Key Objectives

1. Adequate Agricultural / Horticultural production through sustainable practices is essential to meet the increasing demand of food for our ever growing population.
2. Keeping Agro costs low means increasing Farm productivity by Land pooling, industrialization / mechanization.
3. An Agriculturalist obtains three benefits from his land ownership:

• The pride and satisfaction of being a landowner, However, small and poor his holding may be.
• The satisfaction of knowing that by working on it, he is able to produce proportionate benefit for himself and his country and, if he so desires, part with some of the benefits by sharecropping with Tenant farmers.
• The sense of security that it provides, that when the need arises, he can raise money to tide him over by mortgaging or even selling his land.

Any solution that we recommend today, must continue to provide the same benefits and also, effectively resolve the other issues raised above.

In most of the developed countries the percentage of population involved in farming has drastically reduced over the generations. In the USA in 1900 it was 85 percent as it was in India till a generation or so ago. Today in the US the population involved in farming is less than 2 percent, while in India it has already come down to 60 percent and is rapidly reducing further. In the US farmers used to be paid / subsidized to not farm all their land in order to maintain product prices. This is something we cannot even imagine doing in India.

Of course their farms are highly mechanized and benefit from economies of scale but the very large farms there, face the risks that come with mono crop cultivation. Perhaps our proposed solutions should also, be larger farms than we have today, but not too large, and adequately mechanized, so as to lead to higher and better productivity, better utilization of all resources especially the increasingly scarce manpower, and the strength and ability to better deal with the market, both with the suppliers and purchasers while still maintaining the diversity of the produce grown thereon. We should learn from Israel and China and also, from other farmers in our Country who have attained such higher productivity with lesser water use, and lesser or no chemical insecticides /pesticides/weedicides and artificial fertilizers.

Just raising the MSP and providing increased subsidies and loan waivers to the farmers, does not address the real issues of need for mechanization to replace unavailable labour. Farming is seen as back breaking dawn to dusk labour which even the next generation of farmers do not want to do. We too have to plan for farms to be run by say, only 10 percent of our population and yet greatly increase our agro production. Industrialization of Agriculture with share holding in the Farm Corporations ristricted to local farms is the only way.

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