Aug. 21 : If traditional agriculture is not sustaining the farmer, agri-business could. One multinational firm suggested a way. Since potato growers lose money on surplus production, it offered to buy a mutually agreed quantity to make potato powder. It offered to purchase 12,000 acres from farmers in Burdwan, engage them to grow the crop on agreed terms and purchase it from them for its processing plant, thereby giving them an assured market and a good price. The company also offered to provide the farmers an improved variety of seed. The ordinary crop, it said, won't do for high-quality potato powder. But the government ruled out this idea of 'captive farming'. 'For all the advantages the farmer may get from this farming, he would lose the right to his land. We couldn't agree to this,' argues veteran CPM leader Benoy Konar. McKinsey, which drew up its project for agri-business in collaboration with the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation, also contended that neither captive farming nor 'collective farming' was feasible. Instead, it offered what it thought was an 'optimal model' for agri-business. 'Contract farming', it said, is the agri-business of the future as it would marry the farmer's interest with the investor's. In this model, the farmer is responsible for production, while the agri-business company provides inputs and processes and markets the produce. Unlike in captive farming, the farmer retains the right to land in contract farming. In fact, the McKinsey-WBIDC scheme suggested that transfer of land should be 'strictly prohibited' in this brand of farming. The farmer is free to decide how much land he wants to offer in particular seasons. And, he remains free to get out of it after the contract period. A mechanism was suggested to ensure that the contract between the farmer and the company is 'comprehensive' and is properly administered. Since the panchayat system in Bengal functions better than in most other states, it was also suggested that the panchayat samiti liaise between the farmer and the agri-business company. The district administration can play an enabling role. The model, according to McKinsey, is working in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and should do so in Bengal, too. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and many of his neo-reformist party colleagues thought it would. Hence the recommendation for it in the draft policy that was presented before the Cabinet in May. 'There is no reason why it shouldn't work,' says agriculture scientist Mrinal Kanti Basu, 'people are doing it all the time. If someone owns three cars or rickshaws, doesn't he give at least two to others on contract? What's wrong with a farmer getting into some such agreement, especially when his earnings from land are so small?' But traditionalists in the CPM and other Left parties cried foul. The concept of contract farming, agriculture minister Kamal Guha fumes, has come with globalisation 'to enable multinational companies to dominate our agriculture'. The proposal, he says, is 'apparently tempting but is no guarantee for the farmer's benefit'. His party, the Forward Bloc, thought it wiser to depend on the 'free farmer' rather than on the 'contract farmer' for the growth of the state's agriculture. As for the farmer's problems with financing and marketing his crop, Guha thinks the answer lies in developing cooperative agriculture marketing societies. He speaks for most of the dissenters in the Left camp. But water investigation and development minister Nandagopal Bhattacharya would go one step further in crying down contract farming, which, he argues, has failed 'almost everywhere in the world'. In a note on the new agriculture policy, he fears that contract farming would reduce farmers to 'bonded labour of big business'. He, too, advocates the cooperative model as the right choice. The problem is all of them know - and admit - that cooperatives in Bengal have failed the farmers. They talk of the need for capital in agriculture but would resist the entry of big players in agri-business. The chief minister has succumbed to the sceptics, at least in this round. The revised farm policy, likely to be put before the Cabinet next month, may have contract farming deleted from the recommendations. But when and where did reforms come without hiccups?