Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can be devastatingly polite: when Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari, who has a commercial interest in agriculture, wrote him a doomsday letter on the dire state of agriculture under UPA rule, Dr. Singh took a month to reply, but when he did, it was to tell the BJP president in excruciating detail about the rise in agricultural production during his tenure in office, which compares favourably with similar figures from the period the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was in power.
Mr. Gadkari is something of an agriculture expert: his business empire is spread over three districts in Maharashtra's Vidarbha — Nagpur, Bhandara and Wardha — an area that hit the headlines because of a spate of farmer suicides. His public limited company, the Purti Group, has 4,000 stakeholders, a majority of whom are farmers, and it has three sugarcane factories that produce not just sugar but also ethanol and alcohol from its by-products molasses and bagasse.
At the end of January, Mr. Gadkari wrote, saying that while the country's population was increasing annually, agricultural production was falling, compelling the government to import foodgrains and causing loss of revenue.
The letter quotes Monsanto (spelt “Moncento”), the multinational that is the leading producer of genetically engineered seeds, on the projected population of India and the quantity of foodgrains that would be required in 2020. “The increasing urbanisation, the decreasing area under agriculture, the farmers turning backs to the agriculture due to different reasons are the major causes for the cropping [sic] of the problem,” Mr. Gadkari wrote.
Comfortable buffer
In his reply, the Prime Minister, after thanking the BJP president for his concern about the nation's food security, points out that production of foodgrains has actually increased and that no large-scale import has been made in recent times: on the contrary, exports of rice and wheat under OGL have been made to clear surplus production. In the current year, India “is likely to produce 250 million tonnes of food grains, registering an increase of 52 million tonnes over the production in 2004-05,” and against the norms of maintaining 25 million tonnes of buffer and reserve stocks as on January 1, the country is holding 55 million tonnes of foodgrains. The GDP in agriculture grew at 7 per cent during 2010-11, he writes, stressing that it was the highest growth rate recorded in recent times.
The average annual agriculture growth rate during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-08 to 2011-12) would be 3.5 per cent, whereas the figure for 1999-2000 to 2004-05 — that is the period when the NDA was in power — was just 1.63 per cent.
The letter then goes on to list the steps taken to rejuvenate the agricultural sector such as the Rs. 25,000-crore Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna, the National Food Security Mission and the National Horticulture Mission.
