Seeds of Dependency: How Export Crops Threaten India’ s Food Security
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’ s recent advice to Indian farmers to focus on“ export-oriented crops” is not an innocuous policy suggestion; it signals a deeper realignment of India’ s agricultural priorities in conformity with imperialist demands. To encourage farmers to move away from foodgrain production towards export crops is, in essence, to push India into dependency on food imports. This line of thinking, long propagated by the W orld Bank and international financial institutions, aligns neatly with the strategic interests of advanced capitalist economies that subsidise their own agrarian sectors and seek new markets to offload surplus production. The call for“ exportoriented agriculture” thus represents a continuation of neoliberal prescriptions that erode selfreliance and compromise national food security. By advancing this agenda, the government is not only undermining the hard-won gains of India’ s food sovereignty but also capitulating to the pressures of global capital that seeks to reshape agriculture in the developing world for metropolitan needs.
The attempt to impose this shift was clearly visible in the nowrepealed three farm laws of the Modi government. Those laws aimed at dismantling the Minimum Support Price( MSP) regime for foodgrains, a protective mechanism that insulated farmers from the volatility of global markets. The massive year-long farmers’ movement that forced the government to withdraw the laws was a decisive assertion of peasant resistance against imperialist and corporate capture of agriculture. Yet, the Prime Minister’ s renewed call for export crops shows that
16 neither the government nor its ideological patrons have abandoned their project. The push to integrate Indian agriculture into the global market on unequal terms threatens to recreate the very conditions of indebtedness and distress that have driven hundreds of thousands of farmers to suicide over the past three decades. For millions of cultivators already grappling with price crashes and unmanageable credit burdens, the shift away from MSPbacked foodgrains would mean exposure to the violent fluctuations of the world market, where the small farmer has no protection and no power.
Beyond the immediate threat to livelihoods, the larger danger lies in the erosion of national food security and the spectre of what economist Amiya Kumar Bagchi has termed“ globalisation famines.” When nations replace food crops with export-oriented cash crops and rely on food imports, they render themselves vulnerable to international price shocks and foreign exchange crises. In years when export prices collapse, such economies find themselves unable to pay for food imports, leading to a decline in per capita food availability. Even when food aid or imports are available, the lack of purchasing power among cashcrop farmers whose incomes have fallen can trigger famine-like conditions rooted in“ failure of exchange entitlements,” as Amartya Sen described. Similar processes have unfolded across several African and Latin American countries under neoliberal globalisation. India, which has so far avoided such catastrophes due to its continued commitment to domestic foodgrain production, risks reversing this achievement if it abandons the principle of food selfsufficiency under the banner of global competitiveness.
The dangers of food import dependence extend beyond economics into the realm of political sovereignty. In a world where the United States and its allies weaponise trade and food supplies to punish nations that resist imperial dictates, reliance on imported food is a recipe for subordination. The experience of countries like Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, subjected to unilateral sanctions and asset seizures, shows how quickly economic dependence can translate into political coercion and humanitarian crisis. For India to move toward such vulnerability is to compromise both autonomy and dignity. The Prime Minister’ s exhortation to grow export crops is therefore not a vision of progress but a perilous retreat into dependency, where the fields of India may no longer feed its people but serve the appetites of global capital. �
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