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There is no crop that is as closely associated with the politics of a state, or at least parts of it, as sugarcane in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. No wonder the Narendra Modi government recently announced sops for the sugar industry days after his party, Bharatiya Janata Party, was defeated by a united opposition in the by-election in the Kairana Lok Sabha constituency in the sugar belt of western UP.While the sugar industry has been dealing with record production levels and a fall in prices, with farmers being owed Rs 22,000 crore by sugar mills, the timing of the relief package has political overtones. Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, the country’s largest sugarcane-growing states, are also the largest states by Lok Sabha seats, accounting for 128 seats between them out of the total 543.Modi and BJP president Amit Shah need these states to deliver for the party to retain power in 2019 — and the government’s largesse to the sugar industry is a small step in that direction. Both these states are also ruled by the BJP (in alliance with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra).One of the reasons for the jump in sugarcane production in UP is a new variety of the crop. Mukesh Kumar, a 35-year-old farmer in Bhola village in Meerut in western UP, has begun to shift to the new variety, called Co 0238. He acknowledges he is late. Most cane farmers in Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Kairana in the region have already experimented with this variety. Co 0238, he says, is superior, giving higher yields and bigger returns. Locals call Co 0238 “Arthis”, which is 38 in Hindi.In the sugar belt of Uttar Pradesh — the state contributes almost half of India’s total sugarcane and 36% of sugar production — “recovery rate” is a common parlance. It means the percentage of sugar extracted from sugarcane. “Most of us have been using Co 0238 for the last two years,” says Muhammad Haleel, a resident of Kairana, “(and) the recovery rate of Arthis is very good.”One sugar mill in Sitapur district of the state recorded the highest sugar recovery at 12.1% in 2015-16, something that propelled most farmers to abandon traditional varieties and embrace the new one.Over 100 kilometres away, at Delhi’s Krishi Bhavan, SK Pattanayak, Union secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, is cautiously optimistic as he praises this sugarcane variety. “The rapid expansion of the geographical area under sugarcane cultivation is attributed to Co 0238.This variety has become very popular in Uttar Pradesh in particular,” he says. About 60% of sugarcane cultivation in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Bihar is of this variety, prompting overproduction and the resultant drop in sugar prices.So, is the success of Co 0238 a story of crop science alone? Not really. Its political implications could be humongous. After all, the expansion of the total area under sugarcane cultivation in UP would also mean the growing clout of cane farmers in the state.The party won 71 (its ally bagged another two) out of the state’s 80 seats in the 2014 general election, helping it to manage a simple majority on its own. The politics of cane matters as sugarcane farmers have an impact in 25-30 seats. The state’s sugar belt spans across districts such as Baghpat, Balrampur, Bijnor, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Shamli and Sitapur.Earlier this week, ET Magazine travelled through the sugarcane belt of Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat and Kairana to understand farmers’ demands, the complex relationship between factories and farmers, the possible impact of the Centre’s recent sugarcane relief package and the politics of sugar.Just last month, the candidate of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Tabassum Hasan, supported by the opposition parties, won in Kairana, previously held by BJP, prompting RLD to coin a slogan, “Jinnah hara, ganna jeeta” ( Jinnah loses, sugarcane wins), apparently referring to the politics around some rightwing organisations’ outrage over the portrait of Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah in Aligarh Muslim University.RLD’s vice-president Jayant Chaudhary argues that sugarcane farmers were solidly behind its candidate.“The Centre’s sugarcane relief package is much ado about nothing. It’s a mere attempt to manage optics in the aftermath of the Kairana results and our party’s slogan on ganna,” he says. “Sugarcane farmers have to constantly stay vigilant. They have to stay organised and create pressure.”Union minister and BJP leader from UP, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, brushes aside the theory that sugarcane farmers as a whole went against the party in the by-election. “Our loss in the Kairana by-poll has nothing to do with ganna. Here, the opposition parties got united and a transfer of votes took place. We will have a new strategy for 2019.”The Union government in March waived 20% customs duty on sugar to allow exports of 2 mt (million tonne) of sugar in 2017-18 to clear some surplus stock before the next season. But the industry is demanding the limit be raised to 8 mt.The government in May provided farmers a production subsidy of Rs 5.5 per 100 kg of sugarcane, totalling Rs 1,540 crore, helping millers clear some of their dues. Last week, it announced what it called a Rs 7,000 crore package to create a 3 mt buffer stock of sugar for a year, setting a minimum price of Rs 29 per kg for white sugar at mills. The government also said it would provide interest relief of Rs 1,332 crore on loans to sugar mills for ethanol production. The Union government sets a minimum price every year that mills have to pay sugarcane farmers and some states fix prices higher than that.While it seems the government has announced a total relief package worth over Rs 8,500 crore, Prakash P Naiknavare, managing director of the National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories (NFCSF), says the sops do not add up to more than Rs 4,050 crore. Sanjay Khatal, MD of Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation, says sugar mills expected a price of Rs 32/kg for sugar this season, but it dropped to Rs 24. “If we got a minimum price of Rs 3,200 (per quintal) there would have been no need of a package.”Of the country’s 524 sugar mills, 187 are in Maharashtra and 119 in UP. While a majority of the units in the former are cooperative factories, UP has more private mills. The dominance of cooperative sugar factories in Maharashtra, which uses a different variety of sugarcane than Co 0238, is hardly, surprising given their history and inextricable ties to politics.Vithalrao Vikhe Patil set up the country’s first cooperative sugar factory in the state’s Ahmednagar district in 1951. Three years later, the government announced plans for 12 more and over time they came to be integral to the rural economy of western Maharashtra and then Marathwada, where the Maratha community dominates the sugar industry.Since each cooperative factory has a network of sugarcane farmers as members, controlling it meant access to a captive vote bank and elections to the boards of these units were — and are still — fiercely contested. Subhash Deshmukh, cooperatives minister in the BJPled government in Maharashtra, says till the mid-1990s, each sugar factory had its territory of farms marked out and no sugar factory from outside that area could source sugarcane from farmers there. “So people were scared that if they didn’t vote for the candidate (in general and state elections) who controls the sugar factory, their cane would not be taken.”Many state politicians, including former chief ministers, are or have been chairmen or board members of sugar cooperatives, which were controlled by the Congress, helped in no small measure by Sharad Pawar, whose hometown Baramati in Pune district is in western Maharashtra. After Pawar broke away from the Congress to form the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the late 1990s, he took most of the cooperatives with him. Now, NCP controls two-thirds of the co-operatives, Congress a fifth, and BJP and Shiv Sena the rest.NCP’s Dilip Walse Patil, a former speaker of the state assembly, says sugar cooperatives owed their influence to their contribution to the region by building schools and helping install water-efficient drip irrigation systems in farms. “Earlier, cooperative factories mattered in elections, but not now because this generation is not dependent on agriculture. They have more options,” says Patil, who is chairman of a sugar cooperative in Ambegaon in Pune district, a constituency he has been representing in the assembly since 1990. He is also president of NFCSF.Former chief minister Ashok Chavan, who also heads the state unit of the Congress, says all cooperative farmers need not be supporters of a party linked to the cooperative. “There is a misconception that these factories are political outfits.” Chavan is the director of a sugar cooperative in Nanded in Marathwada. Deshmukh also believes the power of cooperatives is on the wane. “There is no guarantee now that if you are the chairman of a cooperative sugar factory you will win an election.” Deshmukh’s Lokmangal Group runs two private sugar mills in Solapur and one in Osmanabad district.Sugar cooperatives have never been known for their management and financial propriety. “Since directors hail from the farming fraternity, their mindset is not attuned to the corporate way of doing things, so business decisions are delayed and go wrong,” says Naiknavare. Deshmukh says it would cost Rs 600-700 crore to revive the 40-odd sick sugar factories, most of them cooperatives, in the state.Added to these legacy issues are the problems of excess sugar and drop in prices. In 2017-18 (October to September), India, the world’s second largest sugar producer after Brazil, is estimated to produce 32 mt of sugar, 58% higher than in 2016-17. At the same time, global white sugar futures, which are a benchmark for prices of physical white sugar, have slid around 30% since February 2017.In light of this, it will be interesting to see how the Centre’s largesse plays out for BJP. The party made inroads into western Maharashtra and Marathwada in the 2014 Lok Sabha and subsequent state elections. BJP fought the 2014 general election with Shiv Sena, but not the state polls, and they are likely to fight the 2019 polls separately.Nitin Birmal, a political scientist, says the non-agricultural population is the BJP’s support base in western Maharashtra. Political analyst Surendra Jondhale believes BJP will look to further its position by addressing sugarcane farmers’ issues. “The Centre’s package is to connect with voters. BJP is blaming the chairmen of cooperative factories and saying they (BJP) are the ones helping farmers.”For sugarcane farmers in UP, the problems range from non-receipt of their dues from factories to delay in harvesting during winter, forcing them to skip a remunerative wheat crop. The factories issue what they call slips — some kind of a release order — without which farmers cannot cut canes and deposit those in mills.An uneasy relationship between the factories and farmers is palpable; the factories in UP are yet to clear dues of Rs 13,500 crore to farmers. “The recent sugar package is not just for the factories. If factories go bankrupt, sugarcane growers will be the biggest sufferers. The fate of the farmers is linked to the health of the factories,” says Naqvi.For most farmers, the anger towards the ruling party will be somewhat assuaged once they receive their arrears from factories. One of the BJP’s poll promises ahead of the 2017 assembly polls in UP was the settlement of cane dues within 14 days of supply at sugar mill gates, something that remains unfulfilled.“Most cane farmers are supporters of (Prime Minister) Modiji and Yogiji (Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath). We overwhelmingly supported the party in the 2014 Lok Sabha and 2017 assembly elections. But we have reasons to be upset. The government must rein in dishonest mill owners and force them to clear our dues,” says Vijay Bharadwaj, a cane farmer from Baraut in Baghpat district.It is hard to say how influential sugarcane farmers will be in 2019, but parties clearly cannot ignore them and, in the coming months, the BJP-led Union government will only try to appease them further.