Kisan Mazdoor Commission (KMC): Agenda 2024 for Agriculture & Allied Sectors

Kisan Mazdoor Commission (KMC), an initiative by the Nation for Farmers, is a collaboration of activists and organisations focussing on current challenges faced by primary producers, artisans and rural workers in India. This Agenda 2024 for Agriculture & Allied Sectors was released by KMC on March 19, 2024. It builds on recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission in the context of growing corporate control on farming and pushes for the “viability and sustainability” of the sector.

Farmers and those engaged in allied sectors have been comprehensively defined to include women, Dalit, Nomadic and Adivasi farmers. The agenda includes in its ambit landowners, tenants, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, plantation workers, fish workers, milk producers, poultry farmers, livestock rearers, pastoralists, and collectors of minor forest produce. It highlights the growing disenfranchisement of farmers who belong to marginalised communities – Dalits and Adivasis, the agenda notes, are often denied access to forest land and women farmers remain landless and unpaid in many cases.

The agenda adds that the central government has drastically reduced government support in farming and is rapidly siphoning off its ownership and management to corporates, highlighting that public sector investment in fixed assets in agriculture is at a meagre 15 per cent.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi, has partnered with corporations like Bayer and Amazon for research and expansion. Such acts, the agenda highlights, reveal the growing corporate control over knowledge production on agriculture, which would mean that, “Public sector research programs will now directly promote corporate agendas."

The demands in the agenda are presented under three broad heads: i) Right to land, water and commons for all; ii) Right to Food, Employment, Education, Health and Social Protection; and iii) Right to public and bank finance, production inputs, knowledge and market. These emerge from KMC’s analysis of various components involved, including production costs, credit and finance, climate change and local governance.

This 17-page document is a compendium of five sections, which are: Statement of Intent (Section 1); Background Note on the Kisan Mazdoor Commission (Section 2); Terms of Reference (Section 3); Executive Summary (Section 4); Kisan Mazdoor Commission (KMC) Agenda 2024 (Section 5).

Ten select demands as listed in the Executive Summary are as follows:

1. Provide for equitable access to land and water: legislate for homesteads for the rural poor; grant land rights to landless for cultivation; promote kitchen gardens, backyard poultry, cattle sheds and group farming.
   
   
2. Recognize women as farmers and grant them land rights, secure their tenancy rights over leased lands.
   
   
3. Recognize land rights of Adivasi farmers, implement Forest Rights Act (FRA), review all rejections under FRA, and roll back pro-corporate amendments to Indian Forest Act, 1927.
   
   
4. Expand and provide for a universal public food distribution system for the delivery of cereals and nutri-cereals, pulses, sugar and oils without linking it to Aadhar or biometric identification and without shifting to direct cash transfer.
   
   
5. Ensure job security and minimum wage by extending the number of workdays from 100 to 200 workdays in rural areas at Rs. 800 wages per day, implement existing provision of 100 days of MGNREGA without creating digital hurdles.
   
   
6. Enact old age pensions.
   
   
7. Guarantee extra budgetary resources to states from the 15th finance commission for raising the level of gross capital formation in agriculture as a percentage of GDP from the current level of 15.7 per cent to 30 per cent.
   
   
8. Guarantee access to publicly-regulated markets purchasing the primary produce at the minimum support price (MSP) not lower than C2 costs plus 50% for the products declared as essential commodities for production by state legislatures. That should also be done with union government ensuring finance for public procurement and a price stabilization fund.
   
   
9. Establish a National Commission for Fisheries to look after policy implementation, inter-state disputes, protection and promotion of the rights and entitlements of small-scale fishing communities.
   
   
10. Grant the right to pool resources for value addition and formation of local collectives such as Kisan Mazdoor Cooperatives/group enterprises (KMCs).

Focus by Dipanjali Singh.