So-Called "Green Revolution" Driving Thousands of Indian Farmers to Suicide

Deccan Herrald, Saturday July 31 2004
MAIN FRONT PAGE ARTICLE
Suicides on the farm
THE COLLAPSE OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/july312004/top.asp

The harmful combination of chemical outputs with water-guzzling crops has
played havoc with agriculture

BY DEVINDER SHARMA

It doesn¹t shock the nation anymore. Reports saying that 65 of the 243
farmers who committed suicide in Vidharbha region of Maharashtra had debts
as little as Rs 8,000 have not shaken the conscience of the world's biggest
democracy. That Meena Prakash Rechpade, widow of the 36-year-old farmer,
Prakash, of village Dhanori, near Wardha, in Maharashtra, has no money to
arrange for the last rites of her husband, who took the fatal route to
escape the misery of the green revolution no longer evokes a strong
reaction.

In Andhra Pradesh, ever since Y S Rajasekhar Reddy took over as the Chief
Minister some three months ago on May 14, more than 400 farmers have
committed suicide. This was the official death toll in the suicide register
till July 15. In Karnataka, the new Chief Minister Dharam Singh has no time
for farmers in distress. He has been too busy with balancing the equation of
coalition politics. More than 300 farmers have committed suicide in the
state, which claims to be on the highway leading to the convergence of
information technology and biotechnology. The sad part of the story is that
a majority of those who committed suicide were relatively young, below the
age of 45 years.

In western Uttar Pradesh, more than 14 farmers have committed suicide in the
month of July. In the frontline agriculture states of Punjab and Haryana,
the situation is no better. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had himself gone
on record (before he was elected) saying that close to 2,000 farmers have
committed suicide in the past few years.

Sensing the uneasiness being felt by the agricultural scientists, lest they
be hauled up for the bloodbath being enacted in the farm sector, support has
already flown in from the expected quarters - the biotechnology industry.
The US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech
Application (ISAAA), which unabashedly promotes genetically engineered crops
and 'transfer' of technology with multi-million dollar funding from Bayer,
Cargill, Dow, Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, Syngenta, in addition to
foundations and Western governmental funding agencies, is busy collaborating
with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and
the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is besotted with the
vision of India as one vast genomic valley.

Technology's side effects

All this is happening at a time when high-chemical input based technology
has already mined the soils and ultimately led to the lands gasping for
breath, with the water-guzzling crops (hybrids and Bt cotton) sucking the
groundwater aquifer dry, and with the failure of the markets to rescue the
farmers from a collapse of the farming systems. The tragedy is that the
human cost is entirely being borne by the farmers.

For all these years, the dryland regions of the country, which comprise
nearly 75 per cent of the total cultivable area, have increasingly come
under the hybrid crop varieties. While the crop yields from the hybrid
varieties was surely high, the flip side of these varieties - these were
water-guzzlers - was very conveniently ignored. For the sake of comparison,
let us take the example of rice. In Punjab and Haryana, farmers cultivate
high-yielding varieties of rice. These varieties require about 3000 litres
of water to produce a kilo of grain. Instead of bringing in varieties that
require less water for the water deficit areas of the drylands, hybrid rice
varieties with water requirement exceeding 5000 litres per kilo of grain
were promoted.

Not only rice hybrids, all kind of hybrid varieties < whether it is of
sorghum, maize, cotton, bajra, and vegetables are promoted in the dryland
regions. In addition, agricultural scientists have misled the farmers by
saying that the dryland regions were hungry for chemical fertilisers. The
harmful combination of chemical inputs with water guzzling crops have played
havoc with the drylands turning the lands not only further unproductive but
barren. The water table plummeted, the impact of deficient rainfall became
more pronounced forcing farmers to abandon agriculture and migrate. As if
this was not enough, Bt cotton requiring more water than hybrid cotton, was
knowingly promoted so as to allow the seed industry to make profits. What
happens to the farmers as a result was nobody's concern. And never was.

Fertilisers and pesticides were aggressively promoted, with huge subsidies
being doled out to keep the fertiliser companies afloat, without realising
the resulting devastation these chemical inputs have wrought on the
sustainability of agriculture. At no stage, did the scientists call for a
mid-term correction to rectify the imbalance created through excessive
application of the chemicals.

Second green revolution?

Instead of learning from the green revolution debacle, the same breed of
scientists and policy makers are being asked to provide a solution to the
prevailing agrarian crisis. No wonder, a second green revolution that harps
on agribusiness and biotechnology, has become the new mantra to pull out the
farming community from the raging farm crisis. Strange, the country has
already jumped into the second phase of the green revolution without first
drawing a balance sheet of the first phase of the technology era. Such an
approach will only worsen the crisis, and force more farmers to commit
suicide or abandon their farms. As a result, India is sure to witness the
worst environmental displacement the world has known and this will be in the
field of agriculture.

****************************************************************************

This GMO news service is underwritten by a generous grant from the Newman's
Own Foundation and is a production of the Ecological Farming Association
www.eco-farm.org <http://www.eco-farm.org/>
****************************************************************************