Autopsy of a farmer suicide

The Suicide Mortality Rate amongst male farmers in Maharashtra went up from 17 per lakh in 1995 to 53 per lakh in 2004. In the so-called ‘suicide-prone’ districts, it was above 100; in Amravati division, it was 140 per lakh in 2004.

The families ravaged by this experience are not the poorest of poor, as romantically stated sometimes. They own assets in rural areas, use the better available technologies, diversify into new crops and expect to do well. This is not the phenomenon of subsistence farming. These are farmers, generally educated, who go after what they see as profitable opportunities by investing a lot—generally from high-cost borrowings—and then lose out.

Cotton has turned out to be the apocalyptical crop. There are many reasons for this, but two that are prominent and policy-responsive are the technology and the price.

The common theory in Delhi is that Bt cotton is a disaster. If this was so, there would not be a running problem. The farmer is not knowledge-proof and will not keep on investing in a failed technology.

It is well-known that the ‘‘illegal and banned’’ Bharat Agro and other replicated seeds are used by almost a million-and-a-half peasants in Western India and Andhra Pradesh. Generally, the farmer makes money from these seeds. So, even if he doesn’t get receipts for his purchase or knows that he’s on the wrong side of the law, he carries on because of the profit potential.

It is in the odd case, when the seed fails after he has borrowed money on what is euphemistically called the kerb rate of interest, that he sees the five horsemen of the apocalypse closing in on him. Now he has nowhere to go because, for the state, he is a criminal.

I know it is the law. As Science and Technology Minister, I had a lot to do with it. But laws are enforced by men and on men. There are levels of policy making where the buck has to stop.

A small empowered working group should be set up with powers at the highest level to develop policies to ensure the farmer has access to the latest seed technology, including biotech. In Kharif 2006 there must be no farmer who faces unnecessary restrictions for using biotech.

Of the 250-odd companies registered with the Department of Biotechnology, only seven are multinationals; the remaining are small Indian companies. India has considerable comparative advantage in technology. If small companies can produce cheap biotech, methods have to be found to allow the country’s farmers to have it.

We must have a mechanism that gives a farmer access to seeds at a reasonable price. There must be effective protection for farmers against seed companies if the seeds fail. Nowhere is the havoc of patent laws on benign trade—as envisaged by Jagdish Bhagwati—more obvious than here.

So far as the price is concerned, it is an issue for tariff policies and market reform. These are the fields where Ravi Kumar’s NCEDEX must be mandated and the farmer protected from extreme volatility. After a good year, cotton prices have started falling dramatically. Import duties must be imposed on raw cotton with automatic setoffs for textile exports, so that they are not adversely affected.

–yoginder.kalagh@expressindia.com