After rising rapidly from early 2020, global food prices have been falling from July 2022. But domestic food prices have continued to rise, especially in low income countries. We explore these trends and the possible reasons.

The problems in agriculture have been reflected in slow growth of agricultural output in the years since 2011-12. Within this, the performance of particular crops and particular states may provide some insights into why cultivators have been upset with the Modi government.

Neo-Liberalism propagates a set of outright falsehoods to present itself in a favourable light compared to the preceding dirigiste regime in India. The basic theme is to suggest that under neo-liberalism there has been such an acceleration of the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product that the people as a whole have become much better off.

Regulating financial activity in global commodities markets, while important, is not enough to stave off rising food insecurity. Policymakers must also take measures to help developing countries build up reserves of essential items and cope with price fluctuations, possibly through a publicly administered virtual reserve mechanism.

The Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits.

The current upsurge in prices in India is led by food prices. In July 2023 while retail inflation was 7.44 per cent (over July of the previous year), food price inflation, which covers all food items including foodgrains, vegetables, milk products and such like, was 11.5 per cent.

A bad monsoon and possible decline in agricultural production threaten to accelerate ongoing inflation in India, particularly because of increased speculation in the market for food.

When food prices in global trade rise, they go up across the world. But the opposite movement of falling trade prices does not necessarily lead to falls in low and middle income countries. We show how this plays out with wheat prices.

The Karnataka government's plan to launch its "Anna Bhagya" scheme on July 1 under which it was planning to provide 10 kg of free rice per month to each family below the poverty-line has run into problems because of the Food Corporation of India's unwillingness to sell any rice to that state.

In the past few years, global wheat prices have moved far away from "fundamentals" of demand and supply. This can be explained by other factors like market concentration and financial activity in commodities markets, which take advantage of temporary or perceived supply shocks.

Making the global food system more sustainable and equitable represents a huge and complex undertaking that necessarily involves difficult trade-offs. The tension between responding to short-term increases in fertilizer prices and implementing long-term strategies for combating climate change is a case in point.

Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country's rubber crop, being badly hit.

The hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture.

The major food crisis now emerging in much of the world is not about supply shortages. It reflects ologopolistic and speculative behaviour in global food markets, along with falling purchasing power and currency depreciation in low and middle income countries.

The FAO's recent wheat production and utilization forecasts indicate that the focus on the war in Ukraine as the sole driver of explosive global price trends is misplaced and ill-advised.

Russia and Ukraine together account for 30 per cent of the world’s wheat exports. Many African countries, in particular, are heavily dependent on them for their food supplies, which are now getting disrupted because of the war; and this disruption would continue since the war is also affecting the acreage being sown under foodgrains there.

The kisan agitation against corporate encroachment is not a bilateral issue. In the process of fighting against corporate encroachment the kisans are fighting objectively for society as a whole, against subjecting India to food imperialism.

Despite its many shortcomings, the minimum support price-based procurement regime is gaining in terms of farmer, crop and geographical coverage. The benefits from the regime that underlie this tendency explain why fear that it may be dismantled triggers protest.

Climate change poses immediate threat to humanity. Unsustainable cultivation patterns along with climate change have affected food security and caused widespread hunger. These issues are too urgent to be allowed to go unresolved.

The major plank of the Centre's safety net during periods of lockdown necessitated by the Covid pandemic has been the provision of free foodgrain to targeted beneficiaries. But both in terms of need and state capacity, that effort has been limited.

A survey conducted in October 2020 shows widespread hunger across 11 states. Immediate relief measures are urgently required, since matters would have got much worse since then.

Supply side disruptions combine with stockpiling and speculation to drive up global food prices. With low income earners still to recover from the Covid-induced crisis, the trend is a cause for concern.

Even before Covid-19, global hunger was increasing and the world was no longer on track to meet the SDG of eliminating hunger by 2030. Matters have got much worse since then.

In its systematic attempt to vilify the farmers' movement, the government claims that farmers from only a few states are opposing the agriculture bills. Not only is this claim false, but the idea that this proposition makes the movement illegitimate, is extremely dangerous as well.

The three agricultural laws brought in by the Modi government remove the life-line of the peasantry and carry forward the neo-liberal agenda to its limit. Thus, there can be no meeting ground between the protesting kisans and the government, within the ambit of these laws; they simply have to be repealed.

It is not just domestic firms that are potential beneficiaries of the new farm laws; foreign agribusinesses are a danger too.

The Indian intelligentsia suggests that the Indian kisans should move away from producing foodgrains towards other crops and import foodgrains from metropolitan countries, but it would take India back to the pre-Green Revolution days.

The three Agricultural Bills of the Modi government, against which the current country-wide kisan movement is going on, expose agriculture to the free market. It is a sub-optimal solution since the prices as well as the quantities of production that would rule for agricultural goods in a free market are likely to be socially disastrous.

The Modi government suggests that intervention in the form of MSP will continue, but it was not incorporated in the Agricultural bills rushed through the parliament by this government. Moreover, if the mandis lose primacy, as the legislation visualizes, then the MSP-regime becomes infructuous.

The agricultural reforms announced by the Finance Minister as a part of the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan has paved the way for the global e-commerce and food processing corporations to lock farmers into new corporate slavery.

Despite having a high rate of growth since the adoption of neo-liberal policies since 1991, growth rate of per-capita demand for foodgrains is still low since the real income in the hands of the working class has not really increased in per-capita terms.

The Prime Minister, in his speech, had made several claims about his relief programmes in the past three months. But various recent estimates and field-based reports clearly suggest the huge gap that exists between these claims and the reality of implementation.

Denial of food is a very potent weapon in the imperialist armoury and every step in the direction of opening agriculture to global trade is ipso facto a step towards reducing domestic food availability.

Lack of planning and preparation by the Central government for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a massive blow to India’s rural economy, causing enormous hardships to working people and further aggravating food insecurity in the country.

There is a huge demand for employment generation because of widespread loss of rural livelihoods under lockdown. Yet, for about two months, most MGNREGS workers have not been provided any employment due to poor fiscal situation of the State governments.

Disruptions caused by the lockdown have resulted in considerable additional economic burden on farmers because of higher costs, increased debt burden, inability to sell the produce at reasonable prices and crop losses. Yet the government’s response to such agricultural distress has been nothing short of a mockery till now.

This article presents quantitative evidence from 1331 mandis to show that, over the first three weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, a large number of agricultural markets were not operational, and in those markets that were operational, arrivals of key agricultural commodities fell very sharply. A disruption of 21 days in being able to sell their crops would have resulted in massive losses to farmers, in particular, to producers of perishable crops.

The 2016 Report of the Haque Committee has proposed liberalization of tenancy market on grounds of efficient land utilization in favour of small landowners. But leasing is seldom done by small to big farmers and owning even a small piece of land provides economic security to the rural poor. Such provisions will only facilitate grabbing of land of the poor by resource-rich landlords and capitalist farmers.

Signing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership would increase destitution and unemployment and also widen the current account deficit, worsening the coming recession.

Prabhat Patnaik explains the paradoxical emergence of excess supply of foodgrains in the neoliberal era despite lower foodgrain growth and higher GDP growth. This reflects squeezed real incomes of the agriculture-dependent population, because of falling agricultural output growth rates and declinesin real purchasing power per unit of output.

At first sight it appears to be an enigma. India has been recording according to official statistics one of the highest GDP growth rates among all the countries of the world, so much so that epithets like "emerging economic superpower" and "a global powerhouse of growth", have been freely used to describe India's achievement.

Agrarian crisis is a direct result of the neo-liberal fiscal regime, which advocates tax incentives for finance, the corporate sector, and the rich in general, and tight control over government borrowing; all this has resulted in long-term neglect of agriculture. Now the measures to provide relief to farmers are being opposed by neo-liberal advocates on the grounds that it will violate fiscal prudence and yet not resolve the problem created by neo liberal fiscal regime in the first place.

Kisans of Sikar have fought many valiant struggles against oppression and against anti-people state policies. This year's struggle in Sikar has once again shown that it is only through such mobilisations of working people that anti-people actions of the current government can be checked.

The article is highly relevant to the ongoing peasant struggle in Rajasthan (Sikar) today. It examines the historical evidence that shows that the emergence of economically and politically dominant landlords from among Jat, and to a smaller extent Brahmin, castes in Shekhawati is a relatively recent phenomenon. Peasant struggles in Shekhawati in the first half of the twentieth century brought an end to the shackles of the Jagirdari system, which fundamentally changed the structure of control over land with tenants-at-will getting ownership rights over land.

The policy shifts of the reform era have not been in favor of agriculture. Trade liberalisation, deregulation and a greater role for market forces have not benefited the farmer, who is trapped in a persisting crisis. It is time for today's policy makers to recognise their own disconnect, and learn from the evidence at hand.

The recent increase in global food prices has once again set off alarm signals in developing countries, especially in South Asia, where food inflation has been a major problem for some years now. Evidence from South Asian countries corroborates the fact that domestic factors do play a role in the international transmission; while rising global prices put upward pressure on domestic prices in a much rapid manner, its downward movements are less rapidly or effectively transmitted and often do not have any such impact.

It is not only for taking forward the struggle for democracy but also the successful achievements of the Left government in the areas of land distribution and health that West Bengal should have a government headed by a revitalised Left Front. It is essential to consolidate these achievements and move forward, rather than allow them to be dissipated or even reversed.

Global food prices are spiking once again, creating fears of a renewal or intensification of the global food crisis. Given that recent domestic food price changes in different Asian countries point to a broader trend whereby they have been strongly related to international price changes, this is a matter of extreme concern.

It is unfair to hold only supply side factors responsible for the upswings in onion prices. Food price inflation can be seen to have been caused by the government's action (inaction) and not by the emerging domestic demand or the unfortunate supply side conditions alone.

Despite numerous problems with the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Scheme has borne some positive results. Ironically, the moderate success of the Scheme in improving the conditions and bargaining power of rural labour, including that of women workers, has now become another source of its criticism.

To look at corporate retail as the solution to the current food price increase seems to be foolish as the recent evidence on distribution margins indicates that the countrywide share of corporate retail in food distribution is estimated to have tripled in the past four years and the retail food prices have shown the greatest increase. Instead, creating a viable and effective public distribution system in essential commodities is an immediate requirement.

The price trends over the last one-and-a-half years suggest that inflation is being driven by factors which are structurally embedded in the economic environment generated by the government's neoliberal reform agenda adopted for two decades now. Further, neoliberal thinking is leading not only to policy paralysis and absurd reasoning, but also to policy responses that are contrary to what is needed.

In its task of formulating the Food Security Bill, the National Advisory Council has ended up recognizing the supply constraints that could hinder implementation of the bill which guarantees universal access to food through a public distribution system.

Recent inflation in India is special both because of its peaks and its persistence. It is argued that unlike during 2008-09, recent inflation is due to structural problems. Further, a distributional analysis reveals that its impact is not shared equally. People in the lower income groups have been facing uncommon difficulties, as their purchasing power seems to have been halved over the last four years.