The Poker Table Called Farming

Often, a photo hides far more than it reveals.  
These flowers – white chrysanthemums –  are pretty to the eye and, as I walk past fields filled with them, farmers – more women than men – are hard at work, plucking them in time for the Ganesha festival that could fetch them decent returns.  Some have – to use a metaphor entirely out of place – missed the boat, for their plants are yet to flower and, if that happens before Dassehra, the crop falls between two stools (another metaphor out of place, you point out?).  It will then fetch just a modest return which belies the effort that has gone in.  Hard work, investment in saplings, labour and pesticides and risks to each individual who sprays these toxic cocktails, a risk these farmers accept as punishment and perdition. 

This flowering field is their poker table.

What is missing in this picture is the crop that should rightfully be growing in this season.  Ragi.  

An economist will argue, from his armchair, that this is the way markets work.  I will argue, in turn, that he, like most armchair economists, should go to hell. I am a hobby economist, so I guess I can pass judgement without indicting myself.

The story is familiar: the price of ragi collapsed at the time of harvest this January and has inched back to about Rs 25 a kilo.  At that price, the few farmers who grow an acre of ragi will make a return of around Rs 8000 in six months – the family pitches in with labour (that is not added in the calc) and the male farmer spends two cold winter months guarding the crop at night from a machan on a tree (which is why we have some big trees left), for elephants and wild boar will visit with food on their mind.  

The Minimum Support Price for ragi is close to Rs 34 a kilo, but the TN Government has never bought ragi from farmers.  Never.

So, these farmers – call them the Last Resistance - grow ragi for their daily mudde, and for the stalk that is fed to cattle: milk provides them their weekly cash flow and insurance. The surplus ragi – heaps of it – is sold to middlemen, often to repay a debt.  
Ragi is a perfect crop: hardy, with minimal irrigation needs, no pesticide and sparse fertiliser, if any.  As nutrition, it cannot get better.  Much of this is true for all our millets, each of which is now, in the hyperbolic symbolism used by modern day dieticians, a Super-Food.

Try telling a farmer this, when he gets twenty five bucks a kilo. 
.…and, oh, lest I forget, on Flipkart, ragi flour sells for between Rs 90 and Rs 200 a kilo.

Make a difference: buy ragi from the family that grows it or a farmers’ collective, at market price.  
And do take their photo, for they are heroes, no less.