Indian Farmers March Against Govt's Neoliberal Policies

Nearly 35,000 farmers in India continued Sunday their 180-km long march in the southwestern state of Maharashtra demanding agrarian reform from the government of right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party, BJP. 

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The farmers' march is part of an ongoing series of the 'long march' which began from the southwestern city of Nashik to Mumbai on Mar. 6, and after walking for nearly 140 hours, tens of thousands of peasants reached Mumbai late Sunday night.

The farmers are uniting and calling upon the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to implement pro-peasant reforms. Some of the important demands laid out by the farmers in the ongoing march include debt waivers, better pay, and implementation of the Swaminathan Committee Report. 

Swaminathan Commission report is a 2004 National Commission on Farmers which was formed to address the farmers' suicides. In recent years, due to lack of government accountability and agrarian reforms, thousands of low-income farmers have taken their lives to escape the debt.  

The commission recommended a "faster and more inclusive growth" for farmers. The committee touched upon a wide range of issues affecting farmers, land grab, water resources, credit and insurance, technology and knowledge management, and the markets. 

"We demand a complete nullification of all pending loans against farmers- be it for urea, seed or credit card loans- as the returns from agriculture have not been able to suffice for the farmers because of inadequate pricing of crops," Dushyant Nagar, convenor of Kisan Sangharsh Samiti,  a grassroots farmers collective, monitoring farmers' issues, told the daily Times of India.

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"These demands are representative of the farmers’ demands from all over the country. We have also written to the Prime Minister’s Office on these issues. We are all awaiting a resolution on these long pending issues."

The leftist farmers' association, All India Kisan Sabha, or AIKS, which is at the helm of this mass mobilization, also saw a large number of bereaved 'Adivasis' or tribals join the march demanding better pay and ownership of the land they have been tilling for decades. 

The march comes on the heels of a rise in farmers' suicides in the South Asian country. According to Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, between 2015 and 2016, nearly 12,602 farmers committed suicide. 

“We are awaiting the figures of 2017, but according to our estimates, the number of farmers suicides may have shot up,” Nagar said, according to the Times of India. The highest number of farmer suicides were recorded in 2004 when 18,241 farmers took their own lives. 

Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist, pointed out the role of agro-chemical giants like Monsanto in the spike in farmers suicides in India.

"These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra," Shiva wrote in an article for the Canadian think tank, Centre for Research on Globalization. 

"This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing control over cotton seed supply — 95 percent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto."