Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [60]
I visited two dozen such families, all housed in low-ceilinged mud buildings in various villages, most with electricity and quite a few with TV. There was a distressing similarity to their stories: The tiny, increasingly small plots of farmland, the fast-declining crop yields, the dependence on seed and fertilizer dealers for expensive inputs, the money borrowed, over and over, from state banks and black-market moneylenders to cover those farming costs, as well as mounting bills for the new fruits of modernization—electricity, TV, the ever-escalating dowry and ceremony costs associated with marrying a daughter, sometimes over-ambitious purchases like motorcycles. And, most significantly, the complete lack of any non-farm sources of income: Unlike peasant farmers in so many other places, the small-hold cotton growers of central India have no source of remittance from the city. In an age when family farms have become a mere buffer for urban economies, farmers in disconnected districts like this, with no direct relationship to the urban remittance economy, are struggling under an agricultural system that essentially assumes the existence of a parallel urban life, a support network in the slums of India’s cities.§
Unfortunately, the slums are inaccessible to most of the farmers of this region. The nearest major city, Nagpur, is a difficult day’s trip away, and it would require savings to make a start there. And, because of this region’s cotton-based economy, its communication links are all directed toward Mumbai, an impossible 20-hour train ride away. The generation-long tendrils of seasonal and chain migration have not begun here. An informal survey of Dorli and its surrounding villages could not find a single villager who had even heard of someone who had moved to the city; without this sort of knowledge, migration is not even an option. Every village has access to at least one television and mobile phone and visits from urban-affiliated non-governmental organizations and political parties, yet none of this has brought the city closer. The small holdings and strangling economics have made it impossible for farmers to migrate anywhere, even to the nearby towns of Wardha or Chandrapur.
In the Indian media, the farmer suicides have been attributed to numerous causes. It has become popular to blame globalization and U.S. policy: After all, the worldwide market price of cotton has plummeted since its twentieth-century peak, in part because of the U.S. practice of subsidizing its own cotton farmers, but also because there is simply too much cotton on the worldwide market. While declining returns have certainly hurt, a simple examination of any cotton farmer’s books will dispel this theory. Even if they were receiving prices equivalent to the historic peak price, I found that most of the farmers who took their lives would still have been unable to meet their costs and avoid spiraling debt with the money they earned. Their fields were simply too small and their yields too poor to make any economic sense with this crop.
Other reports have blamed the financial cost and declining productivity of genetically engineered crops and the commercial fertilizers they require. But the problem predates these technologies and is rooted in more basic costs of modern agriculture. Soil exhaustion has become almost universal: The over-fertilization and lack of crop rotation caused by the application of Green Revolution techniques to unsustainably small crops, without proper knowledge, has turned the huge yields of a decade before into a permanent famine. The farmers here have watched their crop yields plummet over the past decade and their expenses rise. Desperation, indebtedness, and suicide are the result. In other regions, closer to major cities, farmers in similar straits avoid this fate. Though the economics are equally impossible,