DES MOINES: Images of thousands of farmers streaming into India’s capital on tractors and carrying banners to decry potentially devastating changes in agricultural policy can seem a world away, but the protests in New Delhi raise issues that resonate in the United States and have led to dramatic change in rural America.
Indian farmers have left their homes to march through New Delhi in a desperate effort to force the repeal of laws they believe would end guaranteed pricing and force them to sell to powerful corporations rather than government-run markets.
Despite decades of economic growth, up to half of India’s population relies on growing crops on small parcels of land, typically less than 3 acres, and farmers worry that without guaranteed prices they will be forced to sell their land and lose their livelihoods.
The dispute raises questions not only about agriculture but about dwindling populations in rural India where small communities are already struggling to survive an issue mirrored in the parts of the US.
These protests have gone way beyond the bills because this has spiraled into a larger conversation about the soul of rural India, which is something very familiar to those of us in the Midwest, said Andrew Flachs, an anthropology professor at Purdue University who has extensively studied the experiences of cotton farmers in India. Were always talking about the spirit of American agrarianism and the soul of rural America and this has shifted into a conversation of those same dynamics in India.
The images of farmers marching through New Delhi recall similar scenes in Washington, DC, during the farming crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when hundreds of trucks and tractors flooded the National Mall. Thousands of farmers lost their land, in part because of government policies that caused soaring interest rates as demand for their products plunged, leading to falling land values.
Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2021
