The Green Revolution was an important intervention at a time when India needed cereal self-sufficiency. But the industrial agriculture that it gave birth to is proving disastrous for India’s farmers. The high input costs, supply gluts, erratic climate, etc are leading to falling farm incomes, debt traps and farmer suicides
Dead farmers are the litmus test of any civilised society. On December 4, a mirror was held up for all of India as NCRB data revealed a dark underbelly of our progress – 11,290 farmers and farm workers committed suicide in 2022. So basically even before one finishes their Netflix movie or gets home from work one or two farmers/farm workers have died by their own hands. Strangulating not only themselves and their families, but also choking the conscience of our civilisation.
The picture gets grimmer – farm related suicides have gone up by 3.7 percent from 2021 and about 5.7 percent from 2020. As much as 53 percent of 11,290 suicides or about 6,083 are of agricultural workers.
What’s Killing Our Farmers?
Surprisingly the highest number of suicides are reported in “progressive agri” states where industrial agriculture and “modern” GM crop is well established. Maharashtra tops the list followed by Karnataka and then Andhra Pradesh. Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh also saw a high number of reported farmers suicides. Some of the states where agriculture is still more traditional and small scale like West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura all reported zero suicides.
Another shocking figure was the number of suicides in Chattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh. UP reported a 42.13 percent and Chattisgarh a 31.65 percent increase in suicides. On the positive side Kerala saw a 30 percent decline in farmer/farm worker suicides.
The 1960s saw the advent of industrial agriculture – the Green Revolution. The newer agri-chemical input-dependent seeds, along with mechanisation and agri-chemicals swerved India’s food systems from self-sufficiency towards market/industry dependence. To its credit, these technologies helped India become cereals-sufficient and over the years India even exported rice and wheat.
But it also had a hidden cost – ecological destruction, rural debt and food style diseases. Punjab with its highest rural debt, overexploited groundwater, dead soils, cancer trains and social unrest (drug addiction to insurgency) is a prime example of what industrial agriculture can do to a society.
The hidden costs, more recently, were best described by Kishore Tiwari, then chairman of The Vasantrao Naik Sheti Swavlamban Mission (VNSSM), set up by the Maharashtra government. He called Bt Cotton and sugarcane “killer crops” as they were trapping farmers in debt and forcing them to commit suicide. He recommended that both these crops should be removed from the Vidarba and Marathwada region.
The Debt Trap
About 84 percent of farmers suicides coincidently from the cotton growing areas where BT cotton is grown. There is a disproportionate relationship between the area under cotton and the rate of suicide among cotton farmers especially in Maharashtra and also Andha Pradesh. Sugarcane farming in dry parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka has added to incomes for few, but caused a larger destruction for the rural society.
Because both of these crops are very input heavy – meaning they require expensive seeds, agri-chemicals, agri-industrial processing etc, the farmers have to borrow more money to cultivate them. The stakes and interest rates are so high that even one bad year can push the farming family into debt and in the successive years compounding debt rates, which the farmers rarely escape. And it’s not just these two crops, the system of industrial agriculture each year requires more expensive inputs. Meanwhile, the value of agri commodities or crops fall each year, shrinking the farmers’ profit even more.
The prices of everything from fertilisers to fuel have been volatile and what aggravates the wounds for farmers is that the climate has been unkind for the past couple of years. These factors have pushed them into deeper debt. Another major gap was the inability of the government flagship scheme like crop insurance to cushion the blow of the erratic weather.
Escaping The Industrial “Medicine”
When it comes to food security, India has come a long way from the 1960s, and completed a full circle. From receiving benefits, now we are in the crashing phase of the Green Revolution. Dead farmers, bad soils, contaminated and exploited water, and rural debt is the blowback from this technology.
Not to forget the explosion of food style diseases in India which also is directly linked to our agrarian production. Maybe that is the reason why even the father of the Indian Green Revolution MS Swaminathan towards the end of his life advocated for eco-technology and biodiversity based approach to farming.
We have to align our farmers with their agro-climatic zones and encourage them to follow a nature based model of sustainable biodiverse agriculture. This is the one of the safest ways to ensure nutrition and income security for the farming families and at the same point reduce the dependence on industrial systems or fertilisers and subsidies.