What is ‘parity’? Fair prices for crops and a decent living for farmers, at par with their urban counterparts?Indian farmers just returned after a year-long movement for minimum support prices (MSP). Why did they feel the need to do this?In essence, they want parity for their labour and herein lies the danger of agricultural parity amnesia – and, by extension, proof of its urgency. Agricultural parity is not even a frame of reference anymore, largely because globally, agriculture and farmers are not considered “important” . But, ironically, diminishing parity has eroded agriculture as a livelihood.Let’s begin by looking at the US. Parity refers to a farm-gate price floor ensuring purchasing power on par with those in urban industries. US ‘parity’ policies came to encompass supply management, quotas, cooperatives, grain reserves, non-recourse loans; but they ended in neoliberalism.Parity policies were imperfect but crucial for supporting the very existence of agricultural livelihoods. If you have parents or grandparents who farmed for a living, it was because they benefited from the ‘commodity title,’ the cornerstone chapter of the Farm Bill; the one grounded in parity.How is it that I recall parity amidst its ubiquitous amnesia? I research agricultural policy and co-founded the Disparity to Parity project. But my scholarly commitment to this action-research stems from personal experience, growing up in the few vestiges of agrarian viability in the US: Kentucky tobacco, with its price floor and collective quota system.I ‘topped’ (deflowered) and ‘chopped’ (weeded) in high school, before working with my farming family to ‘diversify’ from tobacco after its program ended at the turn of the century. We grew, packaged and sold for wholesale and the new farmers market movement in the early 2000s. Local food initiatives boomed, but cheap imports kept winning. Nothing, as it turns out, takes the place of a price floor and secured market. The race to the (farmgate price) bottom is real and brutal – and yet erased. Farming ceased to be a viable job, or even a viable dream for my generation.Also read: The Last Night at SinghuMuch is lost in this loss of a possibility of collective agricultural livelihoods. Those who remain in the sector are few and far between – and must compete ruthlessly with each other. A few hobby farmers sell at farmers markets while the interested youth are pushed towards high-tech agri-robotics, with drones and exploited undocumented people doing the work rather than people with respectful farmgate prices.Automated large scale irrigation system for providing water and nutrients to this sugar beet field. Bonneville County, Idaho. Photo: Flickr/ arbyreed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.Kentucky is valuable as one of the few places that retains a cultural memory of agrarian livelihoods. Tobacco, because of the carcinogenic cigarette product, has become taboo, thus obscuring the far-reaching impacts of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative, which assured a collective price floor and sure market via quotas and community auctions. While corn and soy drew mass industrialisation, tobacco remained hand-grown and harvested. The parity policies assured its small and medium scale.People grew around 25 acres of tobacco, enough to anchor them on the land and make a modest livelihood while growing their own food, keeping their own time, collaborating with their neighbours – who were not competitors, but co-beneficiaries of the commodity parity program. Multifaceted impacts ensued: farmers helped each other in planting and harvests, enabling a rural social fabric. Local banks flourished. Corporate buyers were kept in check with the rigid price floor.The tobacco parity programme allowed for people to be and stay farmers for a living. It allowed for vectors of agrarian knowledge – how to build fences, how to keep plant pathogens at bay. The context was still monocultural commodity crop production and the beneficiaries largely white men. But the precedent remains so powerful, particularly amidst the economic, social and ecological fallout of its erosion and amnesia.Also read: ‘We Have to Look After Our Homes as Well as the Movement’: Women at Farmers’ ProtestOf course, US agriculture began with indigenous genocide and slavery and has ongoing legacies of racist appropriation of land and labour. But the whole history of the US Farm Bill is one of trying to support a price floor and curbing overproduction. In World War I, the US government incentivised huge increases in wheat production to feed those in battle. Prices were high; farmers grew more. But after the war, European survivors left trenches to return to farms, growing their own wheat.Global prices dropped; farmers grew more to cover their loans, thereby flooding the global market. Prices collapsed, sending rural America into an economic tailspin, catalysing the Great Depression. Farmers ploughed incessantly, further degrading farmgate prices and the land itself. The Dust Bowl ensued, with 100 million acres of fertile topsoil lost in giant dust storms: a man-made disaster from agricultural overproduction. Farmer coalitions joined in DC to demand government assistance and the U.S. Farm Bill was born, providing supply management and a price floor to prevent economic and ecological fallout of commodity crop glut.These programs had flaws – largely white male farmers benefitted; farm labour was still exploited – but it was an honest recognition of the crushing forces of agro-capitalism unmitigated. Ultimately, agribusiness interests convinced the government to end parity. The number of farms dropped precipitously, as the average size grew: consolidation, concentration, land and profit in the hands of a few. Farmers of colour bore this agrarian crisis on top of the ravages of systemic racism.Watch: Farmers’ Revolution Has Been Suspended, but Without MSP Our Revolution Is Not over – RajewalThe 1980s farm crisis brought tens of thousands of farmers – broke, indebted, and fearing foreclosure – to DC in a tractorcade to demand fair prices. But the wheels of neoliberalism were already churning. Millions of farms went out of business. The 1990s ushered in the World Trade Organisation, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 1996 Farm Bill which severed the vestiges of supply management and price floors, leaving what few farmers remained to the whims of a crushing globalised marketplace.Immediately, the median farm income earned by farm households – a key indicator of true agricultural viability – crashed to below zero, where it has stayed for a quarter of a century since. It is a story of off-farm income and land-assets; farming itself has not been a viable livelihood for a generation. This furthers racial and gender disparity as to who gets to even dream of growing food for a living. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) tossed aid to the remaining farmers in the form of direct payments, but these only went to the largest landholders. People blame subsidies, but those are mere band-aids on the wound of overproduction and price fallout; the wound of the churning treadmill of glut and debt with its ecocidal externalities. They are not the cause of the crises.Who has won? The private sector, consolidated into a handful of remaining corporate giants, have more profit, more power than old-world empires of old. Transnational agribusiness input dealers sell to farmers at high prices and mega distributor-processors buy at low prices. Extreme monopolies reign, leaving farmers with neither choice nor agency, in a crushing cost-price squeeze. Debt and foreclosure ensue, with all the land loss and trauma this entails as well as the ecological damage. All the while agriculture now emits a third of the Earth’s greenhouse gases and diet-related diseases kill millions.What would agricultural parity be if expanded for racial and gender justice? Expanded for agro-ecological diversified production? No one is even asking this question – until now.Millions of Indian farmers are asserting that so much hinges on fair agricultural policy. But they also know at the heart of wise agricultural policy is the viability – the livelihoods and wellbeing of those doing the agriculture. The farmers, the farmworkers (who are just farmers without land), the farmer cooperatives and farming communities. Making sure people are well-fed and nourished requires that those doing the work of growing food are themselves supported and nourished.Farmers wave the national flags and raise slogans as they celebrate after Samyukta Kisan Morcha announced to call off the farmers agitation, at Ghazipur border in New Delhi, Thursday, December 9, 2021. Photo: PTIWhy does it matter that farming is increasingly not a viable livelihood in the US, India, or around the world?Farmers can grow nourishing foods, regenerate land and steward water – when not caught in predatory contracts, debt and farmgate prices below the cost of production. To continue farming, people need fair prices and secure markets which also have the potential to invite a new, diverse generation growers committed to food provision agro-ecologically. Farm justice lays the groundwork for food, environmental and labour justice. Accordingly, the Indian farmers’ victory could be a tipping point in international agricultural policy paradigms at large.Garrett Graddy-Lovelace is associate professor of agricultural and environmental policy and agrarian studies at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C.