Globalization: The Political Economy of Rising Rural Suicide Rates in Australia & India

From: THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
March 1, 2005, Issue #397
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness
>From a Public Interest Perspective

EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
WEB SITE: http://www.ea1.com/CARP/
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ALARMING HIGH RATE OF SUICIDES AMONG AUSTRALIAN
RURAL MEN NOTED IN NEW BOOK

RURAL ABC BEWS (AUSTRALIA): A new book being launched in Queensland today
aims to address high suicide rates among rural men.

More than 2,000 men take their lives across Australia each year.

Tough Times is a collection of true stories from ten rural men who've had to
cope with depression, and has been put together by the Centre for Rural and
Remote
Health and the University of Southern Queensland.

Editor Dr Cath Rogers-Clark hopes it will help others.

"From a different perspective, we wanted to know how do people get through
when they're feeling depressed and feeling quite at the end of their
capacity.

"We were able to attract ten brave men who told us in the main that they'd
agree to contribute because they'd seen men around them in rural areas
committing suicide, and they'd realised what a terrible problem it was."

FARMER NUMBERS IN DECLINE

A new National Australia Bank report says Australia will be left with just
100,000 farmers by 2020, if the move to bigger farms and large-scale
production continues.

Government estimates have the current number of farmers at 194,000, although
Mike Carroll from the NAB believes it's more like 130,000.

He says falling populations will continue to put pressure on small country
towns, but the farmers that are left will be switched on, highly productive
and professional.

"They are farmers that are looking for new ideas, receptive to outside
advice; they are embracing new technology but they do that judiciously.

"They don't do things out of habit; they also really understand what is
important in their business.

"They understand what is it that what drives the profitability of the
business.

"I think they also take risks, but they know pretty well what the downside
is, and they normally have a fallback strategy if things don't go according
to plan." [ February 25, 2005 ]

This is a transcript from the ABC National Rural News that is broadcast
daily to all states on ABC Regional Radio's Country Hour and in the city on
ABC News Radio.

MIKE CALLICRATE: I spent the night on a cattle and sheep operation North of
Melbourne, Australia a few years ago. After some discussion I convinced the
ranch
owners, a very nice couple, to go to dinner with me. We were talking about
their sheep operation when the lady started to cry. I asked her what was
wrong. She said, "We filed for bankrupcy this week." They were going to lose
a thrid generation farm and ranch. She explained that prices for cattle and
sheep were so low that they could make it.

In looking at the menu, I pointed out that lamb was the most expensive item,
and that when I landed in Melbourne, the airport shop was selling sheep skin
coats for $1200 and wool winter hats for $60.00. I asked, with consumer
prices so high, what was the problem?

She answered, "Have you ever heard of ConAgra?"

ConAgra and the mutinational corporate agribusiness friends leverage the
Australian producer against the U.S. producer and the rest of the livestock
producing world.

SUICIDE ECONOMY OF CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION

VANDANA SHIVA, ZNET: 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 loosing 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 U.S. Soya farmers, which
artificially lowers the rice 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 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 ten, the report states in one place
that 68% of the suicide victims were alcoholics. Five lines later it states
that 17% 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% 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. [ April, 2004 ]

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