India’s government is “suppressing” hundreds of millions of impoverished farmers by fixing unrealistically low prices for crops to ensure cheap food in the cities, a farmers’ advocate said at an economic conference on Sunday.

“The government has been very wrongly harming the interests of the rural poor by juxtaposing them against the interests of the urban poor,” Khushal Pal Singh, vice president of India’s National Institute of Agriculture, told participants at the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit.