Terms of Trade | Climate crisis is further complicating capitalist agriculture

There exists research to show that the intersection of climate crisis with capitalist farming has made things far worse for the farmer than what pre-capitalist weather fluctuations entailed.

When finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Budget this year, she spoke at length about how promoting millets could be a game changer for farmers in India. Less than a month after the Budget, the government’s attention has shifted to a different area in Indian agriculture. While it is not yet a given, it increasingly looks like large parts of India are going to face a second consecutive year when summer will arrive early. More than anything, this heightens the risk of the winter crop harvest, especially the all-critical wheat, being lower than expected due to loss in yields.

While it is not yet a given, it increasingly looks like large parts of India are going to face a second consecutive year when summer will arrive early. (HT File Photo)

The government is already taking multiple steps to manage a possible crisis. It has almost decided to ban wheat exports, is strategically releasing stocks to manage wheat inflation, which is trending upwards of 20%, and is deploying teams to advise farmers on how to minimise the cross loss in an inclement weather situation. This overdrive makes it clear that India is still dependent on green revolution-driven yield gains in wheat and rice to protect its food security. The rhetoric about things such as millets is, as of now, just rhetoric.

For the uninitiated, it is worth reiterating that the green revolution’s promise of higher yields and therefore incomes (from cultivating rice and wheat, a large part of which the government procures) is the biggest factor that has led to a decline in the cultivation of millets or coarse cereals in India. Without any prejudice to the merits of millets, it is also true that unless the government decides to subsidise them heavily, millets will continue to be unaffordable for a vast majority of the poor to fulfil their food security requirements. The government has now decided to make rice and wheat entitlements under the Public Distribution System (PDS) free of cost. Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) shows that the wholesale price of millets varied from ₹22.7 per kg (Bajra) to ₹38 per kg (small millets).

To be sure, the purpose of this column is not to argue that the government’s promotion of millets is an irrational exercise. It is entirely possible that Indian farmers can reap economic gains by growing millets and catering to a growing demand for them from the rich. However, developments such as these cannot be the mainstay of concerns around farming and food security in India, which is the topic of interest for this week’s column.

The ‘wage-goods’ constraint in modern economies

It is best to start the discussion from the first principles. The first economic revolution in the history of humankind was the discovery of agriculture, which freed us from the daily tyranny of the hunter-gatherer age. Crop harvested in one season could be preserved and consumed over the entire year. This meant that workers were free to pursue other activities during the non-farming season. The growth of modern economies, where agriculture was not the primary source of employment or income, required yet another leap in the agricultural revolution. Not only was farming required to produce a surplus for the non-cropping season, but it was also expected to produce a surplus for workers who would work in places such as factories. This, in the language of economists, is described as the resolution of the wage-goods constraint. Unless an economy can resolve the wage-goods constraint to guarantee adequate food supply, it cannot transition into a modern economy.

How did modern economies resolve the wage-goods constraint? Historically, this was achieved through two routes. First, an increase in agricultural production through technological improvements, and second, by ensuring that the same amount of grain was available at a lower cost for non-farm workers. The second option has been exercised by countries via two routes — colonial power being unleashed to appropriate agricultural production of another country or keeping the price of food artificially depressed to make sure that food inflation does not become a problem. While the former was widely used by colonial powers such as Britain, the latter was an important tool in the political economy playback of socialist powers such as the Soviet Union and China.

How did India manage the wage-goods constraint?

In countries such as post-Independence India, which were neither colonial powers nor fully socialist economies, the state first tried to appropriate as much grain as possible from farmers, only to realise that this was not a workable tactic. It then decided to pursue the route of boosting agricultural production by deploying what is now called Green Revolution Technology (GRT). This strategy essentially meant introducing high-yielding varieties of seeds along with chemical inputs and nudging farmers to use these inputs by offering assured procurement at Minimum Support Prices (MSPs). This procured grain has supported a massive expansion of the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India without which food affordability for an overwhelming majority would be extremely precarious. To be sure, this strategy has unleashed its own set of contradictions in India.

GRT, when it was introduced, was limited to only a small part of the country, mainly in the northwest region, which had assured irrigation. The geographical skew in procurement unleashed its own set of dynamics in India’s agrarian political economy where farmers who enjoyed procurement ended up with much more income than that of their peers in other parts of the country. Ashok Mitra’s cult-classic Terms of Trade and Class Relations (the book has inspired this column’s name), which was published in 1977, is an excellent commentary on the political economy dynamics of this entire process. These contradictions are far from resolved even today. Farmers’ demands such as universalisation of MSP, the government’s vacillation between arguing for complete de-regularization of food markets in times of abundance and resorting to strict regulation in times of scarcity (as it is doing in wheat markets currently) are all indications of these contradictions. As Indian agriculture entered a long period of viability crisis after the 1991 economic reforms, these tensions have only become deeper. These faultlines notwithstanding, the strategy has served India well in the last five decades. The imminent threat to this stability is coming, not from a farmers’ rebellion testing the fiscal limits of the state, but increasing volatility in climatic conditions due to the deepening climate crisis.

Climate crisis meets capitalist farming

It is not without reason that the government is losing sleep over the possibility of yet another premature summer damaging the wheat crop. The government’s buffer stocks of grain are running thin on the back of extra distribution in the post-pandemic period and low procurement last year. With prices jumping significantly in the past few months, anything less than a bumper crop will make it difficult for the government to replenish its food stocks at the going MSP. If this is not problem enough, one does not know whether a premature summer-driven yield loss will increasingly become the norm rather than the exception going forward.

While the climate crisis is definitely making things worse for the farmer, and by extension, creating food security challenges, the Indian farmer has been vulnerable to the vagaries of climate for a very long time. However, there exists research to show that the intersection of the climate crisis with capitalist farming has made things far worse for the farmer than what pre-capitalist weather fluctuations entailed. A recent Journal of Peasant Studies paper by Tanya Matthan, a geographer at the University of California, Berkley makes this argument well. Matthan argues that climate shocks to farmers have been compounded due to their shift to industrialised monoculture — the term describes GRT-like strategies — which include the use of industrially produced seeds and chemicals to push one crop in erstwhile agrarian diverse regions.

“In the context of industrialized monocropping, an erratic monsoon is not only felt as more or less rainfall but equally as additional investment in expensive inputs (seeds for re-sowing or chemicals to deal with new pests), delayed harvests, extensions on loan repayments, or the need to drill a new well. Ordinary risks of inclement weather turn into puzzling and treacherous uncertainties, upending established agricultural practices and raising new dilemmas”, Matthan writes. “In the current moment, the intertwining of capitalist and climate risk does not generate practices of risk minimization”, she further argues, adding that “most farmers are now compelled to engage in risky practices in order to remain as agriculturalists, achieve basic subsistence standards, and enact upward class mobility”.

Isn’t Matthan’s argument dismissive of the possibility of science coming to the rescue of farming and food security against the threat posed by the climate crisis?

Earlier this week, Indian Express reported that the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had developed a wheat variety that can be sown early (before the onset of proper winter) and thus harvested much before an early summer can potentially damage the crop. To be sure, this is not the only example of portraying a technological fix as a silver bullet to India’s food security problems. Last year, the government gave initial approval to GM mustard in India after sitting on the decision for many years. There are enough indications that the final push for the decision came not from a decisive settlement on the scientific debate around GM crops but a growing concern about India’s edible oil import bill.

Aniket Aga’s book Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India offers a valuable perspective in the debate around the efficacy of technological fixes to solve the problems of Indian agriculture and food security. Aga builds a holistic argument to show that the debate around GM crops in India needs to move beyond the usually deployed (shrill) binaries of anti- and pro-science or multinational corporations versus small farmers. He brings in a whole lot of other factors that play a major role in the interplay of inputs as they are developed in laboratories, the business of selling these inputs and the results eventually reaped by the farmer. They include things like the conflict between Indian and foreign seed companies, the power even small retailers have in influencing farmers’ decisions about which seeds and chemicals to use, and the externalities which proliferation of such industrialised inputs inflict on farmers. It is both difficult and unjust to even try to summarise Aga’s book — it is his PhD dissertation at Yale University and packs in more than a decade of research — in a newspaper column, but a sentence is worth reproducing here.

“Finally, I am often asked whether I am pro- or anti-GM. I am neither. I am, however, sceptical of the notion that the deep-rooted problems of agriculture and food can be addressed in any significant and lasting manner by tweaking crop DNA—these problems lie in the realm of policies and politics, and in those realms lie their resolutions”, Aga writes in the introduction to his book. Aga’s scepticism vis-à-vis technological hubris and his wise counsel to seek more and more engagement with politics and policy is a good note to conclude this week’s column.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal