Spaces of Corporate Control in Agriculture: A Critical Study of Contract Farming in the Indian State of Punjab

The dissertation is about the corporate control over agricultural production through contract farming. In contract farming, farmers sell a certain quantity of farm products to an industrial company at a predetermined price. In this process, and in principle, the industrial company has a secure access to the raw material it needs, and the farmers have a secure market. Contract farming is a world-wide phenomenon. The dissertation studies contract farming in the Indian context. The main thesis of the dissertation is that there is an increasing corporatisation of Indian agriculture, and that this process is mediated by the state institutions at the national and provincial scales, with certain ‘developmental’ consequences. Contract farming as an agrarian accumulation process has four aspects. It is, first of all, a structure of relations of production and exchange involving productive capital (both in agriculture and industry), mercantile capital, and finance capital; so contract farming is more than just the market-contract between farmers and industrial companies. It is a way to increase productive consumption of technologies in rural areas produced by agri-input corporations. Secondly, as a structure of multiple relations of production and exchange and as a mode of accumulation as associated with these relations, CF has an important condition of existence: the state. CF is internally related to the state. The capitalist Indian state has been creating conditions for ‘neoliberal agriculture’ that are conducive to contract farming. The state has been doing this, more or less, in the interest of big business (domestic and foreign), ideologically justifying its actions in the name of national development. Thirdly, CF as a relatively new political-economic project is distinctively contradictory: while CF has become a conduit through which several modern mechanical and biological technologies have been introduced, such introduction of new technologies exhibits a class bias. Finally, the logic of the operation of the CF unequally affects the conditions of working peasants who are subjected to the pressure of class differentiation, as well as the wage-workers, who are subjected heightened level of exploitation which is necessary for contract companies to make large profits