The average Indian farmer is poor because the average Indian farm is small
We’d agree that there’s an element of this in it:
“The agricultural profile of any nation is a very boring subject & studying it requires some effort. As a result, most people who have a view on “what’s happening in India" do not realize that the average Indian farmer is poor because the market for his goods is inefficient.”
We’re not about to try insisting that the Indian post-farm market for agricultural goods is efficient. We would also insist that that’s not why Indian farmers are poor. The actual reason is because Indian farms are small:
Since the first agriculture census over 45 years ago, the number of farms in India has more than doubled from 71 million in 1970-71 to 145 million in 2015-16, while the average farm size more than halved from 2.28 hectares (ha) to 1.08ha.
Imagine, as many of those farms will be, that it’s a monocrop of rice. The retail - note, retail - price of which is about 50 pence per kg. The yield is some 3 to 6 tonnes per hectare. The gross income to be gained from rice farming on one hectare is thus £1,500 to £3,000 a year.
It doesn’t matter how efficient that market for the output is. Even if all the value, something that absolutely never does nor can happen, accrues to the farmer the top end of possible income is that £1,500 to £3,000 a year. That’s before all the expenses of seed, fertiliser, electricity and so on. And that will be the amount to support the entire farming family of course.
Even if we mutter something about two growing seasons - a possibility in parts of India - we’re still not going to be reaching non-poverty levels of net income.
The past was grotesquely poor because most lived as peasants on scraps of land. The peasant lifestyle on a scrap of land is a poor one because the value of output from peasant farming on scraps of land is low.
There is no way out of or around this. Peasant farming means a peasant lifestyle, peasant poverty, on a peasant income.
Given that no one is making more land the only way to increase Indian farming incomes is to do exactly what every rich nation has done. Have fewer farmers each farming larger areas of land. Or, to put it another way, to abolish the peasant lifestyle, that peasant poverty, it is necessary to have no more peasants.
No, not the Soviet way with the Holodomor and the like. Instead have an industrial revolution and near all make their livings with indoor work, no heavy lifting.
As we keep saying solutions can only be found when causes are understood. It’s simply not possible to make a non-poverty income out of farming scraps of land - that’s why the average Indian farmer is poor.