The argument is also made that corporate retail will encourage more corporate production, which in turn supposedly involves more efficient and less 'wasteful' use of the production.
But careful studies, including by Rahul Goswami, show that calculations of efficiency based only on marketed output really miss the mark, because they do not include the varied uses of by-products by farmers.
Biomass is used extensively and very scrupulously by most small cultivators, but industrial style farming tends to negate it and does not even measure it.
Goswami notes "the interdependence between biological resources, from the genetic to the landscape level, and long-standing traditions, practices and knowledge for adaptation to environmental change and sustainable use of biodiversity. Interdependence gives no place to waste or loss, and that principle governs India's most resilient and adaptive farming systems."
But this, and much more besides, is increasingly threatened by the shift to more corporate control of agriculture.
There is another critical matter that has barely been touched upon in the media, but it is likely to have huge implications for people over time.
Image: A farm labourer seen fills a box of mangoes at a wholesale fruit market in Jammu in this 2010 file photo.