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Beyond the Farm Laws: Corporate Cloud Poised to Reign Over India’s Fields

Nearly four years after India’s historic year-long farmers’ protests forced the repeal of three pro-corporate farm laws, it is clear that the government’s underlying agenda remains intact. The repeal was little more than a tactical retreat.

Today, the same agenda of corporatisation (recolonisation) is being advanced through bureaucratic schemes, digital agriculture partnerships and policy frameworks that promote ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’.

The book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order offers insights into India’s agrarian crisis, with multiple chapters and substantial sections analysing the impact of neoliberal policies, the Green Revolution and the farm laws. In that book, I warned that corporate power would reassert itself following the repeal of the three laws. The book explored the true beneficiaries of the legislation, the motives of the powerful interests that demanded it and its far-reaching consequences for national sovereignty, farmers and the public.

In February 2022, when that book was published, I stated that repealing the three laws was:

“… little more than a tactical manoeuvre… The powerful global interests behind these laws have not gone away… These interests have been behind a decades-long agenda to displace the prevailing agri-food system in India… the goal and underlying framework to capture and radically restructure the sector remains. The farmers’ struggle in India is not over.”

The intention to impose neoliberal shock therapy on Indian agriculture has never waned and remains clear in central government schemes and public-private partnerships.

The Pradhan Mantri Dhan Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (PMDDKY) is now the government’s flagship ‘umbrella scheme’ for agriculture. According to reporting by The Wire, it merges 36 existing programmes across 11 ministries into a single centralised plan, ostensibly to promote convergence and coordination. But farmer unions and policy critics argue that it represents a massive centralisation of agricultural governance that moves power, funds and oversight away from state governments and into the hands of the Union Centre.

The scheme, they warn, could become a corporate Trojan horse, creating a framework through which public–private partnerships with firms such as ITC, Mahindra and Godrej can quietly take control of rural infrastructure and extension services. Under the guise of coordination, the state is vacating space for powerful corporations to occupy.

This creeping corporate control is being reinforced through the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the country’s premier agricultural body. Between 2023 and 2024, ICAR signed a series of partnerships with multinational agribusiness and technology corporations, including Bayer, Amazon and Syngenta. Officially, these memoranda of understanding are about promoting ‘climate-resilient’ and ‘digital’ agriculture.

In reality, however, they mark a decisive step in outsourcing research, technology and data management to corporations, many of which have a history of scientific deception, aggressive lobbying, subterfuge, vilifying critics and self-serving political manipulation.

Bayer, a company notorious for its history of toxic agrochemicals and monopolistic seed control, is now involved in designing carbon markets and crop-protection regimes. Amazon Kisan integrates India’s farm produce into its digital supply chains, effectively positioning the e-commerce giant as a gatekeeper between farmer and consumer. And Syngenta’s role in drone and AI-based ‘precision’ farming embeds expensive, proprietary technologies that make farmers dependent on corporate platforms.

Under the guise of ‘modernisation’, we are seeing the construction of a complex that binds farmers into new forms of digital corporate dependency. Knowledge, data and decision-making shifts from the field to the cloud.

Contrast this enthusiasm for state-corporate partnerships with the lack of progress on the promise of a legal guarantee for the minimum support price (MSP) (a floor price for various crops) made during the repeal of the farm laws in 2021. The committee on MSP formed that year has produced no tangible outcomes. Meanwhile, corporate collaborations move with lightning speed and with little to no democratic oversight or accountability.

There is also the draft National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing (NPFAM), which farmer organisations such as the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sabha describe as the “return of the farm laws by stealth.” The framework’s talk of “market integration” and “value-chain infrastructure” closely mirrors the deregulation proposed in the repealed laws. It encourages the creation of private wholesale markets and permits direct procurement by corporate agribusinesses such as Cargill, Walmart and Amazon, bypassing state-regulated wholesale markets or mandis. It also envisions the gradual transfer of storage and distribution infrastructure to private control.

Together, these measures threaten to dismantle the last remaining safety net for farmers during price volatility and market shocks.

The government claims that reforms will create a “unified national market.” In practice, they are intended to create a corporate-controlled market. Without a legally enforceable MSP, farmers are left to the mercy of fluctuating prices and corporate purchasing power. The result is a system designed for profit extraction rather than public welfare.

Mumbai-based Janata Weekly notes that expenditure on procurement and price support has been slashed or merged into vague umbrella schemes, diluting their effectiveness, while funds for digitalisation and private-sector “innovation missions” have grown. Janata Weekly states that the political economy is clear: the state’s role is being redefined from guarantor of livelihoods to broker for corporate investment.

If these plans succeed, it is likely that the end-result will be the weakening and eventual withdrawal of public institutions such as the Food Corporation of India and the Public Distribution System, thereby eroding one of the world’s largest food security networks (under the National Food Security Act, India’s food welfare programmes currently serve more than 800 million people, providing subsidised food to a significant portion of the population). The resulting vacuum would be filled by multinational supply chains. The likely outcome, as The Wire warns, is a future where India must rely on the same corporations that now dominate its agricultural policy to purchase its own staples.

In response, since early 2024, new waves of protests have erupted. The demands remain consistent: a legal guarantee for MSP, debt waivers and the repeal of corporate-friendly policies such as the NPFAM. The response has been familiar too in the form of detentions, tear gas, bulldozed encampments and internet shutdowns in protest zones. Social media accounts of union leaders and journalists have been taken down under official orders.

The ability to feed a population on its own terms is the foundation of national sovereignty. As the state retreats and global capital advances, India risks becoming dependent not only on imports but on the dictates of multinational supply chains that prioritise profit and control over nutrition and need.

The farmers protest 2020-2021 received massive global media coverage. The agitation led to the repeal of the farm laws, but it was a symbolic victory and did not change the underlying trajectory. Unless India ensures its food system serves the public good—grounded in food sovereignty and the protection of farmer rights—corporate capture will only deepen.

[Colin Todhunter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). The CRG is an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists. In 2018, he was named a ‘Living Peace and Justice Leader/Model’ by Engaging Peace Inc. in recognition of his writing. Courtesy: Global Research, the online media platform of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.]

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Farmers’ Struggle in India: The Farm Laws and a Neoliberal Death Knell

[This essay, taken from Colin Todhunter’s book, “Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order”, was written prior to the Indian government’s announcement in late 2021 that the three farm laws discussed would be repealed. This is little more than a tactical manoeuvre given that state elections were upcoming in key rural heartlands in 2022.

The powerful global interests behind these laws have not gone away and the concerns expressed below are still highly relevant. These interests have been behind a decades-long agenda to displace the prevailing agri-food system in India. The laws might have been struck down, but the goal and underlying framework to capture and radically restructure the sector remains. The farmers’ struggle in India is not over.]

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In 1830, British colonial administrator Lord Metcalfe said India’s villages were little republics that had nearly everything they could want for within themselves. India’s ability to endure derived from these communities:

“Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down but the village community remains the same. It is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence.”

Metcalfe was acutely aware that to subjugate India this capacity to ‘endure’ had to be broken. Since gaining independence from the British, India’s rulers have only further served to undermine the vibrancy or rural India. But now a potential death knell for rural India and its villages is underway.

There is a plan for the future of India and most of its current farmers do not have a role in it.

Three important farm bills are aimed at imposing the shock therapy of neoliberalism on India’s agri-food sector for the benefit of large commodity traders and other (international) corporations: many if not most smallholderfarmers could go to the wall in a landscape of ‘get big or get out’.

This legislation comprises the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020.

This could represent a final death knell for indigenous agriculture in India. The legislation will mean that mandis — state-run market locations for farmers to sell their agricultural produce via auction to traders — can be bypassed, allowing farmers to sell to private players elsewhere (physically and online), thereby undermining the regulatory role of the public sector. In trade areas open to the private sector, no fees will be levied (fees levied in mandis go to the states and, in principle, are used to enhance infrastructure to help farmers).

This could incentivise the corporate sector operating outside of the mandis to (initially at least) offer better prices to farmers; however, as the mandi system is run down completely, these corporations will monopolise trade, capture the sector and dictate prices to farmers.

Another outcome could see the largely unregulated storage of produce and speculation, opening the farming sector to a free-for-all profiteering payday for the big traders and jeopardising food security. The government will no longer regulate and make key produce available to consumers at fair prices. This policy ground is being ceded to influential market players.

The legislation will enable transnational agri-food corporations like Cargill and Walmart and India’s billionaire capitalists Gautam Adani (agribusiness conglomerate) and Mukesh Ambini (Reliance retail chain) to decide on what is to be cultivated at what price, how much of it is to be cultivated within India and how it is to be produced and processed. Industrial agriculture will be the norm with all the devastating health, social and environmental costs that the model brings with it.

Forged in Washington

The recent agriculture legislation represents the final pieces of a 30-year-old plan that will benefit a handful of billionaires in the US and in India. It means the livelihoods of hundreds of millions (the majority of the population)who still rely on agriculture for a living are to be sacrificed at the behest of these elite interests.

Consider that much of the UK’s wealth came from sucking $45 trillion from India alone according to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik. Britain grew rich by underdeveloping India. Today, what are little more than modern-day East India-type corporations are currently in the process of helping themselves to the country’s most valuable asset — agriculture.

According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture.

In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.

The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE), ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington DC’. The piece says that the current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy:

“Indian business giants such as Reliance and Adani are major recipients of foreign investment, as we have seen in sectors such as telecom, retail, and energy. At the same time, multinational corporations and other financial investors in the sectors of agriculture, logistics and retail are also setting up their own operations in India. Multinational trading corporations dominate global trade in agricultural commodities… The opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses is a longstanding project of the imperialist countries.”

The article provides details of a 1991 World Bank memorandum, which setout the programme for India.

It states that, at the time, India was still in its foreign exchange crisis of 1990–91 and had just submitted itself to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme. India’s July 1991 budget marked the fateful start of India’s neoliberal era.

The Modi government is attempting to dramatically accelerate the implementation of the above programme, which to date has been too slow for the overlords in Washington: the dismantling of the public procurement and distribution of food is to be facilitated courtesy of the three agriculture-related acts passed by parliament.

What is happening predates the current administration, but it is as if Modi was especially groomed to push through the final components of this agenda.

Describing itself as a major global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy company, APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to the Wall Street/corporate US establishment and facilitates its global agenda.

Some years ago, Modi turned to APCO to help transform his image and turn him into electable pro-corporate PM material. It also helped him get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as chief minister was a miracle of economic neoliberalism, although the actual reality is quite different.

Some years ago, following the 2008 financial crisis, APCO stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn has made governments, policy makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of global capitalism.

Decoded, this means global capital moving into regions and nations and displacing indigenous players. Where agriculture is concerned, this hides behind emotive and seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘helping farmers’ and the need to ‘feed a burgeoning population’ (regardless of the fact this is exactly what India’s farmers have been doing).

Modi has been on board with this aim and has proudly stated that India is now one of the most ‘business friendly’ countries in the world. What he really means is that India is in compliance with World Bank directives on ‘ease of doing business’ and ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ by facilitating further privatisation of public enterprises, environment-destroying policies and forcing working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on ‘free’ market fundamentalism.

APCO has described India as a trillion-dollar market. It talks about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. None of this is a recipe for national sovereignty, letalone food security.

Renowned agronomist MS Swaminathan has stated:

“Independent foreign policy is only possible with food security. Therefore, food has more than just eating implications. It protects national sovereignty, national rights and national prestige.”

The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital. The norm will be industrial (GM) commodity-crop farming suited to the needs of the likes of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants as well as the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations and Silicon Valley, which is leading the drive for ‘data-driven agriculture’.

Of course, those fund managers and corporate houses mentioned by APCO are no doubt also well positioned to take advantage, not least via the purchase of land and land speculation. For example, the Karnataka Land Reform Act will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land, resulting inincreased landlessness and urban migration.

As a result of the ongoing programme, more than 300,000 farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to cash crops and economic liberalisation. There has been an ongoing strategy to make farming non-viable for many of India’s farmers.

The number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.

We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports, which depress farmers’ incomes. India’s spurt of high GDP growthduring the last decade was partly fuelled on the back of cheap food and thesubsequent impoverishment of farmers: the gap between farmers’ income and the rest of the population has widened enormously.

While underperforming corporations receive massive handouts and have loans written off, the lack of a secure income, exposure to international market prices and cheap imports contribute to farmers’ misery of not being able to cover the costs of production.

With more than 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture.

Given that India is still an agrarian-based society, renowned journalist P Sainath says what is taking place can be described as a crisis of civilisation proportions and can be explained in just five words: hijack of agriculture by corporations. He notes the process by which it is being done in five words too: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. And another five words to describe the outcome: biggest displacement in our history.

Take the cultivation of pulses, for instance, which highlights the plight of farmers. According to a report in the Indian Express (September 2017), pulses production increased by 40% during the previous 12 months (a year of record production). At the same time, however, imports also rose resulting in black gram selling at 4,000 rupees per quintal (much less than during the previous 12 months). This effectively pushed down prices thereby reducing farmers already meagre incomes.

We have already witnessed a running down of the indigenous edible oils sector thanks to Indonesian palm oil imports (which benefits Cargill) on the back of World Bank pressure to reduce tariffs (India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils in the 1990s but now faces increasing import costs).

The pressure from the richer nations for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers and open up to imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ trade is based on nothing but hypocrisy.

On the ‘Down to Earth’ website in late 2017, it was stated some 3.2 million people were engaged in agriculture in the US in 2015. The US government provided them each with a subsidy of $7,860 on average. Japan provides a subsidy of $14,136 and New Zealand $2,623 to its farmers. In 2015, a British farmer earned $2,800 and $37,000 was added through subsidies. The Indian government provides on average a subsidy of $873 to farmers. However, between 2012 and 2014, India reduced the subsidy on agriculture and food security by $3 billion.

According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma, subsidies provided to US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives subsidy worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.

The Indian farmer simply cannot compete with this. The World Bank, WTO and the IMF have effectively served to undermine the indigenous farm sector in India.

And now, based on the new farm laws, by reducing public sector buffer stocks and facilitating corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.

Of course, many millions have already been displaced from the Indian countryside and have had to seek work in the cities. And if the coronavirus-related lockdown has indicated anything, it is that many of these ‘migrant workers’ had failed to gain a secure foothold in urban centres and were compelled to return ‘home’ to their villages. Their lives are defined by low pay and insecurity even after 30 years of neoliberal ‘reforms’.

Charter for change

In late November 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations) to coincide with the massive, well-publicised farmers’ march that was then taking place in Delhi.

The charter stated:

“Farmers are not just a residue from our past; farmers, agriculture and village India are integral to the future of India and the world; as bearers of historic knowledge, skills and culture; as agents of food safety, security and sovereignty; and as guardians of biodiversity and ecological sustainability.”

The farmers stated that they were alarmed at the economic, ecological, social and existential crisis of Indian agriculture as well as the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination against farming communities.

They were also concerned about the deepening penetration of large, predatory and profit hungry corporations, farmers’ suicide across the country and the unbearable burden of indebtedness and the widening disparities between farmers and other sectors.

The charter called on the Indian parliament to immediately hold a special session to pass and enact two bills that were of, by and for the farmers of India.

If passed by parliament, among other things, the Farmers’ Freedom from Indebtedness Bill 2018 would have provided for the complete loan waiver for all farmers and agricultural workers.

The second bill, The Farmers’ Right to Guaranteed Remunerative Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Commodities Bill 2018, would have seen the government take measures to bring down the input cost of farming through specific regulation of the prices of seeds, agriculture machinery and equipment, diesel, fertilisers and insecticides, while making purchase of farm produce below the minimum support price (MSP) both illegal and punishable.

The charter also called for a special discussion on the universalisation of the public distribution system, the withdrawal of pesticides that have been banned elsewhere and the non-approval of genetically engineered seeds without a comprehensive need and impact assessment.

Other demands included no foreign direct investment in agriculture and food processing, the protection of farmers from corporate plunder in the name of contract farming, investment in farmers’ collectives to create farmer producer organisations and peasant cooperatives and the promotion of agroecology based on suitable cropping patterns and local seed diversity revival.

Now, in 2021, rather than responding to these requirements, we see the Indian government’s promotion and facilitation of — by way of recent legislation — the corporatisation of agriculture and the dismantling of the public distribution system (and the MSP) as well as the laying of groundwork for contract farming.

Although the two aforementioned bills from 2018 have now lapsed, farmers are demanding that the new pro-corporate (anti-farmer) farm laws are replaced with a legal framework that guarantees the MSP to farmers.

Indeed, the RUPE notes that MSPs via government procurement of essential crops and commodities should be extended to the likes of maize, cotton, oilseed and pulses. At the moment, only farmers in certain states who produce rice and wheat are the main beneficiaries of government procurement at MSP.

Since per capita protein consumption in India is abysmally low and has fallen further during the liberalisation era, the provision of pulses in the public distribution system (PDS) is long overdue and desperately needed. The RUPE argues that the ‘excess’ stocks of food grain with the Food Corporation of India are merely the result of the failure or refusal of the government to distribute grain to the people.

(For those not familiar with the PDS: central government via the Food Corporation of India FCI is responsible for buying food grains from farmers at MSP at state-run market yards or mandis. It then allocates the grains to each state. State governments then deliver to the ration shops.)

If public procurement of a wider range of crops at the MSP were to occur — and MSP were guaranteed for rice and wheat across all states — it would help address hunger and malnutrition as well as farmer distress.

Instead of rolling back the role of the public sector and surrendering the system to foreign corporations, there is a need to further expand official procurement and public distribution. This would occur by extending procurement to additional states and expanding the range of commodities under the PDS. Of course, some will raise a red flag here and say this would cost too much. But as the RUPE notes, it would cost around 20% of the current handouts (‘incentives’) received by corporations and their super-rich owners, which donot benefit the bulk of the wider population in any way. It is also worth considering that the loans provided to just five large corporations in India were in 2016 equal to the entire farm debt.

But this is not where the government’s priorities lie.

It is clear that the existence of the MSP, the Food Corporation of India, the public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests who have sat with government agencies and set out their wish-lists.

The RUPE notes that India accounts for 15% of world consumption of cereals. India’s buffer stocks are equivalent to 15–25% of global stocks and 40% of world trade in rice and wheat. Any large reduction in these stocks will almost certainly affect world prices: farmers would be hit by depressed prices; later, once India became dependent on imports, prices could rise on the international market and Indian consumers would be hit.

At the same time, the richer countries are applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre agricultural subsidies; yet their own subsidies are vast multiples of India’s. The end result could be India becoming dependent on imports and the restructure of its own agriculture to crops destined for export.

Vast buffer stocks would of course still exist; but instead of India holding these stocks, they would be held by multinational trading firms and India would bid for them with borrowed funds. In other words, instead of holding physical buffer stocks, India would hold foreign exchange reserves.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital and India’s foreign exchange reserves have been built up by borrowing and foreign investments. The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows and maintain market confidence by ceding to the demands of international capital.

This throttling of democracy and the ‘financialisation’ of agriculture would seriously undermine the nation’s food security and leave almost 1.4 billion people at the mercy of international speculators and markets and foreign investment.

If unrepealed, the recent legislation represents the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable corporations. This legislation could eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces to feed its population — and a possible return to hand-to-mouth imports, especially in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.

[Courtesy: Colin Todhunter’s public data, available at: https://figshare.com. The book has been published by Global Research, the online media platform of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.]