HOLDING OUT FOR THE HARVEST
‘We will fight over and over again and generation upon generation, but we will not let our lands go,’ reads a banner at the protest site on the outskirts of Delhi. Thousands of farmers have been camping here since November 2020, demanding the repeal of three farm laws bulldozed through parliament by the central government that September. After initially protesting locally, farmers, led by their unions, made their way in a convoy of tractor trolleys and trucks – thousands of them, extending for miles – towards the capital city of Delhi on 26 November 2020. They came waving their trade union flags, equipped with food, stoves, utensils, blankets and other essentials to last them for months. They chanted: ‘We are here to stay; we will leave only when the government repeals these draconian laws.’
The three laws taken together ease restrictions for corporate players to function in the country’s agrarian markets. They mark a retreat of government responsibility from public procurement of food grains and provide a deregulated environment in which big agribusinesses will be able to push farmers to enter into contracts for the supply of agricultural produce on terms that may be unclear and unfavourable to them. The farmers fear that these laws were enacted to enable the corporate takeover of agriculture and will make smallholder farming unsustainable, forcing them
