The state of Indian Agriculture…

60% of our working population is involved in Agriculture and it is the life line of majority of our population. Agriculture is in shambles. Number of farmer suicides are raising daily. I will try to give you a picture on the present state of Indian agriculture through the eyes of P Sainath.

One credible source which I am extensively using in this article is of P Sainath. The man has travelled a lot and his articles on the state of farmers have been a real eye opener for many of us. He writes his column in Hindu newspaper. He is a reputed journalist and also winner of many awards including winner of the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts.

200,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1997. These figures are official and official statistics are always understated and you can imagine the real figures. Close to two-thirds of these suicides have occurred in five states (India has 28 states and seven union territories). The Big 5 – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh– account for just about a third of the country’s population but two-thirds of farmers’ suicides.

Why do farmers commit suicide? Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt – peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms,” from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. For instance, 82 per cent of all farm households in Andhra Pradesh were in debt by 2001-02. Those who killed themselves were overwhelmingly cash crop farmers – growers of cotton, coffee, sugarcane, groundnut, pepper, vanilla. Suicides are fewer among food crop farmers – that is, growers of rice, wheat, maize, pulses.

The mantra of export led growth forced farmers to move from food crops to cash crops. The cash crop sector is dominated by a handful of multinational corporations. For millions of subsistence farmers in India, this meant much higher cultivation costs, far greater loans, much higher debt, and being locked into the volatility of global commodity prices. 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 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 an acre.

In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved. Corporations prevent seed savings through patents and by engineering seeds with non-renewable traits. As a result, poor peasants have to buy new seeds for every planting season and what was traditionally a free resource, available by putting aside a small portion of the crop, becomes a commodity. This new expense increases poverty and leads to indebtness.

When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in 2002, the farmers lost 1 billion rupees due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 kilos per acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kilos per acre. Instead of incomes of 10,000 rupees an acre, farmers ran into losses of 6,400 rupees an acre. In the state of Bihar, when farm-saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto’s hybrid corn, the entire crop failed, creating 4 billion rupees in losses and increased poverty for desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies. The crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.

In 1991, you could buy a kilogram of local seed for as little as Rs.7 or Rs.9 in today’s worst affected region of Vidarbha. By 2003, you would pay Rs.350 for a bag with 450 grams of hybrid seed. By 2004, Monsanto’s partners in India were marketing a bag of 450 grams of Bt cotton seed for between Rs.1, 650 and Rs.1,800. Almost 200 times increase in prices with the quantity halved.

With the input cost of farming rising exponentially and the return on investment diminishing one can imagine the financial condition of our farmers.

In my next article i would like to bring in to your notice how the prices of these cash crops which farmer had turned into fell globally and its impact.