R. Venkat Ramanujam and Amit John Kurien
Agriculture’s contribution to the Indian economy is critical and complex. It contributes 16% of India’s GDP but supports between 50-60% of the labour force and up to 70% of all rural households (see a quick overview here). Livelihoods in agriculture have been stressed for some time now due to a combination of high input costs, low prices, and deteriorating eco-hydrological conditions. India launched a nationwide lockdown on March 24 to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although slated to end mid-April, it seems set to be extended further and will deal a severe setback to agrarian livelihoods. Agriculture in India is embedded in multiple overlapping regional economies. Here we draw upon the case of agri-food supply chains linked to Bangalore, India’s third-largest city with a population upwards of nine million, where both of us live.
In the first week of the lockdown since March 24, the farmers in Bangalore’s immediate hinterland were put to great hardship. The announcement of the nation-wide lockdown was made in the national capital New Delhi, 2200 km away, with barely four hours’ notice. As agricultural markets shut down and transportation went off the roads, farmers of perishable commodities – vegetables, fruits, and milk – were forced to throw away their collected produce. Grim pictures surfaced of dairy farmers pouring milk into irrigation canals and farmers dumping tomatoes or letting their vegetable crops rot in the fields for lack of transport to the city. Farmers growing grapes and flowers for export markets in Europe, especially the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, faced huge losses.
About a week into the lockdown the government of Karnataka State (of which Bangalore is the capital city) partially eased restrictions on the transport and sale of agricultural produce. Some farmers are able to supply to corporate food supply chains that cater to supermarkets patronised by middle class and affluent urban customers. The Karnataka Milk Federation, an impressive state-supported network of milk co-operative societies in Karnataka has continued purchasing milk from dairy farmers and supplies dairy products to Bangalore city. Some grape farmers have used social media to tie up with affluent neighbourhoods in the city to sell their produce at reduced prices (USD 0.8-2 per kg) in the hope of recovering part of their investment. However, small farmers who do not have independent means of transport are at a disadvantage. Likewise, small vendors of agri-foods in Bangalore are unable to resume their livelihoods because of commuting and transportation restrictions. However, supermarket chains selling groceries are doing better because they are better equipped in dealing with the government and in taking advantage of relaxations granted to essential services. Meanwhile, even those small vendors who travel with their wares through the city streets are at the receiving end of xenophobic WhatsApp messages that urge middle class residents to keep unknown sellers out of their localities for fear that they may be carriers of the coronavirus, or worse because the vendors may be Muslims rumoured to be deliberately trying to spread the disease.
Agri-food supply chains have collapsed for farmers in Bangalore’s wider hinterland, beyond a radius of 150 km. There are reports of poultry farmers in the district of Chikmagalur 200 km away from Bangalore distributing their poultry locally for free because the private company contracted to procure from them has been unable to do so. The dry rain-fed district of Chitradurga is hard-hit because of the lack of cold storage as well as transport facilities. Smallholders who rely heavily upon the urban vegetable trade for their daily livelihood have been forced to engage in door-to-door selling in neighbouring villages. In normal times, smallholders usually sell to middlemen from whom they have taken loans in advance to purchase crop inputs. Such middlemen, generally traders, have stopped purchasing perishable commodities now because they are unable to supply them onward to urban markets. In the absence of signals from the market or from the government about the post-lockdown situation, the uncertainty about whether or not to sow a new crop, and what exactly to sow, is the key worry for the farming community in this region. Perhaps this holds good for much of India’s interior regions that provision the country’s urban populations but seem to have proved greatly vulnerable to the massive disruption in agri-food supply chains as well as the looming economic uncertainty produced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Acknowledgements
Manjunatha G., Chidananda A. and Apoorva R., researchers, Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation (CSEI), Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore; Lakshmikantha N.R., Obaiah B. and Vikram Aditya, researchers, ATREE, Bangalore
Follow us on our social media
R. Venkat Ramanujam
R. Venkat Ramanujam is a PhD Scholar at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and The Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, India. His ongoing PhD research project, entitled Shifting human-nature interactions in the Maikal Hills of Madhya Pradesh, India, explores rural transformation among forest-dwelling communities in Central India through an ethnographic investigation of changing livelihoods and environment attitudes. He has spent several years as a grassroots development practitioner, much of it in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India, where he worked with the indigenous Nicobarese people as part of the post-tsunami rehabilitation process. He has also lived among forest-dwelling communities in Western and Central India as a practitioner and, more recently, as a researcher. His email address is ramanujam.venkat@gmail.com