Review of Rural Affairs

This paper examines the emergence of specific commodity complexes and transactional forms in eight interior districts in Tamil Nadu focusing on gherkins, marigold, broiler, cotton and papaya. Their growing importance is a response to the structural changes in the larger economy and the contextual constraints on agriculture in the region. It posits that this phenomenon represents an inflection in the trajectory of agricultural growth in the region because of three distinct features. First, the new commodity complexes have strong links to agribusinesses and global markets. Second, downstream players exert an unprecedented influence and control over production practices. Third, the need for control over quality demands particular transactional forms such as contract farming. The paper argues that despite some economic gain, challenges of a different kind emerge and the normative implications of these changes are as yet unclear.

Modifications to the Agriculture Produce Market Committee Acts have removed barriers to private participation and allowed trade outside regulated markets in the hope that it will help farmers and improve market infrastructure. But a key feature of regulated markets - the use of auctions to sell produce - has attracted relatively little attention. This paper argues that the auction mechanism is central to protecting farmers' interests in a given market, even in the presence of collusion among some large buyers. More generally, it is a transparent mechanism of price discovery and sets a benchmark with which any new market set up by a private player has to compete, thus mitigating any adverse impact on prices received by farmers.

Over the last two decades or so the dominant mode of talking about Indian agriculture has been that of “crisis”. Commentators and scholars have tended to attribute this crisis of the agrarian economy to larger processes at work, particularly to globalisation and the new policies of economic reforms initiated by India during the early years of the 1990s. While there may be some truth in these explanations, the framing of the “agrarian”, “rural” question in this discourse presents the complex and diverse rural realities in simplistic and populist terms. Such a discourse also invokes a sectoral policy response, where agriculture as a sector is seen as needing state attention, and ignores the internal dynamics of changing caste and class relations on the ground. Based on a revisit to two villages of Haryana, this paper provides a brief account of the changing nature of class relations in a post-green revolution rural setting with a specific focus on the changing nature of attached and “unfree” labour.

A price increase and improvement in the terms of trade of agriculture after 2004-05 have revived agriculture in Uttar Pradesh. The performance, however, has varied across regions within the state and among crop groups. Price policies in favour of cereals discourage land diversification, but rising agricultural wages induce shifts in favour of high-value crops. The growth momentum has to be sustained by price reforms and by promoting a set of non-price factors that encourages resource diversification towards high-value crops.

Diversification of the agricultural production portfolio to include livestock is an effective way of accelerating agricultural growth and reducing rural poverty. This paper now assesses the situation in India where livestock now accounts for a larger share of the value of agricultural output than foodgrains. It also discusses the technological, institutional and policy options to harness the untapped potential of this sector at a time the demand for animal food products, driven by sustained economic and income growth and an expanding urban opulation, continues to rise both domestically and globally.