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Farmers in India are fighting a historic struggle for their very survival as farmers. Under cover of the COVID crisis, the far-right government of Narendra Modi passed three pro-corporate agriculture bills which hand control of the sector to monopolies like Ambani, Adani and other multinational domestic and foreign agribusiness firms.

These laws mean that, for the first time since India’s independence from British colonialism, big corporations will be allowed to encroach into agriculture and achieve super profits.

Indian agriculture is crumbling under neoliberal policies, which were introduced in 1991. The peasantry was able to survive throughout all the years since, but the current laws introduced by Modi will remove whatever lifeline is left for them. These policies are pushing agriculture into a deep crisis – in 2019 alone, more than 40,000 farmers died by suicide in the context of agriculture-related debts and other difficulties.

The global capitalist economy is gripped in recession and the neoliberal trajectory has exposed itself as a total failure for solving this crisis. In response, the capitalist class is intensifying its effort to maximize profits; hence, it is seeking new areas of economic activity and markets. The new agriculture laws will allow corporations to control agricultural production, purchasing, storage, marketing and procurement. They will dismantle the Minimum Support Price (MSP) mechanism which guarantees prices for many crops and will privatize public places (known as mandis) where farmers bring crops and government agencies buy them. Corporations will be allowed to open private mandis, buy and hold food grain stocks, and have long-term farm leases. Large-scale contract farming will be allowed. It will be the corporations who decide what crops will be grown, seed type and all other decisions related to agriculture production and sale.

This will seriously jeopardize India’s food security, by creating artificial shortages of food grains while facilitating a massive rise in prices and dismantling the public distribution system.

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