Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [61]
The most saddening sight in this region, beyond the devastated families of suicidal farmers, are the few farms that are operating at an appropriate size and capitalization level for commercial agriculture, with a few dozen hectares of fields, modern crop-management techniques, and water-preservation strategies. These fertile, profitable, high-employment farms are green oases amid the parched dun of ruined peasant lives, a constantly visible reminder to those families of just how easy it is, with some investment and savings from outside, to turn farming into a successful livelihood. “It is not hard to make a good and stable living farming around here—you just have to get enough land and manage it properly,” says Subhash Sharma, 55, whose 10 hectares, with 45 employees paid $1 a day each, net him profits of almost $10,000 a year. Significantly, he and his father used their earnings from a move to Mumbai to finance the reinvigorated farm.
A generation ago, almost all the farmers in this region were positioned to become successes like Mr. Sharma. Their holdings were large enough, averaging more than eight hectares; a reserve army of agricultural laborers was available; and the Green Revolution of the early 1970s had delivered high-yield seeds, crop-management practices, and farming know-how that put a permanent end to major famines in India and made market farming a real commercial possibility. What should have happened here was what happened in most of western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The more ambitious peasants expanded their holdings, took on workers, and multiplied their outputs, while the smaller ones sold their farms and either migrated to the city or became laborers on the successful commercial farms, and both the urban economy and the agricultural industry boomed, supporting each other.
But that sort of transition requires a functioning relationship with the urban economy, and India’s impoverished rural districts have been deprived of this in several ways, notably by government policies that promote and even romanticize the small family farm. The most dramatic effect—the one most directly responsible for the suicide crisis—has been on land holdings. At some point after Partition in 1947, the farm families in this region abandoned primogeniture, in which the eldest son inherits the entire farm and younger sons became farm laborers or move to the city. Instead, after the death of the patriarch, the holdings are divided among interested sons. Across this region, farms quickly became smaller, with devastating consequences. Small farms lead to higher unemployment and declining yields, making a breakthrough into commercial success impossible.13
I visited the Chaple family, who live in the busy, crowded village of Rehaki and walk a kilometer to their fields. As late as 1970, their family farm was 35 hectares. The grandfather divided it among four sons, with 12.5 hectares going to one brother and 7.5 to each of the others. This was then divided again, leaving the next generation with no more than 3.5 hectares each. Today, some of them have only 1.2 hectares to farm. Such plots are so tiny that even poor farm laborers can save enough of their earnings to abandon a steady wage for the high risk of small-hold farming (and seed vendors have persuaded many to do so). Ramaji Chaple, one of the grandsons who inherited a 1.2-hectare slice of the original 35-hectare farm, spent $300 in 2007 on cotton seed and fertilizer and, in the autumn, sold his cotton for only $400, a typical yield that year. The remaining $100 was not enough to feed the family, to say nothing of paying the $500 in outstanding loans, and while he had wealthier siblings in town who offered small sums, there was no pressure-relief valve of urban migration either to help him escape or to provide financial support. In July that year, his wife, Mukta, found