Farm unrest and ensuing global protests of peasants

LAHORE: It surely is a winter of discontent for India, where farmers-- representing about 250 million of country’s population --are protesting against the Narendra Modi government since August 2020, though agriculturists in Lahore, Germany, Holland and France had also resorted to streets against their respective governments during 2019, research conducted by the Jang Group and Geo Television Network shows.

The United States has seen such turbulent times during the last 150 odd years on numerous occasions though. Internationally speaking, as the corporate-driven economic globalisation and runaway free trade policies have devastated rural communities around the world, farmers’ organisations are coming together around the rallying cry of food sovereignty.

Many parts of the planet are undoubtedly facing rural crises and a lack of affordable, nutritious, locally grown food, and hence the discontentment against agrarian state-designed reforms and demands for more participatory, sustainable and locally controlled food systems are rising.

Farmers' protests in India at a glance: since India’s “Green Revolution” in the 1960s, New Delhi has been running a scheme where it guarantees farmers a set price for certain crops. Coupled with advances in farming technology, the system has helped the country move from widespread hunger to big annual food surpluses.

Protests in Lahore, Germany, France, Holland and a leaf from the history of such movements in the United States:

In Lahore, during November 2019, protesting farmers contended they were facing state repression. Police intervened and a protester had to lose his life. Way back in the early 2000s, tenants on the Okara farms were witnessed raising their voices for land rights.

The Asia Director of a globally-acclaimed American NGO, the Human Rights Watch, had viewed: "Blocking a peaceful meeting, arresting organisers, and then using excessive force against demonstrators shows a complete disregard for basic rights in a democratic society."

However, in March 2019, according to the Pakistani media, the National Commission on Human Rights disposed of the case of Okara Farms while advising the farmers to pay "Batai" as agreed during negotiations and farms’ administration to refrain from harassment or psychological torture.

In November 2019, French farmers had driven a convoy of up to 1,000 tractors into Paris as part of a protest against the government’s agricultural policies.

The two main farm unions organizing the unrest were blaming stagnant revenues, the phasing out of certain pesticides and what they claim is unfair competition. ‘The Independent’ had written: "The French farmers have driven a convoy of up to a thousand tractors into Paris as part of a protest against the government’s agricultural policies.|

On November 27 last year, around 40,000 farmers had travelled from all over Germany to Berlin. With an estimated 8,600 tractors, they had gone on to form a 10-kilometre-long convoy, according to the Berlin police.

A peek through the American history of farmers' movements shows that during the 20th century, black farmers had lost over 90% of their farmland to policies that consolidated land and subsidised corporate agribusinesses. Historically, these small American farmers have also long suffered from government policies of deregulating and privatising the agricultural sector. At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today.