Reflections or Interview - Reflecting on Food Policy and Agriculture in India: An Interview with Devinder Sharma

Abstract

Food policy and agriculture are important domains of scholarship across the world. However, these areas remain at the margins of management research and teaching in India. The following interview with Devinder Sharma is an attempt to bridge this divide and to raise some important public policy issues. Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. He has also worked as a journalist with The Indian Express for a decade. Sharma has been a Visiting Fellow to the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia and a Press Fellow to University of Cambridge, where he researched on agriculture and world trade. His thought-provoking essays are routinely published across the world in academic and popular publications that include Third World Resurgence, New Scientist, The Ecologist, New York Times, and The Guardian. He has also published four books: GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair, Trade Liberalisation in Agriculture: Lessons from the First Ten Years of WTO, GATT and India: Politics of Agriculture, and In the Famine Trap. Sharma has been an outspoken critic of industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, globalization, and free trade. He chairs the New Delhi-based 'Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security' and is one of the coordinators of a nation-wide 'Coalition for GM Free India'. He offers rich insights into the state of Indian agriculture and food policy in this interview with Rohit Varman.