 So good afternoon everyone and welcome to this discussion Ways Forward, COVID-19 and Indian Agriculture. Now COVID-19 has brought into the forefront and into stark relief, many long-standing systemic issues, challenges that progressive people's movements, researchers, academics and journalists have repeatedly raised and cautioned the public and policymakers about. Now these, you know, key among these are the abysmal conditions of our public health and public welfare services and infrastructure. Then the absence of appropriate, timely and sufficient social protections for the precarious, that vast proportion of India's population on whose labor are homes, daily comforts, houses, cities, transportation, food, sanitation, healthcare, commerce and numerous other facilities depend. As India went into a sudden and unprepared lockdown, it is these workers who faced its brutality. Another key issue that has been forefronted is the issue of hunger, which has been created by the inability and or unwillingness of the government to use its food stocks to feed stranded workers and urban and rural poor. There are reports in the press mainstream and alternative of large stocks of food grain being wasted in the go downs of food corporation of India. Because the central government has not expanded the coverage of schemes such as the public distribution system. So in a country with sufficient food reserves, potentially people are going hungry. Now that lockdowns are being lifted and the COVID-19 discourse is moving to the what next questions. We are also moving. I'm going to devote this webinar to those questions. We have Professor Madhura Swaminathan, who is a development economist and professor. She's the head of the Economic Analysis Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute. She's the founding trustee of the Foundation Fagrarian Studies. Our second speaker is Ranjini Basu, who is a policy researcher with focus on the Global South. She works from focuses India office in New Delhi. So with that, I'm honored and privileged to invite Madhura Swaminathan to please take the floor. Madhura, please. I'm going to speak on the impact of lockdown on agriculture. And right at the beginning, I would like to say that although agriculture is less than 15% of our gross domestic product. If there are 69% of Indians living in rural India, all of whom depend in some way on agriculture. The adverse impact on agriculture is not only that sector of the GDP that is affected, but hundreds of millions of livelihoods in rural India. Now, when we come to the impact of the lockdown and associated disruption in economic activity in transport and communication. I think it's useful to separate the effect on the crop sector from the other allied sectors. So let me start with crop production. March April is the time of the Ravi harvest in India, which is made wheat in Punjab, Haryana, parts of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, some Borupadi, rice in Bengal and some sugar cane maize and some other parts of India. So in the irrigated parts of India, it was a time of harvest. And except for the first few days or the first week of disruption, the harvest activity did continue and was completed. The real impact in the case of the crop production sector is on prices or what happened to sale of the harvest produce and this is where a huge adverse impact came in. Professor R. Ramkumar of the Data Institute of Social Sciences has done a very detailed study of market arrivals in the case of 16 commodities. And he looked at mid-March to mid-May of 2020 and compared it to the same period, March 15, May 15 of 2019. In every commodity, there's a huge decline in market arrivals. Fewer markets or Mondes were functioning. When they started functioning, there were restrictions on timings on the number of people who could come for selling, on the quantities that could be brought in, on the number of trucks and so many other things that are part of the agricultural supply chain. And the question then is what impact this had on prices. I think the impact that everybody agrees on is huge price volatility. So much more fluctuation in prices on a day-to-day basis and steep price fall for several commodities, particularly perishable items like fruit and vegetable. There are some exceptions here and we should mention them in Punjab, where the wheat harvest was coming in, the well-established system of public procurement at the minimum support price, and that more or less went on track. Another exception here is Kerala, where rice harvest was coming in, in central Kerala, Trishur district and other places, and the government of Kerala's supply co-organization, which offered a higher MSP than the central MSP, 26 rupees to 18, also organized procurement, organized arrangements for harvest for machinery for transport of the produce to the procurement sentence. So there were a few exceptions, but in large part, the producers in India were left to the mercy of markets, which were not functioning as a result of the lockdown and suffered price reductions and therefore income reductions. The other, the non-crop sector, in fact, has taken an even larger toll, perhaps, which has not yet been documented fully. Again, I'm going to look at Ramkumar's paper, which is forthcoming in the review of Agrarian Studies, a journal of the FAS, and also a document prepared by the Kerala government of the economic impact by the state planning board. And whether it is milk, whether it's poultry, whether it's meat, fish, flowers, there have been huge losses, economic losses. Let me just give an example. The demand for milk declined by about 20 to 25% in the lockdown, and this had an impact on milk sales and milk prices. Just today, the Karnataka Milk Cooperative Federation has reduced the price of purchase for the second time since the lockdown, and of course private deities have reduced it much earlier. India is the second largest beef exporter in the world, and our exports collapsed. And as all of you know, in the case of beef and mutton and so on, there are many cases where interstate travel, transport of animals is very important. This collapsed, abattoirs in Mumbai closed, and that affected centers in many other districts of Maharashtra as well as in other states and so on. Fisheries. This has, again, the decline in fisheries because except for very small fishermen. Fisheries on the large scale was not allowed. And the lockdown came exactly one month before the two month ban from mid April to mid to the end of May on fisheries that applies to all the marine fisheries in India. So just before the ban came in, they had a month of lockdown, which is usually the period of very high fish production and huge losses, for example, to fishermen because of sale of exports, retail processing and so on. Poor tree. Many of you would have heard about a Karnataka farmer who buried 6000 birds alive on one day. So small producers, medium producers, larger producers, when they could not sell milk, some of them stopped feeding their animals as much the the flowers lay on the fields they were not even harvested as floriculturists could not sell their produce. So chicken and eggs were either buried or destroyed as there were no markets, there were no transport networks, there were bottlenecks. So this disruption of the supply chain has affected milk, food, vegetables, perishables like eggs and poultry which have a certain fixed lifetime, perhaps much more in terms of incomes than the crop production sector. So the first point that I wanted to make is that when we look at the agricultural sector, there's been an impact on production, particularly for nonfield crops, there's been a huge impact of prices, price reductions, price volatility. At the same time, when urban retail prices went up, but today we're talking about rural households and as producers and consumers, not so much at urban consumers. As a result of which the incomes there's been a huge income loss. I can go into details of this now or if there are questions about specific sectors, but I would like to say a little bit now on the differentiated impact of this. So the whole agricultural economy was adversely affected. But what was the effect on difference classes in the rural economy? And this is a question for which you need field level data and the foundation for agrarian studies did a small rapid survey in 16 villages across 10 states, calling respondents whom we had already interviewed over the last year, several years, and finding out about the impact. And I think without any, I can generalize very easily here that the large landowners, the capitalist farmers, the rich farmers, were not as badly affected or were minimally affected as compared to the small landowners and the poor peasants. And let me give you a few examples of this. In a village in West Bengal, where the potato harvest had just been completed before the COVID lockdown, so it had been completed in the early part of March. The poor farmer who was a tenant household had sold part of his potato crop at 600 rupees per bag, which a bag is usually 50 kilogram. But the remaining which he had to sell after the lockdown, the price fell to 500 rupees, so it won 6th reduction from 600 to 500 per bag. In a small village, a much larger capitalist farmer said he was able to store the produce in cold storage and would send it later in the year. Of course if lockdown affects prices in September, November, that family too will be affected. But as of now, you can see the clear differentiated effect. This price reduction, in the case of vegetables, in the case of agriculture, in the case of various produce is because the small peasant does not have the resources to keep the harvest, to store it, to sell it at a later date. Today, this small cultivator, the poor peasant, the middle peasant is also heavily indebted. And this brings me to the third point, which is what next, what about the next season, the Kharif season, which is about to begin since the monsoon has arrived in India. The poor peasant who here a very important point to note, which has come out of the village studies that the foundation has done over the years, is that a large number of almost all poor peasant and middle peasants are dependent heavily on income from wage labor and from income as manual workers as well. So in this season, and we will hear about it from the next speaker, when employment collapsed, this has also affected the incomes of poor peasants who depend on a significant share of their income comes from wage labor. And this is something that we have identified as a very important phenomenon in large parts of rural India today. So this poor peasant who already is very low levels of income, now his crop or her crop might have been affected, the prices at which they sold it might have collapsed, has had no additional income from wage labor. How is this cultivator household going to take up agriculture in the next season, whether it is a field crop or whether it is poultry farming. How is this small cultivator going to take up. And this is where I, it's very sad to see that there are no clear support systems in place. The support that has that needs to be announced by the government of India is to ensure that the supply chain in terms of availability of seed or fertilizer of credit, all at reasonable prices is there now in time for the small farmers to take up the next agricultural cycle because in a way agriculture is something which because the current season has started can be the first stage of revival of the Indian economy, but only if the large majority of small farmers are given adequate support. And what do we have, what are the announcements that have come, what is the support that has come for tenant farmers for purpose and for small landholders, almost nothing. There are changes in laws, the APMC Act, the Marketing Act is going to be changed. Even if this is to have any effect, it's not going to have any effect of the marketing season starts after September, October, and many states have already enacted changes to the APMC so this is nothing new. Similarly, the essential commodities Act, which is not going to give those resources to the resource for cultivator today. Now, new MSPs have been announced, but as a long article shows, these minimum subs are very small increase over last year, and in many states like Karnataka, for the majority of crops, the price exceeds the cost of cultivation, if at all, by a few handful of rupees. In terms of credit, which is very important at this stage, the only thing that has been announced is a delay or a moratorium on repayment. So the loans taken last year, the repayment date has been delayed, first for three months and then it was extended again for another three months. This is a very welcome step, but what is going to be the resource this month in June to start production to buy good quality seed to buy fertilizer to hire machinery for preparation and preparation and so on. So I can go into these steps later. I think I didn't look at the time when we started, but I think I've done my first round. I'll come back again later. But let me to summarize the impact on agriculture. Thank you. Thank you very much Madhura. In fact, you do have a couple of minutes more if you'd like to make any other point. In a sense, we expect agriculture to be least affected by the lockdown, because the rural part of India was less affected as we know the COVID pandemic. The large centers of clusters are in urban agglomerations. Also, within a few days of the lockdown agriculture was called an essential service and was permitted. What we're going to bring to light is you can study of the various guidelines issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs and by different state governments is that the central government was behind the times at every stage. Fisheries was not brought into essential activities for almost three weeks after the lockdown. So the Ministry of Home Affairs was not in touch with the Ministry of Agriculture or the ministries or the people who know what are all the activities that come in agriculture. And I think this is something that is very important because it may be reflected in other parts of the economy as well in other sectors which I'm not so aware of. But the state governments were much ahead of the center in terms of recognizing cultural activities, the Allied Act, because these are perishable commodities, these are life commodities switched off for three months and then switched on again. And I think this is a big failure of planning in terms of the lockdown. Thank you. Thank you very much, Madhura. It's a very, very important point in terms of the issue of coordination preparedness and even actually knowledge of the sector and knowledge of the economy when you plunge an entire country like India with such diverse economies and such diverse producers because no sector is homogenous as you pointed out. You know, to plunge an entire country into this kind of lockdown without adequate preparedness. So let's move on now to Ranjini Basu. Ranjini, the floor is yours. So, taking ahead this conversation and where Madhura left it at the point that the impact of this COVID lockdown on agriculture on the Indian countryside has been differential and differential even in terms of the region and rural classes. In my presentation, I will be mostly concentrating on rural workers, the impact of rural workers. And firstly, I want to qualify why I'm focusing on rural workers rather than calling them agriculture workers is how since 1991, due to the neoliberal policies that have been adopted in agriculture. There remains no pure agriculture labor class as such. The various village studies including those done by the FAS also shows that there is a class of manual workers emerging who have to do an assorted basket of agriculture and non-agriculture work to maintain their livelihoods and this has been due to the following incomes from agriculture. Also, these manual laborers actually can be called the footloose labor. The short circular migrants that we see who have been stranded in the cities coming from the villages as a result of the great industries that has pushed them more to the cities is part of this labor force workforce. The census of India provides us some figures for cultivators and agriculture laborers, although this is not complete because they miss out on certain sectors of agriculture such as plantation and livestock economy. But still it gives us certain indicative trends as to what has been happening to the working population in rural India. In between 2001 and 2011 censuses we have seen that the agriculture labouring population has increased. The percentage points have increased by their population has increased by 34% whereas cultivator population has decreased by about 7% in the same period. In 2011 we are talking about a population of about 144 million agriculture laborers as defined by the census. So we are talking about a huge population of the rural economy who are although the agrarian workforce, the agrarian economy has depressed but the number of worker population has increased in this period and they have been the worst sufferers during this COVID pandemic. Coming to the impact of the COVID on this population one has to actually look at start from the point of where we were before the pandemic hit us. And as all of you know that since the last few years and especially last year the demand crisis had heightened. It has been an extended period of stagnation and fallen demand which is largely attributed in the rural economy to the wage stagnation, the wage declines and stagnation and the decline in the employment available to the manual workers. The NSS consumption data which was not released publicly also shows that consumption had fallen from 2011 to 2017. Rural consumption had declined by 8%, 8.8%. The wage growth had declined from 14.6% in 2014 to about 1%, 1.1% in 2019. So even before the pandemic hit this class of rural workers was suffering through huge loss of jobs, unemployment and which was impacting the demand in the rural economy. And therefore we understand that this agriculture season how important it was for them to continue their livelihoods to maintain their livelihoods actually. Also this pandemic has actually come on the existing inequalities that we have as the moderator pointed out and even Madhura said in her presentation that we have increasing landlessness as the inequalities and asset ownership have widened in this period of neoliberal reforms in the countryside. And as also the data suggests that more people have lost lands and turned into agriculture work. The small and marginal cultivators also have to do much more laboring out work to maintain their incomes, marginal incomes. Coming to the actual impact of the pandemic on these rural classes, their employment, as Madhura said that this was differential across the regions because different regions were at different times of the agriculture season. This had a direct impact on the rural workers. For example, in Punjab and Haryana, which was a busy month of Rabi harvest of wheat and which largely depends on migrant workers from eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand. There's an estimate that about one million workers, rural laborers, migrant laborers move from Bihar to Punjab during the Rabi season due to the harvesting and the post harvest packaging and in the procurement process in the procurement center. These states suffered a labor supply shortage, as the workers could not move or went back to their home states. While in their home states, like in Bihar, because of oversupply of labor, there was a fall in wages of these workers. There is evidence from Bihar village, that the wages had depreciated by about Rs. 50 for both men and women in the harvesting processes, in the harvesting operations. So we see a very differential suffering of the rural laborers in different parts during the COVID. Also, part of the migrant population that I was talking about, the people we have seen huge trongs of people moving from cities to their villages, walking down those stranded populations. Those also included the agriculture laborers. As you would all remember, the death of the girl from Chhattisgarh, Jammala, has been one of the saddest news and points of this lockdown, who was walking down from Chhattisgarh to Chhattisgarh from Telangana while she was stranded in Telangana to do chili harvest. Also, we have heard about the sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra who had migrated from different districts, who continued work on the fields of sugar cutting in very poor conditions until the trade unions actually intervened and provided them some relief. In terms of non-agriculture work, that is what the rural working population depends in the lean season, wherever there is no agriculture operations happening. We saw evidences that non-agriculture work was completely stalled, including NRGA work. In the initial time period of the lockdown, there was lack of clarity whether it is outside the rules and regulations of the lockdown. So NRGA work also completely stalled and once it actually was brought out of the restrictions, still the demand for work under NRGA, including the returning migrants who went back to the villages demanded work, was not commensurated with the generation of employment under the scheme. And I think that is because one of the reasons, chief reasons for this is how NRGA has been treated in the last few years. It has been left to relinquish of suffered budget cuts and the average days of work generated has been lower than the 100 days that it offers to rural households. The other point is that this condition of workers, both rural workers, is not specific just to India. We have observed this across the world, even in developing developed countries, western countries, US, Europe. The FAO has noted the essential kind of work that these rural workers do to continue agriculture production even during this pandemic. And one of the differences lies between the developed countries and India in this matter is how corporate farming has also penetrated, which actually feeds on the cheap immigrant labor who are mostly unauthorized. For an estimate for US, of the 2 million farm workers that are estimated to be working on farms in the US, about 50% are unauthorized. So that has also been a fallout of the agriculture pathways of neoliberal agenda and more corporate driven agriculture that has been adopted in the western countries. Although that is not the reality of India as of now. Coming to my last section of this first round of presentation is about the policies that are being offered to ameliorate the conditions of rural workers. And there is consensus about NRGGS being the more operandi to create employment and generating demand in rural India, which has after the COVID has struck us. Although, I would say that it is very inadequate as to the kind of wages that have been proposed, even after the increase in the wages, it remains abysmally low. And the differences between the newly revised wages of NRGGS and those which are prevalent wages in agriculture and non-agriculture work, the labor bureau provides the data. We can see there is a huge gap. For example, in Punjab, the revised NRGGS rate is about 263 for 2020-21, whereas the agriculture harvesting wages for harvesting operations for men, it is 353 and for women it is 354. So we see a huge difference. Even in non-agriculture work, the wages are 332. So the revised wages are abysmally still low of what is needed by these rural households who are the poorest and the most vulnerable. Lastly, I would also like to point out that there has been an increasing demand, especially from states which have suffered from labor shortages who have demanded that agriculture work should be included into NRGGS. The Punjab Chief Minister has already written to the centre to grant that permission. However, one has to remember that this is not a new demand of including agriculture into NRGGS, especially in the pre-sowing and post-harvest operations. In 2018, there was a subcommittee of Chief Ministers, subgroup of Chief Ministers, group of Chief Ministers that was constituted to look into this matter, and at that point too, the experts and various academics had pointed out how disastrous it can mean to the bargaining, negotiating powers of the rural labor force. Therefore, this pandemic should not actually become a period of pushing for agendas and reforms which can go completely against the labouring classes. In Punjab, we already see that there is growing tensions between the landed classes and the rural labour. There are reports coming in where the landowners have come together to keep the wages low and restrict movement of local rural labour. So this shouldn't become, and Punjab for that matter is the state which has the most concentration of land. So this pandemic or whatever way ahead shouldn't become anti-labor, anti-rural labour stances have to be resisted. And as I was saying that this pandemic has only accentuated the issues that the farmers, the labour, rural labour, small farmers, marginal farmers were facing, and these have to be taken ahead as the real way forward. What has been already pointed out by movements even before the period of lockdown in terms of access to rural infrastructure, storage, market prices, crop prices, issues of production, bringing down the cost of production, things like that remain and they have to be taken ahead along with the more structural issues of disparities in asset ownership. Which has accentuated the gaps between different social groups as well as on lines of class, caste and gender. So this has to be the way forward and nothing else. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much Ranjini. So with that I bring this to a close and I thank you all very much. Thank you for the participants. Very big, big thank you of course for the speakers. Again, thank you for showing the complexities of the agricultural, rural, agrarian sector, the relationship between cultivation, gathering and work, and the relationship between what existed, what has been in our country for so many years, what's happening now and the ways forward.