English On the 12th January, we sent a letter to the Rt Hon MP Dominic Raab, UK Foreign Secretary, asking him to support Indian Farmers through UK development policy. Below is a copy of the letter we sent, and you can also email your MP to ask for their support on these issues.
Dear Mr Raab,
I am writing from the Landworkers’ Alliance, a farmers union with a mission to improve the livelihoods of farmers in UK so that they can earn a decent living and everyone can access local, healthy and affordable food.
Our farmers union is a part of an international alliance of farming groups across the world, including those involved in the ongoing protests in India. Protests being held by farmers in India have been supported by many in India who have gone on strike to support the farmers and supporters across the world. The farmers and their supporters are asking the Indian government to repeal all three of the Farm Bills recently passed, and get Minimum Support Prices (MSP) for their farm produce and intend to keep protesting until the laws are repealed.
All of these demands carry the central theme of resisting the liberalisation of state protection of the agriculture sector which opens the door to increased corporate investment in agriculture and consolidation of the farming sector in India. India is a nation of highly productive small farmers with over 86% of the farmers being small and marginal farmers in India. Nearly 50% of India’s population depends on farming and agriculture. Small scale farming is also important to food and nutrition security for rural populations. Some states have strong powers to provide a guaranteed minimum price to farmers for some crops, which provides a fair livelihood for them and agricultural workers they may hire alongside ensuring a minimum of basic food security. Hence this is being asked to be strengthened for other crops throughout the country too. Removal of these protections will have a direct impact on the livelihoods of these millions of farmers in India and will cause hunger and loss of dignity on a scale we can only begin to comprehend.
We are concerned that that the UK Government, as part of its ongoing and multi-year aid project (UK-India Infrastructure Technical Co-Operation Facility (ITCF)) has since its inception promote had an objective to promote contract farming in India. Contract farming is the goal of one of the 3 laws which farmer groups are protesting against. The farmers worry that the laws passed promote agri-businesses and large-scale behemoths in agriculture and food supply chains, rather than the independent farmers which benefit from the current system.
Whilst the key aim of this aid project was to help Government of India improve its policy and regulatory framework, the projects must have strong engagement with grassroot voices (farmer unions, civil society) which were entirely missing in the UK-India Infrastructure Technical Co-Operation Facility (ITCF) aid project.
As it stands now the ITCF contains provisions which work against the interests of the farms it seeks to support. We are also concerned that the ITCF is a programme which has been developed against the backdrop of the The Conceptual Framework on Agriculture developed by DFID in 2015, which seeks to remove farmers (‘stepping out’) – especially small and subsistence farmers- from the agricultural sector. The conceptual framework envisions a progression away from farming and into other sectors of the economy as part of its vision of “progress”. It is clear from this document that farmers on the ground in India, or their representative civil society organisations have not been consulted. This technical document assumes that is better for countries to follow the path of the UK in the consolidation and destruction of the SME farm sector, without consulting those sectors about whether or not they want to be removed from their source of a livelihood.
With the passage of the Agriculture Act, the UK is working to reset its own agriculture cultivation and food distribution systems in line with its environmental targets. Whilst we are committed to this path for our farming sector, we must ensure the UK government does not guide India and other countries to a highly industrialised and corporate controlled food and agriculture model through its aid projects. We are committed to reforming our own agriculture system is detrimental to tackling the climate and biodiversity crisis, and we must support India to do the same. At the moment in India there are many states who have been working with farmers organisations on the ground to transition to agroecological farming, including states such as Sikkim, which have transitioned to turning entirely organic and Punjab amongst those, which recently banned 27 pesticides. Our development goals for India should not work against this.
UK also currently exports pesticides banned in the UK to India and other countries. We are deeply concerned about pesticides such as paraquat which it exported from the UK to India. Paraquat is responsible for thousands of farmer deaths in India- a situation so severe that doctors in India have resorted to hunger strikes demanding a ban on its usage. The European Commission has recently committed to ban exports of chemicals which are banned in European Union, therefore in solidarity with the 30,000 people in India who died from pesticide poisoning in just 2019 alone we demand that the UK must stop exporting pesticides which are banned in UK to other countries.
We respectfully ask for you to take action on these 2 issues:
1) The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office must engage with farmers groups in a revision of the UK-India Infrastructure Technical Co-Operation Facility (ITCF) aid project and the Conceptual Framework on Agriculture.
2) The UK should ban the export of pesticides not allowed in the UK to other countries.
The Landworkers’ Alliance seeks your action on this and be happy to coordinate such discussions with farmer groups in FCDO aid countries as well.
Kind Regards,
Rohit Parakh
International Support Coordinator
