October 16, 2011: It is the lot of a donkey that it is rarely credited with sturdy horse sense, even when it actually demonstrates to the world that it is in possession of it. Consider the moral of this joke. The guest speaker at a temperance league meeting in the local village church was waxing eloquent about the evils of drinking. He droned on and on and the crowd began to get a bit restive as, no doubt, the speech was making some deep inroads into the local pub's 'happy hours'. Realising that he was losing his audience, the speaker wanted to conclude his speech with a telling argument.
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He said: "Well, gentlemen, I don't want to tire you with too much detail. Why, even a donkey has better sense than to touch alcohol. Suppose, I place a bucket each of scotch and water before it, which do you think will the donkey drink?"
"Water" the crowd responded, with gusto.
"Why?", thundered the speaker.
Someone from the crowd, possibly irritated by the fact that all this was costing him a number of glasses of buy-one-get-one-free ale at the village pub, piped up: "Because it is an ass."
The donkey may shun Scotch whisky and get a bad name. But the tobacco leaf eating caterpillar is a lot more fortunate. Despite what its name suggests, it has, in recent times, shown a marked preference for foraging on other crops such as cotton, soya-bean, etc. and yet has earned none of the opprobrium of a species perched many steps above it in the animal kingdom.
Indeed, it is not just caterpillars, but pests of all kinds that have shown a marked disinclination to chew on that leafy substance with a resolve that would have been the envy of a struggling member of a 'kick the butt' movement. So much so, for root-borers, caterpillars and other insects, it is the tobacco that has become a pest. When Kozhikode town was in the grip of an infestation of the giant African snail the recommended specific against it was a concoction made of tobacco extract, among others.
Lucrative crop
If you are wondering what all this is leading up to, it is quite simply this. Farmers growing tobacco in the country have had to contend with a far reduced risk of pest incidence than those growing other crops. That has meant more output and, hence, more farm income. The advent of genetically modified cotton may have altered the economics of cultivation somewhat to dethrone tobacco from the pole position it has enjoyed all these years. But not by much, one suspects. It is still lucrative. I have often wondered why is it that one doesn't hear as much of suicides by tobacco farmers as of others engaged in the cultivation of other crops. Indeed, out of sheer curiosity, I did an internal search of news reports on suicides by tobacco farmers over the last four years. I came up with just one report from The Hindu.
Even that, it turned out, was a case of death from fertiliser, or rather from the shortage of the substance, rather than from tobacco crop failure. It seems that the local distributor kept repeatedly turning him away after promising to supply fertiliser each time. The farmer, having missed the crop season in the process, ended his life in sheer dejection.
A somewhat dated FAO document examining the economics of cultivation of different crops in India claimed that, on an average, tobacco offered 23 per cent higher return than any other crop. 'Sin Goods' (and I use the word not in any moral and judgmental sense but in the way economists refer to taxation of tobacco and alcohol) are always profitable. But much more seems to be at work here.
Does the relative success of tobacco over other crops offer any insights into what might constitute the ingredients of a successful agricultural policy? In the instant case, a policy of benign neglect by the Government appears to have helped.
As part of an international commitment towards control of tobacco usage the Government did not launch any developmental programmes since 1990, the terminal year of the Seventh Five-Year Plan. Tobacco output has not been any the worse for it though, and has grown quite steadily. In fact, I should think, far more than the growth in other agricultural crops.
But the Government merely abdicating its regulatory and policy responsibilities would not have been enough. Happily for tobacco growers, the Government did not hinder the marketing initiatives of big corporates such as ITC to engage in farm extension and procurement operations.
Free movement
The Government must ponder over why it cannot do for food crops what it has had no difficulty in doing for tobacco. The commodity has also benefited from relatively freer movement of the produce across inter-State borders. That is a privilege that food-grains or oilseed growers would dearly love to enjoy. Though free on paper, there are simply too many restrictions on stocking and inter-State movements in these goods.
Supporters of state intervention in agricultural policy have always worried that it would be calamitous if the Government did not lay down the policy. Well, they need to look no further than to realise the truth. The other day, this newspaper carried a news report about the compensation that farmers would have to be paid if they were to be dissuaded from growing tobacco. The report quoted one such farmer as saying that the compensation would have to be Rs 5 lakh per acre!
Granted, this was more in the nature of an 'asking price,' similar to the practice of traders in a Chinese flea market. Even so, it gives one an idea of how lucrative tobacco farming can be. Now, what would a maize or a millet farmer not do to give himself a chance to earn such returns? Enditem
