Open letter to the government in support of women farmers

As feminists and women’s rights groups, we stand in support of the farmers’ movement to repeal the draconian farm laws passed by the Central Government, the implementation of which now stand stayed by the Supreme Court of India. We salute our sisters, the women farmers who have led the struggle against the three laws that must be repealed—The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020 and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

Women farmers have been firmly in the leadership of this struggle, just as much as they lead the process of agriculture itself and bear the burden of crushing farm debts, suicides, shrinking incomes, and ecological disaster that the agrarian crisis has produced. Be it driving tractors to the borders of Delhi, or organising the protest sites, or being the faces of a powerful protest for over two months in the winter cold, braving state repression and state-sponsored negation of women’s participation and contribution to agriculture, women have been indomitable.

Through their inspiring determination, our sisters have staked a claim to the farmers’ movement as a historicised, gender-specific struggle, as women farmers are neither allowed to own land nor acknowledged for their labour in law or policy. Buttressed by the exclusion fostered by predatory neoliberal capitalism, a masculinist framework of agriculture renders women farmers invisible as citizens of a constitutional democracy, reducing them merely to belongings that must be dispatched home. For women farmers, participation in this struggle is not an option from which they may exit, it is a matter of their bare survival. They argue that just as the draconian labour codes do not recognise domestic workers as workers, these farm laws imperil their very existence, by multiplying their vulnerability manifold as they have neither access to, claim institutional credit nor farming subsidies.

The Census 2011 shows that 65.1% women workers work in agriculture either as cultivators or labourers, while the PLFS (2017-2018) shows that 73% of all the rural female workers are agriculturists. These laws will impact small, marginal and women farmers the worst. The dismantling of the APMC will mean that farmers will not be able to negotiate prices. The laws in redefining the trade area outside the mandi pushes the entry of big corporations and a pernicious eco-system which will deny access, mobility and equality to women farmers, cultivators, tenants and agricultural labourers. These laws propose to de-regulate food supply systems and invite big corporates into the grain trade. Women farmers are also fighting for food security for the Essential Commodities Act 2020 proposes that cereals, pulses, and potatoes should be removed from the list of essential commodities. The contract farming envisaged under these laws would be that women dependent on small or marginal holdings, either as direct cultivators or tenants would be highly disadvantaged in negotiating contracts be this knowledge, power or market acuity. Shockingly, farmers or anyone representing them will also not have any recourse to the jurisdiction of appellate courts to challenge contracts that dupe them or force them into landlessness and penury.

We join our voices to those of our protesting sisters, in their fierce and public proclamation of women farmers’ rights as equal citizens, who have the right to welfare, the right to livelihood, the right to protest injustice, and the right not to be erased from the processes of making law and policy.

We want the government to know that:
We, the women of India, stand with women farmers to repeal the draconian farm laws.
We, the women of India, stand with Dalit and Adivasi landless women farmers for their rights over common land and resources.
We, the women of India, stand for a constitutional democracy for women, by women and as women.
We, the women of India, stand with all political prisoners and human rights defenders.
We, the women of India, will defend our right to life, liberty, equality, privacy, and protest.
We, the women of India, will speak, protest, dissent against every injustice, every draconian law, every pogrom.
We, the women of India, will speak truth to power.

In solidarity with women farmers at the borders of Delhi, the undersigned pledge their support: