Feature
Suicides in Andhra
Leberalisation's Death Trap for Farmers
Events in India’s 50th year of independence have been startling and explosive. While Buddha’s smile informed the world of India’s ‘home-grown’ nuclear bomb, the explosive situation created by a series of farmer’s suicides exposed the travails of liberalisation. The BJP-led government’s claim that the country requires a bomb above everything else makes bitter mockery of this unprecedented deluge of suicides that has gripped many parts of the country.
Though the total loss of life in the present spate of suicides is difficult to ascertain, unofficial figures put the all-India toll above 600. The suicide sprees in Andhra, Punjab, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Bundelkhand in UP, though unconnected, have a common malady - the scourge of market. Andhra Pradesh, worst hit by the shocking phenomenon of cotton farmers consuming pesticides meant for the pests, recorded close to 300 deaths.
Andhra’s White Gold
Cotton, the white gold that had triggered prosperity for Andhra, has once again spelled doom for the farmers. This time the death and devasta-tion struck in Telengana. Ten years back, during the two years period 1987-1989, the coastal districts of Guntur and Prakasam were the victims resulting in a similar widespread suicide by cotton farmers.
Cotton cultivation entered into Telengana in a big way five years back. Warangal and Karimnagar, the two worst hit districts of the region (together they account for 51% of the suicides in the state) had been under Jowar, maize and groundnut cultivation for years. Paddy is also grown but mostly retained for consumption. Some years back sunflower was introduced and became popular due to its high commercial gains. However, after a spell of good yields for the first three-four years, yields thinned out in the later years. Then some kulaks from coastal Andhra with prior experience of cotton growing took to cotton in this region. Lands are cheaper in Telengana by about a fifths of their price in the coastal districts. Compared to the margins that sunflower (Rs.5,000-10,000 per acre) and other produces gave, cotton was definitely more lucrative.
The initial few harvests reaped super profits and in subsequent seasons many other kulaks took it up. There was virtual cotton boom in the region. Private merchants lapped it up with higher purchase prices. The small town of Jammikunta, the biggest cotton market after Warangal, daily transacts business worth Rs.2-3 crores. But of late the lure of the white gold had stuck small and medium farmers almost engulfing the entire Telengana region. And when the crisis fell, it too spread throughout the region claiming suicide victims from the entire region.
By the standards of cotton cultivation, Telengana is resource poor as compared to Karnataka or even coastal Andhra and high input cotton cultiva-tion is not common in these parts. Initially, yields of cotton were around 10-20 quintals per acre. Due to heavy seed demand traders got it from Maharashtra and Karnataka. Pesticides were indiscriminately sprayed sometimes even 10-20 times, on crops at a cost of Rs.5,000-10,000 per acre which on an average accounts for 50% of the input costs. After the crash, best yields were 10 quintal/acre and an average yield 3-4 quintal/acre. Even in well irrigated areas returns were less than half of input costs.
| Left
Parties’ Dharna Against Farmer’s Suicides Six revolutionary left parties, including CPI(ML) Liberation have come together to launch a joint countrywide campaign on the issue of the drastic effects that liberalisation is having on the agriculture sector. Others in the group of six are CPI(ML) Red Flag, COI(ML), CPI(ML) New Democracy, CPI(ML) Janashakti and MCPI. The campaign which will be conducted from district to state level will culminate in a mass Dharna on 15 July at Delhi. The campaign centres around five main issues: nQuit WTO, reject imperialist dictates on patent laws. nScrap globalisation, withdraw New Exim Policy. nWithdraw new agricultural policy leading to peasant suicides, provide full protection against crop damages and usury. nImplement land reform and oppose their reversal, smash Ranveer Sena like groups. nFight increase in prices of all essential commodities. Among the five issues, it is felt that the one related to farmer’s suicide is phenomenal, a lively expression of the pains of so-called ‘liberalisation’ in rural India. |
Dubious
All-in-one Dealers
In many places the pesticide dealer played the all-in-one role. He became the single source for the seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and even credit. And finally the dealer also became the market for produced cotton often acting as the intermediary between the farmer and the ginning mill. Many dealers went a step ahead and offered package deals to farmers with fertilisers, pesticides, growth regulators etc. The fatal blow to the crops came from the rampant supply of spurious fertilisers. Adulteration was achieved by relabeling with faulty specifications advising excessive use, mixing inert materials, supplying sublethal doses, mixing growth regulators which gave a flush green look immediately after spray creating a false impression that the crop was recovering. A nexus operated between the state agriculture department and the dealer, as the department is supposed to check the dealers’ stocks. Most pesticide dealers in the region belong to the powerful Komti and Reddy communities. This business of loot has caught on in a big way, Warangal district alone has more than 13,000 dealers.
If the pesticide dealers were driving the farmers to dump more pes-ticides in the fields, the dealers were being driven by the pesticide giants, most of them MNCs. Sensing the shift of cotton to Telengana from coastal Andhra, these companies employed new recruits, mostly agricultural graduates, on a large scale since the last 3-5 years. Huge money was pumped into market propaganda through journals, newspapers, TV etc. Dealers were offered lucrative sales promotional schemes. Zero stock marketing was used to evade excise duty. Actual sales accounted for almost 10 times the recorded sales.
The powerful force of the market promoted heavy usage of fertilisers. Though figures for pesticide use for the present period is not known, however the quantum of pesticide dumping can be gauged from the fact that in 1987 in Guntur, at the height of the cotton boom, pesticide use was more than the total pesticide used in Uttar Pradesh which has the country’s largest cultivated area! Guntur also boasts of having more than 200 fertiliser production units!
Credit Squeeze
The government’s new strategy in the liberalisation era to deregulating rural credit considerably aggravated the crisis. Banks shut their doors to farmers even after the latter incurred huge crop losses. The banks often asked for land as collateral security (loan to the owner, not the tiller) for extending crop loans. More than a third of the deceased farmers were tenants, disqualifying them from any institutional credit. Many victims, who had no possession of land but had leased in land after borrowing from private moneylenders, were denied loans in their hour of crisis. At many places institutional credits were available only after paying commissions to middlemen. On the other hand, under the pretext of ‘focussing’ of rural institutional credit, banks and cooperative credit societies, catered to only the kulaks while leaving out the small and marginal farmers and specially those belonging to the OBC, SC and ST communities.
Driven by the need for high investment and meagre availability of institutional credit, the farmers turned to the private moneylenders who at times charged interests as high as 36%. In most cases the moneylender is the pesticide dealer or commission agent (adtidar). Once the dealer convinces the lay farmer of the inevitability of pesticide for crop growth, he would also make the money easily available to buy the pesticide. In many cases the moneylenders have diverted institutional loans availed at low interest for giving loans to farmers at much higher rates. And without any crop insurance there was nothing to fall back on in case of crop failure.
Where was the State?
The field extension network that is supposed to act as the link between the agricultural research laboratories, the agriculture department and the farmer, had totally collapsed. Even in the case of seeds, the public sector with comparatively much higher infrastructure resources and manpower could-n’t provide better hybrids than the private sector. Even after the massive devastation, the government failed to come to the rescue of the farmers. Crucial things like soil testing, testing the quality of the fertilisers and pesticides and even advice on the usage of fertilisers and pesticide were not provided to the farmers many of whom had taken up cotton cultivation for the first time. In such a situation the farmers turned to the dealer for advice. Even for soil testing many private companies collected soil samples from farmers at the rate of Rs.100 per sample but never returned with the results.
Increasing control of private sector in agricultural trade especially in cash crops has also come to adversely affect the cropping pattern. Monocropping based on cotton has also had a heavy toll on soil fertility and large tracts have become more prone to pest attacks. Despite huge investments, farmers prefer cotton, as there is no alternative crop that can fetch them an equally good return in favourable conditions. For large farmers due to cultivation of scale, crop diversification is easy and more economical.
Large parts of Telengana have a good irrigation network. Warangal dis-trict has the highest percentage irrigated area in the state. But there is rampant complaint of water shortage leading to crop wilting. The reason being that majority of the irrigation sources are private owned (canal irrigation, the only public owned irrigation source, irrigated a meagre 4.59%) which is another source for indebtedness for small farmers. Release times of canal water are not according to the need of the farmers. This also created a situation of lack of availability of irrigation water. Low average rainfall further compounded the problem and the government declared Warangal as drought hit.
Price Acrobatics
The major purchasers of the cotton produce are the local ginning mills and the traders who forwarded the produce to export yarn producers in Dindigul, Salem, Coimbatore, Tirupur etc. Prices are linked to highly fluctuating internationally prevailing rates. Changes in union policies regarding cotton exports also lead to drastic price manipulation by the local trader’s lobby adversely affecting the helpless farmers. Unlike paddy where the FCI has near monopoly, government has absolutely no control over cotton prices and everything is left to the market forces. Additionally most of the ginning mills switch over to rice milling according to their convenience when markets are depressed. Such year-to-year price instability creates a situation of gamble for the cotton grower. While the crops failed this time around the traders lobby depressed cotton prices owing to the Centre’s refusal to export cotton.
At the input end seed prices also face market fluctuations with normal rates of Rs.400 per bag sometimes shooting up to Rs.1000 per kg in times of heavy demand.
Farmers’ Suicide and Farmers’ Rights (Excerpts of the resolution passed by the Forum of Farmers Organisations on Globalisations and Agriculture in the National Workshop on Globalisation of Agriculture and the Survival of Small and Marginal Peasants held at New Delhi on 30 May 1998. The forum comprises of left and democratic peasant organisations and trade unions, including AICCTU.) The unrest among the Indian farmers irrespective of the region and the climatic conditions is the evidence that the liberalisation of agriculture and the globalisation policies have taken its toll in the form of agricultural security, food security and livelihood security. The feeling of insecurity due to crop failure, land alienation and indebtedness have resulted in an epidemic of suicides by farmers all around the country. The attack on Indian agriculture and Indian Farmers is also through the spread of capital intensive agriculture in which the innocent Indian farmers are being trapped in the lust for high profits and are being driven to indebtedness which is created as a result of purchase of costly internal input such as agri-chemicals and hybrid seeds. But the greatest threat to the Indian agriculture is by opening of the seed sector to the Multinational Corporations (MNC’s) and the introduction of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) for the seeds and plant varieties. The new Seed Policy have resulted in a shift from the indigenous varieties of seeds to the Green Revolutions varieties which involve a shift from a farming system controlled by peasants to one controlled by the agri-chemical and seeds corporations. Therefore all of us from different political and non-political farmers organisations who have assembled here resolve to oppose all attempt by the Indian government to introduce any system of patent UPOV style breeders rights in the area of seed and plant varieties. We also demand that the Indian government should legislate a sui generis system, which should incorporate the following: Farmers’ Rights should establish the prior rights of farming communities as breeders’. The Farmers Rights and Plant Variety Acts should have liability clauses so that the seed corporations bear responsibility for farmers insurance during large scale crop failure and small and marginal farmers are not forced to bear all the risks and all the costs. This unjust burden on farmers is the primary reason for the farmers’ suicides. The pesticide industry needs to be much more strongly regulated both in terms of preventing sale of hazardous and toxic pesticides and sale of spurious pesticide. The pesticide sales agents should be banned as acting as creditors to push sales of their products irrespective of the purchasing power of small and marginal peasants. Since the new economic policies, public sector rural credit has dropped to 10%. 90% of all rural borrowing is from private moneylenders who are often seeds and agri-chemical agents. The interest rate charged is often as high as 450%. There is an urgent need to expand a low interest public sector rural credit system as a solution to the suicide epidemic. Due to pressure of creditors, farmers are forced to sell cheap at the harvest time and buy expensive for their own needs at a latter day, e.g. wheat is sold at Rs.200 a quintal, where it is sold through private trading system, and then bought at Rs.700 a quintal at planting time. Improving the economic stature of peasants and preventing distress sale requires the building of proper marketing and storage system, which are free of the control of private moneylenders. A comprehensive crop insurance system is needed which treats the village and not the block as a unit. This crop insurance system needs to be financed through liability payment, by seeds and pesticides corporations. The heavy indebtedness driving farmers to suicides has been direct result of costly seeds and agri-chemicals inputs. Freeing peasants of debts requires the research and development of low cost ecologically appropriate technologies, which improve productivity without heavy costs of environment destruction and peasants indebtedness. The vulnerability of small and marginal farmers under the conditions of indebtedness increases in the absence of land ceiling. Since the large landowners who often are the private moneylenders and the seeds and the pesticides sales agents can create a new ‘jagir’ in the absence of land ceiling laws. In addition to stopping any dilution in the Land Ceiling Act, the land reforms programmes need to be fully implemented to ensure that the tiller is the owner of land. In British India the dispossession of peasantry through indebtedness in Punjab was prevented by the passing of the Punjab Land Alienation Act. To prevent the alienation of land of small and marginal peasants due to indebtedness, a similar legal step needs to be taken to prevent land alienation and consequent suicides. Since trade liberalisation policies in agriculture and removal of quantitative restrictions have become a threat to the survival of Indian farmers, import and export must be regulated and when the WTO Agreement on Agriculture comes up for review in the year 2000, the Government of India should change the WTO rules related to exports, imports and subsidies on the fundamental criterion of the right to life of Indian farmers being a fundamental right which needs to be protected under all conditions. |
Callous Government Response
Liberalisation-savvy Naidu who otherwise prides himself for being the favourite chief minister of the Fund Bank when it comes to arranging in-frastructure funds, failed to provide any infrastructural support to the farmers. With an impending election, he doled out ex-gratia payments to the deceased’s family. But what about the countless many that didn’t commit suicide but are burdened with huge debts? The government has denied any loan waiver or moratorium in private loans. Only some partial but insuffi-cient relief measures have been suggested with RBI assistance. In a bid to appease the farmers before the elections, about Rs.1 crore worth of pesti-cide was sprayed on cotton fields in the region well after the pests wreaked havoc. The move only spelled good money for the pesticide companies who supplied their fares to the government at subsidised rates.
Vagaries of Market
Quite in line with the government’s logic some independent commentators have argued that there is nothing new in the devastation caused by nature’s scourge. The present spate of suicides have also been slotted in the same category and explained off as vagaries of nature. Refusing to heed the early call of an impending crisis given by the suicide spree in his state (see box), the Punjab chief minister has argued further structural reforms in agriculture in line with liberalisation with forward linkages with agro-based industry.
The central high-power committee concluded that suicides were due to ‘personal problems, mass hysteria, adverse weather conditions, with a greed to grab the one lakh ex-gratia’. Some experts felt that cotton was being grown on unsuitable land and poor soils in Telengana and that contributed largely to the crop failure. But then why did more than 100 cotton farmers commit suicide in rich black cotton soils and irrigated conditions of Guntur and Prakasam districts in 1987-88? Crop failures are not uncommon for Telengana and neither for any other part of the country but such large number of suicides do not occur everywhere. And why is that similar trends are also manifest in Karnataka with tur, chilli and paddy cultivators. The blame is now being solely shifted to the farmers for their ‘over-ambitiousness’ in a quest to make quick money.
| Punjab: The Revolution that Failed The crisis of green revolution is becoming more and more clear now. Punjab, the revolution’s heartland that was drenched in wealth and prosper-ity, today faces the worst after effects of the first experiment that brought capitalist development in Indian agriculture. The iconosised image of a wealthy and happy Punjabi farmer rugged enough to face all challenges seems fast receding to the history books. With the structural changes under liberalisation the crisis has been further aggravated. The recent incidents of farmer’s debt-related suicide in the southern district of Sangrur, almost as a social phenomenon and not any isolated happening, has once again demolished the virtual myth of green revolution that had been in circulation. Here too, as in Andhra, in most cases the suicide victims are the small and marginal farmers. Activists and media sources quote the total figure to be couple of hundreds! Apart from Sangrur similar reports have come in from Mansa and Ludhiana. Punjab has been enjoying normal monsoons and no major natural calamity has befallen the state for the past few years. Societal stress has also played a crucial role in driving farmers to suicide. The initial spurt of capitalist development developed a small but powerful class of kulaks. The growing prosperity in the countryside spawned a culture of consumerism and overspending. Parallely, alcoholism and drug addiction have become alarmingly high. Alienation of Punjabi youths away from agriculture is very common and many are victims of these growing frustrations due to lack of other opportunities in the state. It is for no other reason that the Khalistani movement saw hordes of youth taking to the gun. In the past couple of years, almost as a trend, large number youths have migrated often under dubious arrangements, to foreign countries in search of jobs. The initial confidence bolstered by the green revolution also encouraged farmers to go in for higher risks for more commercial gains. Overspending on agricultural inputs rose gradually. However, the trend of highly invest-ment-intensive farming wasn’t restricted to the kulak or big farmers only. It soon spread to small and marginal farmers also. Societal pressures egged them to live up to the prosperous image that was associated with a Punjabi farmer and this came even at the cost of living beyond their means and borrowing heavily for non-productive purposes. Often small farmers who manage to arrange agricultural loans from cooperative or banks divert it for non-agricultural uses. Indebtedness today has become a major malady afflicting, as a report suggests, almost all households of small and marginal farmers in Sangrur. The study suggests an astronomical Rs.5,700 crores as the rural indebted-ness with an Rs.1,100 crore interest burden in the state today. 70% of the small farmers are indebted and they constitute the overwhelming majority of the indebtors. Merchant capital has also tightened its noose over the hapless farmers in much the same away as in Andhra. Interests rates are as high as 36% and as expected due to lack of collateral most small farmers turn to the vil-lage moneylender. In many case the nexus between the moneylenders, the commission agents (arthiyas) (who supply 46% of the loans) and the influen-tial power lobbies, employ goons to take away tractors or beat up erring defaulters. But unlike Andhra, crop failures or price or yeild fluctua-tions have not triggered the sharp increase in indebtedness but more due to overspending on domestic consumption, maintaining a high social cost of living and making high investments on farm inputs. Often high investments are unsuitable for small holdings and in turn such small farmers have taken to leasing out land to capital-intensive cultivators with large holdings. It has become further clear with this budget that the golden days of hefty fertiliser subsidy can’t continue for long. Besides excessive and unbalanced use of fertilisers has set an unsustainable pattern of farming. The resultant problems of pests, health disorders, loss in soil fertility, waterlogging etc. have raised a big question at the experiments of green revolution. All these factors coupled together have set the process of marginalisa-tion and proletarianisation of small farmers. For many years, migration to the Terai regions of UP, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan etc. provided an outlet from this grim situation. But that too had saturated and the farmers were left with very few solutions. And for some suicide was the easy way out. |
Yet the massive commercial drive behind the farmer’s mad rush for cotton does not indicate the onset of any kind of capitalist development in agri-culture. Unlike the experiments of green revolution there has been no role played by the state in promoting infrastructural growth to support highly intensive capitalist farming. The cotton craze in Andhra has been predominantly spawned by the dominating and outsized role of the merchant capital. There is commercialisation of small and marginal farmer economy but with minimum infrastructural, technical and financial support. Moreover, the unbridled operation of merchant capital in its usurious forms has ensured the continuance of pre-capitalist relations. The moneylender’s role consisted in fleecing the farmer’s surplus, not enhancing productivity in a sustainable way. Instead it has only strengthened the stranglehold of merchant capital over small and marginal farmers.
The role of commercial capital and the almost free reign given to the trader-dealer-moneylender nexus has been at the centre of the crisis. With a virtual absence of the state from the scene, it was but an open invitation for the nexus to loot and plunder. Liberalisation of the agricultural sector has started showing its devastating effects. Natural calamities apart, the poor and middle peasants are being taken on a roller coaster ride in the liberalised market.
-Siddartha