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The book titled “How Do Small Farmers Fare: Evidence from Village Studies in India”, edited by Madhura Swaminathan and Sandipan Baksi, is a study of the small farm economy in India by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies.
There is an interesting new report on forests and food security from the High Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security (HLPE 2017).
Food security one one of the foremost goals of social policy in most developing countries, including India. Subsidies for food security can be at the producer level (through price support and procurement), at the storage, processing and transport level and, finally, at the retail level (that is, to the consumer). As per the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), subsidies are permissible except through price support and procurement.
In a recent Research Note, Yoshifumi Usami and I had examined women’s work in livestock and animal rearing, and we had argued that women constitute the primary work force in the animal resources sector. While we had data on the number of women participating in animal rearing activity, we did not have information on the time spent in animal care. Information on these lines is now available from a pilot time-use survey conducted last week in Siresandra village, Kolar district, Karnataka.
Tenancy reform was an important component of land reform in post-Independence India, and in most States, leasing of agricultural land — or tenancy — is legally regulated or, in some cases, banned altogether. Now the Niti Aayog has published a Report of the Expert Committee on Land Leasing, chaired by T. Haque (Government of India 2016). The main argument of the Report is that land leasing be deregulated.
Arindam Das and I have worked with detailed household level empirical data from 17 villages across nine States of India to examine the viability of small farming. We defined small farmer households as households engaged predominantly in cultivation but with less than two hectares of irrigated land or six hectares of unirrigated land (or combinations thereof).
Is agriculture becoming less important for employment, incomes and livelihoods of people in rural India and for the Indian economy as a whole? The answer depends on the way in which the role and contribution of agriculture is measured.
A relatively new concept in the literature on rural household incomes is that of income from forests and from environment services. Forest income is defined as income from forest produce (other than plantations) including produce collected for fuel, food, fodder, construction, medicine, and other uses.
In India, surprisingly enough, we did not have any official data on incomes of farm households till a decade ago. The first official source of data on farmer’s incomes was the Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation.
The most striking change in Dhalai (as in the rest of Tripura) is the return of peace and security. My impression from a week in the field, participating in a survey of households in Mainama village, is of a society that has taken impressive steps on a public-support-led path of human development.