Talk of India’s agrarian crisis is everywhere. Its most tragic face is the growing number of farmer suicides, not just in the hotspot areas of Andhra Pradesh and Vidharbha but in the allegedly prosperous agricultural zones of Punjab and Karnataka as well. It would have shaken Sri Sharad Pawar ,the Agriculture Minister, to hear of the suicides of farmers in the showcase Baramati region, his pocket borough which boasts of biotechnology colleges and info-tech connectivity. Acknowledging the overall regression in agriculture, the Prime Minister has said that to achieve the targeted 9% growth during the Eleventh Plan period , it was necessary for the farm sector to grow by 4% annually, from its current 1.7%.
A number of studies have been conducted in the regions worst affected by the agrarian crisis and a fair understanding has been developed about the reasons for the rural distress. The Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS) in Mumbai conducted an investigation into the Vidarbha agrarian crisis and farmer suicides at the behest of the Bombay High Court. Their key findings were the following:
The reasons for the crisis leading to farmer suicides were repeated crop failure, inability to meet the rising cost of cultivation, and indebtedness. The suicide victims were predominantly farmers with small to medium land holdings.
The study found that seventy per cent of the total number of suicide victims grew cotton as their primary cash crop. This figure is reflected in the district records of the region which say that seventy per cent of the farmers who killed themselves were cultivating Bt cotton.
A number of studies have been conducted in the regions worst affected by the agrarian crisis and a fair understanding has been developed about the reasons for the rural distress. The Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS) in Mumbai conducted an investigation into the Vidarbha agrarian crisis and farmer suicides at the behest of the Bombay High Court. Their key findings were the following:
The reasons for the crisis leading to farmer suicides were repeated crop failure, inability to meet the rising cost of cultivation, and indebtedness. The suicide victims were predominantly farmers with small to medium land holdings.
The study found that seventy per cent of the total number of suicide victims grew cotton as their primary cash crop. This figure is reflected in the district records of the region which say that seventy per cent of the farmers who killed themselves were cultivating Bt cotton.
The principal reasons for farmer indebtedness were identified as the growing cost of cultivation owing to higher input prices and higher cost for labor which increased the requirement for cash in the farm families. On the other hand, prices for agriculture products were plummeting. The combination of high cost of production, low market price and non availability of easy credit to meet the cash requirements of the farm family led to an astronomic debt burden that the farmers could not cope with. In addition to the agriculture loans, the farmers’ debt burden became heavier because of personal loans taken for social needs like marriages and education.
The study found that the crisis becomes acute when the farmers have exhausted their credit with banks (when such were available), and have turned to the private money lenders who charge usurious rates of up to 60 per cent per annum. These cannot be repaid given the adverse economics of production costs. Heavy rural indebtedness is the result of diminishing investment in agriculture which has reduced credit availability to cultivators. Allocation to agriculture and allied sectors from the total outlay for the Five-Year Plans has fallen from 14.9% during the First Plan to 5.2% during the Tenth Plan.
Apart from the crisis of available credit, crop failures have risen, especially in the last four to five years during which period farmers had moved increasingly to cash crops. This happened even when the monsoons were good. The crop failures were found correlated with heavy outlay on agrichemical inputs , use of hybrid seeds and genetically engineered cotton. According to the TISS report, the crisis in Vidarbha was more pronounced in the rainfed areas than in the irrigated areas, indicating the limiting role that the availability of water is beginning to play in agricultural productivity in all parts of India.
The crisis that has engulfed Punjab agriculture, which along with Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh was considered the grain bowl of India is being attributed to a factors similar to what are being seen in other parts of the country. The wheat-paddy yields, the mainstay of the agriculture of Punjab so far, are stagnating and becoming unsustainable partly because the intensive agriculture cycle which has been mining soil nutrients relentlessly has led to the collapse of soil health. The excessive use of agrochemicals has also destroyed soil quality and eventually its productivity and additional expenditure on restoring degraded soils is adding to the already inflated costs of production. The total cost of production of wheat and paddy has gone up by Rs 65 per ton for wheat and Rs 190 per ton for rice.
Agriculture is becoming so unprofitable in the grain basket of India that entire villages are being put up for sale. Thousands of acres of prime agricultural land in regions like Sangrur are being offered at throw away prices partly because the head of the family has either committed suicide or migrated to seek work. In fact as hundreds of indebted farmers have committed suicide, in village after village once prosperous but now impoverished and old grandparents are struggling to take care of the children that have been left behind.
According to scientists at the Punjab Agricultural University, the emergency in agriculture has developed because of the rising cost of agriculture production which is not offset by either the Minimum Support Price offered by government or prices available on the market. In addition , the water table is falling, a situation made worse by the irrational , wasteful use of water thanks to the reckless political expediency practiced by politicians who have announced free electricity and free water for irrigation. The solution, the university proposes is policy changes that will rationalize water use by stopping the free electricity given to farmers and instituting water pricing, as well as diversification of agriculture to move away from the paddy-rice rotation and introducing new crop varieties.
From Rajasthan too, reports suggest that the chief reason for the now acute farm crisis is the crisis of water. Rains, always scarce in this desert belt are becoming scant and infrequent. In many districts it has not rained for five years in a row. Exacerbating the water scarcity is the cheap populism of the political class which has announced free or heavily discounted water for farmers. The result of this is reckless extraction of groundwater to the extent that aquifers are running dry. Farmers and the new class of ‘water vendors’ that provide underground water to government schemes are pumping up groundwater without any restraint, knowing that it is running out. With no rains or water harvesting structures to harvest what little rain is received to charge the underground aquifers, groundwater is expected to finish in about another ten to fifteen years.
The story of Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan can be told for many other states. The crisis of agriculture today is predominantly the crisis of water. Groundwater depletion affects not just Rajasthan where eighty percent of the groundwater blocks are in danger of running out but also states like Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In Punjab eighty per cent of the groundwater blocks are considered overexploited, In Haryana the figure is sixty percent and in Tamil Nadu , forty six percent. Of the total 5723 geographic blocks into which the country is divided, over 1000 are considered to be critically overexploited with respect to the groundwater available. Unless water is priced and the political concessions of free electricity granted to farmers by vote seeking politicians is withdrawn, the water in many regions in India will simply run out, putting an end to agriculture production in large parts of the country. This will spell the end of India’s dreams and considerable success in achieving self reliance in food security.
The National Commission on Farmers (NCF) which has been working these past two years to understand the reasons for the crisis in agriculture, has recommended in its report that agricultural renewal be undertaken on a war footing incorporating a comprehensive action plan that should include completing the unfinished agenda on land reforms, restoring soil health, rationalizing the use of water and mandatory rainwater harvesting to recharge aquifers, investment in science and technology ,conserving agricultural diversity in the form of plant varieties, livestock and fisheries, providing insurance and credit to farm families, assured and remunerative farmer centered marketing and pro farmer policies.
In the backdrop of this understanding of the agrarian crisis, the Department of Biotechnology and the Biotechnology industry have taken the position at several policy forums that raising agricultural growth from the current 1.7% to the desired 4% could be achieved by promoting genetically engineered crops. US led programs like the secretly concluded and controversial Indo-US deal on agriculture and the ABSP I and ABSP II ( Agriculture Biotechnology Support Project) funded by the USAID and led by Cornell University and implemented in India through the Department of Biotechnology, are invoked by the government and the science administration as enabling programs to achieve the goal of uplifting Indian agriculture. Apart from the desirability of such direct US intervention in India’s program on GE crops and foods, is the ridiculously simplistic approach of suggesting that one single technology could address the many factors for decline in our agriculture.
Will genetically engineered crops contribute anything to alleviating the current crisis? To understand this, the reality ( as against the myth) of genetically engineered crops needs to be examined. What is actually available in terms of crops and their genetically engineered properties and to what extent are these relevant to Indian agriculture and the needs of small farmers. Do GE crops have the potential to carry debt ridden farmers over the threshold of despair and make their agriculture profitable, produce more food more cheaply and abolish hunger and rural distress?
Genetically engineered crops have been developed essentially for the large land holding, mechanised agriculture of industrialised countries. There is little available in the repertoire of genetic engineering today that is geared to address the problems of developing country agriculture. At present GE technology offers only four major crops, Soybean, ,Corn, Cotton and Canola which is a kind of mustard that is cultivated in temperate areas. Apart from a few virus resistant GE varieties, herbicide tolerance and insect resistance (the Bt trait) are the two traits that dominate the field of genetically engineered crops. According to the data for 2005 , of all GE crops planted in the world, 82 percent carried the herbicide tolerance trait , the remaining 18 percent carried the Bt trait. The Biotechnology industry, which owns both these traits, is therefore very keen to promote them as much as possible. Herbicide tolerant crops contain a gene that makes them resistant to the herbicide that is sprayed to kill herbs and weeds. The company that owns the herbicide tolerant crops (in this case Monsanto) is also the company that owns the herbicide that that particular crop variety will tolerate. Hence the company promoting herbicide tolerant crops makes a double killing, one on the sale of the herbicide itself, and two, on the sale of the crop varieties which are tolerant to that proprietary herbicide.
Herbicide tolerance was developed for industrial agriculture with its large farms and labor starved conditions, where weed control was possible only by using chemicals like herbicides. In developing countries like India weeds are controlled manually.Weeding is an income source in rural areas, especially for women. Sometimes it is their only source of wages. Farm operations like sowing, weeding, harvesting and winnowing are the key sources of rural employment. Agricultural labour constitutes the largest section of the labour force in developing countries; in India and other South Asian countries, the agricultural labour force is growing at the rate of six to seven percent per annum. The herbicide tolerance trait is essentially a labour saving and hence a labour displacing trait. Its introduction will take work away from agriculture labour and destroy income opportunities in rural India. Hence introducing these kind of genetically engineered crops is economically damaging and totally against the interest of rural people.
Weeds are considered a nuisance in the monoculture agricultural systems of industrial nations but not so here. In India and other developing countries, the fields are surrounded by local flora, the so called weeds, which have several useful functions critical to the well being of rural communities. What is collected by those doing the weeding in an agricultural field, fulfils two important nutritional roles. The plants that constitute weeds are largely nutritious leafy greens like chaulai and bathua saag , which are a valued source of nutrition in the family’s diet. A typical wheat field in India or Bangladesh would yield at least twenty types of leafy greens over the cropping season. These greens provide nutrition in a fresh and easily available form, at no cost. This has to be seen in the context of rural poverty where many farm families would not be able to buy too many vegetables from the market but they are able to access it for free from fields and field boundaries. This access to free nutrition is one of the reasons why nutritional status is better among the rural poor than among the urban poor who have to buy all their food.
The plants collected during weeding that are not consumed by the family, serve as fodder for the livestock that rural families maintain as an additional income sources. India has a very large livestock population; it has the largest cattle population in the world. India is also a fodder starved country and increasing fodder availability is one of the key concerns of the agricultural research system. For rural families the livestock they can keep is critical for extra income either through milk or the sale of the animals for meat. The fodder that is collected during weeding is fodder that is obtained for free. If rural families had to buy all the fodder that was needed to maintain their cows, goats or pigs, many would not be able to afford keeping animals and would have to forego the extra income.
Apart from this, using herbicide tolerant crops would make it impossible to plant crops on the field bunds, as is done in many parts of Asia both for additional food and for increasing farm incomes. Typically, farmers will grow crops like yams, ginger or vegetables on the bunds surrounding rice fields. Thus two or three kinds of produce are available from the field in the same season. This advantage would be lost if the package of herbicide tolerant crop varieties and herbicide use would be implemented. In addition, the practice of intercropping and mixed farming would suffer a setback. Traditionally farmers plant more than one crop in the field. Sugar cane for instance is interspersed with lentils or mustard and it is not uncommon to find farmers planting mustard along with wheat, to be harvested one after the other or linseed together with lentils. Mixed cropping is widely practiced, with differing combinations of crops depending on the region.
So called weeds are also the medicinal plants that rural families depend on for the health and veterinary care needs of themselves and their animals. The introduction of herbicide tolerant crops with accompanying herbicide use would kill the surrounding vegetation and deprive rural communities of the medicinal plants which form the basis of indigenous healing traditions. . It is well known that about 80% of rural communities across the world are dependent on medicinal plants and indigenous systems of medicine. Destroying the vegetation around crop fields would deprive village communities of crucial health care opportunities especially in a situation where the formal system does not adequately address their health and veterinary requirements.
Bt technology is the second category of genetically engineered crops like Bt cotton which is the only GE crop being cultivated in India at present, although many others are in the pipeline. In Bt crops, a toxin producing gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is put into plants. These GE plants which produce the Bt toxin are in essence producing their own insecticide. Pests that feed on the plant are supposed to die on eating the poison.. They do up to a point but then like all pests, they too will develop resistance. This has begun to happen. Reports are coming in about the collapse of the Bt cotton technology from China and from the state of Arkansas in the cotton belt of the US. Cotton scientists in India are warning that with the way that legal and illegal Bt cotton is spreading everywhere, without farmers following the recommended crop management practices, it is only a matter of time before the pests become resistant to the toxin and the technology collapses here as well.
In India, the Bt strategy for disease resistance is likely to collapse earlier than predicted since in the absence of any coherent policy, the Department of Biotechnology has sanctioned such a large number of Bt crops that today, about 42 percent of all the research on GE crops in India, is based on the Bt gene. Ranging from cotton to potato, rice, brinjal, tomato, cauliflower, cabbage, even tobacco, to maize, the Bt gene is everywhere.
Assuming that the crops that are being researched are targeted to reach the fields one day, we are facing a situation when a wide range of crops growing in both the Rabi and Kharif season will contain the Bt gene. So throughout the year, there will be standing crops containing Bt endotoxin. Not only that, in the same season, there will be a number of different Bt crops growing next to each other in small fields specially in regions where farmers grow a variety of vegetables. When the bollworm is exposed to the endotoxin, constantly, year for year, in every season, resistance to the Bt toxin will surface very quickly in the pest.
We saw this happen with DDT which was used in such profusion everywhere that the mosquitoes quickly acquired resistance to it and DDT became ineffective in controlling mosquito populations. The same thing happened with the use of synthetic pyrethroids as pesticides in agriculture. Single point interventions in pest control have never worked for any length of time , whether it is through chemical pesticides or through a genetically engineered route using Bt toxins. The reason is simple. Every pest, in its effort to survive , will ultimately develop a resistance to the poison that is aimed to kill it. That is why a constantly evolving Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach, using a variety of strategies, is the only approach that can work over the long term to control plant pests and diseases. That is the reason that the very expensive Bt technology will not work for Indian agriculture.
On top of all this, the high cost of Bt technology makes its cultivation economics adverse for small farmers. Bt cotton seeds cost several times the price of successful, local non Bt seeds. So exorbitant has the pricing been, that the Government of Andhra Pradesh has filed a case against the owner of the Bt technology, the Monsanto company.
Gene Campaign which presented the first scientific data from the first harvest of Bt cultivation in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, showed that net profit from Bt cotton was lower per acre compared to non-Bt cotton in all types of soils and that because of the high investment costs and poor performance of Bt cotton , sixty percent of the farmers cultivating Bt cotton were not even able to recover their investment and incurred losses averaging Rs. 79 per acre (Table 1)
Table 1: Comparative income from Bt. and non-Bt. Cotton ( Andhra Pradesh & Vidharbha)
This then is the scenario with regard to the currently available genetically engineered crops that the promoters of agricultural biotechnology present as the answer to India's problems in agriculture. It is possible that one day genetically engineered crops may contribute to solving one of the other problem in agriculture but that day is not here yet. At present GE crops are being generated by the private sector which is investing in traits and technologies that benefit farming in advanced industrialized countries and are profitable enough to guarantee adequate returns on investment in research. There are unresolved issues about the environmental impact of such crops and their safety as food. There should be greater clarity on safety issues before GE crops are considered as a viable option. It needs to be kept in mind that genetic engineering is a technology owned predominantly by six multinational corporations. These are Monsanto , Syngenta, Dow, Du Pont , Bayer and BASF . Every aspect of the technology is shackled in patents and access to it is possible only through licensing. Is it realistic to assume that in their current form, genetically engineered crops have anything to contribute to alleviating rural distress in India?
Suman Sahai is the director of Gene Campaign, a research and advocacy organization working on food and livelihood security, farmers’ and community rights. She can be reached at genecamp@vsnl.com and http://www.genecampaign.org/
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