India’s Dangerous Reversal Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent reversal on farm policy reforms will reverberate for years to come. Essentially, the nation will revert to a system that used a market support price (MSP) to boost farmer income but at levels above what would allow the market to clear supplies. Agricultural economist Ramesh Chand points out that demand for foods not under the MSP umbrella has been growing faster than the demand for foods under the MSP. To illustrate how distorting MSP can be, he notes that the government now procures 63 percent of India’s rice despite production only expanding by 11 percent. India is already upset that the latest version of the WTO’s draft agriculture text lack...

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