Minimum Support Price for Agriculture Produce- A Legitimate Right of Farmers’

Abstract

Farmer’s access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmer’s rights was first coined, there now exists a board consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researches and activists who are sympathetic to farmer’s rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India’s unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmer’s Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on a analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmer’s rights.