Emaan Singh Mann is a happy farmer, a rare commodity in India's northern state of Punjab, where over-farming and a falling water table have affected productivity on the broad plains that gave rise to India's Green Revolution of the 1960s, writes Fortune magazine's John Elliott in an insightful report on how leading Indian companies are developing contract farming to feed the world as well as India's retail revolution.

He's happy because FieldFresh, a new company that plans to become India 's first large-scale exporter of produce, has leased 90 acres of his land to grow vegetables that need less water than the wheat, rice, and sugarcane he used to cultivate. FieldFresh will pay him slightly more than the US$30,000 a year he was getting and it hires his tractors as well as pays his workers.

Until recently, like tens of millions of other farmers, Mann had been forced by law to sell his produce at mandi s, a network of local markets originally introduced to protect poor farmers from exploitation but now controlled by cartels of traders, bureaucrats, and moneylenders.

He would be paid the official minimum price or less for his produce, but no one would tell him what vegetable varieties sold well or show any interest in improving quality. The produce would then be sent via other middlemen on a slow and often hot journey to retail customers. En route, according to estimates by agriculture expert Abhijit Sen, a member of India 's Planning Commission, between 30% and 40% of it would rot before it got to market.

[ delWine Editor's Note: FieldFresh is a 50:50 joint venture between E. L. Rothschild, a British investment firm owned by a branch of the Rothschild banking family, and Bharti Enterprises, one of India's two biggest telecom operators, which is planning to set up a nationwide retail chain, reportedly with Britain's Tesco, as well as an export business.]

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