In reality, the three new laws ensure that farmers will be powerless in front of big corporate agri-buyers. Purchase contracts will have to be agreed to before the sowing season. The farmer will have to ensure that the quality of the crop meets the contracted standards. The buyer will have the right to terminate the contract whenever he wants. If there’s a dispute, the farmer will not be able to go to any civil court. In effect, the farmer will be at the mercy of the corporate buyer. The complexity of crop procurement will ensure that a few big corporates, who can assimilate a part of the existing network of grain traders into its system, will quickly capture the market and become monopsonies. The corporates will dictate prices and farmers will have no fallback option, since there will be no MSP system to protect them. The same trading networks that give some price stability to small farmers, because of government procurement, will simply congeal and be absorbed into the procurement structure of big corporates. The vast sea of rural exploitative relations will be preserved, but the lifeboat of MSP will be taken away.
Aunindyo Chakravarty, 'Why MSP is a must for farmers', Tribune
