How to Sustainably Boost Millet Crops Without Hurting Peasants

The United Nations has declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets following a proposal from the government of India. Recently, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reflected on the immense potential of cultivating millets in promoting ecological and economic sustainability. According to Qu Dongyu, Director-General of the FAO, “Millets can play an important role and contribute to our collective efforts to empower smallholder farmers, achieve sustainable development, eliminate hunger, adapt to climate change, promote biodiversity, and transform agri-food systems.”

The Indian government is ostensibly campaigning to hike millet production and consumption. Union Budget 2023-24 has announced making the Indian Institute of Millet Research in Hyderabad into a Centre of Excellence to boost millet production. However, are these intended objectives in sync with the ground reality of millet cultivation in India? Let us take a look.

The area under cultivation of bajra or pearl millet in India increased from 9.02 to 12.81 million hectares during the first three Five-Year Plans between 1950-51 and 1967-68. After that, there was a steady decline since the New Agricultural Strategy, popularly known as the Green Revolution. Bajra fell from 12.81 million hectares in 1967-68 to 7.57 million hectares in 2020-21 during this so-called green phase.

The share of bajra in the total area under food grains was 9.3% in 1950-51. It grew to 10.6% in 1967-68 and then declined to 5.6% in 2020-21. The share of bajra in total foodgrain production was 5.1% in 1950-51, 5.5% in 1967-68 and 3.5% in 2020-21.

The declining importance of bajra is inextricably linked to the spread of conventional farming, which is synthetic chemical input intensive. Led by rural elites, this kind of farming took off under the New Agricultural Strategy. At the same time, in this phase, a rice and wheat-based cropping system came to dominate agriculture, with adverse ecological consequences. The dominance of rice and wheat is an outcome of State intervention to principally—though not exclusively—facilitate accumulation for the landed sections, the rural elite, primarily the landlords and rich peasants. State-aided accumulation in Indian agriculture also proceeded, for instance, through price support measures for material inputs, subsidised finance, and the less-than-universal public procurement of crops. That said, it is undeniable that the peasantry earns relatively higher incomes wherever public procurement of agricultural produce is effective.

Therefore, we must remember the limitations to the type and magnitude of interventions a neo-liberal State will adopt in agricultural marketing. These limitations arise principally from the commitment of the State to permit corporate encroachment in agriculture. The neo-liberal State may project it as a commitment to “fiscal prudence” and supposed greater efficiency of corporate organisation, but that is not the case. For instance, official estimates of minimum support prices for agricultural products do not cover the entire cost of cultivation. This neglect of certain expenses disproportionately affects peasants adversely.

Moreover, though the public procurement of agricultural produce is spatially uneven, it is also principally focussed on select crops—rice and wheat—which compels cultivators to become entangled in the fixed cropping system. The adverse consequences on farm ecology have, as a result, spread across every dimension of conventional farming, from excessive water use to reliance on synthetic chemicals and so on.

Remember that compared with millet, rice cultivation is more susceptible to adverse climate change and contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, policymaking under the sway of capital has created a contradiction between the farm economy and farm ecology. This disconnect existed in the dirigiste period and continues in the neo-liberal period.

In other words, attempts to increase millet cultivation with corporate agribusiness as its fulcrum will likely impoverish peasants and workers more. Let us examine one illustrative scenario in this regard. Suppose millets are produced under corporate direction. With the help of “enabling” curtailment of public rice and wheat procurement, corporate agribusinesses could bid down the prices of privately-procured millets. This process is bound to impoverish peasants.

And if corporate agribusinesses repackage millet for the exclusive use of elites, the area under rice and wheat cultivation (and output) would fall. The private market prices of rice and wheat would rise. Since the public distribution system does not meet the complete needs of the working people for food, any rise in rice and wheat market prices will impoverish workers.

A beginning to overcome this contradiction between farm ecology and farm economics could be made a public-led process of the agroecological cultivation of millets, along with rice and wheat, in appropriate proportions. Millets such as bajra are more climate compatible and have crucial health benefits, especially when blended with rice and wheat.

However, enhancing the ecological sustainability of crop production by cultivating millets will require public intervention in several agrarian realms. These include configuring agricultural extensions, public credit disbursement to all peasants, public procurement of agricultural produce, and more such steps. The potential to enhance the links between farmers, extension services, and farm credit exists. But they must be disentangled from their current role under the neo-liberal regime as facilitators of corporate encroachment in agriculture.

Regarding public procurement of agricultural produce, this system needs to be enhanced by creating marketing infrastructure to procure all crops (24 as per official documents), including bajra. To make this process viable, the government must set the effective minimum support price of bajra (for instance) at a level that provides the cultivator with a per-acre return not less than for rice and wheat. The State can then provide this publicly-procured millet to people through a universal PDS.

Agroecological cultivation of millets and other crops, fortified by public procurement and distribution, would be climate-compatible and decisively reverse the neo-liberal project in India.

Shantanu De Roy is an assistant professor at the Department of Policy Studies, TERI School of Advanced Studies, Delhi. C Saratchand is a professor at the Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views expressed are personal.