New Intermediaries and Changing Regimes of Agricultural Production in South Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Agriculture in South Asia is rapidly changing, but the nature of the change is not well-understood. As new mechanisms of production and exchange and recent concerns about sustainable and heritage agriculture mesh with historical legacies of unequal access to land-holding, markets, technologies and seeds, South Asian farmers navigate a distressed present and an uncertain future. This panel examines how people experience cultivation by focusing on the figure of the intermediary. Intermediaries between the state, the market and farmers have always been crucial for agrarian production and distribution. The proposed panel will look at both: the familiar intermediaries (e.g., irrigation officers) and the expanding set of new intermediaries such as producer companies, NGOs working on high yielding, and representatives of multinational corporations. A close look at these new actors and their roles in this dynamic environment casts fresh light on the nature and structure of agrarian transformation in South Asia. Through an examination of their everyday lives and relationships with farmers, this panel unravels new arenas of conflict, coercion, and collaboration across the structure and institutions of agriculture in South Asia. In doing so, the panel re-thinks classical agrarian issues, in particular, the coming together of old and new regimes of exploitation and immiseration in South Asia.

Papers in this panel present studies on NGOs promoting high yielding varieties in Jharkhand, India; the changing paddy economy in Punjab, India, the unstable category of the farmer in Punjab, Pakistan and attempts to create direct linkages between producers and consumers in Bengaluru, India.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Aniket Pankaj Aga, Yale University

Chair

• K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• In Search of the Farmer: Notes from Pakistan’s Punjab - Maira Hayat, University of Chicago

• A Web of Intermediaries: Navigating the Paddy Economy in Punjab, India - Shreya Sinha, SOAS, University of London

• Taking Out the Middlemen: Efforts to Shorten the Food Chain in Bangalore, India - Camille Frazier, University of California, Los Angeles

• The Agricultural Dynamism in Rural Jharkhand, India: NGOs and the Adoption of High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) - Avinash Avi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay