed, let's say. For all the talk of reforming APMC Act, nothing really very much has happened because of the sort of hold that merchants, and in some cases landlords, have on these agricultural markets. Now, I think there are two things to be understood here. One is that the whole motive of having APMC Act was to, let's say, even if somewhat ineffective, was to regulate agricultural trade because agricultural trade was where you saw the worst of the agrarian relations, the worst of agrarian power being concentrated. And the whole motive of regulating the agricultural markets was to somehow say that, OK, if there are merchants who are giving badon or who are giving advances to traders and engaging in unfair practices to control farmers, in particular extract surplus from poor peasants, state has to intervene to regulate agricultural markets. Now, well, that has not been very effectively done. There are serious problems with, let's say, ineffectiveness of APMC Act in doing so, but you can't be talking about throwing the baby with the bathwater. So now you're basically saying that let's not regulate. Let's get rid of APMC Act. Let's deregulate agricultural markets. Now, the point is that this problem of imperfection of agricultural markets has remained as, in fact, one thing that has happened with coming in of regulated Mondes has been that at some level, this has got somewhat consolidated. I'll give you one example. We did a survey in a village in Madhya Pradesh in 2010 in a village in Gwalior, where the landlord was a very interesting person. I always give this example in my class in agriculture. And he's really the classic landlord, as one would like to know. He had some 200 bigas of land, the best lands of the village close to the road. The entire stretch of land was his. And he was the quasi-judicial authority in the village. He used to take pride in the fact that never once had a police complaint from the village, because he was there to resolve all disputes in the village. When he walked around on the streets, people had to touch his feet, and so on. But what was interesting was that he had been chairman of the local Mandi. He owned an ardent. So he was the commission agent. His son owned a Dalia mill, a wheat processing mill. And one son owned a Poha mill, where the rice is processed. So he used to be the main buyer of all produce from the village. He used to be the commission agent. His sons would basically process the wheat and the rice that he bought. And he was the chairman of the Mandi. Now, it was very interesting to see how the power gets concentrated. Now, you see, the commission agents charged, I think, 3% those days from the farmers for giving them payment upfront. So when the farmer goes to sell the produce, the commission agent organizes the sale. And the commission agent recovers the money from the buyer in future, but basically makes the payment to the farmer upfront. And for doing that charges something like 3% as a commission for doing this, except that in this case, Babu Singh was the buyer. Babu Singh was the commission agent. And Babu Singh was actually pocketing that 3%. And all of the grain that he bought went to his son's factories for turning into Dalia and Poha, and so on. So you see, that's the nature of concentration that can exist. This, of course, takes different forms in different parts of the country. In Eastern India, where you don't have a market yard, so to say, you could have a situation where the traders are dispersed. Traders are of different kinds. In a place like Bengal, you could have small traders who buy things from the village, then sell it to a whole hierarchy of traders. Eventually, the grain reaching either in Calcutta or Bhubaneswar or wherever. Or a place like Punjab, where a particular community, Banyas, for example, have had traditionally a hold on the Mondays. But there have been periods where the large landlords have tried to move into it. There are these whole market barriers of entry barriers into the Mondays. But this has been a tussle. While the Arthis have been the major creditors for poor peasants, lending money to poor peasants, not just for agriculture, but sometimes for all kinds of things. I remember in 2005, when I did a survey in Fatehabad, and the commission, Arthis basically ran the whole economy. So if your daughter was getting married, you went to the Arthi. The Arthi gave you slips for buying clothes. The Arthi gave you slips for buying jewelry, for buying all the various things that you needed for the wedding and for the dowry. And everything was just credited to your account. So that was one side of the relationship the commission agents had. And the other was that the large landlords actually put their money, they invested in the business of commission agents. So although the landlords could not themselves, even where landlords could not themselves directly enter into the market as merchants and commission agents, they were actually putting their money. They were saving their money with commission agents who were giving them a return and were doing the sublending. So it's a complex network of relationships, highly concentrated, and where the concentration of power is critically, though in different ways, linked to concentration of ownership and control over land and the production process. Now this is a critical aspect of agricultural markets in India and something that as President was saying has refused to go away. All the reforms that you've done have actually meant very little in terms of change precisely because this control and power that was concentrated in the agricultural markets has nothing has been done to break that monopoly. So that's another thing that I think is a crucial aspect of agricultural markets that needs to be discussed and seen how in the context of a gradient crisis, what happens to that concentration of power, how that concentration of power sort of plays out in a situation of a gradient crisis. One thing that we know about a gradient crisis is that a gradient crisis is always differential. In a situation, in a context like India, it's never a uniform gradient crisis that affects equally all classes. I mean, a gradient crisis is in fact a boon for somebody. I mean, if there is a crisis, if there is a drought, if there's a flood, there's a money lender who benefits from it. So what happens in situations of a gradient crisis, how does this concentration of power and wealth play out, is something that we need to discuss. Now I would sort of briefly like to present a few things from a study we did two years back on the global economy of pulses where we looked at agricultural markets. And there were a couple of things that I thought were useful there for me to flag. We looked at cost and returns from pulse production in different parts of the world. And this graph here is for Chana, the top panel, then Masur, and then the beans, the rajma beans. And what we've done is the first column is countries where you have large-scale producers. And the next column is countries where you have small-scale producers. The rows are not comparable. Essentially what we've done is for each country, we convert the costs and output in terms of kilograms of that crop. So if you look at the first row, let's say in Australia, the total value of output per hectare is 1,200 kilograms of Chana. That's your per hectare production is 1,200 kilograms of Chana, of which something like 600 kilograms goes towards the cost. And 600 is the return that a farmer gets. Similarly, every bar is in terms of that crop. So in India, for example, the Chana is about one metric ton, of which about 700 goes in cost, and 300 is what a farmer saves. So if you convert the cost also in terms of using the price for that crop into the quantity of the crop, you basically get out of the grain that the farmer produces how much is actually saved as return of the farmer. Now there are two points that I would like to show. I'll show you some sort of detailed numbers in a moment. But there are two things that one needs to see. One is that every country which has large scale production has higher returns. I mean, Australia, Australia and Canada for Lentil, for North Dakota, United States for Common Bean. The returns are higher than they are in countries which have small present production. The second thing is that these returns are higher not just because their yields are higher. That is the total length of the bar is taller, but also because in most cases, their cost of production is lower. They are actually producing at lower cost than we are. These are variable costs. They don't take into account capital costs, but this stands out very strongly that their cost production is lower. There is a third element. I'll come to that in a moment. But let's look at the details. Now, this is for Lentil, that is Masur. If you compare India, Bangladesh, Australia, and Canada, I mean, Canada's production is twice that of the other three countries. The variable cost, if you look at the cost, the Canadian costs are considerably lower than. So Bangladesh, the cost is 721 kilograms of Lentil. They go towards the cost in Canada, only 339. So the costs are lower. Now, interestingly, costs are lower most importantly because look at the labor and machinery costs. They're spending less, not only on labor, but also on machinery. The machinery cost in India and Bangladesh is much higher than machinery cost per hectare in Canada. And you would think that large-scale production will be more mechanized. But here, our farmers are spending much more even on machines. Leave aside human labor. Now, what is interesting is that they've actually moved to much greater cost of chemicals. You have, look at Australia, 199 kilograms of Lentil go towards cost of plant protection chemicals in inoculants. One big transformation that has happened in large-scale production in developed countries is a shift towards use of herbicides and a shift towards no-till cultivation, which has meant that machine costs are lower. Farmers are basically killing the stubble and the weeds by use of herbicides. So the chemical costs are higher. In fact, chemicalized agriculture is much more a characterization of this agriculture than mechanized agriculture. In fact, we are perhaps more mechanized than they are. They're just using chemicals and killing the weed. And in fact, planting next crop without tilling at all. So you actually have a situation where machinery is used more efficiently, tilling is not done, and is replaced by use of chemicals, resulting in a situation where their cost of production is considerably lower than us. This is something that's seen across the crops. I've got here, for example, chickpea, chana. In case of chana, look at Australia. In Australia, produces 1,300 kilograms of chana per hectare. Myanmar produces 900. We produce 1,000. Look at variable costs. They spend 563. We spend 660. So if you look at our costs are higher, our yields are lower, and per hectare returns are hugely lower. Now, there is something more here. So this is one problem, that when you're competing, when a country with small-scale peasant production is competing with a country where production happens on large farms, you already have two problems. One, the yields are much higher. There's much greater application of modern technology, better seeds, better application of technology. You have lower costs, again, because of better use of technology. But you have another problem, and I think that's even more serious, which is that an average median farmer in Canada has 600 hectares of land. This level of return over 600 hectare of land for a family farm in Canada means a huge annual profit. At this rate of return, even if you had the same rate of return as a Canadian farmer, an Indian farmer with something like half a hectare of land actually is going to make an absolute earning, which is starvation income. So now that simply means that if you're talking of, say, 10% return over production, or even 50% return over production, 50% return over production in case of lentil production in Canada means that lentil is a booming business in Canada. Lentil is not only a booming business in Canada. Lentil has become more profitable than wheat in Canada. Chana is more profitable than wheat production in Australia. It's unthinkable in India that lentil or chana would be more profitable than wheat. Now, you actually have a situation where 50% return over production means that it's a booming economy of Canada, while 50% return over cost of production in India, given the small scale of production, means that farmers are starving. Now, this results in a situation where the small, I mean, there's just no way you can compete. There is no competition between a poor peasant of India with a large-scale producer of Canada or Australia. Now, this needs to be understood. Now, you see, and this is a problem that's compounded because of three things, because of lower yields, because of higher costs, and because of small-scale production. These three things together is a killer combination. Now, if you actually had a situation where you had RCEP, I mean, Indian pulse production would have been destroyed. I mean, at least chana production would be destroyed. So you actually have a situation where agricultural trade, when it's opened up like this, between countries with small-scale producers and between countries with large-scale production, there is just no competition. I mean, to say that we're going to have a level playing field is really a scandal on working people of the country. So that's my second point. Now, looking at pulses, there are two other things that sort of stood out. One was we did a bit of an analysis on futures market for chana in India, which there were essentially two points that stood out. One was that in the period when we had futures market in chana, the volatility in spot market increased because of volatility in the future market. So volatility, rather than bringing down volatility in spot markets, the futures market contributed to increasing the volatility in the spot market. The second thing was that it was clear that futures market was not a place for farmers to hedge their risk. I mean, not only were the farmers not actually able to function in the markets, the risks were higher in the future market than in the spot market. And it was not as if that was an avenue where farmers could hedge their risk. The third thing that stood out was if you look at value chains between the developing countries and developed countries. And if you're looking at commodities where value chains are extremely important, pulses have to be milled, pulses have to be processed before they are consumed, particularly in India there. They are milled, and India is the biggest market. It is clear that Indian value chains are much longer than value chains in developed countries. You have a whole sort of hierarchy of traders and commodities sort of pass through that whole long value chains, which means that the cost of the difference in the value, the price that a consumer pays, and the price that the producer gets is pretty large. And that further squeezes out your producer. So you've got actually a series of things that squeeze out your producers. You have small scale of production. You have higher cost. You have low yields, and you have long value chains. So all of this essentially means that your farmers are squeezed that much. So this very clearly creates a situation where you simply, there's no possibility of competition between poor peasant economies and economies with large scale production. And to me, there is no choice but to have ways to protect your peasantry. There's just no other way of doing it. Now coming to my last thing, which is about the agricultural policies in the current regime, I think, I don't know, I was thinking of Mark saying, history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. Here we have a situation where tragedy and farce are actually happening together. Now I don't know what to worry about. If you look at agricultural markets, the only thing that the government is interested in is emandis, period. That's the only thing they want to talk about. I once went and met John's secretary in the ministry, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was emandis. And for him, the only authentic source of data on agricultural prices was real time data coming from emandis. What does one say to this? And he said, I don't want to look at this Agmarknet data, which is daily price data from hundreds of mandis across the country. Because the only thing where the future lies are price data, which are real time coming from mandis. Now from emandis, what does one say to this? I mean, you actually have a situation where policymakers are so completely divorced from the reality. I mean, the fact that the actual trade in emandis, what is not just being cooked up and shown as trade in emandis, but actual trade in emandis is not even the 0.1% of total trade, is of no relevance to your policymakers, is what is worrying. Not only the fact that your policy is completely misdirected, but the fact that you've shut your eyes to the world. And you've shut your eyes to the reality is what, where the problems lie. In fact, it's not even clear whether this is simply because of the ineptitude or it's actually clever design. We were, Prachi is here. Prachi and I were doing some work on fertilizers, and we decided to visit some fertilizer traders to find out what had happened in the wake of GST. So there's been a whole, I'll just take a minute. I'm just in my last thing. This whole thing of GST being imposed on fertilizer is supposed to have increased the prices of fertilizer. So how are farmers taking it? It was quite interesting to talk to the fertilizer traders, and they said, it's not a problem. And we were quite surprised why it was not a problem. It turns out that, you see this, since you've had a situation of deregulated fertilizer prices, fertilizer prices fluctuate every day. It just changes every day. Now, in between, GST also came and got introduced. And farmers obviously didn't realize whether it was just one of those fluctuations that was coming in or it was an additional tax that they were paying. So the additional cost of fertilizer price because of GST simply got absorbed because the fertilizer prices are now fluctuating from one day to the next. And no farmer knows what actually the real price is. And you go to the market and there's a new price. You pay the price and you buy the fertilizer. Now, you actually have a situation where agricultural policies are changing so fast. Things are coming in. And we are really ill-equipped to deal with it. In terms of resistance, you are not able to build the resistance simply because there's so much happening. And I mean, so much is being dismantled. That where do you fight is really a question. So I think let me stop here and then take some questions. Thanks.