After the price of sugarcane disrupted both Parliament and Delhi traffic, the government has called for an all-party breakfast meeting on Monday to find a solution to what has become a gigantic political problem. One so large that it united every opposition party from the Right to the Left.

And at the end of a day that saw thousands of farmers protesting in Delhi's streets, the Prime Minister also assured Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi that he will review the government's policy on sugarcane pricing.

Within minutes of Parliament beginning its winter session , opposition parties, led by the BJP and Ajit Singh's RLD marched to the well of the House, demanding that the government cancel its sugarcane policy laid out in a new ordinance. BJP party president Rajnath Singh warned that he "will not allow Parliament to run till the ordinance is withdrawn." (Read: The controversy in a nutshell)  The Congress-led UPA government's allies, Mamata Banerjee and Tamil Nadu's DMK, joined the protests. And  by noon, it was clear that the government will review its ordinance.   The Prime Minister called an emergency meeting with senior ministers including Agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar. (Read: Govt to review sugar ordinance)

At the heart of the dispute is the Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP): the minimum price that sugar mills have to pay to farmers which is now fixed by the central government . In is new ordinance, the Centre has announced a price of Rs 129.85 per quintal as the FRP.   Farmers, as well as opposition parties, want this to be much higher." We demand at least Rs 250 as the cane price," Anil Singh, secretary of the National Alliance of Farmers' Associations said.

So what are farmers, mainly from Uttar Pradesh, fighting for?  Initially, the centre government used to set a minimum price that mill-owners had to pay farmers for sugarcane.  State governments had the right to set a higher price. The difference between the state and the centre's prices was borne by mill-owners.

The lobby of mill-owners pointed out that there were other financial disadvantages.  Mills are obliged to sell a part of their sugar to the government at highly-subsidized rates. So they were incurring losses worth 14,000 crores on this front as well.  Fed up, they took the centre to court and won their case.

The centre then decided to introduce the FRP. In its new ordinance, the centre said if the state government's price is higher than the FRP, it's upto the state, and not mill-owners, to pay the difference to farmers.  Mayawati complained that this was a huge burden for her government's budget, and wrote to the Prime Minister, demanding a review.

Economics is, however, a side-effect.  The main issue is that UP will vote in 2012, and no party can afford to alienate the state's farmers.  That's also possibly why the government blinked and publicized the fact that Rahul Gandhi, heading the Congress revival in UP, had intervened on behalf of the farmers.

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