 The Public Policy Research Institute Trivandrum and the P Sundraya Memorial Trust organized a national seminar on the crisis of natural rubber sector and delegates from different rubber growing states from Tripura in the northeast to Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south attended this seminar more than 100 delegates took part in the last more than a decade the rubber farmers in our country have been facing an extreme crisis to give an example in 2011 if a rubber cultivator was getting 230 rupees per kg of rubber today it is less than 120 rupees a kg and this is directly a result of the quality policies being implemented at the best of the different union governments whether it be the Congress or the BJP which have gone ahead with the free trade agreements with the ASEAN countries which are also rubber growing countries and cheap rubber is being dumped here in a systematic way the price is being depressed it is being reduced and the farmers are suffering the burden of such a price crash while big tire manufacturers who have formed a cartel among themselves are getting this cheap rubber and also profiteering at the expense of both farmers as well as the consumers today the competition commission of India has fined about 1800 crores on these tire tire manufacturers mrf being one seat apollo tires and Birla and so on who have formed a cartel called the Atma so as a organization of the peasantry the all-india Kisan Sabha has demanded that this about 1800 crores should be given back to the farmers for helping them out and the chief minister of Kerala also has reiterated this demand it is to be noted that the huge losses that the farmers are suffering a state like Kerala itself must have suffered in the last decade more than a lakh crore loss because of the price fluctuation the fall in prices that has been continuously witnessed in the rubber sector it is in such a circumstance this seminar has discussed issues related to all stakeholders from the cultivators to the tapping workers to the MSMEs as well as the industry and plantation sector all were involved for the first time every section being brought together under one roof to discuss the crisis of the natural rubber sector very clear recommendations from different people have different experts have come the farmers have also intervened in each of these sessions in a big way it calls for the alternative set of policies implementation of alternative set of policies withdrawal from the free trade agreements as promised by Narendra Modi in Thailand a few years back that the ASEAN free trade agreement would also be reviewed but the government has been pursuing similar policies at a much faster pace so against that the need for uniting all sections of the farmers is something which came up for discussion exploring possibilities of collectivizing farmers for setting up industry agro processing industry rubber based industry is also something that was discussed to overcome the crisis faced by the rubber farmers the all-india Kishan Sabha is proposing an alternative P. Krishna Prasad the finance secretary of AIKS speaks about the need to set up cooperative organizations in production marketing and consumer sectors but the AIKS is also well aware of the challenges in creating awareness among the farmers first if you want to develop a agro processing industry which is now under the corporate control because of which the farmers are not getting the real price they are exploited then there is no other way than the petty producers come together and then develop their own cooperative producer organization so the producer cooperatives will work in three levels one thing is then the production of the industry processing second thing is the marketing and third thing is the consumer cooperatives so with these three sort of cooperatives consumer cooperatives market cooperatives and production cooperatives only we will be able to expand the base of the cooperative production for this we should first make the farmers aware about the cooperative intervention and second we should come together and uniquely put the demands in front of the society and the government that the change from the corporateization of agriculture to cooperative agriculture this demand should be popularized and based on this the government and the MLAs and MPs should be put under pressure to enact law in support of the cooperative agriculture and there the major thing is will be one thing is that whatever the surplus created that will be shared with the primary producer the worker as additional wage and the farmer as additional price second thing is that then their system of the cooperatives whether the production cooperative marketing cooperative or industry is a consumer cooperative this should be under the worker self-management system so that workers themselves will control the cooperatives and they will ensure the interest of the workers and the presence the farmers will be protected and this is the basic foundation of a cooperative intervention in any society for them there should be a campaign in favor of the cooperative production system and how to link the agriculture with in agro processing industry and market and the consumer marketing system so this sort of a huge effort or huge task in front of us is there then we have to undertake through making the farmers and the workers aware about the importance of the cooperative production in the struggle against the corporate recession of the economy this is the basic of the concept of the old episcopal and there are a lot of experiments going on many places in the country where the cooperatives are become really successful so what we are saying is not the government cooperatives but the social cooperatives under the leadership of the workers and farmers the government cooperatives are controlled by the bureaucracy and that will not serve the purpose of these social cooperatives which will capture the interest of the workers and the farmers and such a social cooperatives needs to be built across the country in the sector wise and the crop wise and that challenge we are going to undertake in the coming days in a more effective manner with the wide participation of the farmers and the working class