| In light of the diary about the failure of the Green Revolution I posted earlier today, I'd like to also examine the farmer suicides in India. And I think, as you'll see below, that perhaps saying that the Green Revolution was bad because of the suicides is misleading. The Green Revolution was bad because it was bad. It didn't work. It replaced one unacceptable situation (starvation) with another (a few years of plenty followed by a crisis). But the suicides? They are the result of a perfect storm that particularly affected one region of India worse than the rest of the country. The Green Revolution was a part of that, but so was the climate, the political and economic environment, and the lack of other career options in the area.
My source for this information is: "Farmers' Suicides In India: Magnitudes, Trends And Spatial Patterns" by K. Nagaraj, Madras Institute of Development Studies |
| Indian records show about 200,000 farmer suicides from 1995 to 2006. Records show a sharp increase (18%) in suicides in 1998, which remained constant at about 16,000 suicides per year until 2001. 2001 showed another increase (10%) to 17,000-18,000 per year. However, this is an underestimation because they only counted people as "farmers" if they had a title to their own land. That means if you're a tenant farmer or if your dad owns the title to your land, you aren't included in the farmer suicide statistics.
While official statistics show that farmers commit suicides at a higher rate than the general population, those are underestimated as well (due to the issue of requiring a title to land before counting a suicide as a farmer suicide). These statistics are most valid for 2001, the year India did a census. In that year, nearly two-thirds of farmer suicides occurred in the states Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh & Madhya Pradesh (five contiguous states in the heartland of India). In those states, people in the general population commit suicide at a rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people, but farmers (and remember this is an underestimated number) commit suicide at a rate of 28.7 suicides per 100,000 farmers.
The worst state of the bunch for farmer suicides is Maharashtra. In 1997, 1917 farmers committed suicide in that state. The number increased each year (except for 2005) to 4453 farmer suicides in 2006.
...there have been attempts at late, especially by state functionaries - particularly in the most affected states like Maharashtra - to delink farm suicides from the agrarian crisis. The claim often made is that a number of farm suicides are not attributable to agrarian crisis and are due to factors like unsustainable life styles of farmers, alcoholism, large expenses on marriages, or due to some incurable diseases etc. And these types of explanations, we believe, are seriously flawed, since they do not view suicides as a social phenomenon.
The same document describes the area hardest hit by farmer suicides as "highly water stressed with a low degree of irrigation and with scanty, uncertain rainfall... the soil quality here is poor - and worsening." This area was vulnerable to being hit by the perfect storm - which it was. The government opened up to free trade and complied with international trade agreements by removing subsidies AND forcing Indian farmers to compete with imports at much lower prices than they were used to receiving for their crops. This meant that the cost of producing cotton went up while the price received for cotton went down. And what happened, at the same time as this?
Now, a socio-economic context, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by the state was taken up private agents particularly in areas like credit, supply of seeds and fertilizers, extension services (like advice and help on crops to be grown, digging of bore wells etc.), marketing of crops etc. These agents, often combining all these multiple roles were mostly from the urban centres in the region and, with next to no regulation of their operations, their relationship with farmers was essentially a predatory one exploiting the latter's vulnerability during the period of crisis. |
