Dealing with crises has become an Indian way of life. Issues and situations, howsoever serious, are taken in one’s stride. But, for the first time, India is facing a crisis that it may not be able to push under the carpet. It is a crisis of plenty --- of foodgrain rotting due to glut.

It has become a herculean task to safely stack away over 422 lakh tonnes of foodgrain worth Rs 33,000 crore. Already, 180 lakh tonnes are in excess of the buffer stock and the stockpile continues to swell.

Paradoxically, over 525 million Indians, categorised as "very poor", find it hard to come across one square meal a day. As if this is not appalling enough, foodgrain worth Rs 400 crore is rendered unconsumable in storage every year. It is destroyed by pests. Incidentally, these revelations come from none other than Food Minister Shanta Kumar himself.

The Green Revolution in Punjab during the late 1960s and the 1970s ushered in a ray of hope for the starving millions of the country. Punjab achieved the highest yields of wheat and paddy in the country --- 3,941 and 3,393 kgs per hectare respectively. The state contributes about 21 per cent to India’s wheat, 9 per cent to paddy and 21 per cent to cotton production. Over the last three decades other Indian states have slowly caught up on food production and become Punjab’s competitors. For a Punjab farmer, the issue of survival has taken precedence over service. Once the nation’s provider, today he himself is famished.

Punjab’s farmer has always believed in the maxim ‘produce or perish’; today he is left wondering if he has not produced to perish!

Stringent procurement norms triggered the present paddy crisis. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal got a relief package of Rs 350 crore from a friendly Central government and temporarily bailed out the farmers. Improved quality and abundance of foodgrain from other states is bound to trigger off a similar crisis following every rabi and kharif crop. But each time the government at the Centre may not be as obliging as it is now.

Unable to cope with rising debts due to high farm inputs and low returns, there has been a steady rise in suicides among small and marginal farmers. "What else can you expect when a farmer who has borrowed heavily for seed, fertilisers and other inputs, finds no buyer for his produce," asks Swinder Singh, a medium farmer from Khaba Dogran village in Amritsar district.

Problems of the farmers would be further aggravated after the implementation of the WTO in 2001. The Agreement calls for withdrawal of all subsidies and allows free imports. Punjab’s agriculture sector will be the worst affected. However, the full impact of the GATT would be realised from January 1, 2005, when it would be implemented in toto. Unable to envisage the impending threat, the Punjab and Haryana governments have formed a joint committee under the chairmanship of Dr Y.K. Alagh to study the implications of GATT and then recommend solutions.

Incapable of understanding new economic realities and the fact that we are moving towards a buyers’ market, the farmer is caught in a quagmire. The peasants’ dilemma is not very tough to comprehend, especially when you realise that the state government itself has been caught napping and is in no position to offer help, except offer alms translating into relief packages.

A young and progressive farmer from Kot Kapura, Gurbir Singh Sandhu, says, "It is the lack of vision on part of the consecutive governments that has landed the farmer in this mess. The bumper crops that once made the Punjab farmer proud have today become a curse. While the farmer cannot find buyers for his produce, the government is importing wheat, sugar and every possible foodgrain at higher rates. Today, stocks of sugar have accumulated in mills and each and every sugar mill is facing huge losses."

Gurbir says, "There is an urgent need to educate the farmers on crop diversification, keeping in sight the impending global competition arising out of GATT. Most farmers are incapable of finding a way out for themselves. Even if they stop the wheat-paddy rotation, the crop they grow will face a similar fate in absence of any government thinking on how to protect them from international competition."

Punjab’s Finance Minister Captain Kanwaljit Singh says, "Foodgrain glut is a serious issue on which the governments have been caught napping. In consultation with the Central government, we need to work out details of how to safeguard the interest of our farmers and the long-term prospects on food production."

"Is the food-surplus actually surplus when the teeming millions go unfed," he questions. The WTO call for withdrawal of all food subsidies, says Captain Kanwaljit Singh, would push up the price of food, taking it further out of the reach of the hungry. Punjab, he avers, would be the worst-hit. "Already the scare of the WTO is so much that people in the state have started selling their cattle, saying the animal won’t sell when imported milk starts flowing in less than a year."

Manjit Singh Sandhu, a big farmer from Sherewala village in Muktsar district, feels that the farmers are paying a price for not paying heed to the advice of agricultural scientists who have repeatedly advised against sowing paddy before mid-June. A majority of the farmers finish sowing in May and then resort to early harvesting when the moisture content is high. This results in discolouration and poor quality of the crop. "The immediate need is to persuade farmers to adhere to the advised sowing and harvesting schedule. If the farmer is in a hurry to encash his crop, he has only himself to blame for the loss," he says.

"A person dying of starvation picks up leftovers from the road to assuage his hunger pangs. But when he is not hungry, he becomes very choosy. This situation aptly describes the predicament of the Punjab farmer. When the nation was deficit in food, all the foodgrain from Punjab, irrespective of quality, was picked up. Now that other states too produce foodgrain, the procurement agencies have become extremely selective", says Sandhu.

Diversification, he feels, is important, but it will not be of much help unless the government ensures that the support price is not violated. "What is the purpose of fixing a support price unless the government ensures that this price is binding on the traders? In the absence of government agencies, the farmer has to make a distress sale much below the support price," he says.

"Since government agencies are buyers only for wheat and paddy, even if the farmer goes in for diversification to break the wheat-paddy cycle and grows sunflower, mustard, lentils or any other crop, the farmer will remain vulnerable and be at the mercy of traders," says Sandhu. "Despite a support price of Rs 1200 per quintal for soyabean, farmers in the South are finding no buyers even at Rs 500. Therefore, the farmer in Punjab prefers to stick with the paddy-wheat cycles for security," he explains.

By and large, the farmers in Punjab blame the lopsided policies of the government for their plight. "The support price for mustard was fixed at Rs 1200 per quintal. But when the government went for heavy import of mustard oil, there were no buyers for the crop even at half the support price," says agriculturist Bawa Singh.

The two-cropping pattern has caused extensive damage to nutrients in Punjab’s soil, besides upsetting the water table. In the Majha belt, the area between the Beas river and the international border with Pakistan, the water level has gone down considerably. From a few feet three decades ago, water level is over 70 feet below now, due to extensive sowing of paddy that is known to be a thirsty crop. At the same time, the water level in the Malwa region which used to grow cotton has risen to sub-soil level making the region unfit for cotton cultivation.

The agitated peasants in the state are unable to understand the real cause that has created an upheaval in their lives. Therefore, their frustration and anger is obviously targeted at the government. When Kurukshetra’s Joga Singh wrote a letter to The Tribune’s Editor, his views reflected the present popular sentiment.

He wrote, " In India, a shopkeeper can kill hundreds of people with kuttu atta. You must buy mustard oil and you will find it adulterated. Are there no specifications for these people? Why then are specifications only applied to the farmers who fulfil the basic requirements of the people? Are farmers supplied enough electricity? Are the pesticides, seeds, etc supplied to the farmers as per the specifications? Most of them are substandard. They get all the commodities with rates fixed by others but they themselves cannot fix the rate of their own produce. They are not even given the minimum support price. I think the farmer is being harassed just because he is innocent and free from all manipulations the others are capable of."

The threat arising out of the WTO is something that the fathers of the Green Revolution could not visualise. But the government cannot absolve itself of the impending crisis of which it has been forewarned several times in the past. In 1986, the Johal Committee headed by former Vice-Chancellor S.S Johal stressed on the need for diversification from wheat-paddy rotation. The committee suggested that the percentage of fruit and vegetable fodder and oilseed crops be raised to 20 from the existing 2 per cent then. With the report remaining confined to cupboards, the crisis has only worsened with each passing year.

The situation continued to worsen since the beginning of the 1990s, reaching a flashpoint at the turn of the century. Thinking is on at several levels to deal with the inconsistency over the poverty-plenty issue. According Food Minister Shanta Kumar, the government is considering proposals like "food for work", "allocation of 10,000 tonnes of food grain to each Member of Parliament for distribution among the extremely poor", "food in lieu of environmental and plantation work", "distribution of wheat at Rs 2 per kilo and rice at Rs 3 per kilo to the extremely poor through the PDS", etc.

The Punjab farmer has toiled hard to serve the nation well for over five decades. Now, when in a quandary, it is the nation’s responsibility to lend him a helping hand to emerge out of this sticky situation. A simple, hardworking and self-respecting being, he is looking for a vision and not a pittance as compensation. It would be an acid test for both the Punjab and the Central government to find solutions that would make the peasantry emerge victorious.