ZNet Commentary
By Vandana Shiva
The Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of
extinction.
Two thirds of India makes its living from the land. The earth is the most generous employer in this
country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more
than 5000 years.
However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, and the climate, and linked
to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of
corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most
tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced
by Indian peasants.
1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India. A rapid increase in indebtedness, was at
the root of farmers taking their lives. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy, a losing economy.
Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for
peasants - the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors
are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and
corporate globalisation.
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. The global corporations changed the
input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed
fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.
As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable
traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available
on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty
and leads to indebtedness.
As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit
suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice
of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations
started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob
farmers of life.
The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from
biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to
grow diverse legumes, millets, and oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton,
leading to disappearance of millions of products of nature's
evolution and farmer's breeding.
Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse
ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the
market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion
due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as
low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of
Rs. 6400 / acre.
In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto's hybrid corn, the
entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and increased poverty for already desperately poor
farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed
monopolies.
And the crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed
monopolies of global corporations.
The second pressure Indian farmers are facing is the dramatic fall in prices of farm produce as a
result of free trade policies of the W.T.O. The WTO rules for trade in agriculture are essentially
rules for dumping. They have allowed an increase in agribusiness subsidies while preventing countries
from protecting their farmers from the dumping of
artificially cheap produce.
High subsidies of $ 400 billion combined with forced removal of import restrictions is a ready-made
recipe for farmer suicides. Global prices have dropped from $ 216 / ton in 1995 to $ 133 / ton in
2001 for wheat, $ 98.2 / ton in 1995 to $ 49.1 / ton in 2001 for cotton, $ 273 / ton in 1995 to
$ 178 / ton for soyabean. This reduction to half the price is not due to a doubling in productivity
but due to an increase in subsidies and an increase in market monopolies controlled by a handful of
agribusiness corporations.
Thus the U.S government pays $ 193 per ton to US Soya farmers, which artificially lowers the price
of soya. Due to removal of Quantitative Restrictions and lowering of tariffs, cheap soya has destroyed
the livelihoods of coconut growers, mustard farmers,
producers of sesame, groundnut and soya.
Similarly, 25000 cotton producers in the U.S are given a subsidy of $ 4 billion annually. This has
brought cotton prices down artificially, allowing the U.S to capture world markets which were
earlier accessible to poor African countries such as Burkina, Faso, Benin, Mali. The subsidy of
$ 230 per acre in the U.S is genocidal for the African farmers. African cotton farmers are loosing
$ 250 million every year. That is why small African countries walked out of the Cancun negotiations,
leading to the collapse of the W.T.O ministerial.
The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities are stealing incomes from poor peasants
of the south. Analysis carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are loosing $ 26 billion or Rs. 1.2 trillion annually.
This is a burden their poverty does not allow them to bear.
Hence the epidemic of farmer suicides.
India was among the countries that questioned the unfair rules of W.T.O in agriculture and led the G-22
alliance along with Brazil and China. India with other southern countries addressed the need to
safeguard the livelihoods of small farmers from the injustice of free trade based on high subsidies and
dumping. Yet at the domestic level, official agencies in India are in deep denial of any links between
free trade and farmers survival.
An example of this denial is a Government of Karnataka report on "Farmers suicide in Karnataka - A
scientific analysis". The report while claiming to be "scientific", makes unscientific reductionist claims
that the farm suicides have only psychological causes, not economic ones, and identifies alcoholism
as the root cause of suicides. Therefore, instead of proposing changes in agricultural policy, the report
recommends that farmers be required to boost up their self respect (swabhiman) and self-reliance
(swavalambam).
And ironically, its recommendations for farmer self-reliance are changes in the Karnataka Land
Reforms Act to allow larger land holdings and leasing. These are steps towards the further decimation
of small farmers who have been protected by land "ceilings" (an upper limit on land ownership) and
policies that only allow peasants and agriculturalists to own agricultural land (part of the land to the
tiller policies of the Devraj Urs government).
While the "expert committee" report identified "alcoholism" as the main cause for suicides, the figures
of this "scientific" claim are inconsistent and do not reflect the survey. On page 10, the report states in
one place that 68 percent of the suicide victims were alcoholics. Five lines later it states that 17 percent
were "alcohol and illicit drinkers".
It also states that the majority of suicide victims were small and marginal farmers and the majority had
high levels of indebtedness. Yet debt is not identified as a factor leading to suicide. On page 32 of the
report it is stated that of the 105 cases studied among the 3544 suicides which had occurred in five
districts during 2000 - 2001, 93 had debts, 54 percent had borrowed from private sources and
money lenders.
More than 90% of suicide victims were in debt. Yet a table on page 63 has mysteriously reduced debt
as a reason for suicide to 2.6%, and equally mysteriously, "suicide victims having a bad habit" has
emerged as the primary cause of farmers suicides.
The government is desperate to delink farm suicides from economic processes linked to globalisation
such as rise in indebtedness and increased frequency of crop failure due to higher ecologic vulnerability
arising from climate change and drought and higher economic risks due to introduction of untested,
unadopted seeds.
This is evident in recommendation no. 4.3.24.3 "The government should launch prosecution on the
responsible persons involved in misleading the public and government by providing false information
about farmers suicide as crop failure or indebtedness"
(page 113 of expert committee report).
However, farmers suicides cannot be delinked from indebtedness and the economic distress small
farmers are facing. Indebtedness is not new. Farmers have
always organised for freedom from debt.
In the nineteenth century the so call "Deccan Riots" were farmers protests against the debt trap into
which they had been pushed to supply cheap cotton to the textile mills in Britain. In the eighties they
formed peasant organisations to fight for debt relief from
public debt linked to Green Revolution inputs.
However, under globalisation, the farmer is loosing her / his social, cultural, economic identity as a
producer. A farmer is now a "consumer" of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global
corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders
locally.
This combination is leading to corporate feudalism, the most inhumane, brutal and exploitative
convergence of global corporate capitalism and local feudalism, in the face of which the farmer
as an individual victim feels helpless. The bureaucratic and technocratic systems of the state are
coming to the rescue of the dominant economic interests by
blaming the victim.
It is necessary to stop this war against small farmers. It is necessary to re-write the rules of trade in
agriculture. It is necessary to change our paradigms of food production. Feeding humanity should not
depend on the extinction of farmers and extinction of species. Another agriculture is possible and
necessary - an agriculture that protects farmers livelihoods, the earth and its biodiversity and
public health.