Commercialisation Of Agriculture

“Commercialisation of agriculture” refers to cultivating crops for commercial selling instead of personal use. An “excess” of output above must be used to market farm goods. However, agriculture was only primitive during the period. It was not the result of peasants’ deliberate responses to market pressures. As a result, the idea of the surplus was only partially meaningful. The marketable surplus was decided by the peasants’ human community, not their entrepreneurial activity. Farmers’ small-scale agricultural needs frequently influenced the choice to produce cash crops. As a result, corporate agriculture in India was not the result of “peasant economic efficiency.”

Phases of Commercialisation

In India, there have been three main forms of agricultural commercialisation. Plantation agriculture, particularly tea plantations in Bengal’s northern regions, was the earliest type of commercialisation. The second commercialisation was dubbed ‘jute phase’ or subsistence commercialisation.’ Farmers in quest of a minimal subsistence standard of living switched to specialised cash crops, mostly jute, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underneath this jute variant of commercialisation.

The ‘reliant commercialisation’ and ‘indigo phase’ of the 18th & 19th centuries is a third type of commercialisation. The dependency and destitute commercialisation stages ‘were almost ubiquitous in influencing the constructive things of the labouring peasants of eastern India,’ even if there is no clean ordering of these periods of commercialisation. Increased supply in Europe provided a tremendous incentive for an entirely unprofitable crop such as indigo. The influx of foreign finance was a defining feature of this period.

Causes

Money-Economy

With the injection of money into town, the trend of commercialisation began to take off. However, commerce and money ties remained in the rural areas throughout the Mughal empire. The EIC offered to pay land tax in the currency as quickly as possible, frantically acquiring even more areas. Cash evaluations were implemented in the department of agriculture under British control. The old technique of paying land taxes gradually fell out of favour. As a result, the cultivator was forced to sell a portion of his harvest. This, unfortunately, isn’t the only issue. An influential merchant elite arose in India, benefiting the peasantry’s crushing debt.

Easy Transportation

Secondly, unless domestic transportation was enhanced, the influence of commercialisation could only go further. British authorities constructed the rail tracks. With the construction of rail tracks, crops by self-sufficient communities entered areas of Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Karachi. The primary motivation for the massive increase in railway building was to look after the interests of the department of agriculture in Britain. There was industrialisation brought about by colonial trade. The British cotton industry’s feedstock was virtually wholly colonial, though not Indian.

The Civil War

Furthermore, the American Civil War was another incident that encouraged the commercialisation of agriculture. As the United States entered the Civil War, the British need for raw cotton was moved between America towards India. Aside from natural cotton, shipments of other raw commodities such as jute, groundnuts, & essential commodities increased. Natural cotton shipments began to decline after the Civil War ended. However, this was more than offset by a significant increase in domestic consumption. A drop aided the increase in the local production of cotton in commodity prices to a more reasonable level. The cotton mills’ business began to spread throughout the cotton-growing regions. The trend toward commercialisation started to gain traction. It’s worth noting that perhaps the pattern of commercialisation for different agricultural commodities was not consistent.

Consequences 

The expansion of national and worldwide marketplaces for Indian agricultural commodities should have acted as a catalyst for the country’s agrarian growth! However, the actual outcomes were quite the opposite. Trade is described as “implicit production” or “high productivity.” However, Indian agriculture was surprisingly unresponsive to such influences of trade and business. Agriculture was relegated to the role of trade’s servant.

Agriculture’s commercialisation has not resulted in a shift inside the production system that may be classified as small-scale peasant agriculture. This industrial organisation maintained the cornerstone of commercial crop agriculture throughout the market revolution.

However, small-scale peasant farming gave rise to a new class of credit bankers who had great control over the production and sale of staple crops. A network of middlemen seized management control, even though they were by definition ‘parasites’ concerning agriculture. In other words, commercial agriculture’s expansion was encouraged and assisted by its twin brother, exorbitant capital.

Conclusion

In plenty of other ways, food growing is indeed a nearly a century practice that has enabled humanity to ensure its survival, among several other things. This has eased communication throughout the world’s many areas and set the groundwork for what we would now refer to as progress. Agriculture has changed so much in the last sixty years than in the preceding ten thousand years. Agriculture has changed so much in the previous thousands of years than in the previous thousand. It has transitioned from a public good to something like a commodity. Industrial farming is growing more popular, while remote regions are shrinking.