Amanpreet Singh

State-controlled agricultural marketing systems play a crucial role in regulating prices, ensuring market access for producers, and protecting the interests of small and medium-sized farmers. From an economic sustainability perspective, these systems can stabilize farmers' incomes, reduce price volatility, and enable a fairer distribution of profits along the production chain. However, their effectiveness depends on management capacity, transparency, and adaptability to market changes and producer needs.

From an environmental perspective, government marketing policies can encourage sustainable practices by directing demand toward environmentally friendly products, supporting certification, and promoting agrobiodiversity. Nonetheless, they often face challenges such as excessive bureaucracy, insufficient integration with environmental protection initiatives, and limited support for innovations in sustainable production.

For state agricultural marketing systems to fully achieve the goals of economic and environmental sustainability, it is essential to enhance institutional capacities, foster greater collaboration with the private sector, and introduce measures that integrate environmental criteria into marketing and distribution processes. Only such a holistic approach can ensure long-term sustainability of agriculture at all levels.

The government-controlled agricultural marketing system has had mixed effectiveness in achieving economic and environmental sustainability. On the economic side, regulated markets and minimum support prices (MSP) have provided farmers with assured outlets and income stability, particularly for staple crops like wheat and rice. However, this has also led to regional crop monocultures, distorted price signals, and limited incentives for diversification into high-value or climate-resilient crops. Environmentally, procurement policies favoring water- and fertilizer-intensive crops have contributed to soil degradation, groundwater depletion, and higher greenhouse gas emissions. While market regulation has protected farmers from extreme exploitation, it has not fully integrated sustainability goals. A more balanced system—linking procurement incentives to sustainable practices, strengthening farmer-producer organizations (FPOs), and diversifying supply chains—would make the marketing system more effective in advancing both economic and environmental sustainability.