Marginalised farmers deserve protective measures.

In a recent international webinar titled "Ensuring land and food rights at a time of Covid-19 and beyond", experts and researchers from six Asian countries made a call for implementing agrarian-and social-security reforms to protect farmers from the adverse impacts of the pandemic. Moreover, in his keynote presentation at the webinar, eminent researcher Antonio B Quizon touched upon issues like increased rural indebtedness forcing small farmers to sell off their homes and farmlands. He has pointed out that agrarian reforms have slowed down as government priorities have been shifted elsewhere during the pandemic. Besides, agricultural workers are not being paid properly and pastoralist communities and indigenous people have been impacted as countries have closed their borders because of the pandemic. What is more regrettable is that despite bumper production of rice this year, farmers, especially those belonging to small and medium groups, faced problems in marketing their produce in time during the lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. Vegetable farmers have also counted huge losses due to the pandemic. They have had to do so during the lockdown between late March and May because of the supply-chain breakdown, while they are still doing so because of the faulty marketing mechanism prevalent for long in the country. One can refer to the recent media reports on vegetable prices declining further in this connection. Incidents of land grabbing have also been reported in this period. Scores of small farmers finding no alternative way to make their ends meet have had to sell their land at throw-away prices. Studies are there that a significant portion of the population has already gone down the poverty line because of the pandemic. Overall, the Covid-19 health crisis has created an environment where it is...