REVIEW BY EVA CHENG
Harvest of Death: Farmers' Suicides and Rural Starvation in the Shadow of Globalisation
By V. Shankar and R. Vidyasagar
Published by Indian Institute of Marxist Studies 2004
50 pages
Harvest of Death, a new pamphlet from the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Marxist Studies, notes: "Five years ago, farmers' suicides [in India] were considered to be a temporary phenomenon. But, today what we are witnessing refutes that story."
The pamphlet points out that suicides by Indian farmers are regularly reported in the daily press in most Indian states. Official studies of the problem in Punjab in 1998 and in Karnataka in 2002 both blamed "chronic illness", "alcoholism" and other individuals' problems rather than examining the underlying social causes.
However, sporadic newspaper reports and activists' tireless exposes have revealed a horrifying picture. In Karnataka alone, at least 300 farmers took their own lives in the six months to October 2003. In the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh state, 1826 farmers killed themselves in the last five years.
Meanwhile, "thousands have died of endemic hunger and malnutrition in states like Rajasthan, Orissa, etc.", Harvest of Death points out. Even in some pockets of the prosperous "rice bowl" of Tamil Nadu state, it notes, "there are reports of people eating rats as they cannot get any staple diet. Children and women are being sold. The worse tragedy is that the people starve", while government warehouses, a few kilometres away, are overflowing with food stocks. "In some cases", the authors note "food grains are rotting because of want of storage space."
After independence from British rule in 1947, India introduced government procurement and distribution of food grain to ensure minimum food supply for the most impoverished people. But these public food systems have been increasingly undermined since the government adopted neoliberal "free trade" policies in the early 1990s.
Under the resulting "economic liberalisation", the dictates of the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were embraced. Price controls were removed and tariffs and other protections for India's farmers were lifted.
Public Distribution System (PDS) food supplies were previously priced within the reach of the poor, but they are now close to the market prices, leading to a plunge in sales and overflowing public food warehouses. This has led to a drive by the government to weaken the public food procurement system, which has made poorer farmers even more at the mercy of "cheap" agricultural imports. Domestic production of grain has thus become increasingly less viable.
While the meagre and dwindling PDS subsidies only loosen the nooses on the farmers' necks, the imported grains with which they have to compete are mostly from First World countries, where grain farming is heavily subsidied.
To ensure the playing field remained uneven, the WTO agricultural rules stipulated in the early 1990s that the subsidies existing then, predominantly in the First World, could continue, while those mostly Third World, countries that did not have public subsidies during 1986-88 couldn't introduce them to help their farmers.
Meanwhile, local landlords and moneylenders are working overtime to ensure that India's small cultivators are chronically dependent on them — for everything from the supply of seed, fertiliser and pesticides to loans and sales. They are pushing small farmers into mono-cropping and cultivation of non-food cash crops, making them even more vulnerable to price declines for their produce and rises in their input costs.
Millions of poorer farmers are running up big debts simply to produce their next crop — until, having lost all hope of getting out of the debt "black hole", many commit suicide.
Systematic cuts in public investment in agricultural infrastructure also make small-scale cultivation increasingly less viable. This is a subtle way to undermine the post-independence land reform under which small plots of land were provided to tillers.
Small tillers are forced to become, if they're lucky, landless rural labourers or pushed into the ranks of the urban poor. The proportion of landless rural households was 41% in India in 2000, up from 35% in 1987.
Starvation deaths are most endemic among these agrarian labourers and among the rural paupers. Suicides, on the other hand, are most common among low-income farmers.
Harvest of Death makes it clear that these are socially created problems, products of "the crisis of world capitalism" which has been transferred "onto the shoulders of the broad masses, particularly the peasantry".
Penetrating social analysis, backed by concrete examples, is the pamphlet's strength. It's a useful tool to help understand yet another instance of how working people are forced to endure extreme deprivation in the midst of abundance under capitalism.
[UD$3 per copy or US$10 for 5 including postage. Make cheques payable to Liberation Publications, U-90, Shakapur, Delhi, India 110 092. Email <liberation@cpiml.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 29, 2004.
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