Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [67]
Had anyone committed suicide in Jaamni? Yes, a man named Anjanna, who was about forty-five years old and had killed himself the previous year by drinking pesticide. “He killed himself to escape his debts,” said one of the farmers. “Now his wife and grown son are in Maharashtra State working as farm laborers.”
The problem, again, comes back to water. In recent years, irrigation has suffered under a wave of neoliberal disinvestment. The state has removed important subsidies from small farmers; as result, thousands of them have killed themselves.
The process went like this: Starting in 1991 the Indian government began a process of economic liberalization. Efficiency became the watchword ; the state cut power subsidies to farmers. With that, running pumps for wells and irrigation became more expensive. To cope, farmers started taking loans from local banks or usurious moneylenders.29 The neoliberal withdrawal of developmentalist policies meant that local irrigation systems fell into dilapidation. With bad irrigation works soon the norm, farmers turned to drilling privately-funded wells and taking groundwater. This was typically done on an ad hoc and individual or village-by-village basis, with little planning or proper water management. As a result, the aquifers soon fell into decline. These private coping strategies require private capital. To drill wells, farmers had to borrow from local moneylenders—often at exorbitant rates. Now, when crops fail or wells run dry, which is becoming more common due to climate change, farmers cannot repay their debts.
By the late 1990s, many farmers had run out of options—they were too far in arrears to borrow more, too broke to produce crops. For thousands, the only escape from this debt trap came in the form of suicide—often by swallowing pesticides. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, 150,000 Indian farmers killed themselves between 1997 and 2005. But as Anuradha Mittal reports, “Farmers’ organizations believe the number of suicides to be even greater.”30 In Andhra Pradesh, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 farmers killed themselves between 1998 and 2004. As one creditor told the New York Times, “Many moneylenders have made a whole lot of money. . . . Farmers, many of them, are ruined.”31
When the links between drought, irrigation, debt, and suicide were becoming clear a dozen years ago, the Political and Economic Weekly investigated. “A study of 50 deceased farmers in Warangal District [near Adilabad] shows that well [water] is the largest source of irrigation for about three-fourths of the farmers. Only about one-third of the wells were dug under the subsidy schemes of the government. In the rest of the cases farmers themselves have borne the expenses for digging of wells. Besides this the depletion of groundwater in recent years has necessitated deepening of wells and laying of in-well bores.”
The cost of such a well in the late 1990s averaged between $1,400 and $3,000.32 As a World Bank study on drought and climate change in Andhra Pradesh found, that means debt. The Bank noted, “Household responses to drought have been largely reactive and do little to build longterm drought resilience. Credit remains the most common coping response to drought.” In fact, 68 percent of households in the study took loans due to drought, with large landholders borrowing “from formal sources (such as banks), while the landless and small farmers borrow from moneylenders at inflated interest rates.”33 Not only are the rates usurious, but these more informal contracts rely on brutal and humiliating enforcement mechanisms.
The Green Revolution
Another cause of debt is seed purchase. The zenith of this trap is Monsanto’s genetically modified Bt cotton. The story of Bt begins back in the halcyon days of modernization theory