By Moin Qazi
As the world transitions from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to end poverty and hunger and promote sustainable development small farmers hold the key.
In India, small and marginal farmers those who work on less than two hectares (five acres) of land constitute 80% of total farm households, 50% of rural households and 36% of total households in India. Sadly, the plight of these farmers is very distressing. Agricultural productivity levels have been stagnant for the past ten to fifteen years. An estimated 70% of the countrys arable land is prone to drought, 12% to floods, and 8% to cyclones. NITI Aayog recently highlighted that the agricultural sector is 28 years behind its time.
A social crisis brewing in the countryside
Despite the fact that agriculture is their primary source of livelihood, small farmers have little access to technology and irrigation techniques. This makes them one of the most vulnerable groups to climate change. Farming for them is grinding physical work, largely supported by their family, with each new generation being pushed into increasingly smaller plots of land. From threshing and bundling to separating grains by hand, crops have to be planted, picked, harvested and hauled by them.
Years of market-oriented reforms have unleashed a wave of capital and entrepreneurialism across India. High-end sectors such as information technology have made impressive strides leading to adulatory portrayals of India at home and abroad as an economic juggernaut. Despite this success, the benefits of reform have yet to extend to the hundreds of millions who toil on the land. The government has slashed or phased out subsidies for some crops, shredding a key safety net. The result is a growing social crisis. Fueled by crushing debt for buying transgenic seeds, failing crops on account of soil abuse by fertilisers, squeezing of prices by big multinational and government, indifferent farmers are trekking to cities. Here an equally cruel fate awaits them, but they are saved the shame of humiliation in the eyes of their own fellow villagers. A sense of deep despair runs through the lives of farmers. They have lost all hopes and also the will to fight. Many of them are taking a permanent escape from this physical and emotional pain by ingesting deadly pesticides.
Real costs of the Green Revolution and liberalisation
The Green Revolution was a success, but it came at a heavy price. It relied on high-yielding seeds, fossil fuels for fertilisers, modern methods of plant breeding and massive use of pesticides and equipment. A heavy dependence on irrigation led to massive water mining. This did increase agricultural productivity but depleted the soil and consumed far too much water. The Indian states that were the front-runners during the Green Revolution now suffer from soil degradation, ground water depletion and contamination along with declining yields.
Two decades back, the government embraced the global marketplace and began cutting farm subsidies as it liberalised the managed socialist economy. The farmers’ costs rose as the tariffs that had protected their products were lowered. Many farmers switched to new genetically engineered cotton seeds which are resistant to a deadly pest called bollworm and produced far higher yields and healthier crops with less use of pesticides. The seeds can be more productive and became standardised in many regions of Maharashtra. However, they can be three times more expensive to maintain than traditional seeds.
The looming threat of credit
Peasants borrow loans from moneylenders at exorbitant rates of interest for all their needs from buying expensive transgenic seeds and high-cost fertilisers to food for themselves and their cattle. They hope for a better yield in the times to come but this never happens. Eventually, they find themselves in a debt trap as they keep pursuing a vain mirage of a golden crop bonanza. As borrowings mount, many farmers are driven to suicide. Owing more than they earn, the steadiest of these workers have become gamblers of the highest stakes, betting their land and their lives on a better crop.
Indias first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in 1947, Everything can wait, but not agriculture. What India is witnessing today is exactly the reverse. All the other sectors in the Indian economy are surging ahead. Agriculture is the only one which is moving in the opposite direction. Within this self-perpetuating cycle of misery, wrapping a noose around the neck are all-too-friendly exits for farmers. While their deaths might bring personal escape, they leave behind crippling emotional, financial and physical burdens, inherited by those left to farm the dust: the women who did not die.
Moin Qazi, a former banker and an accomplished poet and writer, has extensively contributed articles to leading publications around the globe and authored several books.
Featured Image Source: World Economic Forum