Articles by Sukhpal Singh

guarantee at a pre-determined price at the end of eight years if the trees met certain Contract Farming quality specifications. The farmers were free to sell to others if they so wished. The loan instalments were not of equal amount and Forest Management and decreased annually over the eight Company-farmer Partnerships for the Supply of Raw Material to Wood-based Industry by Sushil Saigal and Divya Kashyap; India Country Sub-study published by Eco-tech Services (India), New Delhi and International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London; 2002.

Green Revolutions Reconsidered – The Rural World of Contemporary Punjab by Himmat Singh; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001; pp 302, Rs 595.

In the wake of the Structural Adjustment Programme initiated in the early 1990s, it is inevitable that the agricultural and rural sector will experience its share of threats and opportunities. The severe effect of economic and policy changes in the agricultural sector will he felt in the areas of agricultural trade and capital investments in agro- activities. This paper looks at the emerging evidence on these two crucial aspects of agro-sector and argues that there will be serious distortions with the emergence of the new trade regime, both internal and external, and the dominance of agribusiness corporations by way of corporate and contract farming. The penetration of the market into the rural economy will put pressure on the already marginalised sections and make small and marginal producers an assetless workforce. The only available mechanisms to reduce this impact will be producers' organisations of various types like co-operatives, informal groups and the political pressure groups.

to differentially affect different groups and classes in society. This may be both the latent purpose and the means by which the 'success' of this strategy is achieved. Thus, in some Latin American countries, a drastic curtailment of the power of organised trade unions may be the major institutional change brought about, so as to increase the relative strength of the capitalist class. In other countries, as in India, the burden is likely to fall more heavily on unorganised groups, even as organised workers also lose their rights and their bargaining strength. A relative enrichment of those with access to social and political power is usually concomitant with this package even while the disadvantaged sections become worse off. More unequal income distribution is both a result and a symptom of this process in all cases. Concentrating simply on aggregating macro-economic variables may obscure this important tendency.

Towards a Political Economy of the Economic Policy Changes Vinod Vyasulu Sukhpal Singh D Rajasekhar Pooja Kaushik A Indira This paper, by analysing the performance of the commodity producing sectors of the Indian economy and the nature of the crisis facing it, argues that there is only a fiscal crisis of the government of India, and not a crisis of the nation. The authors then situate the recent economic policy changes in a broader context. They argue that the policies are contradictory in nature and are unlikely to result in the desired and anticipated changes in the economy. While the impact of these policies in the long run is not very clear, they are certain to adversely affect the poorer classes, both in rural and urban areas, in the short run. In an unequal society the question of who tightens the belt is crucial.