Transformation in Retail markets. Good or Bad?

Disintermediation (removing layers and layers of middlemen) of goods travelling from producer(farm owners) to consumer(you and me) is one of the primary goals of retail revolution. Direct FDI in retail in the next 5 yrs would eventually lead this economy to dsintermediated and effective chain mostly composed of producer, optional-trader and retail/wholesale groups.

PROS:
It serves many purposes to the stakeholders:1) Keeps the CPI (consumer price index) and the inflation in constant check as consumer will have to spend less to get more as a result of world-class logistics/supplychains of these retail groups compete to get consumers into thier stores, there by giving the consumer a quality product at competitive price (which our indian consumers were never previleged with in the past).

2) Will for sure benefit the producer/farmer as these retailers attempt to cut all the layers and go direct to producers for procurement in several ways (a)contract farming where farmers are ensured of risk-free returns for your harvest, (b)smart traders making use of commodity futures to hook up the aggregated produce to retail-procurers at very good rates that will eliminate layers ….benefits farmers and retail/wholesale procurers.

3) Will encourage farmers to start cultivation using up-to-date farming techniques for high-yields at low capital/operating costs as there is a clear danger of getting marginalized in this new world if his farm isn’t delivering the product at the same price as others.

4) will lessen/status-quo the subsidization burden on federal/state coffers as improved productivity in the chain would more than compensate for the costs of WTO-forced integration of indian economy to global market where a farmer in Idaho could dump his well-subsidized and high-yield produce to countries like india and china.

5) Gradually helps to Scrap all these inefficient and corrupt state/federal agri. mktg agencies that barley accomplished thier stated objectives.

6) Encourages cooperative movement amongst farming community to collectively share the burden of improvisation techniques to compete well on global level.

CONS:
As with any change in staus-quo, there ought to be some cons with this change.
1) Economy of Scale wold tilt in favour of agrarian-economies where large-tracts of land would be harvested by effective-farming techniques and hooked to world-class consumer delivery supply-chains.(TRANSLATION: Big corporate (or) entrepreneur managed contract-farming done with an up-to-date farming techniques and harvests sold to efficient retail–supply chains like Reliance, Mittal-Walmarts. Innovative/Creative small/medium farms is always an exception anywhere). This would certainly happen to our farming in the next 5-10 yrs. Eventually this is inevitable for any capitalistic economy integrated into world through WTO.
What would happen to small and midsize farming community who had been prcatising farming using traditional low-yield techniques on small tracts and relying on thier harvest for decades?
This is where our federal policies and 5/10 yr plans should kick-in to plan and support a smooth transition of this community to other sectors where jobs/business opportunities being created would be serving this huge-block of farming community. How skillfull is our federal stewards in doing this is going to dictate the level of civil-unrest that has to be managed by our country in the next 1-2 decades.

2) There would be a significant downsizing of the number of mom-and-pop retail stores currently serving consumers. Assuming that the jobs created with these big-retailers and thier upstream logistic lifecycle (walmart itself employs 1.2 million in USA at it’s 3400 stores that’s visited by 100 million consumers) is a bigger figure when compared to the job-loss at these unorganized retail sector, the only concern that govt. has to interpret correctly is the often complained (not fully substantiated) sub-standard quality of life that’s common place with these walmart-kind of employers (The average full-time hourly wage for a Wal-Mart employee is $9.98, which is just above the minimum wage).

Any thoughts??