Crisis of Petty Commodity Producers in the Crop Production Sector under a Neoliberal  Regime: A Village Economy in Kerala

Crisis in the crop production sector has been sufficiently explored at the state and sub-state level ever since its outbreak by the late 1990s in India.

A common thread in the analysis of agrarian crisis is generalisation of its causes and its concomitant eventualities (Jeromi 2007). Price volatility exacerbated by a price fall of agricultural commodities consecutively for years and compounded further by the hike in the cost of vital inputs were stated to have left farmers in deep disarray. The impasse in the agriculture sector is attributed to the neoliberal policy paradigm introduced in India in 1991 (Mohanakumar and Sharma 2006). Agrarian crisis, therefore, is a crisis of reproduction, and it denotes a period of interregnum during which petty commodity producers and wage labours dependent on agriculture and allied sectors with fragile capital base find staying in their traditional vocation rather difficult to carry forward. Specificities of the agrarian crisis at the intra-district level can be better understood by analysing the issue in a village/gram panchayat, which is predominantly agrarian.