People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Vol. XXIX

No. 16

April 17, 2005

18TH CONGRESS RESOLUTION

 

On Agrarian Crisis And Struggles Of Peasants & Agricultural Workers

 

This 18th congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) takes serious note of the fact that for the last decade and a half, India has passed through an unprecedented agrarian crisis. The sharp decline in the livelihoods of the working people in India’s countryside is illustrated starkly and tragically by the suicides and deaths by starvation of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and agricultural labourers. Together with this is the growing land alienation of the peasantry. Agrarian social and economic distress has hit the most vulnerable social sections of the rural population the hardest, particularly dalits, adivasis, minorities and women. The crisis has destabilised millions of families, and has forced lakhs to migrate.

 

The annual compound rate of growth of output of foodgrain fell from 2.85 per cent in the 1980s to 1.66 per cent in the 1990s, and the corresponding rate for all crops fell from 3.19 per cent to 1.73 per cent. At the same time, the rate of growth of population in the 1990s was 1.9 per cent; the 1990s were thus the first decade since the 1970s in which the rate of growth of food (and other crop) production fell below the rate of population growth.

 

The decade of the 1990s showed a sharp decline in public investment in agriculture. At constant (1993-94) prices, public gross fixed capital formation in agriculture, which peaked at Rs 7300 crores in 1980-81, fell steadily to Rs 4500 crores by the end of the 1990s. Public sector gross fixed capital formation in agriculture was about 5 per cent of agricultural GDP in 1979-80 and about 2.2 per cent of agricultural GDP in 1990-91, fell to about 1.5 per cent by the end of 1990s. Rural development expenditure fell from 14.5 per cent of GDP during the VII plan period (1985-90) to less than 6 per cent in 1999-2000.

 

Inadequate public investment, stagnant yields, increased input costs due to slashing of subsidies, and the crash in output prices due to lifting of quantitative restrictions and reckless import liberalisation have combined to attack the farming incomes of the mass of poor and middle peasants. The increasing penetration of MNCs in agriculture has also had serious effects. There is a growing trend towards the privatisation of irrigation and electricity.

 

The rates of growth of rural employment plummeted in the 1990s, the pattern of this decline affecting agricultural workers the most. This has led to severe exploitation of women who are forced to do the same work as men for far lower wages. Increasing mechanisation of agriculture has also hit the jobs of agricultural workers. At the same time, wage rates have stagnated, resulting in substantial declines in wage incomes of rural manual workers. All this has increased the incidence of migration to massive levels.

 

Government policy has failed to deal with the enormous human consequences of drought, flood and natural disaster.

 

Not only has land reform been jettisoned, several states have also introduced counter-reform legislation that provides, in different ways, for lifting land ceilings, taking away tenants’ rights, clearing the way for private corporate land ownership and diverting land from crop production altogether. Tribals have been evicted in large numbers from their traditional forest lands.

 

If financial liberalisation has had the effect of damaging the system of formal-sector credit in the rural areas, changes in banking policy have also had a rapid and disastrous effect on the debt of the poor, placing them increasingly at the mercy of usurious private money-lenders.

 

Governments since 1996 have sought to curtail the public distribution system (PDS) by targeting it ever more narrowly, pushing more and more people to the brink of nutritional disaster. Fifty per cent of the population is under-nourished.

 

The new trade regime has serious implications for land use, cropping patterns, and the future of food and nutrition self-sufficiency in India. Similarly, the Seed Bill, seeks virtually to prevent on-farm seed production and the exchange of seeds between farmers, and to hand over seed production and retailing to the private corporate sector, particularly multinational agri-business corporations. Efforts are being made to do away with public intervention in the marketing of agricultural produce and the establishment of the public sector mandis, and to hand over the agricultural marketing infrastructure to the private sector and multinationals. There is an attempt – under the pretext of reforming a system that is beset by many real problems – to circumvent and undermine the part played by state governments in the cooperative credit system.

 

The National Common Minimum Programme outlines some measures that will, if implemented, bring some immediate relief to the rural masses. The current policies of the UPA, including those outlined in the union budget do not, however, indicate any basic change of direction. There is no basic difference between the BJP-led NDA government and the Congress-led UPA government as far as economic policies are concerned. The recent intervention of the Left in parliament on the Patents Bill, along with movements outside, showed that the UPA government can be forced to accommodate some of our concerns in this regard. Similarly, the struggle of the peasantry in Rajasthan was able to achieve certain immediate demands against the fierce repression let loose by the BJP government in the state.

 

The Left Front governments of West Bengal and Tripura are the only governments in the country to put forward viable alternatives. They have shown the people how the distribution of land and non-land inputs to the poorer sections of the peasantry by panchayats can, given the existing limitations of the system, help to increase agricultural production and food production and reduce income-poverty.

 

The agrarian situation in India is presently characterised by two important contradictions. The first is the sharp division between landlords, big capitalist farmers, large traders, moneylenders and their allies on the one hand, and agricultural workers, poor and middle peasants and rural artisans on the other. The second is the growing opposition to imperialist-backed policies of the government not only from the mass of the poor and middle peasantry and agricultural workers, but also from the sections of the rural rich.

 

Taking into consideration that both these contradictions are intensifying, the 18th congress of the CPI(M) calls upon all Left, democratic and patriotic forces to organise countrywide struggles for an alternative agricultural policy, which will include: