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ECOLOGIST VOICE FROM THE SOUTH The small farmers of India are a most resilient and independent community. They have defended their rights, fought every injustice, and bounced back after every flood, every drought, and every crop failure. Why, then, are they giving up on life today? Why are they committing suicide in such large numbers? There have been more than 300,000 farmer suicides since 1995, according to official government records. Addressing these questions has become a critical survival imperative – not only for farmers, but also for all of us who rely on the food they put on our tables. The epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India is a result of the haemorrhaging of the agrarian economy by a linear exploitative economy of industrial agriculture, which extracts fertility from the soil, and finances from small farmers, by selling them costly seeds and chemicals and locking them into unfair trade. The result is destruction of ecosystems and farmers’ lives as they get trapped in debt. The epidemic of suicides started after 1995, when agriculture policies were changed under the pressures of WTO agreements. Globalisation added to the debt burden, which was a consequence of the capital-intensive, chemical-intensive industrial agriculture inappropriately called the Green Revolution. In 1984, I carried out a study for the United Nations. I found that the high costs of industrial agriculture had trapped farmers in debt and polluted the soil, depleted the water and destroyed biodiversity. Ecologically it led to the death of the soil due to excessive use of chemical fertilisers. First, globalisation spread industrial agriculture everywhere. Industrial agriculture operates under the belief that WHY ARE INDIAN FARMERS DYING, AND WHY SHOULD IT MATTER TO US? Vandana Shiva believes a shocking wave of suicides is the result of globalisation and the industrialisation of agriculture I discovered four reasons why Indian farming was in crisis: Farmers are our givers of food Milled rice, India © Tom Pilston/PANOS 18 Resurgence & Ecologist September/October 2015

the ecological processes of Nature can be substituted with expensive and toxic chemical inputs. In place of soil organisms it promotes synthetic fertilisers, and in place of biodiversity that maintains a healthy pest-predator balance it promotes pesticide-producing GMOs like Bt cotton. In reality, fertilisers have destroyed soil fertility, and pesticides have created more pests. Second, corporate globalisation replaced food sovereignty with import dependency. A false idea was generated whereby food security did not mean growing your own food, but, instead, importing it. India dismantled every policy that had ensured justice for the small farmers and guaranteed our food security and sufficiency since Independence. Third, another false idea took root – that the small farmers are dispensable to the future of India. This could not be further from the truth. Worldwide, small farmers grow 70% of the world’s food on 25% of the world’s land. Fourth, industrialised agriculture ceases to see food as nourishment and instead regards it as a commodity. People have always eaten potatoes and corn, but today potatoes are raw material for crisps, and corn is raw material for animal feed. The acreage under these raw material commodities has jumped dramatically, whereas acreage under real food eaten directly by people has dropped significantly. Agriculture has been violently separated from its roots in soil, water and biodiversity. Instead of existing primarily as a source of food for families and communities, it has been artificially and coercively connected to global industry as a source of industrial inputs. These inputs – non-renewable seeds and toxic chemicals – have replaced farmers’ renewable and adaptable seeds, and displaced the ecological inputs of the farm ecosystem. Farmers thus carry a double burden of exploitation. First, they are exploited when they are sold costly seeds and chemicals. These seeds and chemicals often fail, which leads farmers to buy more – on credit from the companies – in the hope that the next non-renewable seed and the next toxic chemical might save them. Second, farmers are exploited by an industry that buys agricultural produce at cheap rates as a raw material. When farmers grow food, they eat the food as well as selling some in the local market. When they grow cotton, sugar cane, potatoes, corn or soybeans, they cannot eat their produce and must sell to industry. And industry pays exploitatively low prices, which aren’t enough for farmers to buy the food they can themselves eat. Sandwiched between high costs of inputs bought from industry and low prices of raw material sold to industry, the farmer is trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt. And despair-ridden, debttrapped farmers are committing suicide. The epidemic of farmers’ suicides began in the cotton belt of India, where Monsanto has monopolised the cotton seed supply with its genetically modified Bt cotton. Over the past year, suicides have spread to potato farmers in Bengal who are growing potatoes for Worldwide, small farmers grow 70% of the world’s food on 25% of the world’s land Pepsi. Sixteen farmers of West Bengal who shifted from rice cultivation to growing potatoes for Pepsi committed suicide in March 2015. Pepsi makes money by buying potatoes from farmers at low prices while selling them costly chemical inputs. Less than 1–2% of what we pay for a packet of Pepsi’s potato chips reaches the farmer. Now sugar cane farmers are committing suicide because they are getting into debt: after being hounded by the banks for repayments they cannot make, they are taking their lives. Indian farmers must be liberated from seed slavery and dependence on highcost, unreliable and ill-adapted corporate seeds. These farmers have been seed breeders across the centuries, and can continue to breed seeds of nutrition, diversity, and resilience. We at Navdanya have committed ourselves to Seed Sovereignty. The 120 community seed banks we have set up make farmers’ seeds directly available to farmers, freeing them of crop failure and debt. Farmers must also be liberated from high-cost, toxic inputs that are perpetuating the cycle of debt and creating disease, among both farmers and consumers. Liberation from poisons in agriculture is liberation from poisons in our food system. Organic manures and the ecological renewal of soil fertility are a tried and tested alternative. Ecological pest control is proven to work better than toxic pesticides and pesticide-producing GMOs. Farmers’ suicides are the direct result of an exploitative economic model seeking to maximise corporate profits at the cost of farmers’ lives. The answer to this is not to call for the end of small farmers, but to give them respect and justice, and to recognise that small farmers make up the backbone of food security. Of course the issue of farmers’ suicides is urgent for the farming community, but it should also be of utmost importance to each and every one of us. Farmers are our givers of food, and the foundation of food sovereignty. Farmers keep India’s 1.3-billion-strong population fed with their blood, sweat and tears, with their skills and their knowledge. Not because it is profitable, but because farming is for them the highest of all vocations. Yet farmers are taken for granted. We have turned food into a commodity, but it is now time to turn it back into food. What many do not realise is that if Indian small farmers are wiped out, no one else can feed India. No other country has enough surpluses to feed 1.3 billion Indians who will have given up their food sovereignty. And what applies to India applies everywhere. Across the world we need to protect our small farmers to protect the planet, our food and our health. Only small farmers grow real food, only they care for the soil and biodiversity, only they bring us nutritious, healthy, safe, fresh food. Their freedom to farm with dignity is indivisible from our food freedom. So let every meal become a moment to thank our farmers for the diversity of food they grow to bring us health, nourishment, taste and culture. Food sovereignty is not a luxury: it is a survival imperative. And it is in our hands. Vandana Shiva is the director of Navdanya. www.navdanya.org Issue 292 Resurgence & Ecologist 19

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ECOLOGIST VOICE FROM THE SOUTH

The small farmers of India are a most resilient and independent community. They have defended their rights, fought every injustice, and bounced back after every flood, every drought, and every crop failure. Why, then, are they giving up on life today? Why are they committing suicide in such large numbers? There have been more than 300,000 farmer suicides since 1995, according to official government records. Addressing these questions has become a critical survival imperative – not only for farmers, but also for all of us who rely on the food they put on our tables.

The epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India is a result of the haemorrhaging of the agrarian economy by a linear exploitative economy of industrial agriculture, which extracts fertility from the soil, and finances from small farmers, by selling them costly seeds and chemicals and locking them into unfair trade. The result is destruction of ecosystems and farmers’ lives as they get trapped in debt.

The epidemic of suicides started after 1995, when agriculture policies were changed under the pressures of WTO agreements. Globalisation added to the debt burden, which was a consequence of the capital-intensive, chemical-intensive industrial agriculture inappropriately called the Green Revolution. In 1984, I carried out a study for the United Nations. I found that the high costs of industrial agriculture had trapped farmers in debt and polluted the soil, depleted the water and destroyed biodiversity. Ecologically it led to the death of the soil due to excessive use of chemical fertilisers.

First, globalisation spread industrial agriculture everywhere. Industrial agriculture operates under the belief that WHY ARE INDIAN FARMERS DYING, AND WHY SHOULD IT MATTER TO US? Vandana Shiva believes a shocking wave of suicides is the result of globalisation and the industrialisation of agriculture

I discovered four reasons why Indian farming was in crisis:

Farmers are our givers of food

Milled rice, India © Tom Pilston/PANOS

18

Resurgence & Ecologist

September/October 2015

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