[SustainableTompkins] Fw: On India's Farms, a Plague of Suicide

[bosak at ibiblio.org]

The human cost of genetically modified crops.

   http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/world/asia/19india.htm

Jon

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The New York Times
September 19, 2006
On India's Farms, a Plague of Suicide
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

BHADUMARI, India — Here in the center of India, on a gray
Wednesday morning, a cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide
and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house.

The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two
small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a
soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his
only source of income.

Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove
Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was
by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of
the crisis facing the Indian farmer.

Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107
farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which
government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that
the high rates are continuing.

Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an
increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple
the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power.

Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened
Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to
expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened
the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance
against pests and rain.

Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong
ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the
developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in
subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the
price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.

At the same time, frustration is building in India with American
multinational companies peddling costly, genetically modified
seeds. They have made deep inroads in rural India — a vast and
alluring market — bringing new opportunities but also new risks
as Indian farmers pile up debt.

In this central Indian cotton-growing area, known as Vidarbha, the
unofficial death toll from suicides, compiled by a local advocacy
group and impossible to verify, was 767 in a 14-month period that
ended in late August.

“The suicides are an extreme manifestation of some deep-seated
problems which are now plaguing our agriculture,” said
M. S. Swaminathan, the geneticist who was the scientific leader of
India’s Green Revolution 40 years ago and is now chairman of
the National Commission on Farmers. “They are climatic. They
are economic. They are social.”

India’s economy may be soaring, but agriculture remains its
Achilles’ heel, the source of livelihood for hundreds of
millions of people but a fraction of the nation’s total economy
and a symbol of its abiding difficulties.

In what some see as an ominous trend, food production, once
India’s great pride, has failed to keep pace with the
nation’s population growth in the last decade.

The cries of Indian farmers — or what Prime Minister Singh
recently described as their “acute distress” — can hardly
be neglected by the leaders of a country where two-thirds of
people still live in the countryside.

Mr. Singh’s government has responded to the current crisis by
promptly expanding rural credit and promising investments in rural
infrastructure. It has also offered several quick fixes, including
a $156 million package to rescue “suicide prone” districts
across the country and a promise to expand rural credit, waive
interest on existing bank loans and curb usurious informal
moneylenders.

But pressure is building to do more. Many, including
Mr. Swaminathan, the agricultural scientist, would like to see the
government help farmers survive during crop failures or years of
low world prices.

Subsidies, once a linchpin of Indian economic policy, have dried
up for virtually everyone but the producers of staple food
grains. Indian farmers now must compete or go under. To compete,
many have turned to high-cost seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,
which now line the shelves of even the tiniest village shops.

Monsanto, for instance, invented the genetically modified seeds
that Mr. Shende planted, known as Bt cotton, which are resistant
to bollworm infestation, the cotton farmer’s prime enemy. It
says the seeds can reduce the use of pesticides by 25 percent.

The company has more than doubled its sales of Bt cotton here in
the last year, but the expansion has been contentious. This year,
a legal challenge from the government of the state of Andhra
Pradesh forced Monsanto to slash the royalty it collected from the
sale of its patented seeds in India. The company has appealed to
the Indian Supreme Court.

The modified seeds can cost nearly twice as much as ordinary ones,
and they have nudged many farmers toward taking on ever larger
loans, often from moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates.

Virtually every cotton farmer in these parts, for instance, needs
the assistance of someone like Chandrakant Agarwal, a veteran
moneylender who charges 5 percent interest a month.

He collects his dues at harvest time, but exacts an extra premium,
compelling farmers to sell their cotton to him at a price lower
than it fetches on the market, pocketing the profit.

His collateral policy is nothing if not inventive. The borrower
signs a blank official document that gives Mr. Agarwal the right
to collect the farmer’s property at any time.

Business has boomed with the arrival of high-cost seeds and
pesticides. “Many moneylenders have made a whole lot of
money,” Mr. Agarwal said. “Farmers, many of them, are
ruined.”

Indeed, one or two crop failures, an unexpected health expense or
the marriage of a daughter have become that much more perilous in
a livelihood where the risks are already high.

A government survey released last year found that 40 percent of
farmers said they would abandon agriculture if they could. The
study also found that farming represented less than half the
income of farmer households.

Barely 4 percent of all farmers insure their crops. Nearly 60
percent of Indian agriculture still depends entirely on the rains,
as in Mr. Shende’s case.

This year, waiting for a tardy monsoon, Mr. Shende sowed his
fields three times with the genetically modified seeds made by
Monsanto. Two batches of seed went to waste because the monsoon
was late. When the rains finally arrived, they came down so hard
that they flooded Mr. Shende’s low-lying field and destroyed
his third and final batch.

Mr. Shende shouldered at least four debts at the time of his
death: one from a bank, two procured on his behalf by his sisters
and one from a local moneylender. The night before his suicide, he
borrowed one last time. From a fellow villager, he took the
equivalent of $9, roughly the cost of a one-liter bottle of
pesticide, which he used to take his life.

Those like him with small holdings are particularly vulnerable. A
study by Srijit Mishra, a professor at the Mumbai-based Indira
Gandhi Institute of Development Research, found that more than
half of the suicides in this part of the country were among
farmers with less than five acres of land.

But even those who are prosperous by local standards are not
immune. Manoj Chandurkar, 36, has 72 acres of cotton with
genetically modified seeds and sorghum in a neighboring village
called Waifad. Every year is a gamble, he said.

Each time, he takes out a loan, then another and then prays that
the bollworms will stay away and the rains will be good. On his
shoulders today sit three loans, bringing his total debt to
$10,000, a vast sum here.

The study by Mr. Mishra found that 86.5 percent of farmers who
took their own lives were indebted — their average debt was
about $835 — and 40 percent had suffered a crop failure.

The news of Mr. Shende’s death brought his wife, Vandana, back
home to Bhadumari. Relatives said she had gone to tend to her sick
brother in a nearby village. By the time she arrived, her
husband’s body was covered by a thin checkered cloth.

A policeman had recorded the death — the eighth in six months
for the officer.

Ms. Shende, squatting in the narrow village lane, shrouded her
face in her cheap blue sari and wailed at the top of her
lungs. “Your father is dead,” she screamed at her small son,
who stood before her, dazed.