the WDR 2008 correctly stresses the need to promote farmer-led technologies and calls for extending the Green Revolution to subsistence farmers in less favorable regions yet avoids grappling with the increasing monopolistic control of biotech firms and agrochemical TNCs over genes, seeds, plant varieties, fertilizers and other associated inputs for their propagation. It acknowledges the importance of improving poor farmers’ access to productive assets but favors market-based land reform and water management which more often than not has resulted in increasing, rather than decreasing, inequities and further marginalization of subsistence farmers. It stresses the state’s role in providing core public goods such as infrastructure and research and development but does not consider how the benefits of such “public goods” are disproportionately captured by richer farmers and agribusiness corporations while the social and environmental costs are disproportionately borne by landless and subsistence farmers, indigenous people and rural women.
