Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

This transcription of a presentation, commentary and a discussion at IIM Bangalore in 2020 has three parts. In Part 1, contested definitions of food, urgent food questions and concepts of food systems are clarified before considering the ways agricultural markets are integrated in food systems, the contradictory principles at work in policies for their regulation, and the ways such policy practices are imagined. Sixteen multidisciplinary depictions of global food systems, agricultural markets and food policies are analysed, concluding that their conceptual fracturing results from a disregard of theory. New models of the Indian food system will need to give rigorous attention to institutions for policy. Part 2 problematises the empirical granularity needed to understand market behaviour that policymakers ignore as they shift agriculture from being the driver of industrialisation to being a residualised welfare sector. By continuing to ignore and misunderstand existing physical markets, regulatory reforms like the new central laws assume that the deregulation would somehow automatically bypass the vast number of private intermediaries necessary for distribution whose relatively easy-to-enter, small-scale activity undercuts the transaction costs of corporate agribusiness. In doing so, they lose sight of the original purpose and need for public regulation in primary agricultural markets in the first place. Part 3 discusses the need for consultative policy processes for policy and the implications for small scales and informality in agriculture and its markets of the close integration of self-employment in the rural non-farm economy.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

World University root node

Economic and Political Weekly

Agro-food Systems and Public Policy for Food and Agricultural Markets A Discussion

This commentary, part of a forum on India’s Agrarian Question, analyses India’s new controversial union Farm Laws and the farmers’ protest against them in the context of the history of agricultural market laws, and the political mobilisation commonly observed in actually existing markets in different Indian states and regions. It identifies two critical shifts in law and protest and their emerging dynamics and contradictions. The first is the shift in the locus of regulatory power and resistance from the states to the union government; the second is the presence of farmers rather than traders at the forefront of protests against market reforms and in defence of local, state-regulated markets. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.