Farmers’ crisis is now a humanitarian crisis

There was indeed a time when I had called for a 10-day session of Parliament to exclusively discuss the greatest crisis of our times. I no longer believe that a 10-day session will be sufficient. It’s time for Parliament and every state assembly to have a special session, entirely devoted to the agrarian crisis and allied issues affecting women farmers, Dalit and Adivasi farmers. If this doesn’t happen, what kind of democracy are we?

What is happening now can be called the consolidation of the corporate state. When the farmers staged their protest in Delhi, not a single newspaper or TV channel reported that the Ambanis’ personal wealth is higher than the GDP of Punjab, and Adani’s greater than the entire state of Haryana. Like the transfer of wealth from the hands of the poor to the rich, the water due to the poor goes to the rich. It flows upwards.

Every major sector should have a minimum wage. Otherwise, how will people survive? The minimum support price is a must for farmers. The government promised farm incomes would double. The 77th round of the NSS (National Sample Survey) has come and gone, but where’s the increase in income? What with the upkeep of animals and daily wage labour, their income has dropped by 8 per cent. Sharecroppers are the worst affected.

This is the age of market fundamentalism. In India, the marriage of socio-religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism has been a happy one. These people are running the country. If you speak to the farmers, they say they have only two things left: their lands and their debt. Everything else, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, is in corporate hands.

The present government enacted laws to make the cattle trade difficult. Farmers get lynched while buying or selling cattle, especially cows, whose market rates have crashed. Stray cattle are wrecking crops. Indigenous breeds are heading towards extinction. The rearing of foreign breeds of cows is proving expensive for farmers. The <desi> cows of Tamil Nadu, and our western states, are small, but they don’t need cover, come rain or shine. They have evolved over thousands of years. I have seen Jersey cows and Holsteins being brought into Yavatmal, trembling in temperatures of 45 degrees, dying in a couple of months. Success lies in breeding indigenous cows, as seen in Karnal, Haryana, not foreign cows. Most of the cheetahs imported from Africa have died. This is the result of ignorance.

For the farmer, the farm labourer and the industrial worker, the future is catastrophic. The disaster is already here, it can only get worse.

P. Sainath is an author, award-winning journalist and founder of PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India)

Edited and translated excerpts from a conversation with Atal Tewari for the Kitabi Duniya portal