It is not only exposure to subsidized market prices that is driving Indian farmers into such desperate straits. It is more generally the attack upon collective rights and ownership that is such an integral part of the neoliberal (or neoimperialist if you like) program that has thoroughly dispossessed farmers in the South of control over how, what, and for whom, they produce. And so indebtedness rises and food security is sacrificed on the altar of liberalization.

Since 1991, when India was swept up into the wave of global capitalist triumphalism and made the structural adjustment from developmental to neoliberal state, the social democratic system of agricultural management has been dismantled and the space is now being filled by the agents of private capital. One of the central demands of imperialist finance capital wherever it imposes its will is the removal of subsidized institutional credit for small producers (because it potentially depresses rates of return more generally), which in India was vital in providing the farmer with independence from the aathi (moneylender/grain trader) – such credit has been completely done away with post-1991. Minimum Support Prices have for years been attacked by the World Bank/IMF (citing their market distorting effect, as if the market is the be and end all), and so today they are far less consistent and increasingly do not cover the cost of production. The deflationay posture imposed by the neoliberal program has completely undermined public investment in agriculture (infrastructure, research, extension/support services) specifically, and rural development more generally, so yields are stagnating despite increasing costs of production, and rural employment growth has nearly grinded to stagnation (it is approximately 0.6%!). This means that as national income share as a whole declines in agriculture, more people are forced to look to agriculture for income, as non-farm employment is increasingly not there.

But this has been a boom for forces of primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession. There is a particularly nasty nexus of moneylender, grain trader, input supplier (increasingly these “services” are being vertically integrated into single commercial enterprises) that has been strengthened like never before owing to the collapse of rural institutional credit, the attack on public grain procurement, the removal of state extension services – so the farmer is forced to turn to this unholy trinity for credit, output purchase, input supply, and advice on input use (which from these agents is predictably “use more pesticide and chemical fertilizer” since this means more profits).

Remarkably, though, the liberals are trying to articulate this crisis as one which proves that the state is not equipped to manage agriculture, and so the solution, they claim, should be to open up further to allow deeper corporate penetration of the agrarian sector. So whereas before democratically accountable bodies provided credit, input advice, and output procurement, now it is Cargill, Monsanto, Walmart, Pepsi, Unilever, Tesco, the Rothschild banking empire (has a fifty percent share in Field Fresh), Reliance India, etc that are expected to fulfill these essential services. India’s liberals seem to overlook the fact that it was the removal of state support that brought about the crisis, and that wherever the corporate sector penetrates agriculture the end result is always a decline in the farmer’s share of the farm receipt.

But beyond the desperate sigh of suicide, resistance there is, and I do not think that the neo-imperialists will be able to fully takeover the farm without a fight…