Topic 1 : The right support
Introduction: It has been flagged by various government departments that the government’s support of farmers does not apply to all crops. Few crops like oilseeds, pulses, and millets do not get price support like wheat and paddy get, which distorts the market.
What discrimination do oilseeds and pulses farmers face?
- Oilseeds and pulses farmers today suffer policy discrimination on two counts.
- The first is from their minimum support prices (MSP) being largely on paper.
- Mustard is currently selling at Rs 5,000-5,100 per quintal in Rajasthan and chana (chickpea) at Rs 4,700-4,800 in Maharashtra, as against their respective MSPs of Rs 5,650 and Rs 5,440.
- And this is even before the crops now in the field are to be marketed in about two months’ time.
- The second bias has to do with imports.
- Wheat attracts 40 per cent import duty, with these at 70 per cent for milled rice and 100 per cent for sugar.
- As against this, crude palm, soyabean and sunflower oil are importable at zero duty.
- So are most pulses, barring chana and moong (green gram).
The impact of policy discrimination and negligence
- It is not for nothing that India’s edible oil imports have risen from 11.6 million to 16.5 million tonnes (mt) between 2013-14 and 2022-23, with the latter valued at $16.7 billion and meeting almost two-thirds of the domestic consumption requirement.
- Things have been better in pulses, where imports have fallen from a peak of 6.6 mt in 2016-17 to 2.5 mt in 2022-23, translating into a 90 per cent-plus self-sufficiency ratio.
- But the current year has seen a resurgence of imports, with the Modi government swinging from a pro-producer to a pro-consumer stance ahead of national elections.
- Price and tariff support apart, oilseeds and pulses have not received research and development attention anywhere near that of wheat, rice or sugarcane.
- Denial of approval for genetically-modified hybrid mustard and herbicide-resistant soyabean technologies is a manifestation of this official indifference.
- Even in pulses, the breakthroughs have been largely limited to the breeding of short-duration and photo-thermo-insensitive varieties in chana and moong.
What should be the way forward?
- Various departments within the government are flagging concerns over the extant MSP and procurement policy favouring only a few crops.
- Farmers, like all rational economic actors, respond to price signals and incentives.
- MSPs should supplement, not supplant markets.
- The two sub-sectors of Indian agriculture that have registered the highest growth over the last two decades — livestock and horticulture — are the ones that are the most market-led.
- The crops sub-sector, on the other hand, has exhibited less dynamism, in which MSP-based market distortions have certainly played a role.
- That needs correction. The best way to do it is by replacing all price-based supports, whether MSP or input subsidies, with per-acre income transfers.
- Directly linked Income Support based on Market Prices for crops. E.g. the Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana of Madhya Pradesh.
- Improved Market Infrastructure and Access
- Crop Insurance Schemes
Conclusion: Existing MSP and procurement policy favours only a few crops, and creates market distortions. It needs to be corrected.
Topic 2 : Reshaped by AI
Introduction: Amidst competitive global politicking, as the world struggles to contain the toxic legacies of 2023 — cruel regional wars, civic conflicts and undeniable stories of anthropogenic harms — technocrats, ecocrats, and bureaucrats across the world continue to device and launch quiet initiatives portending a better and larger future for human rights.
The global governance of AI
- One such initiative led, in early October 2023, to the Report of the High-Level Committee on Programmes and the High-Level Committee on Management joint session on the use and governance of AI and related frontier technologies hosted, significantly, by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
- The UN system had already begun its work on “frontier technologies” and artificial intelligence (AI), including the development, in 2019, of a United Nations system-wide strategic approach and road map for supporting capacity development of AI.
- The principles for the ethical use of AI in the United Nations system were adumbrated in the famous UNESCO declaration which prescribes many values and principles, chief being the following: Respect, protect and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms and human dignity; ecological sustainability; diversity and inclusiveness.
- These range across eleven areas of specific concern that include good governance and just development.
- A “system-wide normative and operational framework on the use of AI in the United Nations system, based on these principles for the ethical use of AI” was finally recommended.
How AI is diluting ‘territorial sovereignty’ and strengthening ‘digital sovereignty’?
- In one way or another, the principle of territorial sovereignty is slowly but surely being transformed into that of digital sovereignty.
- Transborder, multilevel governance of AI is at the very heart of corporate governance, and sovereignty over peoples and nations is being transformed into masses of accumulated classified data.
- Disinformation, misleading information, and even hate speech, are the order of the day and the big question now is how to prevent these evils in governance and development so that some truth and accountability are ensured.
The conflict among three models of governance of AI
The present digital wars between the US and China, in fact, represent three different “digital empires” in complicity as well as collision, China, the US and EU law and regulation regimes.
The USA’s model of surveillance capitalism
- The free digital model of the US, which amounnts to complete freedom to the AI industry (the techno-optimistic model) revives the models of free speech and open markets, leaving the form and content entirely open to free market forces.
- Free market fundamentalism has nurtured the growth and global eminence of the social media industry which (according to the Business Research Company) rose from $193.52 billion in 2001 to $231.1 billion in 2023, and is expected to grow to $454.37 billion in 2027.
The Chinese model of digital authoritarianism
- All this techno-optimism run “wild” is yielding to the appeal of an “authoritarian” model of regulatory reach, based on state surveillance and hegemony over private AI companies.
- The Chinese state-driven regulatory model is on “the ascent worldwide, leading to growing concern in the US, the EU, and the rest of the democratic world about the implications of that ascent.”
- The worry that “China’s regulatory model will prevail is real, both normatively and descriptively” because while China’s technological development is impressive, its way of “harnessing that technology is often deeply oppressive”.
- The Chinese state-driven model also “appeals to many developing authoritarian countries” because it “combines political control with tremendous technological success”.
The EU’s Liberal Democratic model
- In contrast, the very few actually existing “democratic” societies seem to prefer the EU model, seen as providing the “necessary building blocks of a more equitable and human-centric digital economy.”
- The EU Declaration on Development on November 22, 2021, privileges a human rights-based approach to development, postulating respect for human rights as “a precondition for the achievement of inclusive and sustainable development”.
- Bradford reminds us about the promise of an uncertain future of the technopolitical, although it remains open “whether surveillance capitalism, digital authoritarianism, or liberal democratic values will prevail as a foundation for human engagement and for our society as we advance further into the digital era”.
The dehumanizing impact of AI
- We would need to go far afield to even begin to look at the uses of AI technologies for war or terror purposes or perspectives.
- But AI has now irreversibly “revolutionised” warfare.
- The use of unmanned lethal autonomous weapons systems, abbreviated in an unconscious irony by the US Defence Department as LAWs, illustrates complete machine-learning dependence and dehumanisation of the means of warfare, setting back the project of international humanitarian law.
Conclusion: The overall project of “humanizing” AI applications in all contexts, civil or military, must continue lest, as the poet T S Eliot said in The Waste Land, we lose it in the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.”