Free Farming, Not Freebies
In the 1946 novel, Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis writes: 'Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. 'What, grandfather!' I exclaimed. 'Planting an almond tree?' And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: 'My son, I carry on as if I should never die.' I replied: 'And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.''
Kazantzakis' anecdote perhaps best explains the differences in conceptualising policies by those advocating them for primary producers and those being implemented by India's establishment. India's agricultural policies echo the 'live for the moment' mindset, as if there's no tomorrow. Farmers, too, taught by a defunct agricultural research system and goaded by GoI policies, are knowingly farming without a care for future generations. This short-termism probably takes its cue from elected representatives whose only objective in life seems to be to get re-elected.
India requires a strategic vision of how the world and national economies might evolve over the next 25 years, what skills may be needed, how technologies will disrupt the workspace, changing demand for nutrition, and, finally, how to deal with challenges of ageing and climate change. It is only against such a vision that one can judge whether today's activities make sense.
Keeping the current trend, in every scenario, agricultural production will fall way short of the country's nutritional demand. But the establishment's policies imply that India is nutritionally secure and climate change won't impact production. Without systems thinking, India isn't even ready to identify risks, let alone mitigate them and explore opportunities.
India not having a real agricultural policy speaks volumes. National Cooperative Policy 2025 was finally released, 23 years after National Policy on Cooperatives was formulated in 2002. As White House political adviser in the 1940s David Niles explained, 'It's not about getting the forecast right - it's about having a series of plays ready, so when the unexpected happens, you're not frozen.' Scenario planning is not only about predicting the future, it's also about training for it, being prepared to shift course. Now, without an India-US trade deal, for instance, we are in deep, untested, muddy waters.
Systems thinking is much more common in areas like military strategy, engineering and judiciary. It is glaringly missing in agricultural policy formulation, and more so in agricultural economics.
Making one thing better tends to make other things worse. Increasing fertiliser application for productivity destroys soil biome. Applying pesticides to kill insects kills other lifeforms, too. Suppressing prices for consumers decimates farmer livelihoods. Giving free electricity causes aquifers to dry up. Just as open-ended MSP paddy procurement has ruined Punjab, free wheat and rice to 2/3rd of the Indian population has changed diets and destroyed biodiversity.
Similarly, in the India-US trade negotiations, shielding Indian farmers from cheap US farm produce adversely impacts India's services and industrial goods exports, sends stock markets into a tailspin, and inhibits private sectors fundraising as the US ramps up tariffs on India exports.
Take Israel, like India, also founded in post-WW2 scarcity. Israel spends more than 6% of its GDP on R&D. This is more than 2x the global average. Half of that funding comes from the private sector. Today, Israel is a developed country. India, in contrast, invests less than 1% and languishes as a developing nation.
Both Planning Commission and its watered-down successor NITI Aayog failed to convince their political bosses to increase R&D funding. Neither do farmer union leaders seek resources for agricultural R&D, funding for which has been shrinking as percentage of GDP annually this century.
For Indian agriculture, outcomes have been plagued by decades of political indecisiveness, whether it's the pending seed Bill, pesticides Bill or stalled agriculture market reforms. This compels states like Punjab, Haryana and Telangana to enact their own draconian and ineffective agricultural input regulations. Supreme Court's intrusion into scientific matters further complicates the field.
Uncertainty on regulations has made the private sector reluctant to invest in agricultural R&D. Lack of investments has driven lags in India's crop yields, which makes its agricultural produce uncompetitive and impacts its trade negotiations.
Take soybean. India's best yields are about half of what's available for non-GM varieties worldwide and 3x less than that of GM soybean. Imagine if India were to achieve comparable yields in just one crop. It could ease the pain of pulses and edible oil imports. No one knows why it's not happening.
Because of unresolved regulatory issues, Indian farmers will not be able to tap the potential of the recent India-Britain trade deal. Our high-value farm produce will keep failing safety tests at British ports of entry. Same holds true if we were to eventually sign an India-US trade deal. Irrespective of its fine print, it won't lead to more or diverse Indian farm produce exports. Later, experts will term such issues as 'non-tariff barriers'.
Indian bureaucracy lauds itself by making policies that seem sensible in isolation, but which interact in strange ways to restrain India as a lower-middle-income nation. Had this reductionist approach of making policy in silos been replaced by a systems approach that examines interconnectedness within complex networks, these issues could have been mitigated, if not avoided.
Trump tariffs have rattled the Indian establishment. One can only fervently hope that this can act as an inflection point in the agricultural space, where it breaks away from ideological inhibitions and complacency, from 'popularism' to 'deliverism', and finally towards improving governance and reforms.
Sources : Dairynews7x7 Aug 11th 2025 Ajay Jakhar in ET Mumbai