An Agro-Food Planning System: Democratic, Decentralized, Holistic, and Voluntary Participatory

In both capitalist and socialist economies, agricultural planning has been understood as the allocation of areas for planting of certain products; the production potential and ability to act rationally of farmers, the main productive actors, have been neglected. In addition, in both economic structures, the desired results have only been partially achieved by determining prices. These experiences reveal two important results. Firstly, agriculture can not be fully planned, but it cannot be continued without planning either. Secondly, it is necessary for agricultural products to have an exchange value, but price is a multifunctional phenomenon and how it is determined is important. The current equivalent of the claim that prices are determined through the market mechanism is to advocate that prices are determined by capitalist companies that have monopoly power in the markets. The increasingly severe problems and increasing fragility of agricultural food markets, which are already largely under the control of these institutions, already show that this structure is not a solution. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to provide food security by planning for primary agricultural products alone; agro-food production and distribution have acquired different structural characteristics, and it has become necessary to address food security within the framework of agro-food systems. Therefore, effective agricultural planning requires the planning of the agricultural food system as a whole. The e-nam system being popularized in India has achieved a certain success and shows not only that it is possible to organize and manage agricultural food markets after primary production but also that technological opportunities offer effective planning opportunities. In this study, based on historical and current experiences, the inadequacies of the market mechanism, the fact that agricultural production is carried out by using living things to produce living things, and the dependency of uncontrollable factors are taken into consideration in the development of a democratic mix of centralized and decentralized planning aimed at determining both the production quantities and prices by utilizing the capacity and conditions of farmers and technological opportunities to meet today’s needs. In accordance with this result, a basic planning proposal is presented.