OUR colonial rulers when they seized political power, hastened to turn the pre-British set up upside down. Land was handed over to a class of landlords, newly created by them, alongwith another class of brutal bloodsuckers - the usurious moneylenders, to keep the peasantry in control. The moneylenders supplied money to the peasants at exhorbitant rates of interest, whenever their crops failed and whenever the landlords stepped up their exploitation, by raising their demands of rent or imposing fresh levies, on various pretexts. The brutal exploitation by landlords and money-lenders, sucked the peasants dry and ruined their agriculture. Devastating famines in the last quarter of the 19^th century took a heavy toll of lives. Our country, which was earlier exporting foodgrains, became a heavy importer, to feed our people. The pattern did not essentially change in post, independent India. In both 1965-66 and 1966-67, when a severe drought engulfed large parts of the country, the government of independent India, which succeeded the colonial rule, had to import one crore and 1.2 crore tonnes of foodgrains, respectively, causing a heavy drain of our scarce foreign exchange resources, and throwing into jeopardy our plans to speedily industrialise and modernise our backward country.

Drought conditions again plagued our country in 1970 and the Congress government sought the advice of the Ford and Rockfeller Foundations of the USA, to meet the situation. Their experts advised us to use chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds, both to be imported at that time, to enhance the productivity of soil, under what came known as the "Green Revolution", the essence of which was the use of modern inputs, without touching land relations.

The land reforms, to which the Congress party, while leading the freedom struggle was committed, were totally given up. The Greeen Revolution did raise our foodgrains production, only 50 lakh tonnes in 1950, it became 150 lakh tonnes in 1983, but it was confined to only those parts of the country which were already endowed with stable sources of irrigation---Punjab, Western UP, coastal Andhra Pradesh, etc. and left the remaining parts of the country untouched. In the main it benefitted less than 10 per cent of the well-to-do upper fringe of farmers who had the means to purchase the above-mentioned costly inputs and apply them in their fields, in requisite quantities.

Thus the green revolution not only intensified regional disparities, but also the disparities between sections of the peasantry - the richer peasants becoming richer, and the bulk of the peasants who were poor, landless or a very small landholders remaining steeped in poverty. As no agency was created to conduct soil analysis in every field, and on the basis of such an analysis to advise the peasantry as to which particular crop could best be grown or which particular fertiliser or pesticide or mixture, in what proportion, would produce the best results, these chemical inputs were used indiscriminately, not only increasing costs of production, but also destroying the fertility of the land in many places.

In Andhra Pradesh, indiscriminate use of fertilisers and pesticides, on the advice of dealers who only wanted to offload their stocks (much of it was fake and of substandard quality) made them heavily indebted to usurious money-lenders. When crops failed due to untimely, or low, or excessive rains, finding themselves unable to pay back their loans, some 3000 cotton growing farmers, chose the path of suicide, to get out of a shameful and ugly situation.

In the decade beginning in 1980 the green revolution began to loose steam and the rate of growth of foodgrain production started to decline. By the mid-nineties, it went below the rate of growth of population, which harbingered a new crisis.

The last decade of the twentieth century which saw intensification of the crisis of world capitalism, when world imperialism, led by the US in order to pass on the burden of their crisis to, and capture the markets of third world countries like India, began to force on these countries, a new world order, euphemistically called "structural reforms", or more popularly the "New Economic Policy". The P V Narsimha Rao government and subsequent governments, succumbed to this pressure and the present BJP-led NDA government is implementing this policy, with a zeal unsurpassed in sycophancy by any other government, anywhere in the world.

In 1994-95 public investment in agriculture was Rs 4,971 crore or 33.1 per cent of total (public and private) investment in this sector. By 1998-99 it had come down to Rs 3,876 crore or 23.6 per cent of total investment. The Agriculture Research Department of the Ministry of Agriculture had recommended an expenditure of Rs 1,082 crore on agricultural research, in 1998-99, which has been sliced down to Rs 629.55 crore. Expansion of irrigation through new projects, has come to a standstill and enough funds are not being allocated to carry on even the yearly repairs and cleaning of distribution channels of working irrigation sources. Our villages are starved of infrastructural facilites---30 per cent of them have no pucca road links within a radius of five kms; there are no seed stores in 55 per cent of villages; 70 per cent of villages have no facilities at all for storing agricultural produce; there are no village markets in 60 per cent of villages; and 75 per cent of villages have no facilities for repairing agricultural implements and machines, and so on.

The rate of growth in agriculture is slowing down---it was 7.2 per cent in 1997-98, and 1.3 per cent in 1998-99, but less than 1 per cent in 1999-2000. In the name of keeping pace with an inflation of about eight per cent per annum, the government goes on increasing issue prices, in the public distribution system, with the result that offtake from the PDS has gone down by 17.5 lakh tonnes this year as compared to the previous year. This is happening at a time when producers, at harvest time, finding government procurement prices higher than open market prices, want to sell as much as possible to government purchasing centres, which did purchase more wheat and paddy this year as compared to last year. By the end of September 2000, the government had purchased 172.7 lakh tonnes of rice and 179.1 lakh tonnes of wheat (out of rabi produce of 1999), while in the same period last year 117.9 lakh tonnes of rice and 141.4 lakh tonnes of wheat was procured.

But as offtake went down, the stocks with the government went unmanageably up to about 43 crore tonnes, when the stipulated capacity of all government godowns is only 20 to 22 crore tonnes. To offload this stock, the government is negotiating with Iraq, Malaysia, Iran and many other countries to export wheat and rice, at prices lower than above the poverty line and near to below the poverty line prices of PDS, with a loss of about Rs 400 per quintal, causing a total loss of about Rs 2,500 crore to the exchequer, for wheat alone.

Many purchase centres have downed their shutters as they are not getting money from the government treasuries, or even as loan from banks, and producers are find themselves forced to sell their grain at throwaway prices, to unscrupulous traders. The government wants to export about 60 lakh tonnes of wheat, but as this is not going to bail them out of the huge stock problem, 10,000 tonnes of wheat is being given to each MP, free, to sell it at a low price or for free distribution in respective his/her constituency.

The problem is further aggravated by the government's commitment to the WTO to reduce curbs like quantitative restrictions on imports of agricultural commodities. Although the WTO had fixed the date for this purpose as 2004, our servile government wants to remove these restrictions by 2001, and is hesitating to enhance import tariffs which are much lower than the limit of 100 to 150 per cent, prescribed by the WTO. While rich countries like the USA, Germany and France, give about 40 times more subsidies to agricultural exports compared to our country, we are also being persuaded to reduce the meagre subsidies, that our government gives. The WTO is step by step, pushing up towards "free trade" which means removal of all controls, restrictions and regulations on international trade, which will bring total ruination to our peasant producers, who will have to give up production of foodgrains in favour of such commercial crops, as can find an easy market in the rich, developed countries. Our food security will go and the bulk of our poor and middle peasants, who have less than two hectares of land-holdings each and no capital to shift from subsistence crops to commercial crops, or to manage exports, will starve and agriculture will face a total disaster.

It is high time that our entire people are made aware of this impending disaster and made to rise as one man to force the present government to retrace its steps, and desist from its anti-people and anti-national role of serving the interests of the imperialists and betraying the trust of the people.