 Hello and today is September 25th, the day farmers across the country are on strike. They are protesting the three farm bills that were passed by parliament and are likely to seriously affect the phase of agriculture in the country. Now the resistance by farmers is not a new phenomenon, it has been going on on this issue for months, but it peaked over the past few days. Today, protests are taking place across the country with states like Punjab and Haryana seeing very strong ones. The resistance even seems to have forced the government on the back foot. Prime Minister Modi, in fact, specifically addressed this issue in his speech to party workers today, blaming the opposition as usual and claiming that his government has made a huge difference to the lives of farmers. The protests on the streets however tell a different story. So if the farmers are opposing these laws because it's against their interests, who exactly benefits from them? What do these laws imply? In our continuing coverage of the issue, we talk to journalist Anandya Chakravarti. Thank you Anandya for joining us. So as I was just saying, major protests taking place across the country today, farmers movements on the street. This is of course not a new issue for them, they've been protesting for many months. And the way in which the bills were passed in parliament is only made it first, something will get to later. But first of all, maybe an overarching question, a macro question if you may call it so. What really is the larger agenda if there is one of the government with respect to these farm bills right now? So the question is that what we are being told Prashant is that these new farm bills are essentially going to make life. Finally farmers will have freedom to sell to whoever they want and they will be controlled by these APMCs. These are these kind of villains in the rural areas who go around exploiting farmers and this has been happening all these years. And finally the Modi government has come and fixed it, freed them up. Some people say, yeah, yeah, maybe APMCs were required when we had independence because farmers were being kind of exploited too much and they needed some support. But now they are free, they need to be freed like the rest of the economy. We of course don't tell people that the rest of the economy when it is free and cars don't sell, those same economists say, please give incentives to car buyers, give some tax cuts to car manufacturers because the market system is not working and helping them. But in any case, the clear objective is this. If you say that farmers should be able to sell to the free market, open market to private players and not to these government administered APMC Mondes, 96%, 94% of the of I was speaking to Dr. Mr. Devinder Sharma just a short while ago and he tells me that the Shanta Prasad committee actually said that only 6% of farmers in India get a administered price. They go to Mondes, sell it and get MSP, rest of them actually operate in the private sector. They sell in the private sector. So what is this great new thing that you're going to bring about right now? Maybe over the years, it's dropped to 90%, maybe 85%, but 85% to 90% of farmers still sell in the open market. Why are they not free and rich already? It's an interesting question because over the past few weeks, especially the APMC like you said has become a villain and that basically helps the government avoid certain questions. For instance, a key question was, okay, fine, if the APMC is such a problem, let's okay, let's even consider that. Why don't you make the MSP mandatory for all trading, which is something the government has completely refused to answer. So what we also see probably is that with some of the big corporates coming into the retail sector, this is really going to set the stage for them to do what happened with the geek on like maybe low prices in the first couple of seasons and then you monopolize the space and from there taken up completely. So someone said that, you know, the reason I support these bills is because right now the farmer is getting 5 rupees and you're paying 50 rupees. I want the farmer to get 10 rupees, get 10 rupees and you pay 35 rupees. Let the profit go to the guys, but the farmer earns more and you pay less. On the face of it, this sounds very good. It's a win-win for everyone. Okay, even now the middleman was taking most of the money. Of course, there's a one can unpack that in any case, right? But let's now look at the other side of the coin. What is a minimum support price? Minimum support price means that the government doesn't want prices to fall below this minimum and that minimum support price is fixed by the CACP, which calculates agricultural costs and sets the minimum support price. There is a lot of debate on how they calculate that those agricultural costs and we've discussed this in the past, for instance, let's take the idea of when we look at how corporates are taxed, their rents are removed, the interest they pay that is removed, all of this is seen as a cost and legitimately with the machine deterioration is taken into account, right? And that is removed, what we call depreciation of capital that is removed as seen as a cost only then is your income calculated and on that you pay cost. But when the farmer's income is calculated, imputed land cost, rentals, interest rate, these are not actively calculated in the cost itself, right? So farmer actually never gets what they put into growing a crop, which is why all the time we know that a large number of farmers earn less from farming than they spend on a daily basis. The monthly expenditure is lower than what they earn, so they fall into debt. Let's come back to the issue of minimum support price. Minimum support price is supposed to say, you go out and sell in the market, open market, no one's stopping you. If you cannot sell in the open market, the government will come in and procure and buy your crop at a minimum support price. This is the minimum that you're due, right? And these people tell you, and as Devendra Sharma rightly pointed out while I was speaking to it, that, you know, they say that if you make minimum support price a law, right, what will happen? It will cost a lot of money. The government will end up losing so much money. But at the same time, you're saying that the minimum support price and the APMC system is very bad. It is very bad for farmers. Farmers will get much more when the reliances and the other big companies, the Bhartis and all come in. I don't know if they're still there, but I'm saying all these big layers when they come in, farmers will get much more than they're getting from the APMC system. Then why would they even want to come to sell to you as a minimum support price? In that case, the minimum support price is just a technical thing because farmers are assured more through the market system, right? So why would it cost anything to the government? In fact, technically, theoretically, if what these economists, these pink paper pundits are telling us is true, that the farmers will become richer under these new veils and they'll get much more money. Not a single farmer should be turning up at an APMC. Precisely. So right, in that context, that's an interesting point you put because one of the key demands of the farmers' organizations has to actually strengthen the APMC mechanism to make it more fine tuned, to make MSP a far more stronger feature of the system itself. And the government's obviously moving in the opposite direction. So one of the aspects also is this basically opens up Indian agriculture through the corporate sector into the international sector as well, where what we produce basically becomes something that gets traded globally. It's already happening, of course, but now it becomes far more open. And now once you expose the global market, there is even lesser for the farmer in terms of security because price fluctuations can be cited as an example to completely just destroy their lives. So you look at it, price fluctuations, that is the entire game. The reason why you don't want to announce MSP, the reason why you want to remove certain products from the essential services, essential goods act, and remove them is because you want the prices to fall. You want those prices to effectively fall or fluctuate whenever they want. If farmers get more good enough, if they don't, they don't, that is the entire game. And we've seen how in India, hunger has increased. India has been consistently dropping in the World Hunger Index. We know per capita availability of food grain has gone down. Despite the fact that the FCI sits on such a huge buffer, the government exports the food grain. So this is the entire game is to essentially take and export to markets, to create, for instance, if we say contract farming, right? Now let's say that in Europe, in some country, people want to eat kiwi, right? If I am a business person, and my interest is to grow kiwi because it's going to earn more money for me, I'm going to put, take over large parts of land over contract farming and it gives some amount of money in the initial years and then evict them, put machines, bring in different kinds of operation and grow kiwi. Who cares whether there's rice and wheat for people to eat or not? Then we will be exporting kiwis and importing grain, right? Because private interest is profit and accumulation. It is not national interest. That's for the state to take into account. Not for private players. If Prashant, you had a business, why would, if you had a business and you put your money into it, what would you look for? And this is not so, I'm not saying that capitalists are bad. I'm just saying that- It's natural. It's a natural system, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even the best, the most, the person who's kindest will say that my first job is to increase my profit. Absolutely. Especially if you're on the stock markets and you have shareholders and people, directors coming on your board who will say, why are you not trying to make more profits by diversifying in this crop? Which sells much more in Japan. Who cares if Indians are hungry? In this context, I also want to take the discussion into another place as well, which is what this kind of says about our democracy and society as well. Because, of course, this is not the first time the government is doing something like this. We also have the workers' bills coming in the coming weeks, which will again destroy a lot of their rights. But what we also see is a particular kind of discussion, a particular narrative that is built, which almost completely removes the realities of agriculture from our day to day lives. So we are still stuck in the idea of, say, the trader exploiting the farmer, which is true as well, but it's kind of completely cut off from actually what happens on the ground with respect to this. Before we move to that, I'm sorry Prashant, I'm just interrupting because you talked about the trader exploiting. It is true traders exploit. And it is true that in a lot of particular crops, there are eight to ten traders who control the national market. For instance, in onions, right? But it is for the government. If it announces 23 crops with MSP, why is it that it only procures to? And a little bit of cotton. Why does it not say all 23 crop? If a farmer comes to a mandi and said, here is my crop, buy it at MSP, it is the government's job to ensure it will be bought. Why doesn't it do it? Why are there only 7,000 mandis in this country? And as Devendra Sharma was saying, that the demand is for 40 to 45,000. And there are only three and a half states, as he said, which are covered by mandis. Rest of it, farmers can't even go anywhere. So that is one part. Secondly, when we think of that, oh, the farmer got 10 rupees and I am paying 40 rupees, how did that happen? Let us understand one thing. The farmer, when they sell something, the water content of most products is pretty high, especially vegetables. Let's say something like onion, let's take the case of onions, right? A farmer goes and sells his high moisture content. By the time it reaches the mandi, the moisture content reduces, the weight reduces on that. So when the mandi buys 10 kilos, by the time they take it to another local mandi, it's struck to another local mandi, that 10 kilos become 9.5 kilos. Out of that, 500 grams has to be thrown away because it's gone bad, right? Once it reaches your, then there's a local mandi which takes a commission. They sell a certain amount and that goes to your local sabziwala, picks it up, brings it and sends it to you. That is the process through which that 10 rupees has become 40 rupees. Because some of it has dried up. The Aartiya has made a big chunk of the money, hoarded, released, controlled the release. Some of it has been taken by the local mandi in Azadpur Mandi in Delhi, when it has come from Lasalgaon. By the time it reaches my local guy, Pawan here, right? He has had to throw away a significant amount, right? And he has to sell it at half. Is your local sabziwala a very rich person, Pratap? I don't know. Mine isn't. Mine isn't. I look at him, he lives in a tenement quarter, right? And that he's very happy, he's recently moved to that. Before that, he was in the Jhopad Katti. He had bought a second hand, Maruti Suzuki, in which he used to bring his vegetables to the local, you know, Thela here. Not the Thela, the corner where he sits. And he was very concerned with the court, announced that cars have to be changed in 10 years. He said, what will I do? And is he a rich person? No, there's an entire system of traders, not just big Aartiyas. There is an entire system of retail and wholesale sitting on this, which earns their living from it. So when big retail comes into this place, it is not just the farmhouse affected, right? It is this entire chain. We know the trade and hawkers, so-called self-employed, right? They're a big chunk of India's employment. So we tend to forget that by the time we pay the money for the vegetables that we buy. Right. And maybe a very small portion gets somehow absorbed into the retail chain, but a large number of just going to be once again jobless in, again, various stages of migration and impoverished into. Absolutely. Yeah. And therefore, in case they're getting jobless, the government's job should have been to ensure that workers' rights are strengthened. But it knows that it should do the exact reverse, because that's what is going to help corporates, right? Absolutely. That is what it's doing. So, when the idea is that from agriculture, as marginal farmers leave and move out, as corporates come in, as contract farming takes place, we get a large surplus of workers sitting in urban areas, right? Labor becomes cheaper. Right. So the government actually exists and says that we know there's going to be a huge influx of migrant workers, right? And they make it easier for people to exploit them even more. Absolutely. That is what it is. That is what, I guess, you were asking about the social aspects of this. Exactly. The other side of it. Right. And also, of course, the fact that, yeah, one more knife in the back of democracy considering the way how the bills are passed is when Absolutely. Ram wrote it to the Rajasabha without even the pretense of a discussion. Yeah. I guess, you know, we were, in a lot of ways, we had a mythical imagination of our democracy, I guess. We didn't know that it was so easy to completely circumvent these institutions and go past them. It is extremely easy. That's what I think this government has shown. And maybe at various times, various governments have shown and we were not aware, because now it is almost power for the post. We didn't now say, yeah, this is how it's going to happen. Right. So that is the point. Now, there is one last thing that I wanted to talk about, and that is essentially about the fact that when we say that farmers are being allowed to operate in the free market, socialism is being removed, which was curtailing it. We tend to forget that actually in India, the largest private sector is farming. They're all private players. Exactly. You had state capitalism of a certain kind. You want to replace state capitalism, which provided some welfare measures to ensure food supply, actually, not more than anything else. It's not for any other reason. So MSP was announced, procurement was only in these two things, the grain. You want to replace that through the operation of finance capital. That is what it is. And the finance capital and its extension, which is trade. Not manufacturing in the least bit. So India's corporate, India's capitalist class has reached its limits when it comes to manufacturing and services. Now it is eyeing agriculture, because everyone has to eat. And so that is what is happening. Thank you, Aditya, so much for talking to us. Thanks a lot. That's all your time for today. We'll be back on Monday with more news from the country and the world. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.