Impact of Corporate Integrated Farm Solutions on Small Farmers

This study explores the penetration of agribusiness on the peasantry in a Karnal zone of Haryana, with a focus on input supply networks. It elaborates the ways in which big corporations, particularly transnational agribusiness, penetrate the markets and production systems through the promotion of ‘integrated solutions’. The material basis of the establishment of corporate dominance through such solutions can be found in the emerging patterns of vertical and horizontal integration which are embedded within the macro political economy, marked by the ascendency of neoliberal economic reforms. The main motivation of the project was to understand how the power and control of transnational businesses is growing over the agricultural system in the context of persistent agrarian distress because of the changing role of the Indian State and its declining interventions in the agricultural sector. As this paper illustrates, neoliberal policies led the emergence of Global Agricultural Value Systems (GAVS), which were largely led by some of the biggest transnational corporations, with Bayer Crop Science being one of the four big players in the agro-chemical world market, especially after its merger with Monsanto in 2018.