Poor farmers in India struggle against neglect, powerlessness, discrimination and corruption. Advocacy Coordinator Jeff Atkinson explains how Oxfam Australia is ensuring their voices are heard.

Oxfam Australia and local partner organisations are helping the voices of India's poor farmers be heard on the national and world stage.
Photo: Martin Wurt/OxfamAUS

When farmers in the Phagi District of Rajasthan in north-western India recently came to sell their grain to the government buyer for the official guaranteed support price, they found that they were being given all sorts of excuses by the buyer as to why he could not purchase their grain. There were no bags available, he said, or the grain was wet.

Suspicious, they turned to a local farmers' organisation, the Kisan Seva Samiti (KSS) who investigated and unearthed a scam. The government buyer was being paid by local grain merchants to turn away the farmers' grain, so that the merchants could buy it at a lower price. KSS took the matter to the district level authorities and the official involved was dismissed.

KSS supports farmers and rural people in many ways, especially this kind of grassroots advocacy. In a state like Rajasthan where three-quarters of the population depends on agriculture, it serves a vital role in countering corruption and oppression that can rob rural people of their livelihoods.

KSS focuses particularly on the poorest and more oppressed sectors of rural society, such as tribal people, the 'scheduled castes' and women landowners. Typical of their activities is a recent case in which an influential upper-caste landowner simply absorbed the small land-holding of a tribal farmer on the assumption that no one would challenge him. However, KSS did and he was forced to give back the land.

The formation of KSS was largely supported by a Rajasthan-based non-government organisation called CECOEDECON, a multi-faceted organisation that has been our partner organisation for the past 15 years. CECOEDECON is itself also involved in advocacy on behalf of farmers, at a state and national level.

Agriculture in India is a State rather than a federal government matter, and CECOEDECON takes up issues such as the inadequate implementation of the Public Distribution Scheme of cheap food for the chronically poor in the State, or the inadequacies of the government's drought relief schemes.

CECOEDECON is also increasingly becoming involved in advocacy and campaigning at a national and international level, as part of a group called the Food Trade and Nutrition coalition, which Oxfam also supports.

At the national level CECOEDECON and the coalition wants the Indian Government to keep to its current position of supporting reforms at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that will preserve food security and rural livelihoods. At the international level it wants the European and American governments to stop subsidising their agricultural producers in a way that leads to the dumping of agricultural products on export markets.

These objectives reinforce those of Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign, and an alliance has been formed between CECOENDECON and the Make Trade Fair campaign on agriculture in India.

Increasingly we are seeking partners such as CECOEDECON who have not only grassroots experience but the ability to use that experience to work for systemic change and to link into our advocacy work in Australia and internationally. The most effective form of advocacy is that which is linked from village to international forum, and in which each level supports and reinforces the other.

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