After all, we are one of the three big agriculture nations!
But what is happening in agriculture policy making today?
How much attention we give to agriculture
And the people depending upon it?
The recent WTO ministerial meeting in the distant Brazil ended after disappointing those countries who wanted to improve their trading gains by securing food and also getting some foothold in enhancing the farm subsidies regime that is, as everyone knows, heavily tilted in favour of the rich and the powerful with the tag of developed country status, the USA and the European Union. It is unfortunate that bureaucracy under the Modi regime is as divorced from the actual cultivators, the big and the not so big farmers and thus, a lone Mr.Prabhu, the minister, was the only voice we heard by way of what happened in the WTO meet. Much of what the minister was supposed to have said or argued was lost in the reporting, though the official news agency, the PTI reports were too were not very enlightening.
This is one of the many tragedies of the Indian agri sector.
If this is the situation at the level of a magazine like the AIS, we can imagine how many other sectors, the mainstream press added, not to speak of the TV channels.
Why not the Boardcasting Ministry funds some preventatives of the mainstream media? Why not specialist agri press be excused.
The corporates engaged in agriculture, like tractor companies and other big ones in diverse sectors must have raised to the occasion. The FICCI must rise up from its slumber.
It should not consider it a big occasion once the Prime Minister visits them.
There must be much more than the very formal ceremonies.
Our media which sell sin rural areas hasn’t done its duty towards its own media responsibility.
Why don’t you interview either the minister, surely the battery of officials accompanying him to say something sensible for the public to understand why the AWTO meet failed in its objective?
After all, India is going to be the biggest, one of the biggest three great agricultural economies of the world.
So, we have a critical role to playing shaping an agricultural policy for the world.
So, there must be a better coverage of the agricultural issues in our mainstream press.
It is a pity that we as the largest producer of major food grains, wheat and rice, don’t have a significant voice in determining major agriculture policy for the rice producing South East Asian countries.
We ask the government of India to send some press delegations to these great rice producing South East Asian neighbours so that we can exchange views.
Let the Agriculture Ministry wake up so that there are better public relations between the agri bureaucracy and the leading agri lobbies.
It is unfortunate that the gap between the farmers lobbies and the agri bureaucracy is so wide. Even in Delhi, the headquarters of the agri ministry, why even the ICAR must be functioning at the very centre of the city.
They ask you to travel to outskirts and this puts off many.
Will the Prime Minister’s Office(PMO)take note of this suggestion and pass on the news to whomever it concerns?
Who is the agriculture minister anyway? Not many seems to know!
So, please make the Indian agriculture the every centre of all other policy making.
The Indian villages would remain for all time to come, right?
Anybody, who is big enough in Indian politics knows this reality?
It looks no one seems to be interested.
Only when election time comes, unfortunately, as we have seen in the recent Gujarat elections, that too, when the campaigners turn the rural, farmers vote into one of caste vote banks!
This is really a silly turn of events and this mentality must go!
Farmers must become a powerful lobby, it is a reality in the European countries that farmers lobbies there are really very powerful, very united and so that the farmers meets become the very powerful political events. Not is so in UK, in France and even in other developed countries.
Yes, we are a very complacent nation, people. We take our politicians seriously.
We are leader-worshippers! We worship power! We get easily deceived by catchy slogans.
As a nation we are still immature and easily
misled.
So,dear readers,once you are interested in agriculture,it demands an active participation.