Kirit Bhai is an ace stock Market player who picks his portfolio investments à la the farmer who  sorts his best seeds before sowing. Much like the agriculturist who follow the weather forecasts, Kirit studies the current economic climate, analyses the growth potential of various industries and shortlists companies for high returns. This very much mirrors the strategy deployed on the farm to assess the fertility of the soil to decide on which crop to grow for the best yields. And just as the farmer knows that timing is critical to begin the farm activities, Kirit too has a sense of the opportune moment to take the investment plunge. When the farmer waits for the rains to pour down and wet the soil, Kirit bids his time for the market to go on a downward spiral and hit rock bottom before he picks up the blue chips at the cheapest price. But the comparisons between the player at the bourse and the farmer at his field stop here at the strategy level. Operationally, the farmer does a laborious ploughing of the field with his bulls to tend his crop while all that Kirit needs to do is to wait for the bull to arrive and take control of the liquidity market. And when the stock index reaches a zenith, Kirit makes a windfall by just offloading his shares whereas the farmer puts in unending hours of work to ensure a decent harvest. One reaps the fruits of his own hard labour while others labour to make Kirit Bhai the rich person that he is! That, in a nutshell, is stock trading for most of us.

But when Food Grains produced by the farmer is sought to be treated as a stock market share,  a very peculiar situation, hitherto not foreseen, emerges and that is what the new farm laws passed by the Indian Parliament inadvertently seems to do. The laws allow buyers, who mostly would be powerful corporates, to procure food grains as much as they wish from farmers at a price dictated by market conditions and also store them as long as they want to. The corporates instinctively would buy the food grains, just like Kirit Bhai would buy the shares, when the prices are at their lowest, stock them in large quantities and wait for the prices to move upwards. And when it reaches a high, the corporates would sell the produce to the public, much like booking profits at the share market, and make a killing in the process!  With control over procurement, storing, transportation and distribution, the corporates are all set to make a grand entry into the hitherto restricted space of agricultural trade that would change the rules of the game beyond recognition. And the farming community in India is rebellious to it and rightly so.

Till now the farmers were assured of a definite Minimum Support Price, the MSP, at which the government agencies would buy their produce affording them a safety net and a safeguard against fluctuating marketing conditions. The government in turn, had a steady stock of food grains for  giving it to the poor at subsidised prices through the well laid out Public Distribution System, the PDS. With the enactment of these new laws, the prices of food grains are left to be fixed by the market forces as the government inches towards a policy of Laissez-faire in agricultural trade. This might sound as a good practice for the votaries of free market where everything supposedly is fair and transparent. But for a country like India where agriculture is the vocation of the vast majority and a huge number depend on subsidised food, this is a sure shot invitation to deny a large part of its population their right to assured prices and also to food security. For whenever there is an agreement between the powerful corporate and the small farmer, the deal is not always fair as there cannot be equitable terms between unequal parties. That, in sum, is the basis for the unprecedented farmer protests ever mobilised in free India . 

As the world gets integrated more closely and an ever increasing number of goods and services seamlessly cross international borders, there is a now a tendency to allow the supply-demand theory to percolate even to realms that are till now considered sacrosanct. By coupling the mechanism of the sale and purchase of food grains to market forces similar to the operation of the stock markets, universal access to the basic essentials of life is now put to jeopardy and that indeed is a cause for deep worry. 

Let not the bull run away with all the staples and leave the field fallow!

Yours 

Narayanan

Here is a small clip on the on-going protests: