Articles by Sukhpal Singh

Punjab's agricultural sector and allied activities are now in a crisis. This paper examines the role of policy and institutions in perpetuating or tackling it. It looks at the major initiatives taken by various organs of the state in the absence of any other major institutional alternatives and analyses their class and social biases from a smallholder perspective. It also discusses new mechanisms such as contract farming, corporate farming and policies granting agricultural incentives and subsidies before putting forward suggestions to benefit smallholders and ensure the sustainability of the farm sector.

This is a report on the first-ever census survey conducted on suicides by farmers in the two most affected districts of Punjab, Sangrur and Bhatinda. It tries to arrive at the number of farmer suicides, the reasons (whether they were caused by economic distress alone or they were due to the interplay of the forces of economic distress, social conflict, cultural backwardness and lack of community/state support) and also the present economic status of the families of the victims.

This survey of the global and Indian experience with retail supermarkets, against the backdrop of a recent official paper on foreign investment in retail, highlights malpractices due to buying power, employment loss in the value chain, and an unwillingness to share the risk of the growers. In this context, it would be prudent to slow down supermarket expansion by using mechanisms such as zoning, business licences and trading restrictions. Measures to ensure smooth functioning of the contract farming system should include strengthening competition laws to limit buying power, providing legal protection to contract growers and encouraging farmer cooperatives and producer groups.

The main objective of this study is to assess the overall debt position of the farmers in Punjab and identify the factors affecting their indebtedness. The important policy recommendations that emerge are the need to improve the institutional agricultural credit system, to regularise and continuously monitor the functioning of non-institutional sources of finance, to reduce farmers' fixed costs in heavy machinery and equipment for which loans should also be based strictly on economic feasibility, to strengthen the dairy sector and create off-farm employment opportunities and to launch a mass campaign against intoxicants and extravagant expenditure on social festivities.

Whether local producers will benefit from trade liberalisation is predicated upon their ability to enter global value chains or production networks of the lead firms. Understanding how these chains are organised, controlled and governed is the key to unravelling how the gains from these networks/chains are shared across the participants. This paper examines the issues of governance and small producer participation in the organic cotton supply chain in India with the help of a case study of a private firm. The paper assesses the prospects and ways and means of including marginal and small producers in these chains if the organic sector has to play its developmental role.