Dr.Banarsi Lal
Agricultural policies involve the Government, organizations and the farmers. The Government aims in maximization of agricultural outputs on sustainable basis. The agricultural universities and research institutions give policy inputs and the government departments prepare the programmes on the basis of the policies and implement them to achieve the objectives of the government. The farmers seek to maximize their farm income and employment of the family members to increase their income. The state planning policies which are top down in approach decide on macroeconomic basis, assuming that the farmers would adopt them or could be induced to adopt .The general policy of Government for agricultural development can be summarized in terms of (a)supply of inputs like high yielding varieties seeds, fertilizers and insecticides-pesticides at reasonable rates;(b)supply of water, credits and electricity at subsidized rates; and (c)fixing of minimum support price for important food grains and other crops along with procurement system for wheat and rice. The farmers have responded to these policies by allocating higher acreage under wheat and rice crops which have least risk of yield as well as price. The policy of diversification has been loaded with objectives like checking degradation of soil health, sustaining the land productivity, checking decrease in level of water table and water logging, controlling the use of insecticides and pesticides, decreasing the water pollution, maintaining the ecological balance and increasing production of crops. The farmer thinks for the short term benefits. The continuous increase in area under wheat and rice in spite of echoing of the above mentioned considerations clearly proves the fallacy of this policy of diversification.
The support price with procurement arrangement has been revealed as the most important instrumental variables in influencing the acreage allocation decisions of the farmers. This support is becoming unsustainable for the Government due to its financial situation. The support price with procurement arrangement for additional crops is almost ruled out in view of prevailing weak fiscal situations of the Central and State Governments. The acreage planning for individual crops is widely used as a management tool by almost all the developed countries. Acreage planning requires realistic estimates of the acreage under individual crops at national level on the basis of domestic and export demand of the concerned crops. The level of production and acreage can be fixed for different crops at national level so as to fetch a market price reasonably above the cost of production. The cost of production may be targeted so as to compete with the international price of the crop in next 2-3 years. We cannot do away with the responsibility of planning agricultural output in the pretext of liberalization or incompetence of line departments. The million of traders are effectively covered under some or other kind of registration then why not the farmers. We need to try it at least for certain crops. We should choose the path of area planning for further agriculture growth otherwise we shall be heading towards the disastrous situation with present approach of no planning. It may be worthwhile to use area planning as a policy for certain crops like floriculture, vegetables , strawberry, fruits etc. where the number of farmers and area involved is much less. The acreage for the selected crops may be fixed at national level on annual basis and the same may be allocated among the individual states. The state level acreage of each of the selected crop can be allocated among the districts through the concerned Department of Agriculture as per their share in the state. The district officer of the department can further allocate the acreage among the individual farmers on the basis of their last 3 years acreage of the concerned crop. This procedure will take care of the likely state and district level concerns in allocation of planned acreage. This practice may be tough in the beginning but such planning is being effectively implemented as a policy instrument in almost all the developed countries at present. Farmers will be benefitted if they are restricted to one or two selected crops along with the purview of acreage control. For this purpose farmers need to be convinced by taking the specific area plan models of some crops. Such models can be helpful to increase the income of the farmers as well as the agricultural sector as a whole. The existing crop departments need the training and use of information technology.
The policy of acreage planning can serve many purposes such as (a)Farmers will get the specialization of the concerned crop by restricting themselves to the crop on regular basis.(b)Price support will be available to the farmers due to planned production according to the domestic and export market requirement. (c)Specialization in one or two crops will enable the farmers to produce the quality products in terms of taste, colour etc. which will pay them high prices.(d)The long term association of the farmer with a particular crop will help him to think for processing the same.(e)The allocated area will be reliable for providing any type of technical or market support. The supply of inputs and credit facility can really be provided to the farmers. (f)The area planning can help us to avoid the causes of wastage of scarce resources like land, fertilizers, pesticides etc. Any type of intervention after excess production will just transfer the losses from farmers to Government or vice-versa. The area planning can avoid those losses and even save scarce resources .
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