ZERO-BUDGET FARMING A PLOY TO END FERTILISER SUBSIDY: AIKMS

PRAYAGRAJ : All India Kisan Mazdoor Sabha (AIKMS) has criticised Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) plan to promote “zero budget natural farming” claiming it to be a ploy to increase fertiliser prices and end fertiliser subsidy. This will ruin small and middle farmers whose crop yield and returns will go down by more than 30%, it has claimed.

AIKMS—a frontal organisation of the CPI-ML (New Democracy)— has called upon all farmers to resist the move of increasing input burden and reducing farmers’ income, though the ruling party had promised to double the income by 2022, said AIKMS general secretary Ashish Mital in a communiqué issued on Thursday.

As announced in the budget and in the poll campaign by BJP, it plans to allow only natural farming up to 5 km on both sides’ of 2500 km along the Ganga. This is to promote bio fertilizers which are costlier and less effective on high yield variety seeds. This plan will be enforced by the police and lead to ruin of crores of farmers along the Ganga belt, he said.

Already fertilizer cost has doubled and farmers have suffered heavily from black marketing.

This year’s budget allocation for fertilizer subsidy is Rs 1.05 lakh crore, as against Rs 1.55 lakh crore spent last year. The government is promoting ZBNF to reduce its support to farmers, maintained Mittal, who is also a member Sanyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM)

Dismissing the claims, BJP’s Prayagraj city unit president Ganesh Kesarwani said that zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) is a method of chemical-free agriculture drawing from traditional Indian practices.

“It is an alternative to farming methods driven by chemical fertilizers and pesticides and intensive irrigation. Without the need to spend money on these inputs or take loans to buy them, the cost of production can be reduced and farming made into a “zero budget” exercise, breaking the debt cycle for many small farmers,” he said.

AIKMS CALLED UPON FARMERS TO RESIST THE MOVE OF INCREASING INPUT BURDEN