Introduction: India's rainfed agricultural dystopia1

1. A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution: Wikipedia.

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Notes

1. A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution: Wikipedia.

2. This kind of production has many terms: they include peasant production; petty commodity production, small farms and micro enterprise.

3. The International research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics – one of the 16 international agricultural research centres breeding seeds and inventing new technologies in the form of public goods and services for poor producers in developing countries (www.cgiar.org/).

4. As in the profit drive of an MNC and the social goals of an NGO; see Brugman and Prahalad 2007.

5. The abrupt and severe price rises from late 2007 may give short-term windfall returns until the oil-based inflation adds to the structure of input costs.

6. To put India in perspective. the World Health Organization gives rates as follows: UK 17; US 19; Scotland and France: 30; Russia 73: WHO data.

7. Food Security and Environmental Change Conference, Oxford University 2008 www.gecafs.org/FoodConferencePresentations.htm.