A secure and independent agricultural peasantry is the only base on which a people rises.
In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.
Our Indian neighbors are advancing, many of them with spirit, and others beginning to engage in the pursuits of agriculture and household manufacture. They are becoming sensible that the earth yields subsistence with less labor and more certainty than the forest.
I always said that to get India stronger, first strengthen its roots, and all our roots are our country's interiors, rural areas, and villages.
If farmers become weak the country loses self-reliance but if they are strong, freedom also becomes strong. If we do not maintain our progress in agriculture, poverty cannot be eliminated from India.But our biggest poverty alleviation programme is to improve the living standard of our farmers. The thrust of our poverty alleviation programmes is on the uplift of the farmers.
In Africa, animals and the natural landscape allow local communities to support themselves, as there is a constant source of money from tourism.
It’s been proven that of all the interventions to reduce poverty, improving agricultural productivity is the best.
I do think that there is a big difference between family farms and agri-business, and one of the distressing things that I think has occurred is with consolidation of farm lands. You've seen large agri-businesses benefit from enormous profits from existing farm programs, and I think we should be focusing most of those programs on those family farmers.
After long centuries, agrarian civilization is weakening. Is sufficient attention being devoted to the arrangement and improvement of the life of the country people, whose inferior and at times miserable economic situation provokes the flight to the unhappy crowded conditions of the city outskirts, where neither employment nor housing awaits them?
Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture.
India and other developing nations need non-farm sector activity. So what we are doing, we are giving small microbusiness to the rural women, especially the farmers' wives.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Growth in village economies is often ignored. It should not be.
Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
It Is in the Agricultural Sector That the Battle for Long- Term Economic Development Will Be Won or Lost.
He that would look with contempt on the pursuits of the farmer, is not worthy the name of a man.
There is too little public recognition of how much we all depend upon farmers as stewards of our soil, water and wildlife resources.
Bharat Nirman was a development programme aimed at stepping up public investment and public-private partnerships in the construction of rural roads, drinking water supply, rural telecommunication, rural housing, and minor irrigation.
Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.
It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'
Women in Africa are really the pillar of the society, are the most productive segment of society, actually. They do agriculture.
Family farmers are small farmers who love the land. They're still not getting enough money for their product and are rapidly losing their battle to stay in business. By helping the American family farmer, we will in turn help ourselves out of the economic hole that we find ourselves in today. It doesn't really matter how we got here; the point is, we have to dig our way out.
The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?
The rubber industry is of much significance to our countries. For millions of our smallholders, the rubber tree is a tree of life, serving as a crucial source of income for earning a living and raising families.
I want to remain that family farmer independence, which I think is so critical to this country. I think it's helped build this country.
