| Chapter 1: | Introduction: Seeking Success, Finding Farmers |
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is the identity of small farmers traceable mainly to the desires of official development?
In terms of development planning, small farmers began to be specifically targeted within India's Five Year Plans in the early 1970s (Planning Commission 2009b).3 This shift toward the needs of small farmers can be viewed as part of a larger effort to address rural inequalities, given that Operation Flood, the program to replicate cooperative dairying across rural India, was also launched in 1970. Two major programs that focused on small farmers were the Small Farmers Development Agency (SFDA) and the Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labor (MFAL) program (Madan 1990), both of which were initiated to ensure more widespread adoption of agricultural technologies associated with the Green Revolution, including high-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, mechanization, and irrigation. To quote from the Sixth Plan, their objective
By the 1980s, however, the failures of target-oriented programs had begun to be articulated, especially in terms of their inability to reach the poorest segments of rural society, and their tendency to privilege those who already owned some land (Chakravarty 1981). The Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) was begun as a corrective to these shortcomings, in order to bring the proliferation of rural development programs within one cohesive framework, as well as address the needs of the poorest segments in rural India. To return to Ferguson's (1994) notion of the “antipolitics” of development, the solution to development