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Fields Afire
P. Sainath
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Indian
farmers wrote suicide notes to Prime Minister, Chief Minister
explaining the situation before hanging themselves, even as
experts wondered what was deriving them to this end |
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 But
for the everyday act of cultivation, there is almost no sector of
agriculture that corporations do not dominate. Seeds, fertilizer,
pesticides, other inputs. Prices, trade, all the way to Big Retail.
The last 15-18
years of policy measures sculpted the situation that now exists.
Investment in agriculture has collapsed. Credit has dried up even as
farm incomes have crashed. Sector after sector – for instance, seed
– has been opened up to predatory corporate control. Mindless
deregulation has been the norm, embracing the World Bank and IMF
prescriptions with enthusiasm and bringing Indian agriculture to the
WTO heel. Millions of small farmers who cannot take the risks have
been shifted from foodcrop to cash crops and locked into global
price volatility. Extension services were crippled and most
agricultural research now serves corporations, not communities.
Input costs have skyrocketed, for some crops (like cotton, for
instance) by several hundred per cent over those 15-18 years.
Standards (like minimum germination rate of seed) were lowered or
done away with.
And the
explosion of costs is on all fronts, not just in agriculture. Large
numbers of indebted farmers who committed suicide had huge health
expenditures. Several had mortgaged land to pay their hospital
bills. Many others still do that and also see their children
dropping out of an education they can no longer afford. In short,
the hyper-commercialization of the countryside.
 Some eight
million farmers have quit cultivation. There were 111 million
cultivators recorded in the 1991 Census, 103 million in the 2001
Census. Where have they gone? We don’t really know since no
systematic work has been done on the scale required. In the media,
we aren’t really interested. We can tell you where Paris Hilton is,
though. When the 2011 Census appears it is likely that even the
eight million figure will be dwarfed as the enforced ‘exit policy’
in farming proceeds unchecked. Where will they go? How will they be
absorbed? And apart from these troubling questions: at least
1,82,936 farmers have ended their own lives, in the largest
sustained wave of suicides ever recorded, anywhere. We are staring
at, but not seeing, the most unbelievably intense misery in the
countryside. And one sustained over a period of many years.
The agrarian
crisis is comprehensive, all-encompassing, reaching almost every
crop, touching almost every sector. It has been around for quite a
while, too. And the corporate conquest of agriculture is well
apace.
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The crisis still lives. And thrives. It will not be resolved by
band-aid relief packages. Tackling it calls for nothing short of
a huge reversal and transformation of policy. And along with
that, an addressing of the long-term real reforms that Indian
agriculture needs. Including what kind of agriculture we need to
replace this dying model with. |
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Some ground
rules that help understanding:
Do not
disconnect urban from rural
India. This is a
big mistake, often made. The same processes are at work in both, the
same policies – even if the fallout is more dramatic in the farm
sector. Also, the two are closely connected at many levels. Take the
diversion of credit, for instance, towards fuelling urban (and rural
elite) upper middle class consumption. Through 2003-04 several
farmers killed themselves, unable to raise crop loans of Rs 8,000 or
less, except at exorbitant rates of interest. This was at a time
when banks were offering upper middle class professionals a chance
to buy a Mercedes Benz at 4-6 per cent interest – without
collateral. In any case, at the political level, the decisions are
made in urban India.
Do not
disconnect the rural from the rest of the world. The most dramatic
effects of neoliberal globalization are, in fact, seen in the
countryside. The operations of Wall Street’s Index Funds can have
huge impact on the livelihoods of rural Indians. Speculation in
markets around the world have a major fallout, likewise.
The rise of
inequality in post-1991
India has been
nothing short of stunning.
India
today has 51 dollar billionaires, but ranks 128 in the UN Human
Development Index. While 51 individuals in a population of over one
billion have a net worth equalling roughly 31 per cent of our GDP,
the Report of the National Commission for Employment in the
Unorganised Sector tells us that 836 million other Indians get by on
less than Rs 20 a day. Such contrasts are endless. The inequality of
the past 18 years is different from that of the preceding 40 years
in this respect. Never has it been so cynically constructed, so
ruthlessly engineered.
 The
same process has been on at the global level. Even the meltdown –
which has just begun – is strongly linked to that process. CEO
salaries exploded, and wealth concentrated at unprecedented levels
in a tiny number of hands, while the real wages of working people
stagnated or shrunk all the time. In 2008, a year of millions of
layoffs, the heads of
New York’s
financial firms paid themselves bonuses of $ 18 billion. Wages fell
and jobs were lost in millions in an era where two-thirds of US
corporations paid zero corporate income tax between 1998 and 2005.
Anyone could see that it could not be sustained. You’d have to be an
economist to believe it could.
Follow the
money. At all times, follow the money: There’s big bucks in misery.
And agriculture is going to be the great provider of both, big bucks
and misery. Remember the food price crisis last year when the West
touted the idea that it was because Indians and Chinese were eating
a hell of a lot more? How were the large corporations in that sphere
doing? As the Wall Street Journal noted (30
April 2008): ‘At a time when much of the world is facing food riots,
Big Agriculture is dealing with a different sort of challenge: huge
profits. The grain processing giant Archer Daniels-Midland, for
instance, saw a 42 per cent rise in its fiscal third quarter
profits. "Including a seven-fold increase in net income in its unit
that stores, transports and trades grains such as wheat and corn, as
well as soybeans." Seed and herbicide giant Monsanto and
fertilizer-maker Mosaic "all reported similar windfall profits in
their latest quarters".’
Incidentally,
those food prices at the global level fell sharply a while ago. Did
it imply the same Indians and Chinese began starving? As a matter of
fact, the daily net per capita availability of food grain in
India sank from
510 grams in 1991 to 422 in 2005. What had happened was the same
with oil, as with food. Speculative capital was moving towards
agricultural commodities and fertilizer, driving prices upwards.
 As
thousands of bank branches shut down in rural
India and credit
dried up, farmers turned more to moneylenders. But this time of a
different kind. The small village sahukar is hardly a force in
regions like Vidharbha. Indeed, some small moneylenders have
committed suicide – their clients have all defaulted or vanished (or
killed themselves). In the decade from 1991-92, Indian farm
households in debt went up from 26 per cent to 48.6 per cent. The
regions seeing high numbers of suicides are also regions where
peasant indebtedness is very high. Over 80 per cent of Andhra’s farm
households, for instance, are in debt.
We had locked
our farmers into the volatility of global cash crop prices, rigged
and controlled by a handful of corporations. Add to this the obscene
subsidies that the
US and EU threw
at their corporations and growers. In the US, subsidies made up two
per cent of total farm income in 1974. By year 2000, they made up 47
per cent of total farm income. In item after item, US-EU subsidies
destroyed millions of livelihoods, not just in
India
but across the world.
In
India, we made
no effort to raise duties to halt the dumping of highly subsidised
US cotton on this country. Sharad Pawar was not in the least
interested. Cotton was not his baby. The subsidized US cotton was
grabbed by our textile magnates. They were getting it virtually
free. No prizes for guessing what this did to the cotton price for
Vidharbha farmers. Maharashtra’s suicides are perhaps unique. In
that state, farmers have written suicide notes addressed to the
prime minister and chief minister on the issue (while many experts
ponder about why these people are taking their lives).
India’s farmers
were and are buffeted on all sides these past 15 years. In different
states of the country you will find many who tell you the only way a
farm can survive is to have one son or brother working in the city
who sends some money back to the farm. More and more people quit
farming in the past decade and migrations went berserk, but that’s
another story.
The end is not
in sight. Not after the prime minister’s 2006 visit. Not after the
2008 loan waiver. Yes, the waiver did bring a measure of relief to
some. And yes, the Congress might benefit from it in some pockets.
But it was and is no solution. In fact, credit for the fresh season
is proving to be a huge problem for millions of farmers. Very few of
the major recommendations of the National Farmers Commission have
found expression in policy. The CAG’s reports on the ‘relief
packages’ have been devastating.
The crisis still
lives. And thrives. It will not be resolved by band-aid relief
packages. Tackling it calls for nothing short of a huge reversal and
transformation of policy. And along with that, an addressing of the
long-term real reforms that Indian agriculture needs. Including what
kind of agriculture we need to replace this dying model with.
(Excerpted from
an article in
Seminar, India.
P Sainath is one of India’s leading voices of conscience working on
issues of farm crisis, credit policy, rural
India
reporting and much else. His path breaking book, Everybody loves a
good drought, forever changed the way India’s engaged journalists
look at rural domain.)
29
April 2009
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