India’s Angry Farmers Need a Better Deal
Imposing a minimum price on private buyers will mess up the nation’s food supply. There are less intrusive ways to make agriculture sustainable.
A stand-off outside New Delhi.
Photographer: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images
Drones dropped tear-gas canisters, and the police fired rubber bullets as Punjab and Haryana farmers marched toward New Delhi last week, navigating nail pads strewn on heavily barricaded roads. Similar scenes played out three years ago. Back then, farmers had amassed at the border of the Indian capital to oppose three hastily passed laws that would have allowed a greater role for markets in what has historically been a state-dominated food supply chain.
But the protestors saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to transform agriculture as a backdoor entry for large businesses and eventual abandonment of so-called minimum support prices, or MSPs. These government-administered rates are key to the agrarian economies of Punjab and a few other Indian states where the government purchases large quantities of wheat and rice in designated markets, known as “mandis.”