Correcting Distortions in Farm and Food Policy

Bharat Dogra

Farm and food policy have been heavily influenced by some significant distortions in the dominant thinking on this subject. To evolve proper policy we need to consider issues like - What is best for farmers? What is most needed for providing healthy, safe nutritious and adequate food to people? How can we protect and ensure sustainable livelihoods of farmers? How can we protect soil health and local water sources? How can we minimize costs of farmers and keep them away from debts?

Instead of concentrating on these issues the dominant distorted thinking has concentrated on some very different issues. How can the self-reliance of local farming system be broken so that more and more outside inputs or industrial inputs (chemical fertilisers and pesticides, weedicides, matching big company seeds, fossil fuels, vast centralised irrigation systems) can be introduced and then made indispensable? How can more surplus be extracted from farmers and farming systems?

As the right priorities and aims were not even considered most of the time, it is not at all surprising that big distortions emerged in the food and farming system in the form of increasing risks and hazards for food safety, high indebtedness of farmers and high risks for their livelihoods, rapid and even alarming decline in soil health and local water sources, rapid reduction or even extinction of friendly insects, birds, earthworms and micro-organisms and overall rapid destruction of the natural conditions in which healthy crops prosper.

What is more, most powerful interests are at work to unleash forces which will lead to further rapid accentuation of all these problems and concentrate control of farm and food system increasingly in the hands of a few giant multinational corporations.

Hence it extremely important to strengthen the  forces which can protect rights of farmers, right to safe and healthy food, and all conditions for maintaining eco-friendly, self-reliant and low-cost farming. There is need for a holistic understanding of the food and farming system we need, so that various sections of these protective forces do not work at crops-purposes but re-enforce the yearnings and strengths of each other, together working with unity to create a farm and food system based on justice, sustainablity, environment protection, welfare of other forms of life, a system which ensures sustainable production of safe, healthy, adequate food and other farm products.

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Frontier
Jan 30, 2020