Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide and How Can We Stop This Tragedy?

By Vandana Shiva, Huffington Post. Posted May 18, 2009.

While Monsanto pushes the costs of cultivation up, agribusiness subsidies drive down the price farmers get for their produce.

Cotton producers in the US are given a subsidy of $4 billion annually. This has artificially brought down cotton prices, allowing the US to capture world markets previously accessible to poor African countries such as Burkina Faso, Benin, and Mali. This subsidy of $230 per acre in the US is untenable for the African farmers. African cotton farmers are losing $250 million every year. That is why small African countries walked out of the Cancun negotiations, leading to the collapse of the WTO ministerial.

The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities steal from poor peasants of the South. A study carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are losing $26 billion annually. This is a burden their poverty does not allow them t bear. As debts increase -- unpayable from farm proceeds -- farmers are compelled to sell a kidney or even commit suicide. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.

Farmers suicides in the state of Chattisgarh have recently been before in the news. 1593 farmers committed suicide in Chattisgarh in 2007. Before 2000 no farmers suicides are reported in the state.

Chattisgarh is the Centre of Diversity of the indice varieties of rice. More than 200,000 rices used to grow in India. This is where eminent rice scientists Dr. Richaria did his collections and showed that tribals had bred many rices with higher yields than the green Revolution varieties.

Today the rice farming of Chattisgarh is under assault. When indigenous rice is replaced with green Revolution varieties, irrigation becomes necessary. Under globalization pressures, rice is anyway a lower priority than exotic vegetables. The farmers are sold hybrid seeds, the seeds need heavy inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, as well as intensive irrigation. And crop failure is frequent. This pushes farmers into debt and suicide.

Chattisgarh is also a prime target for growing of Jatropha for biofuel. Tribals farms are being forcefully appropriated for Jatropha plantations, aggravating the food and livelihood crisis in Chattisgarh. The diesel demand of the automobile industry is given a priority above the food needs of the poor.

The suicide economy of industrialized, globalised agriculture is suicidal at 3 levels -- it is suicidal for farmers, it is suicidal for the poor who are derived food, and it is suicidal at the level of the human species as we destroy the natural capital of seed, biodiversity, soil and water on which our biological survival depends.

The suicide economy is not an inevitability. Navdanya has started a Seeds of Hope campaign to stop farmers suicides. The transition from seeds of suicide to seeds of hope includes:

• A shift from GMO and non renewable seeds to organic, open pollinated seed varieties which farmers can save and share
• A shift from chemical farming to organic farming
• A shift from unfair trade based on false prices to fair trade based on real and just prices

The farmers who have made this shift are earning 10 times more than the farmers growing Monsanto's Bt-cotton.

See more stories tagged with: india, farmers, farmer suicides, vandana shiva, sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture

Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science,

Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books,

including Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy.

Vandana is a founding director of International Forum on Globalization.

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