Abstract
Mainstream macroeconomic policy in India has sought to alleviate rural poverty and food insecurity by expanding agricultural production, providing agricultural credit through a national agricultural banking system, programs of employment generation to alleviate income poverty, and some state-level midday meal schemes at schools. The green revolution was introduced in the late sixties, making India food self-sufficient at the national level. Even as the country accumulated buffer stocks of food, problems of hunger and starvation nevertheless persisted at the individual, household, village, and regional levels. Beginning in the late nineteen eighties, India gradually began to adopt market friendly policies. The economic crisis in 1991 set India on a path of fast track liberalization and structural adjustment resulting in comprehensive initiatives by the Government to promote the industrialization of agriculture. The government has opened up contract farming, food processing, horticulture, value added agricultural products, export crops, and biotechnology, and has allowed private corporations to invest in agriculture. This rapid industrialization is a transformative process. The social fabric matrix approach demonstrates this process where trade liberalization, scientific research, agricultural policy, and the ideology of neo-liberalism are interlocking agents shaping the contemporary industrialization of agriculture in India today. Thus, in the context of a liberalizing India, the concept of transformation replaces the term development and helps to focus our attention on a detailed understanding of the interactive institutional process of change in agriculture. The question continues to be whether or not the contemporary expansion of the agrarian sector through industrialization has served in preventing the ever-present problem of endemic hunger that nearly 320 million Indians still face.
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Notes
- 1.
Joseph 2006.
- 2.
See Bajpai and Sachs (1997) in which they present a moving average of average growth for four always closed and eight always open economies between 1965 and 1985 as evidence to argue that open economies grew much faster than closed economies.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
India suffered a severe macroeconomic and balance of payment crisis in the early 1990s. The consolidated gross fiscal deficit of the central and state governments in fiscal year 1990–1991 was as a high as 9.4% of GDP. With a GDP growth of 1.3%, an inflation rate over 10%, and by the summer of 1991 with foreign exchange reserves plummeting to below 2 weeks’ worth of imports, India was on the verge of bankruptcy (Bhagwati 1993).
- 6.
- 7.
I am grateful to Dr. Sunder Ramaswamy, President Monterey Institute of International Studies and Fredrick C. Dirks Professor of Economics Middlebury College for his input to the section on economic reforms in India.
- 8.
Pulses are defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as annual leguminous crops solely harvested for the dry grain, yielding from 1 to 12 grains or seeds. Pulses are used for food and animal feed. Pulses are important food crop due to their high protein and essential amino acid content and for playing a key role in crop rotation due to their nitrogen fixing ability. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_(legume))
- 9.
Based on such arguments, many have advocated deregulating and liberalizing agriculture. However, it must be noted that even amongst those who advocate deregulating and liberalizing agriculture, many academics and policy makers in India have questioned the ad hoc nature of many of the reform decisions in agriculture particularly that of decontrolling input prices and relaxing import controls (Gulati 2002).
- 10.
I am grateful to Clifford Poirot for his thorough and insightful comments on this issue that appeared in paper I presented at the AFIT meetings in 2006.
- 11.
Note that agricultural scientific research agencies are by no means uniquely post liberalization phenomena. They have been an active part of agricultural research in India, particularly since the green revolution. The current climate of liberalization and the government’s active role in making agriculture an industrialized sector has certainly made agricultural research and crop breeding a key part of the ongoing changes India.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
See Kothari and Minogue (2002).
- 15.
15 The author conducts field studies in dry land areas of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in southern India. Specifically, she conducted field research in a dry land district of Tamil Nadu in 1999–2000 and continues to collaborate with her long time field collaborator Dr. Arivudai Nambi who resides in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
- 16.
See Table 1 in Chap. 9 in this volume by Parto and Regmi (2009).
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Natarajan, T. (2009). Indian Agriculture in a Liberalized Landscape: The Interlocking of Science, Trade Liberalization, and State Policy. In: Natarajan, T., Elsner, W., Fullwiler, S. (eds) Institutional Analysis and Praxis. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88741-8_14
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