What You Need to Know About the Farmer Protests in India

6 min readMar 5, 2021

We stand in solidarity with the farmers fighting a ‘life or death’ battle against unwanted agricultural reform.

Since August 2020, over 200 million Indian farmers have mobilized in protests against government de-regulation of the country’s agricultural industry. With over half of India’s total population dependent on the agricultural sector for their livelihood, the protests represent a matter of life and death for millions of people. Up until recently, most of the world was unaware of the events leading up to the protests or the current events. We’re hoping to shed a little bit of light on what’s happening and the global implications.

These protests have their roots in events that happened nearly 80 years ago.

Between 1943 and 1944, India experienced a food shortage that killed 3–4 million people. This event, called the Bengal Famine, also forced many to sell their farms and left the entire country dependent on international food aid for decades. In an effort to prevent a catastrophe of this magnitude in the future, in 1947 the Indian government began to expand the amount of farmland and provided financial aid to farmers to develop the land to be more suitable for growing crops.

However, agriculture took off in India between 1967 and 1978 during the Green Revolution. The Revolution was intended to fully insulate India from large-scale famine with three components: the continued expansion of farmland, government-funded irrigation projects, and the development of high-yield seed varieties.

The Green Revolution was successful and by the 1990s the Indian agricultural industry was booming. In 1991, the government established the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) to protect farmers from being exploited by ensuring stable pricing and guaranteeing timely payments. In exchange for this protection, farmers were restricted to only selling their crops in government-designated markets and auctions called mandis.

The power of the APMC began to wobble in the mid-2000s, as farmers became increasingly dissatisfied with the arrangement. They claimed that the APMC markets were not evolving to keep pace with the amount of produce farmers had to sell; due to the restrictive agreement, many farmers were turning to illegal middlemen to sell excess crops under exploitative conditions.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, he publicly recognized these problems and made sweeping promises to modernize and industrialize the agriculture sector and increase farmer incomes.

This brings us to the present day.

India’s farm and agricultural workers make up over half of the country’s workforce (54.6% or 263.1 million people). However, as with most of the world, COVID-19 pushed the country to a grinding halt, throwing India into a deep recession and barring farmers from selling at the APMCs–their only legal outlets–amid pandemic lockdowns.

In response to growing panic in one of the country’s largest sectors, Modi passed the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commission Act in September 2020, a controversial piece of legislation that acted as a spark to ignite the tinderbox of dissent among the farmer population. The government claims that the act grants farmers more freedom by dismantling the APMC and creating a free market. Farmers disagree, arguing that it leaves them more vulnerable by removing price regulations that have protected them from predatory corporations driving down crop prices.

“First, farmers will feel attracted towards these private players, who will offer a better price for the produce. The government mandis will pack up meanwhile and after a few years, these players will start exploiting the farmers. That’s what we fear,” — Multan Singh Rana, a farmer in the northern state of Punjab.
Source: BBC

To add insult to injury, the Act was written and passed without any input from the country’s huge farmer population.

Localized protests that began in early fall became a country-wide movement on November 23rd, when protesting groups began to converge in New Delhi. As they arrived in the capital, they were met by police who used tear gas, water cannons, and physical force to prevent the peaceful protesters from entering. Out of solidarity, on November 26th, 250 million workers from a range of other industries (banking, transportation, telecommunications, etc) went on strike in the world’s largest coordinated strike of all time. Folding to popular pressure, the protesters were given permission to enter New Delhi.

On December 1st, government officials met with protest leaders for the first time, with both sides claiming that the talks had been productive even though no agreement was reached during that meeting or meetings on subsequent days. By this point, news of the protests was spreading internationally, with solidarity protests occurring in the Bay Area, Canada, New York, London, France, Germany.

On December 8th, frustrated protestors shut down public transport, shops, and markets across the country in a move to pressure the government to respond to protesters’ demand to repeal the new laws. On January 24th, 2021, protesters arranged a tractor rally that saw the most widespread violent response from police. In early February the government offered to put a temporary hold on implementing the new laws, but protesters are not appeased, claiming that they will fight for as long as needed to get the legislation fully repealed.

Why should this matter to you?

As a consumer. In the past decade, India has emerged as a major agricultural exporter, surpassing Australia in 2013 to become the seventh-largest. It is one of the greatest exporters of rice, sugar, cotton, and other commodity crops. It is also the main exporter of spices, with exports in 2019–2020 exceeding $3 billion and reaching 185 countries (just ten shy of reaching every country in the world). Beyond that, India grows a huge diversity of crops that are key in the regional and global food trade.

Modi’s new legislation changes nearly the entire process of buying and selling food within India, a move that prioritizes the position of wealthy corporations without a safety net for farmers. Without government-guaranteed pricing, it is likely that many farmers will not be able to survive on their farm income, resulting in the foreclosure of small farms and growth of large ones, eventually decreasing competition within the market altogether and causing a surge in pricing for India’s numerous exports.

As a human. Unfortunately, most Americans will never visit India, nor meet the millions of agricultural workers living and working there. However, we have and will all benefit from the fruits of their labor (literally and figuratively). The farmers of India take enormous pride in how their profession allows them to feed their families, communities, and the world over. India has already seen an epidemic of farmer suicides in situations of financial stress, a heartbreaking trend that will only rise as their livelihood becomes more unstable. To add insult to injury, these laws–which will have huge social and economic implications for the majority of the Indian population–were passed without any input from the people it would have the greatest effect on. Protests and demonstrations are therefore the only avenue of expression for hundreds of millions, yet the predominantly peaceful protests have been met with violence in efforts to silence their message

This is a pattern seen with oppressed groups on a global scale. Farmers around the world are the backbone of our economy, growing the food that sustains us, and they deserve to have their voices heard. Standing in solidarity with the Indian farmers is also standing in solidarity with American farmers and laborers who often face great hardships to provide for us.

Why does it matter to us?

Last year, Freight Farms created a pledge about how we want to drive positivity and build community by learning about, sharing, and supporting the world’s diverse farmers. In spite of India’s importance in our global food system and the protests that have been on-going for six months, we still see very little awareness of the issue in the U.S. In keeping with our promise, we wanted to change that.

Check out these other articles for more insight into the issues:

Thank you especially to Stacker for lots of great information: A Timeline of Farmers’ Protests in India

What You Need to Know About the Farmer Protests in India

Written by Freight Farms