America First, Farmers Last: How Trade Wars Risk India's Food Sovereignty

The plans for ‘reciprocal’ tariffs by the current US administration have rightly come under the analytical lens of economists and policymakers, who are assessing their impact on trade. These analyses have entailed the predictable effects of tariff wars or trade conflicts on pharma, electronics, agriculture, goods and commodities.

However, such wars have affected localised food systems, caused policy alterations and created long-term microscopic impacts within more extensive agrarian disruptions.

History shows that global tariff wars and trade conflicts have ripple effects.

During the 2018-20 trade wars between the US and China, China responded to US tariffs by imposing a 25% tariff on American soybeans – its largest agricultural import from the US. It led to a sudden drop in US soybean exports to China.

India took a hit when soya farmers in states such as Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan were left reeling as global prices crashed amid an oversupply of soybeans from the US. India failed to meet Chinese demand due to a lack of infrastructure and logistics. Soy farmers, under pressure, sold it below the minimum support price (MSP) to intermediaries and traders. As Chinese demand shifted to Brazil and Argentina, global soybean prices fluctuated.

Similarly, the North American Free Trade Agreement implemented in 1994 aimed to eliminate trade barriers between the US, Mexico and Canada. Mexico, where corn/maize is a significant crop, traditionally protected small farmers through policies and tariffs. As it removed tariffs on US corn and agricultural imports, highly subsidised corn from the US market flooded Mexico.

Small farmers were eliminated from global competition, leading to the disruption of the local corn ecosystem. Bigger agri-businesses bought cheaper US corn and began to dominate the high-yielding, often industrialised economy of corn production.

As rural livelihoods and land systems collapsed, millions of farmers became landless migrants. Monocropping and the erosion of Indigenous food cultures particularly hit hard the tribal campesino (rural, peasant farmers) communities, who lost many varieties of Indigenous maize. Beyond the ecological repercussions of biodiversity loss and GMO crops, the rural economy witnessed impoverishment and the mass destruction of livelihoods.

The loss of food autonomy caused by trade policies and changes in tariffs – which are decided by top leadership often on the high horse of economic nationalism (like what ‘America First’ espouses), as a negotiation tactic, as an electoral strategy or as a narrow attempt to revive localised regions in the US witnessing an industrial decline – hits harder for those at the bottom of the food supply chain.

States such as Mexico were coerced to tag along with neoliberal ideals through a series of IMF conditionalities and tempting debt adjustment plans. History shows that the US often uses asymmetric dependency to dominate trade and tariff policies and turn the tables on countries already inhabiting vulnerable agrarian economies and independent, microscopic local agrarian structures already reeling under global pressures.

Moreover, many US sanctions since the Cold War have been notorious for impeding economic growth, be it the 1987 oil embargo levied on South Africa or the 2011-14 sanction on Iran to stop the country from building nuclear weapons.

The ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on India, among other countries, will have far-reaching consequences on localised food culture, microscopic food systems and vulnerable food ecologies. Although farmers, the commodities market and pharma businesses are gearing up for the tariff war, minor farmers, peasants and those at the bottom of India's agrarian crisis will bear the brunt too.

Indigenous food pathways, that is, crops such as local seeds and millets attached to ancestral memories, could be erased.

India has used high tariffs to protect vulnerable domestic farmers from subsidised US goods. Local agro-economies, including those within indigenous food cultures, have gradually shifted to commercial cultivation to cater to an export-oriented economy. Many of these farmers who are new to the game already lack safety nets and alternative sources of income or investment.

These farmers may find export markets shrinking, leading to wastage and overproduction. Their produce would be sold in alternative domestic markets at a lower MSP, or more radical shifts can happen to cater to domestic markets.

Thus, farmers might target domestic markets by growing wheat/rice monocrops, oilseeds or animal feed or shift attention to demands from markets in the Middle East and Africa. The already-shrinking agroecology and food diversity in many regions might transition to the cultivation of incentivised maize (to cater to some Asian markets), oilseeds or exotic vegetables.

Land use patterns, particularly in tribal communities, might change from the cultivation of millets to soybean or maize for exports, threatening traditional ecologies and diets.

Cultural rights and an already faltering local hold over food sovereignty might significantly decline if the government removes some protective tariffs, giving more of a free hand to traders and middlemen.

Input-heavy farming for these relatively new crops might require initial monetary investments with unfair interest rates; heavy machinery (particularly imported ones) can further add up costs.

Thus, a tariff war can fuel global input cost volatility, destabilise local autonomy and increase global dependency.

Finally, such disempowerment goes beyond small farmers and has an amplified effect on women. Sociologist Bina Agarwal's research shows that women operate more within a subsistence economy. In contrast, men gradually shift to a market, export-oriented agrarian economy.

Trade shocks, such as the current US tariffs and the subsequent market volatilities, disproportionately impact women. Women's control over land wanes and unpaid or hidden labour increases massively within such market restructuring.

Women's role within the subsistence economy is made even more precarious by patriarchy as dynamics of land control, prices, rights of decision-making and knowledge of ecology acutely come under pressure. Women cannot easily transition into a market economy due to a lack of or limited land ownership, which impedes access to formal credit and subsidies. Trade and tariff decisions and market policymaking are mostly skewed to favour men.

While the illusion of independence, self-reliance and decoupling from developed Western economies fuels idealistic nationalist rhetoric, the realities of entanglement with the global economy, interdependence and its repercussions may hit the country harder than is assumed.

Thus, ideals of agrarian self-reliance, political autonomy and autonomous policymaking become masculine myth-making without a long-term vision to build sustainable agroecology, formulate women-centred land and agricultural policies and redesign tariff policies with an agroecological lens.

Focusing on building strategic, resilient agrarian systems and agriculture inputs, strengthening local and rural markets and expanding the public distribution system to include diverse crops beyond rice and wheat can lead to comparatively self-reliant rural microscopic units, which can absorb some of the impending shocks of this trade war if the tariffs are imposed.

Abhinita Mohanty is an assistant professor at the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University. She is a sociologist and a development practitioner working on the intersections of sustainable food systems, land relations and structural inequality in India.

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