- Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her maiden Budget speech on July 5, 2019 stressed the need for farmers to consider taking up “Zero budget farming” to tackle the ongoing agrarian distress. However, farmers are not happy with this announcement. According to the some farmers, as told The Hindu, ‘when half the country is in the grip of drought today, but no concern or commitment has been shown by the Finance Minister.” So what is Zero Budget Farming is all about?
- According to the UNFAO, ‘Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is a set of farming methods, in which ‘Zero Budget’ means without using any credit, and without spending any money on purchased inputs.
- Actually it is a grassroots peasant movement, which has spread to various states in India.
- This farming method was first evolved in Karnataka. The movement in Karnataka state was born out of collaboration between Mr Subhash Palekar, who put together the ZBNF practices, and the state farmers association Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), a member of La Via Campesina (LVC).
- According to the FAO, ‘the neoliberalization of the Indian economy led to a deep agrarian crisis that is making small scale farming an unviable vocation. Privatized seeds, inputs, and markets are inaccessible and expensive for peasants. Indian farmers increasingly find themselves in a vicious cycle of debt, because of the high production costs, high interest rates for credit, the volatile market prices of crops, the rising costs of fossil fuel based inputs, and private seeds. Debt is a problem for farmers of all sizes in India. Under such conditions, ‘zero budget’ farming promises to end a reliance on loans and drastically cut production costs, ending the debt cycle for desperate farmers. The word ‘budget’ refers to credit and expenses, thus the phrase ‘Natural farming’ means farming with Nature and without chemicals. “
