Farm groups urge government to exclude all aspects of agriculture from the India-US trade deal

NEW DELHI: As India-US trade talks enter final stage, a network of farmer organisations has written to Union commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal, urging him to exclude all aspects of agriculture from the trade deal with the US to protect the interests of Indian farmers, ensuring the country’s food sovereignty and security, and safeguarding the vitality of India’s rural economy.

“Allowing heavily subsidized US imports into India would undermine our long-standing position at the World Trade Organization (WTO) against these very subsidies. More critically, it could flood our markets with cheap, subsidized products, destabilizing domestic prices and severely harming our farmers,” said the Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements (ICCFM), including various factions of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) of different states, in its letter to Goyal on late Tuesday.

The letter, signed by general secretary of the ICCFM and BKU Yudhvir Singh and national spokesperson of the BKU Rakesh Tikait, flagged how any deal granting duty-free or low tariff access to the US agricultural products will negatively impact India farmers who produce maize, soybean, pulses, cotton and fruits & nuts.

Similarly, it also underlined the impact of such trade deals on the Indian dairy sector and cited a recent report by the SBI that cautioned that the opening of India’s dairy sector to the US imports could result in an annual loss of more than Rs 1 lakh crore to dairy farmers.

The farm network also flagged the threat of transgenic produce, pointing out that much of the American agricultural produces are transgenic and import of any such products into India - be it corn, soy, canola, cotton or apples - would be unacceptable due to biosafety concerns.

“If the Indian government moves forward with trade deals that overlook critical issues affecting our farmers, movements like ours will be compelled to intensify our protests against such anti-farmer policies,” said the farmer representatives.