"Agriculture is the mainstay of a country's economy and the tillers of the soil, its most precious subjects". -- Lalitaditya Muktapida, 8th century king of India
An enormous tragedy
One of the least-reported tragedies that resulted from globalization and corporatization of agriculture is the farmer suicide story of India - a tragedy comprising several hundred thousand individual tragedies, and possibly the ‘largest wave of suicides in history'. Last month UK Independent carried a report titled "1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India", and cited falling water table, crop failure and debt as the reasons. The figure and the reasons are - at best - cruelly watered down versions of hard and sad reality. The actual piece of data is nearer 200,000 and the reasons both global and local.
Magsaysay award winning journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought, P. Sainath keeps the collective Indian nation's (and hopefully global) conscience alive by reporting very regularly on the plight of the farmers. As the rural affairs editor of a national newspaper, he bases each of his intricate analysis on hard statistics and highlights the different causes and contrasts that have resulted in the sorry state of affairs (variously called agrarian crisis, rural distress, even Neo-Liberal Terrorism) of these care-takers of the land.
The official data provided by India's National Crime Records Bureau reads - 182,936 farmers took their own lives in states of central India in the 11-year period up to 2007. This figure is over twice the estimate of India's military casualties during WWII. Note that over those years, the number of traditional agriculturists continuously declined. The official figures are an underestimate - they do not include farmers' wives and families, who also spent their days tilling and toiling, but found they had to ‘give up'. Easy way out, you may think. But that's the kind of bleak outlook for a good proportion of those professionals. And the tragedy is even now unfolding well into its 15th year, not only in India, but across countries elsewhere in the world.
US News magazine AlterNet sums up the situation so well - "Crop failure may have pushed farmers over the edge, but American companies have been leading them to the cliff for years". (see the article header at "1,500 Indian Farmers Commit Mass Suicide: Why We Are Complicit in these Deaths")
The route followed to the cliff was paved by pathetic policies, absurd subsidies and Bt patents.
The promise of plenty - Enter the Patentee
What has a poor but thus far self-sufficient farmer in central India to do with a US multinational? The farmer has been forced to use seeds produced by a laboratory - seeds that were supposed to be more pest resistant, more yielding - as loudly claimed by the patent-owners.
Why? As a third world country, India decided to put in place 'economic reforms' to keep up the general trend that industrialization is the quickest means to monetary uplift of its masses. The state's blind embrace of modern economic theories meant that the small scale farmer had to change from proven, traditional, indigenous methods and means to laboratory produced, alien, commercially driven agricultural inputs -- the Bt GM wonder seeds with customized herbicides. These new practices promised miraculous jumps in yield at lesser input costs. In reality, the farmer paid much more for imported seeds and pesticides - on credit - and ended up with much less harvest. Bt seeds ensured that several thousand farmers drowned in debt.
Unfortunately, the world is yet to make up its mind about the ethics or otherwise of GM crops despite glaring evidence of much more harm than good. It is amazing how short-sighted nearly all governments and their corporate partners are, in matters relating to the larger and longer good - principles of doing right by all have always been kept beyond visual range. Bio-technology started off with a noble purpose, but very soon all that became visible was the immense potential for milking it, with excellent support from patent regime and abetting deregulation, non-regulation, and under-regulation.
The Debt Spiral
At another level, export-led growth became another guiding principle in economic reforms put in place by governments. This meant that third-world farmers had to switch from food-crops to cash-crops. Millions of marginal farmers did make the switch that not only entailed increased cultivation costs, much bigger loans (credit), but also subjected them to the unpredictability of global commodity prices, that are dictated by a few big names. P. Sainath illustrates this as follows: "The extent to which the switch to cash crops impacts on the farmer can be seen in this: it used to cost Rs.8,000 ($165 today) roughly to grow an acre of paddy in Kerala. When many switched to vanilla, the cost per acre was (in 2003-04) almost Rs.150,000 ($3,000) an acre." ($1 is about Indian Rs. 50)
Subsidies Galore
When agriculture was opened up to free global trade in open market regimes, the price of cotton fell drastically. India had been one of the largest producers of cotton, with maximum arable land devoted to cultivating that fiber. Mumbai region was the ‘Manchester of India', another city Coimbatore had nearly the same reputation.
The cotton farmer then was a happy person - he was poor, but he produced enough cotton to meet market demand, and was able to feed his family comfortably. It didn't take long for free and fair trade to become lopsided in favor of tiny farming populations in rich countries who enjoyed absurd millions in subsidies. Millions of farmers in developing countries began to experience costly and unfair trade - subsidized cotton from the US drowned local produce out of the market. The subsidies ‘took care of' thousands of Indian cotton farmers.
The Farmer is Dead, Long Live the Farmer...
Farmer suicides are the most evident record of India's agrarian crisis that has both local and global causes - increased production costs, subsidy-supported plummeting prices, absent or unfair credit, risk-laden switch from food to cash crops, and from traditional hardy seed varieties to imported bio-patents, and - unkindest of all - lopsided global trade. Rich or poor, every country is morally and ethically obligated to the global land-caring and food-producing community to live and let live. For, whatever wonders and luxuries can spring out of modern technology, it cannot sprout healthy crops needed by future generations. King Lalitaditya's attitude is as relevant now as it always was.
Note: The ongoing tragic saga of India's nationwide rural distress, with region-wise analyses and reports is available here.
Other Related Articles on Celsias:
GM Seeds: A Rape Disguised as a Courtship
Biotech Companies Try to Hijack Agreement on GM Contamination
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