Towards the end of November 2020, more than 250 million farmers and supporters from the states of Punjab and Haryana, gathered and marched to the capital of India, New Delhi, to peacefully protest the new laws that had been imposed on the agricultural sector by the Indian Government.
India is a developing nation, with 60-70% of its population composed of farmers and other agricultural workers. Amidst a global pandemic, the Indian government made the decision to issue laws regarding the sale of crops and other products between farmers and big corporations. Previously, farmers would auction off their crops at a government-established mandi. They would then receive a guaranteed minimum support price (MSP) for their goods as they would sell it to the government, who would then sell it to a corporation. The new laws allow the government to be exempt from the trade between farmers and buyers. While the Indian government believed that the new law would allow farmers to regulate their prices and gain more freedom in terms of which corporations they could sell to, the farmers have actually been placed in a worse position. Since the new laws don’t guarantee a minimum price for the sale of a farmer’s crops, this makes them vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of bigger corporations. These laws enforce contract farming within the agricultural sector, which is a binding agreement between farmers and corporate firms. This allows the corporations to decide which crops the farmer grows and the predetermined price at which they will buy the crops for.
Additionally, the new laws make it almost impossible for the farmer to approach the national courts when a dispute arises between them and a private corporation. Instead, the farmer will have to plead his case to a local government official. However, the government system in India is easily corrupted and bribed by the corporation to favor the result of the dispute in their direction, which gives a meager chance for the farmer to benefit from the dispute. Another law allows any person to store an unlimited quantity of any food, product, or essential commodity. As the agricultural sector of India is very poor, many of the farmers don’t have the financial means to build a storage facility to store their crops while bigger corporations do.
While the government may have believed that these laws would provide more freedom between the farmers and the buyers, it simply increases every farmer’s vulnerability to exploitation. The protests continue to persist at the capital, as farmers have set up camps along the roads of the city, running almost 19 miles long. With the lack of power their voices have when it comes to such monumental legal changes, peaceful protests appear to be the only way to gain the government’s attention.
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