Isn’t it Time for Food Sovereignty? Creating a food system that is capable of helping people rather than making huge profits. This movement consists of Creating an alliance of farmers and consumers. It would take time, but paving the way for building the network is very essential.
Its high time that we consumers started to buy our major share of products directly from farmers, farmers markets. The country’s farmers are protesting to guarantee the minimum support price of their products. Due to lack of price stability and proper planning which actually needs to be implemented in each state and each village we still see farmers who are forced to throw their potato-tomatoes on the streets and we all still wonder whether the agricultural laws in the country actually communicated with farmers and was made without knowing their difficulties?
If the government thinks its new agricultural laws have been brought to give more value to farmers products, it can only be understood when the problems the small and medium scale farmers currently face can be resolved says Ramanjaneyulu.G.V. This will include resolving the disparities between states in terms of investment, subsidies, procurement and skewed support for few crops.
Yes we are sure that there would be competition between corporate and prices of big commercial agricultural products will be greater than been imagined by farmers. But what we actually need is more collectives, more farmers who are better equipped with the latest technology in each state to be able to speak on behalf of farmers to stabilize the prices and not allow corporates to take the lead. This needs better Organisation and clarity from farmers which at present is lackadaisical.
Corporates are here to stay but what is needed are many proactive steps to counteract them ,reducing the increasing risks in agriculture, investments in infrastructure which needs to be there to strengthen the farmers to grow their produce. Don’t we need a shift towards better farmer organizations, better reclaiming of soils, better water harvesting structures, better surveillance techniques, better crop forecasting models etc.
There are many farmers who haven’t been able to cultivate their small patches of land and these farmers migrate elsewhere and perform other odd jobs. To get back to farming and achieve food security the government needs to strengthen community based agro-ecological models of food production. Reclaiming diverse food systems and there by increased wage incomes should be the norm. Continuing the effort towards ascertaining food sovereignty in these small villages should be the idea same.
Building on working on communities that feed us is what we need.
