H14799
Headlines : InternationalSeeds of debt sow suicide in India
In what is one of the best mainstream articles I’ve read on the subject, The Globe and Mail examines the antagonistic effects that globalization and the unfortunately-named Green Revolution are having throughout India.
Indian farmers in the 1960’s were told to use new, high-yielding crop varieties in conjunction with intense herbicide and pesticide regimes, which boosted crop-yields and profits for the country’s massive cotton industry. When yields began to slump again in the 1990’s due to over-use of agricultural chemicals and poor soil management practices, genetically modified, insect-resistant cotton cultivars again increased yields and profits.
But these yields rapidly fell, and profits fell with them, due to the banning of the traditional practice of saving one’s seeds year after year. Monsanto’s intellectual property right licensing agreement locked Indian farmers into their cropping systems, even as they were rapidly failing throughout the country, and the rest of the world.
In addition to the imposition of American technology on Indian farmers, the generous subsidies to the American cotton industry lowered prices of cotton in the U.S., which is the world’s largest cotton market.
On an academic level, such protectionist, one-way trends in globalization aid in the refutation of the flat-earth theorists, but on a much more important and visceral level, have left a swath of dead farmers in central India.
[Posted By tango]Republished from The Globe and Mail
Only a few years ago, the Bandharkawda family considered themselves one of the developing world’s great success stories. From the depths of rural poverty, on farm-labour earnings of a few cents a day, they had saved for 40 years to attain the old Indian dream of owning land and becoming actual farmers.
When the patriarch, Barku Bandharkawda, 80, bought his hectare of fertile land in the sun-baked centre of India for the equivalent of $375 in 1997 and planted it with hybrid cotton seeds, he was joining the tail end of the country’s so-called Green Revolution, growing a high-yield cash crop destined for world markets. He was part of the Indian agricultural success story.
This summer, his dream came to a despondent end. While he was attending a wedding in a neighbouring village a few weeks ago, Mr. Bandharkawda’s only son, Ishwar, 45, strolled into his parched fields with a glass bottle in his hand. The next morning, Mr. Bandharkawda found his son’s body amid the furrows.
Posted by tango
Tango.
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While it is good that the story of what has happened to Indian farmers has finally squeaked through all the noise about ‘emerging superpower’ India, I do have a few problems with the article.
One at a time, then:
In short, unlike farm crises of earlier generations, these farmers are victims of success, driven to death by an agricultural boom that has produced more food than the world needs, more cotton than markets can bear, more crops than the land can sustain and far too many farmers. The Green Revolution, which 30 years ago put an end to India’s famines and food shortages and turned farming into a profitable business, has now self-destructed in a deadly spiral of bankruptcy and death.
Now, it is definitely the case that the Green Revolution has contributed significantly to the current agrarian crisis – but it is by no means the fundamental cause as the author seems to think it is. Indian farmers have been absolutely devastated by the neoliberal economic reforms of the past fifteen years, and it seems odd that the author would not mention this. Based on my own research and experiences, much of the stress that farmers experience from one season to the next has to do with the loss of control over the production process – the IMF/World Bank’s anti-statist ideology was received very happily by globalizing Indian elites, and so state support and protection of farmers against usurious and predatory forces such as moneylenders, grain traders, and international agribusiness all but disappeared in the years following India’s 1991 structural adjustment. These include the loss of input subsidies, the steady withdrawal/decline of the minimum support price, loss of agricultural extension and research services (critical for soil rehabilitation and preservation), de-regulation/privatization of the banking sector (dried up institutional credit sources for the farmer). The World Bank has for years been pressuring India to dismantle its dual program of minimum support payments to farmers and food subsidies to low income consumers, as they claim that such support inhibits the freedom of market forces to most effectively and efficiently allocate resources. The Indian central government has now successfully persuaded many state governements to amend their Agricultural produce and marketing acts to allow private traders to procure produce directly from the mandis. This allows these traders to buy low and sell high, thereby lowering the share of the food receipt going to the farmer. Many of these traders are now multinational, as restrictions on foreign capital have been done away with, and so this also has negative implications for India’s national food sovereignty.
International agribusiness, retailers, and biotech, such as Cargill, Tesco, Walmart, Monsanto, and others are effectively using the neoliberal economic reforms to take over control of the food chain in India, and this is where much of the cause of distress for Indian farmers is located.
For the author to say that the farmers are victims of success – wow – he seems to be implying that so much food has been produced that farmers are now experiencing critical marketing difficulties. The fact remains that within the context of a supportive policy regime that includes support for agricultural cooperatives (input, production, credit, and marketing), state protection against usurious and predatory interests (including the international agribusiness that runs the WTO) and rural employment generation programs (which again were severely cut by the neoliberal reforms) to generate increased food demand amongst the undernourished and starving, Indian farmers could raise enough food and find a very large market in their own country.
And the author is correct that there needs to be a significant population shift away from farming in India and towards rural non-farm employment (such as small-scale industry), but again it has been the neoliberal reforms that the author does not even touch upon that effectively defunded the integrated rural dvelopment programs that had done much to provide credit for small scale business and alternative employment for farmers in the 1970s and 1980s.
Why so many dead farmers, and why now? This is not a case of abject poverty: In fact, these are among India’s less destitute farmers, in material terms. The villages are prosperous, most houses have colour TV and access to telephones, and most larger villages have excellent schools and agricultural universities. This has baffled authorities in India and the West.
Wow. This guy must have visited one relatively well off village, and sees fit to make huge generalizations based on that. My family farms in Punjab, one of the wealthiest states in India, and I can tell you that those of my cousins who are struggling the most right now have no telephones, colour tvs, and the public schools in their villages are grossly underfunded. Agricultural universities in larger villages? Poverty does figure very centrally into the equation. Hunger levels are now rising in India, and especially poor rural people are experiencing declines in nutritional intake.
As countries such as India have improved rural services to advance health and education, the cost of being a poor farmer has increased considerably. Along with increasingly expensive marriages, there are now monthly bills for electricity, cable TV and sometimes telephones. Many farmers, excited by the money they made from their early high crop yields, have bought motorcycles, DVD players and other goods they can’t really afford.
Actually, the stagnation/decline in state spending on health and education during the neoliberal era has forced many poor farmers/labourers to try to go through the private sector, something that has increased their costs significantly. Again, while it is the case that middle/larger farmers might be experiencing discomfort/social shame from their inability to keep up with the Joneses, the fact remains that motorcycles, colour tvs, dvd players (!) are not something that one would find in the possession of small and struggling farmers. The real problem, as the author does recognize, is that the actual cost of production has gone up some 300 percent while prices have stagnated or declined – both outcomes of the neoliberal
policy regime.
Anyhow, some good points in the article as well, but I thought I would point out what I thought was a little weak. Gotta stop myself now, or else I can go on for days about what I think needs to be done for agriculture in India (or at least the parts of India that I am familiar with). And I dont gots time for that right now.