Jan 13, 2026

The Agri-Cartel’s 35-Year Siege of India: From the 1991 Crisis to the 2026 Seed Act

CST Research

As the Indian Parliament moves into the February 2026 Budget Session, there is a sense of déjà vu in the country. While the world celebrated the repeal of the 2020 Farm Laws as a victory for farmers and their year-long protest, the underlying blueprint never left the table. It has simply been rebranded and digitised.

Today, the introduction of the Seeds Bill 2025—frequently called the 2026 Seed Act—completes a pincer movement that was first inked 35 years ago in the halls of the World Bank and the IMF.

The story begins in 1991. Facing a balance-of-payments crisis, India accepted a structural adjustment package that evolved into a massive cumulative debt through decades of servicing and conditional reform.

Over three decades, this financial hook grew to more than $120 billion in cumulative obligations. When adjusted for 2026 inflation in today’s dollar terms, that commitment represents around $286 billion.

The ‘interest’ has been the systematic dismantling of India’s sovereign food systems through successive policy realignments to make way for global corporate players, steadily shifting the nation from a focus on food security to a dependency on cash-crop exports and expensive external inputs. These reforms have progressively aligned Indian agriculture with global trade, intellectual property and financial regimes.

Many of the long-term dynamics set in motion in 1991 are analysed in detail in the book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022), which examines India’s agrarian crisis, neoliberal ‘reforms’, and the 2020–21 farmers’ protest (available as a free download here).

This 35-year plan has now entered its bio-digital phase. Two pieces of legislation are currently working in tandem to finalise the enclosure of India’s farmers. First is the National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing (NPFAM), the sophisticated successor to the repealed farm laws. It utilises ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’ and Silicon Valley ‘AgriStack’ to create a unified national market that effectively bypasses the regulatory protections of the traditional mandi system.

By declaring private warehouses as ‘deemed markets’ and linking farmer IDs to a centralised digital grid, the NPFAM would enable unprecedented price-setting power for global asset managers and Indian billionaires to monitor harvests and dictate prices before a single seed is even planted.

The second half of this pincer is the 2026 Seed Act. Scheduled for full implementation this year, it introduces mandatory registration and QR-code traceability for all commercial seeds. While the government claims the Act protects farmers’ rights to share ‘unbranded’ seeds, this is a hollow promise.

Under the NPFAM, only ‘certified’ and ‘traceable’ produce can enter the high-value digital value chains. This makes indigenous, unbranded seeds commercially invisible—relegating them to a subsistence-only bubble while corporate-patented hybrids take over. Furthermore, the Act introduces graded penalties that can reach ₹30 lakh ($33,300) for administrative errors, a figure that would pose an existential risk for any small-scale seed-saving collective.

This predatory commercialisation was forged in Washington 35 years ago: a drive for monopolisation by a handful of global agribusiness giants and tech firms under the guise of ‘modernisation’.

Federal states like Punjab and Kerala now pass resolutions to reject the NPFAM and protect their own seed sovereignty, while others are being financially coerced or ‘incentivised’ to play along.

The forces of human displacement and dispossession are attempting to finalise a decades-long corporate hijack through debt, digital infrastructure and legislative control. The 1991 deal was the beginning. What began as a financial adjustment is now rapidly evolving into a total restructuring of India’s food sovereignty, agriculture and—given that around 64% still live in the countryside—society.