Phase out agricultural subsidy on tobacco: Indian Agriculture Minister asked

The Indian union minister for agriculture, Mr. Sharad Pawar had some serious assignments to deal with other than cricketing during his visit to Chandigarh today. Mr. Hemant Goswami, chairperson of the NGO Burning Brain Society (BBS) met Mr. Pawar today and sought his intervention and commitment on providing alternate employment to farmers engaged in tobacco cultivation.

Petitioning Mr. Pawar BBS said that the providing an alternate to farmers engaged in tobacco cultivation should be a priority area for the agriculture ministry and a plan for transfer of tobacco cultivation to other productive crops over a period of next 15-20 years should be worked out. It mentioned that a planned phase-out of tobacco crop will also help the farmers engaged in tobacco crop from suddenly loosing their livelihood and shall also help thousands of other workers engaged in tobacco trade.

Mr. Hemant Goswami said that it was quite unfortunate that on the one end WHO and the ministry of health is working for reducing the demand of tobacco products but on the other hand the government is subsidizing and providing grants for tobacco cultivation. Hemant pointed out that the real beneficiary of the entire subsidy and incentives are the tobacco companies and not the farmers.

Burning Brain Society also presented an outline of the proposal to the agriculture minister asking for scrapping of the “Beedi Workers Welfare Fund Act, 1976” and instead to create a new fund to support farmers going in for alternate crops and economic activities. It has been proposed that a part of revenue collected by tobacco taxes must be shifted to the “Ministry of Agriculture” in the form of a “cess” levied on all Beedi and Tobacco products on the lines of the existing fund developed for Beedi workers. This amount could be used to promote alternate cultivation. The memorandum to the Minister also mentioned that Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) has already done some very successful experiments in the area of shifting tobacco farmers to other crops but it has been realized that the farmers require motivation, so good amount of subsidy to all tobacco cultivators who shift to other form of crops must be provided.

BBS pointed out that tobacco is a negative crop and has no true economic use. The financial benefit perceptible by immediate sale only triggers greater economic loss to the nation and thereby putting tobacco in the category of a highly uneconomic crop which is truer in more than one sense in a regime of strict international tobacco control.

Presently around 420000 hectares of land in India is used in tobacco cultivation and this can in reality be put to better productive agricultural use resulting in greater economic benefits and for producing food grains for millions of starving people of India.