Domain specificity.
These two words are enough to explain it all. The misery of the farmer, the problems of land acquisition and the greed of the businessman. The odd thing about the aquisition is that no matter how far apart the two poles of the deal appear to be, they are essentially the same side of different coins. Or was it different sides of the same coin. Does it matter, if you get the gist?
Two parties are involved in the land aquisition business, the land taker and the takee ( a neoligism). The farmer (takee) has been working for years, if not centuries on the same piece of land. The intrinsic property of the soil, the minor fluctuations of the weather and knowledge of a host of local factors determine his ability to put his land to profitable use. The businessman does the same job, assessing intrinsic market value, gauge the minor fluctuations of the stock and credit markets, knowledge of a host of other factors to put his ability to put his resources to a profitable etc.
One shouldn’t bellitle the efforts of the farmer who is just as much of an entrepreneur as the businessman, if not more. The only difference is perhaps that of margins and that of the resources available. The businessman is able to outbid the farmer and not vice versa. In the end it all comes down to the output that a piece of land can achieve.
This story is older and is perhaps a sort of quid pro pro. The land that originally belonged to the hunter gatherers was taken over by the farmers.The hunter gatherer that the farmers displaced would have required twenty times the amount of land that the farmer did for the same level of food resources. The industrialist would require some 400 times less. The hunter gatherer has been avenged, the cycle of development continues and farmers would one day become extinct just as they killed off the hunters.
To be honest though, we don’t really care about the farmers do we? If we only had humanitarian considerations in our minds, then help of some sort would have been forthcoming for the landless labrourers, who are the real losers in any deal of land aquisition. We care about our own food getting expensive, we are worried that one day, there wouldn’t be enough food for all of us to go by and we all know what happens when there isn’t enough food to run a densely packed metropolitian city. The people start leaving of course and settling again in the rural areas. You weren’t thinking of cannabilistic wars were you?
Government tries to support the farmers. They try incentives, subsidies and then a uniquely Indian phenomenon…. loan waivers ( which of course benefit the rich farmers the most). The upshot of all this is, that like an ailing patient kept on drugs, the agricultural sector too has been surviving on the tetherhooks. World over the governments don’t want to realise the painful fact that for the most part, the days of massive labour oriented agriculture are over. In an industrial world, where we consume everything on the industrial scale, the need of the hour is to have industrial level farms.
It is here that the energies of private companies need to be diverted. Corporate run farms, with huge R&D and competitive markets that rewards the most efficient. This vision might horrify some with the prospects of grasp of profit hungry Blackberry boys on the vital issue of food security, but this picture isn’t too far from the on ground reality. The supply of the fertilizers, seeds, equipments and technical know how is already managed by these ‘companies’. As agriculture becomes unsustainable for the smaller farmers, the grasp of rich farmers would only increase. The climate shocks, the vast amount of R&D required would ultimately lead us there.
The very first ‘wars’ in the true sense were fought by the hunter gatherer groups against the farmers .The hunter gatherers were trying to defend their turf upon which they had survived for thousands of years. The entire ecosystem was kept in balance by consuming only as much as was sustainable in the long term and by having a de facto cap on the population because of a lack of ability to store any food. All the species had their share in the environment and as far as any environmentalist is concerned, it was pure heaven.
The farmers brutally burnt down forests, over hoarded food for leaner times and with their primitive methods, destroyed vast tracts of land. They were seen by the ‘wild’ men as being just as destructive as the ‘industrialists’ are seen by the farmers and the scales are just as unevenly balanced.
The romanticisation of the rustic rural life leads to opposition to any change in the current setup of things. The farmers lobby is also large and would stongly oppose corporate farming. This story is true world over. Once in the forefront of food production, the farmers are now the very people holding it back. Land which once seemed endless is now a precious resource, too important to squander it by living in the past.
The human aspect of the problem is just as important. The business men and the farmers being domain specific people cannot be expected to work in different domains, which is part of the problem in relocation of farmers even from ruinous agricultural practices. A compensatory programme for the farmers might give them skills for a modern world. Just like the ‘wild men’ cannot function in a city, the farmers wouldn’t be able to do so in an urbanised world. The future would come, whether we want it to or not, but the question is, are we ready?
No comments:
Post a Comment