Farmer Advocacy Matters with Ajay Vir Jakhar

Agribusiness Matters with Venky Ramachandran

In this fascinating conversation, we explored

1. What is the idea behind Bharat Krishak Samaj? How to understand the role of Farmer advocacy organizations vis-a-vis farmer unions?

2. Why does politics remain an albatross around the neck of Agriculture?

3. Why do farmers not have much say on the policies that affect them despite being a majority vote bank? How to understand this contradiction in a global context where farmers, say, in the US have a bigger say on policies than Indian farmers?

4. Why is decontextualized policymaking a bane for Indian Agriculture?

5. What is the difficulty of taxing agricultural income in India? [Ajay shared an interesting anecdote based on his interactions with the late Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley]

6. According to Ajay, what would ideal farm reforms look like?

7. Why should governments focus on human resources instead of infrastructure?

8. Why we should document failures in Indian Agriculture? Why is it wrong to assume that fertilizer subsidies are helping farmers?

9. What policy changes could steer Indian Agriculture towards an agroecological paradigm and create alternative markets and marketplaces?

10. How does Ajay see the clash of paradigms between the Industrial agriculture paradigm and the agroecology paradigm? Is there a clash of paradigms in the first place? How can we build markets and value chains that value the quality of the produce? How can we change the design of the market?

11. Why do Indian farmers not prefer to have cows these days? How has the Indian political party BJP supported natural farming paradigms?