With more than 70% of Assam’s population directly or indirectly dependent for their livelihood on the agricultural sector, it is surprising that the state has only seen sporadic protests against the farm laws passed by the Central government, at a time when farmers from Punjab and Haryana are marching to the Delhi demanding the repeal of the Acts.Reformists would like to read this muted response from the state’s farming community as the voice of the silent majority who expect to benefit from the new farm laws. However, the real answer lies in the political economy of the state’s rural sector, which has its origins in the colonial handling of its agrarian possibilities.Ungrounded and uncultivatedThe pre-Independence British administration had invested substantially in the agriculture in what today constitutes Punjab and Haryana, building dams and irrigation facilities and creating conditions that allowed farmers to benefit from the post-independence Green Revolution that gave rise to the capitalist class among them.However, at the same time that the agriculture sector in India’s north was being boosted, peasants in Assam were arbitrarily taxed by the British Raj, according to historian Amalendu Guha in his classic Medieval and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity, Economy, to make them voluntarily give up farming in favour of joining the labour forces of the tea industry in the region.File photo of Punjab farmers protesting against the farm Bills. Photo: PTI/FilesWhile the colonial government was not very successful in securing the peasantry’s labour for the tea industry, its policies did result in the transfer of land from the peasantry to mid-level revenue officials, leading to a highly unequal land distribution that has persisted since that time. Since the landed class tended to support the Indian National Congress-led freedom struggle, no land reform programme has ever been pursued seriously in the post-independence period.Now, seven decades after independence, Assam’s agrarian setting is still characterised by a very high level of unequal land distribution. The evidence documented in the Assam Human Development Report, 2014 shows that 20% of farmers hold as much as 70% of the state’s farmland. In such a setting, tenancy has evolved as an institutional arrangement to meet the tillers’ demand for land. However, in the official discourse, tenancy remains an invisible institution in the rural setting, much of it neither legally reported, nor appropriately documented.Also read: Farmers’ Protests: An Opportune Moment to Review the Development Model of Land GrabbingIn the National Sample Survey Office’s 70th round report published in 2012-13, 8% of farmer households in a sample of approximately 4,000 households from Assam are shown as tenants. However, the Assam Human Development Report, which is based on a larger sample of 40,000 households, shows tenancy at a much higher level of 26%.The lack of legal recognition of tenants means most of them have never been beneficiaries of public policies in agriculture in the state. The state’s agriculture is characterised by mono-cropping, with rice accounting for 90% of the land cultivated, but public procurement at the minimum support price (MSP) is conspicuously absent.The latest information from the public information bureau (PIB) shows that the state produces 4.2% of the country’s rice, but only 0.2% of its farmers availed public procurement by the Food Corporation of India (FCI). Most farmers had to bear with the low prices of rice in the open markets, even as the state was flooded with rice sourced from elsewhere through the public distribution system.Frequent floods often ravage the region, reducing farming operations to just one season in most flood-affected districts. And Assam’s cropping intensity of 146% is one of the lowest among all major rice-producing states. In such a setting, the landed class takes little interest in farming, even as small and marginal farmers have increasingly been migrating, many even outside the state, to earn their livelihoods.File photo of farmers load paddy on a bullock-cart in a flood-affected field in Morigaon district of Assam, Thursday, May 28, 2020. Photo: PTIReferring to the state’s agrarian setting during colonial times, historian Amalendu Guha observed in his book that the landed middle class kept one foot in the urban sector and the other foot in the rural sector, taking little interest in farming. This observation still rings true in contemporary rural Assam.It is no surprise then that the state has rarely seen its farming community of tenant, small and large farmers demanding any concession in terms of an intervention from the state. In fact, the performance of the agriculture sector has little bearing on the electoral fortunes of any political party in the state.So not surprisingly, the state’s agriculture is still stuck at the subsistence level. The Assam Economic Survey 2017-18 shows only 38% of the state’s land under high yielding variety seeds, and 26% of its land under irrigation.APMC must be strengthenedThus, though the farmers of Assam, left out of the Centre’s procurement programme, might benefit from the breaking down of MSP procurement elsewhere through higher prices in the open market. The new farm laws are more or less meaningless, which are more about agricultural produce market committee (APMC) markets than about MSP.File photo of a market yard Photo: MAHAPFCWith just 24 regulated APMC markets, Assam does not have enough marketing infrastructure to justify the argument made by the advocates of the new farm laws that the new Acts will liberate the farmers from the APMC markets’ monopoly and boost private investment in the sector. With the state’s agricultural marketing largely revolving around 700-odd unregulated haats (village markets), the 24 APMC markets are hardly enough to curtail the farmers’ ‘freedom’ to dispose their produce.Also read: What Should the Outcome of India’s Farmer Protests Look Like?In fact, most farmers in Assam rarely visit an APMC market, partly because they are distantly located, and partly because most have barely functional infrastructure. As with most other public programmes in the sector, most farmers in Assam don’t even know what public markets such as an APMC can confer. It is thus no surprise to see that Assam is conspicuous by the absence of any voice of dissent from its farming community against the new farm laws.However, that does not mean that Assamese farmers should be optimistic about the new farm laws which intend to invite private investment by curbing the influence of APMC markets. The APMC markets as sites for price discovery are still very important for the state, especially since Assam has not benefitted much from the private investment expected to come after the farm laws were passed.Also read: Amid An Important Farmer Debate, Don’t Forget the Woes of India’s Landless WorkersThe credit deposit ratio (CDR) reported by major national banks in the state in 2017 is still below 40% compared to 72% at the national level, serving a poignant reminder that the state is losing much of its savings to better-endowed states instead of receiving investment from outside the state.At this moment, Assam’s farming community will be better served by examining the Bihar experience, which has not received any significant investment in its agri-food supply chain despite repealing the APMC Act 15 years ago.The APMC market as a public institution still has a large role to play in reviving the state’s agricultural sector. Additionally, it can stop growing inter-state migration that has come to light in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.Rajib Sutradhar teaches economics at Christ University, Bengaluru.
