Evolving Modes of Capital Accumulation in Agrarian West Bengal

I. Context

In 1967, between 1969-1970, and between 1977–2011, West Bengal was governed by coalitions led by the CPI(M) [Communist Party of India (Marxist)]. In rhetoric, it lived up to its name. It positioned its goal as bringing about socialist relations of production. It perceived the Constitution of India as a bourgeois document that perpetuated private property relations; it saw this as a limitation on the sorts of policies it sought to implement.^c1,c2 Even within those confines, the party stated that it saw its immediate tasks as:

Abolition of landlordism without compensation and distributing gratis to agricultural laborers and poor peasants, cancellation of debts to landlords and moneylenders, cheap credit and modern infrastructure and technologies, adequate wages and the encouragement of co-operatives on a voluntary basis.^c3

The CPI(M) translated this rhetoric into an extensive land reform effort. The state dispossessed (in local vocabulary, vested) 104.5 lakh acres of land above legal ceilings for private ownership to 254.4 lakh beneficiaries. This amounted to around 8.2% of land being redistributed to 58.6% of households.^c4 In the same era, the rest of the country had been experiencing a consolidation of land ownership: land markets elsewhere in India generally transferred land from smallholders to large landowners.^c5 But even in the frame of land markets, Vikas Rawal’s 1977–1995 sample showed that West Bengal’s land transactions were decentralizing land ownership. Nonresident and large landowners sold the most and bought the least land; 32.5% of households that owned land in 1995 had been landless in 1977.^c6 The state and even the market subverted an existing regime of capital accumulation: large-scale ownership of agrarian land.

The CPI(M)-led Left Front achieved many successes in its agrarian reform. It redistributed small plots of land to marginal and landless households. It improved sharecropping tenants’ rights. But rural poverty in West Bengal continued through the period, relations of production remained fundamentally exploitative, and the agrarian sector was structured to the end of capital accumulation in arrangements not present in the preceding period. In this paper, I provide an account of the state’s goals during the period when this regime of capital accumulation (section II), how this regime of capital accumulation managed to emerge in parallel with those goals (section III), and how that regime changed and new ones emerged in the neoliberal era starting at the turn of the millennium (section IV). While this paper provides an account of the fundamental mechanisms of these regimes of capital accumulation, further research is needed to understand their environmental impact and their intersectionality with caste.

West Bengal's land reform assessed on its own terms

There was a particular historical reading of West Bengal’s relations of production that informed the nature of its land reform efforts. An account of those efforts on their own terms is inextricable from this reading, which is as follows:

The Permanent Settlement was the agreement that brought West Bengal under British East India Company rule, and it established a class of zamindars who the British recognized as rightful owners of the land. They had the right to fix revenues from it, creating a landed class that supported British authority. In the Ganga-Padma basin of Bengal, where the conditions make for high agricultural output, the extraction of large rent surpluses resulted in a tiered system of rent-extracting intermediaries. However, the agrarian relations in other parts of the country were different. The North Bengal Terai and the Sunderbans are regions that require high labor input for smaller surpluses: the Terai’s foothills need to be reclaimed from vegetation to be cultivated and the Sundarbans’ saline wash grounds provide smaller yields. These areas had a sharecropping system called the barga system. Under barga, land is leased to bargadars who till the soil for a share of the yield. Barga sharecropping became the dominant mode of labor between the 1930s and 1950s.^c7,c8 This intensified after zamindari relations were abolished by the federal government in 1951. Under the colonial system, the zamindar would often not be present on the land from which he extracted rent: the direct management of the land was delegated to the jotedar.

In this historical reading, the abolition of zamindars and the spread of barga created a ‘semi-feudal’ mode of labor. In this system, the remaining jotedar had two modes of exploitative accumulation over the bargadar: usury and land ownership.^c9 In the traditional arrangement, a jotedar providing no material inputs whatsoever receives a 50% share of the crop.^c10 To provide for a combination of those inputs and their basic needs, the bargadarⁿ¹ must take a loan. But as a landless tenant with no asset to borrow against, the only institution of credit available to them is from their jotedar. The jotedar’s loan is structured in such a way that the bargadar pays it back in kind with the next harvest at interest rates typically around 50–100%. This leaves the bargadar with not enough to eat, meaning they must take another consumption loan. At the same time, the jotedar can accumulate a reserve of grain from his bargadars. He can sit on this supply and then sell it back to them at higher prices in the lean season just before the next harvest. From this arises a de facto feudal arrangement in which the bargadar is tied to their land until their debts are settled.^c11 Of course, these debts are structured to never be settled. This system makes the jotedar’s interests regressive: technological improvements that would increase bargadar productivity would mean they have a greater surplus over their consumption needs. This would reduce their requirement for the consumption loan and therefore eliminate one of the jotedar’s primary modes of accumulation.^c12

The first CPI(M) led governments under the United Front (1967, 1969-70) were not the first to pass laws seeking to improve labor rights based on this perception of material relations. At the state level, the Indian National Congress had been doing so since at least 1950. The Bargadar Act of that year entitled sharecroppers and landlords to a third of the crop each. The final third was divided according to relative contributions to the cost of production. In 1955, the West Bengal Land Reform Act entitled sharecroppers to 60% of the crop if they contributed inputs, and the landowner could not evict tenants unless the owner chose to take back that land for ‘personal cultivation.’ On paper, of course, this improved bargadar’s position from the traditional 50/50 cropsharing arrangement. In reality, these laws effectively resulted in mass evictions. The ‘personal cultivation’ provision included hiring wage labor. The legal framework restructured tenancy in favor of the bargadar and then provided the jotedar with a means to exit from tenancy relations, rendering the bargadar a mere wage laborer.^{c13, c14, c15} This reinforced an existing shift in Bengali agricultural labor relations that I will return to in the following section. The laws also included land ceilings above which the state would confiscate (“vest”) land and redistribute it. These could be easily circumvented with benami transfers, where the property is held in the name of a person and the beneficial owner’s name is made anonymous.^{c16, c17} In any case, Congress’ unwillingness to restructure the administrative state meant that though the law favored bargadars, its enforcers favored jotedars:

The landowner, in alliance with the local police and land reform administration, could in most cases effectively deny the tenant his rights… Apart from the lack of documentation in support of his claim, it was not easy to find lawyers who would enthusiastically pursue his case to the annoyance of their traditional landowning clients. In the dispute between the landowner and the tenant, the former could almost always count on the support of the local guardians of the law, even when at the formal level the law was changed in favour of the tenant. To the local level administrators and police nothing was more natural than to see their role mainly as defenders of vested interests irrespective of the changes in law.^c18

As a result, bargadars did not enjoy the letter of these laws under the Congress government. Because of the administrative state’s deep links with the jotedar class, jotedar efforts to maintain the status quo or even weaken bargadar status had state sanction. In the cases in which agricultural land was vested, jotedars often just continued occupying it and operating on it as usual.

The United Front recognized this problem when it came to power in 1967. It decided that machinations of legislation were too slow, and that the command landowners had on the administrative state was too strong. Instead, they called for mass mobilization. Benami land was to be identified by peasants. Vested land that the administrative state had not itself taken over and redistributed should simply be occupied by peasants. As a result, Biplab Dasgupta reported that 3 lakh acres of land were redistributed under the United Front.^c20 If his estimate holds water, that would still only account for a drop in the bucket out of the 1.334 crore acres of net arable land in West Bengal.^c21 The United Front’s efforts to mobilize peasants when faced with regressive legal and administrative frameworks may have been admirable. But their ability to achieve their goal of redistributing land to the landless and improve bargadar rights was highly limited in their short time in power.

From 1977–2000, the Left Front government synthesized the United Front’s mass mobilization with a legislative approach. Land ceilings were reduced. The sharecropper’s share was increased to 75 percent. Sharecropping was made hereditary. The sharecropper had the right to decide the place of storage of the harvest. Landlords could only access their share of the harvest by issuing a receipt, which was the only proof of tenancy a sharecropper needed. The ‘self-cultivation’ loophole was closed by ensuring that ‘self-cultivation’ would really mean ‘self-cultivation,’ not wage labor.^c22 At the same time, Operation Barga was a joint legal and mass mobilization effort to register bargadars. Bargadars were encouraged to register in groups to raise solidarity and reduce the chances of jotedar intimidation. Their registration made their new legal rights far more enforceable, and eroded the singular hegemony of jotedar authority in their lives. Around 12 lakh bargadars were recorded, which Biplab Dasgupta contends is “the vast majority,” but Ratan Khasnabis estimates is only about half.^c23,c4

According to D. Bandyopadhyay, who had been part of the United Front’s land reform administration, the idea for this came from an exchange with a local peasant leader, Sambhu Tudu. This is representative of the self-conception of the Left Front in this era. Its leaders saw themselves as taking a necessary but incomplete legal route towards a revolution that was untenable without mass participation.^c25 Its defenders contended that the combination of administrative and constitutional limits — both of which they thought of as favoring bourgeois-landlord interests — forced them into being as limited and incremental as they were.^c26 One of the primary mechanisms by which the Left Front tried to circumvent these limitations was through the institution of the village panchayat, a local representative body. The creation of this institution transformed the structure of state and party in West Bengal. Prior to the first panchayat election in 1978, the CPI(M) had a membership of 3 lakhs; for the first panchayat election, 8 lakh new party members offered themselves up as candidates to fill the panchayat seats.^c27 For some, the panchayat successfully represented local peasant interests: it bypassed the alienation between Left Front goals and the regressive administrative state. D. Bandyopadhyay, for instance, attributes the incredible progress in groundwater irrigation to the panchayats. From 1976-77 to 1985-86 West Bengal’s increase in tubewells was an incredible 575.4%, compared to the All-India figure of 59.7%. Though they were mainly privately built, Bandyopadhyay argues that panchayat use of wage employment funds for agrarian infrastructure construction was what facilitated that private investment.^c28 However, John Harriss denies that panchayats played a significant role in the expansion of tubewell irrigation in his sample in Birbhum and Bardhamman.^c29 More fundamentally, Debal K. Singharoy contends that the panchayat did not live up to its promise of democratizing administrative power:

Radical grass-roots mobilisation has been replaced by institutionalized mobilisation of the peasantry in West Bengal. The strategy of ideological revisionism has co-opted the grass-roots mobilisation as the effective tool to keep the poor peasantry attached to the political parties… In effective terms there has been the replacement of the primordial form of domination over peasantry by the domination of the Left political parties…^c30

Singharoy contends that Operation Barga programs have been unable to provide peasants with economic security (let alone autonomy). This means they look to panchayats — which facilitate their access to credit, employment, and vested land — for help. This has created clientelistic relations where access to any of these benefits hinges on demonstration of party allegiance. Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee’s results point towards Singharoy’s account. The Left Front’s land redistribution was most extensive in places where they had just the absolute majority. In places where they had a larger share, it implemented them less, implying that local governments only implemented land reform when they needed it electorally.^c31 It’s possible that this was an honest effort on the part of the Left Front to democratize administrative power, which was then exploited by new, local party members who used the panchayat structure for their own gain. It’s also possible that this was always a strategy to co-opt grassroots mobilization and place it in a dependent relationship with party machinery. Regardless, the material reality seems to be that the panchayat did not provide the people (or the Left Front) with the administrative power necessary to more effectively redistribute land.

This meant that at the end of the day, Operation Barga distributed 104.5 lakh acres of land to 254.4 lakh beneficiaries, i.e., 8.2% of agrarian land was redistributed to 58.6% of households.^c32 These small holdings certainly benefited the families who acquired them. But they were just not enough to improve economic security, and certainly did not account for a fundamental change in property relations.

Drawing from the image of the jotedar who opposes agrarian progress, the government of West Bengal has argued that the improvement of agricultural production in the state has been due to the “fundamental and structural changes have taken place…which has unleashed the latent productive forces which hitherto could not be harnessed.”^c33 In terms of those latent productive forces, a large part of this increase in production was due to the cultivation of high yield varieties (HYVs). West Bengal’s percentage of cultivated rice area under HYVs increased from 29.60% to 56.03% between 1980–1981 and 1990–91.³⁴ As mentioned earlier, this coincided with a remarkable expansion of groundwater irrigation. Combined with the use of chemical fertilizers, this has made harvests secure against drought in the aman (monsoon) crop and made cultivation of a second crop during the boro (dry) season possible. This meant that its rice production increased from 7.5 to 10.4 million tons from 1980-81 to 1990-91, keeping pace with the growth of all-India production. But of course, the government’s claim that this was driven by structural changes is completely implausible. The rest of India didn’t benefit from the same land reforms but experienced the same growth in production. And of course, the redistribution of 8.2% of agrarian land is not a structural change!

In fact, John Harriss and G. K. Lieten have both argued that any marginal improvements in peasant life during this period are largely attributable to those technological advancements.^c37 In John Harriss’ sample, around one third of village households were able to purchase land between 1982 and 1991: all of them were able to do so because of the additional income from boro paddy cultivation. For most peasants, a whole new season of cultivation was more life changing than receiving less than an acre of vested land. In fact, income from the boro season meant that peasants broke their dependence on high-interest jotedar-issued credit.^c38 Of course, it was not the peasants themselves who facilitated these technological advancements, as they simply lacked the wealth to implement them. It was the landholders. But this reality contradicts the reading of material relations that informed Left Front policy. In that reading, credit was one of the jotedar’s primary modes of accumulation. This prompts the question: if technological advancement ended one of the main regimes of accumulation for the jotedar landholder, then why did they implement it?

III. Assessing the terms of West Bengal’s land reforms & the regimes of accumulation it permitted

The reason is that the jotedar-bargadar regime had already been declining prior to West Bengal’s land reforms. Even before they had started, technological progress made the aman crop far more reliable and the boro crop possible, drastically increasing the potential productivity of land if the initial capital was invested. Accumulation by the sustained credit-bondage of the bargadar — which is contingent on low-productivity land — became far less appealing when there was potential to extract such a large surplus from that land. At that point, guaranteeing a share of the produce to a sharecropper was less lucrative than hired wage-labor.^c39 This meant that by 1978, in Ashok Rudra and Pranab Bardhan’s sample, only 21% of tenants took production loans with interest from landlords. 23% took loans that required no interest payments, and 56% took no loans at all.^c40 The fact that West Bengal’s land reform efforts were always centered on improving bargadar status only accelerated this tendency. Landholders feared legislation would give their bargadars a higher share of the produce. They became hesitant to enter new shareholding agreements. In the end, this led to the mass eviction of existing bargadars. Their former jotedars re-hired them as wage-laborers.^{c41, c42, c43} In Vikas Rawal’s sample, only 20% of households cultivated land on a sharecropping basis.^c44 By 1981, barga relations accounted for only about a fifth of West Bengal’s agrarian land.^c45 The Left Front’s land reform effort not only protected a declining demographic that made up a fraction of the actual agrarian labor force, but it facilitated that decline by incentivizing the transition to wage labor.

The land reforms, built around the aforementioned imaginary of a jotedar-bargadar set of labor relations, simply did not fit the material realities of how labor was organized. For instance, they failed to address the thika system. In this relationship, the landowner leases-out land they cannot afford to cultivate to someone with more capital, who can. These sorts of tenancies are structured to benefit the wealthier party who leases-in, typically to many plots of land owned by several owners. They are typically in fixed payment of either cash or kind: the wealthy tenant does not enter sharecropping relations with the less wealthy landholder, as this would give the landholder far more than a fixed payment in kind. This is especially common for the more capital-intensive boro season paddy, which requires the support of tubewells, HYVs, chemical fertilizers, and other technological implements.^{c46, c47} Smallholders don’t have the wealth to access these implements themselves, so they enter a relationship that inverts typical imaginaries of landholder-tenant exploitation: they are landholders in contract structured towards the accumulation of a wealthier tenant. The labor for this system is either wage labor or (sub)leased-in through a joma system. Joma is a seasonal lease that allows the laborer to cultivate the land either on a sharecropping basis or with fixed payments. John Harriss’ sample may have demonstrated that laborers benefited from having a second season’s worth of income,^c48 but there is no doubt that their wage-labor or lease-in relations are structured primarily towards the accumulation of their capital-rich employer. Their appropriation of large surpluses have given them the ability to invest in the technology needed for boro paddy cultivation in the first place.

A government with the stated goals of West Bengal’s Left Front could have instituted a system more sensitive to the realities of labor relations. Land redistribution could have been combined with other policies that addressed these relations directly: for instance, providing land-poor cultivators with a way to collectivize to access credit and subsidies. This could allow them to modernize their practices and benefit from the boro paddy without a jotedar appropriating the surplus. Instead, without touching agrarian relations, the state provided cheap institutional credit for jotedars, meaning they were able to reap most of the benefits of technological progress and corner them off for their own personal capital accumulation.^c49

The jotedars’ post-bargadar regime of capital accumulation, though, was paralleled by the far larger scale, vertically-integrated ex-Zamindari and Marwari diasporic commercial oligopoly, whose methods of capital accumulation had been facilitated by central government policy. By the 1980s, technological inputs, transit systems, storage systems, credit, and 560 semi-automatic rice mills (each processing around 8000 tons per year) were vertically integrated. This was at the expense of the 40,000 mills that process around 5 tons per year.^c50 The central government facilitated this state of affairs in the name of its Public Distribution System (PDS), which was ostensibly designed to assure some supply of accessible and cheap grain. In order for PDS to be efficient, it looked to centralize rice supplies in particular sites to reduce its own procurement costs. The cheapest way to do this was through existing centers of capital: ex-Zamindari and Marwari owned rice mills. It legally mandated this centralization in several ways. First, through movement restrictions for small-time cultivators; second, through government-subsidized finance that facilitated the mechanization of those mills; and third, a system of paddy agents who collected paddy from farmers and were mandated to sell them to particular rice mills. Though it was positioned as a way to provide cheap grain for the country’s working class, the central government effectively enforced a mode of accumulation for the rice mill owners.^c51 At the state level, the Left Front didn’t seek to rework the administration of PDS in a more equitable way. In fact, provided liberal subsidies to labor-displacing technology for owners of agro-commercial capital.^c52 While previously, accumulation by usury was primarily for the jotedars, the new concentration of wealth in agro-commercial capital created a new system of accumulation by usury. Its owners lent downwards at rates far less favorable than the subsidized ones they had access to from the government.^c53 These credit relations had been far more important through decades of land reform than any credit relations between jotedars and bargadars. They operated in effectively the same way: the advance payment is so high that the loanee has virtually no money left to transact, keeping them in a state of perpetual indebtedness.^c55 By operating to end an imaginary of exploitative relations, the Left Front allowed that exploitation to be re-imagined elsewhere.

As mandated by the central government, PDS fixed prices of the rice it bought from the mills at below-market level so that it would be cheap for its consumers. As a result, the mills compensated by raising the price of the rice sold on the market. This effectively meant that PDS was primarily structured towards the accumulation of owners of agro-commercial capital, at least partially helped a limited urban population who had access to their cheaper provisions, and made grain more expensive for everyone else.^c55 By the 1990s, the agro-commercial elite used this surplus capital for further vertical integration: in the processing of rice husk into fuel, in the processing of burnt husk for high tech applications, in the processing of bran as commercial cow feed, and in the processing of rice into muri (puffed rice). All of these mechanized industries rely on the employment of wage laborers. They sometimes facilitated a new mode of accumulation for those who lease out smaller husking mills. Those leasing-in were usually indebted processor traders reliant on the same agro-commercial capital for credit.^c56

Outside of this vertically integrated agro-commercial circuit is the petty trade, processed by approximately 40,000 small, semi-mechanized rice mills. The Left Front was unwilling to finance or legitimize this trade, and actively thwarted it by making the semi-mechanized mills illegal. This was ostensibly to protect the women’s livelihoods who depended on the traditional dheki, a foot-powered rice mill. The reality was that these semi-mechanized mills became ubiquitous, but the only way they could stay competitive with the far more technologically advanced, legally sanctioned, and consolidated agro-commercial economy was based on women’s unpaid labor in the family.^c57

So, out of national efforts (reproduced by the Left Front at the state level) that were supposed to ensure a foundational cheap grain supply, new systems of exploitation and accumulation were born. A charitable reading might hold that the Left Front government was caught in a worldview tied to land ownership as opposed to commodity processing and distribution. As a result, it missed the emergence of this regime of capital accumulation and exploitation that emerged concurrently with its land reform efforts. Yet for the active role it played in subsidizing it, that is a hard position to hold. It's possible to charitably interpret state policies around PDS as appeasement of the national government to the end of allowing the Left Front to have more leeway in land reform. If this was the case, it would have been misguided. The land reform was predicated on an imaginary of labor relations that was simply no longer true. In fact, it helped end that very set of labor relations. In the process, the Left Front allowed for a new regime of capital accumulation for the jotedar, too: one based on wage labor, fixed-rate lease-ins, and the thika system.

The result of the Left Front’s decades of intervention — the vesting and redistribution of land, the improvement of bargadar rights, the state machinery that centralized grain processing into a handful of mills — was an agricultural economy that was structured through-and-through for capital accumulation.

IV. Neoliberal-era regimes of accumulation in agrarian West Bengal

At the turn of the millennium, the government undid many of the structures it had put together in the name of PDS. The restrictions that artificially facilitated capital accumulation for the large rice mill owners were dismantled in the name of liberalization. Paddy agents were untied from particular mills.^c58 Paddy agents now had autonomy in how they controlled their supply: they were no longer agents of the agro-commercial oligopoly but could act in competition with it.^c59 Mill owners no longer benefited from a low-price paddy guarantee, as paddy agents would sell to the highest bidder. At the same time, the petty circuit husking mills were given legal sanction, and with it, access to state credit.^c60 The large rice mills no longer cornered off the market with a system of legal privileges.

Liberalization may have eliminated the old mechanisms of state support for agro-commercial capital accumulation, but new mechanisms replaced it. The state abolished the movement restrictions that previously siloed West Bengal’s agrarian market from other states’. Unmilled paddy from poorer states with more exploitative labor practices (mainly Bihar and Jharkhand) could enter West Bengal. As a result, paddy prices went down from Rs. 640-790 a quintal to Rs. 320-315. Under the old system, the state artificially guaranteed rice processors a margin by creating state infrastructure that appropriated surplus from farmers and transferred it to the rice mills at a privileged low price. Under the liberalized system, the state guaranteed rice mill owners cheap paddy by letting them exploit spatial inequities within India. At the same time, it reduced subsidies on fertilizer, pesticides, and electricity, which raised the cost of production in West Bengal. During the 2002 aman season, the value of the output was equal to the cost of production; during the boro season, farmers faced losses.^c61

Meanwhile, liberalization had pushed prices so low that, for the first time, the state-set prices for rice procurement from the rice mills were above market price:^c62 a system ostensibly designed to provide cheap grain to the urban poor was effectively subsidizing margins for the rice mills. Before liberalization, PDS legally mandated capital accumulation for the rice mills; after liberalization, it ended up subsidizing it. At the same time, West Bengal’s agrarian poor lost state support and suffered from having an even poorer population integrated into their market; owners of capital kept their profits and found a new form of state support.

Neoliberalization has not just allowed for new regimes of capital accumulation for the same groups, but it has invented other regimes of capital accumulation for new groups. With this has come a discursive shift on the side of the state, epitomized in West Bengal’s Export Promotion Policy of 2023. Agrarian policy is not treated as a category in itself. It is integrated in a general “Development Model” based on investment in export economies.^c63 This investment is clearly meant to come from abroad. The document reads: “the world is looking at India for its potential in strengthening the global supply chain.”^c64 For West Bengal’s agrarian economy to be an appealing site for multinational capital, the state emphasizes commercial crops from which greater surplus value can be extracted. The document lists mangos, chillies, potato, and litchi among other horticultural produce.^c65 These commercial crops are perishable. They require motorable roads, refrigerated transport, and cold storage warehouses. To meet these needs, the state will use public-private partnerships (PPP).^c66 As a result, the restructuring of rural life to the ends of export-oriented agribusiness is also an opportunity for state transfers of wealth to private contractors. The document’s underlying logic is so deeply on the side of capital that it finds no need to justify why this will provide for general welfare. There are arguments to be made that linking small and marginal farmers to global markets is a means to generate wealth for them. There are arguments to be made that they benefit from the supporting infrastructure necessary to do so. But the state finds no need to articulate this perspective in its export policy. Its goal, prima facie, is to attract investment: the document reads as an advertisement to “attract concerned investors in the relevant domain.”^c57 In the state’s logic, investment is an end in itself.

This investment largely takes the form of contract farming. At the most basic level, this is an agreement between the farmer and the buyer — a multinational corporation (MNC) — in which the farmer agrees to provide produce at a fixed price at a certain time. This is particularly common for potatoes, one of the primary crops towards which agriculture in West Bengal has diversified.^c68,c69 Because they have a highly volatile market price,^c70 farmers often engage in contract farming to assure a minimum income.^c71,c72 In India as a whole, the average acreage of contract farmers’ holdings is 1.16.^c73 These are very marginal holdings. PepsiCo chooses to engage in contract relations with a very impoverished section of the population. Of course, PepsiCo is incapable of managing such fragmented holdings directly. Instead, they employ local commission agents, known as vendors. These vendors invest their capital in procuring inputs like seeds and pesticides from PepsiCo, which they in turn provide to farmers on credit.^c74 These inputs are sold in bundles, so farmers often find themselves buying pesticides that they don’t need given the weather conditions.^c75 MNCs at large develop seed varieties designed to break farmers’ self-reliance: they create varieties that germinate as hybrids if re-sowed. This means that the first generation will provide good yields but subsequent generations won’t. Farmers are forced into purchasing seeds for each season. Intellectual property laws that prevent farmers from even selling, giving, or even reproducing seeds are easy to enforce with the oversight embedded in contract relations: farmers are kept paying MNCs for inputs every year.^c76

At the time of harvest, farmers must sell their crop to PepsiCo vendors. Because the vendors provide them input on credit, they don’t have a choice. The farmers, with no means to organize collectively or communicate with PepsiCo, have no means to negotiate the price PepsiCo fixes. On top of that, the vendors find ways to push costs onto farmers which PepsiCo guidelines demand that vendors take. The most common form of this is making farmers pay the cost of transporting produce to a location convenient for the vendor.^c77 This meant that, in the 2021-22 season, contract farmers earned Rs. 32,709.69 less per acre than non-contract farmers: they may have the security of a minimum price, but they cannot benefit from higher market prices.^c78 Even that security is not absolute. Vendors can reject produce on the grounds that its quality is low, which can put farmers under just as much psychological pressure as market fluctuations.^c79

MNCs are able to manufacture consent for such a system because vendors are given a mode of capital accumulation integrated in global markets. Of course, they are typically of forward castes and have the wealth to afford the initial capital outlay. In Prasenjit Barik et. al’s sample, 13 vendors invested an average Rs. 17,012.70 per farmer, but sold Rs. 39,426.48 worth of potatoes per farmer, with each vendor averaging 23 farmers.^c80 Farmers’ returns may not be as good their non-contract farming counterparts. But if integration in global markets and access to credit is treated as a good in itself, then proponents can moralize the system regardless of what it entails for the farmers.

Interestingly, PepsiCo itself shies away from this sort of rhetoric. In its own discourse, it never claims to systematically assure the prosperity of its farmers. Instead, it appeals to a series of narratives that seem to be constructed to claim the exact opposite of material realities on the ground. Appealing to a narrative of sensitivity to local geographies and practices, PepsiCo claims to provide “Independent agronomic support… to demonstrate how practices will work on their individual farm with its specific soil and weather conditions.”^c81 As mentioned earlier, PepsiCo sells its pesticides in standard bundles that force farmers into buying pesticides that local weather conditions do not necessitate. Appealing to a narrative of horizontal partnership, PepsiCo claims to value “working shoulder-to-shoulder with farmers.” In reality, this took the form of various investments in “farmer-facing organizations.”^c82 PepsiCo uses its investments as a means to conjure up an image of horizontal partnership, when the reality of their relationship with farmers and vendors alike is a vertical and downward outsourcing of risk and responsibility. The investment risk is entirely on the vendor, who needs to recoup the investment in their oversight of the farmer. The production risks fall on both the vendor and the farmer, who rely on enough of their harvest being up to quality standards. Another example is that, across its global presence, PepsiCo has a mere 83 so-called “demonstration farms.” It uses these as grounds to claim that they offer “[s]ocial and cultural support: provid[ing] farmers with opportunities to connect with peers and community champions.”^c83 The reality of PepsiCo relations within communities in West Bengal is that indebtedness locks farmers into relationships with their vendors. These are on an individual basis, and usually oral, making it easy for vendors to treat them differently and find ways to extract more revenues from them on a case-by-case basis. PepsiCo is able to prevent any development of collective bargaining power in their contract farmers. Their common relationality is obfuscated through a multitude of intermediaries; their relationships with those intermediaries are atomized, informal, oral arrangements that enable localized exploitation. Through delegation downward, PepsiCo is able to exploit labor they would not have the capacity to oversee otherwise. Both in inputs and outputs, the farmers are bound to an MNC that extracts their wealth.

This is the second regime of capital accumulation in neoliberal rural West Bengal. In the state’s discourse, it is justified by an epistemology in which any foreign investment is conceived of as a good in itself; In the MNC’s discourse, it is justified by a series of imaginaries that paint a picture antithetical to material relations.

In its two rural instantiations, neoliberalism in West Bengal has allowed existing centers of capital to accumulate further surpluses thanks to spatial inequities. In the first instance, the existing local agro-commercial oligopoly benefited from liberalization that allowed them to profit from cheap labor in Jharkhand and Bihar. In the second instance, existing multinational capital benefited from liberalization that allowed them to profit off of Bengal’s marginal farmers. In that sense, agrarian West Bengal demonstrates a paradigm of (neo)liberalization: the “freeing” of markets allows for new regimes of capital accumulation based on the exploitation of marginalized people previously inaccessible to capital.