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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] 'Green Revolution' Trapping India's Farmers In Debt
  • Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:56:23 -0600


'Green Revolution' Trapping India's Farmers In Debt
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102944731
by Daniel Zwerdling

Morning Edition, April 14, 2009 · As the world's population surges, the
international community faces a pressing problem: How will it feed
everybody?

Until recently, people thought India had an answer.

Farmers in the state of Punjab abandoned traditional farming methods in the
1960s and 1970s as part of the national program called the "Green
Revolution," backed by advisers from the U.S. and other countries.

Indian farmers started growing crops the American way — with chemicals,
high-yield seeds and irrigation.

Since then, India has gone from importing grain like a beggar, to often
exporting it.

But studies show the Green Revolution is heading for collapse.

A Thirst For Water

On a recent morning, a drilling rig is pounding away in the middle of a
wheat field near the village of Chotia Khurd. The sound, part jackhammer
and part pile driver, is becoming increasingly common in the farm fields of
northern India's Punjab region.

The farmer, Sandeep Singh, is supervising and looking unhappy as the rig
hammers away, driving deeper and deeper under his field in search of water.

When India's government launched the Green Revolution more than 40 years
ago, it pressured farmers to grow only high-yield wheat, rice and cotton
instead of their traditional mix of crops.

The new miracle seeds could produce far bigger yields than farmers had ever
seen, but they came with a catch: The thirsty crops needed much more water
than natural rainfall could provide, so farmers had to dig wells and
irrigate with groundwater.

The system worked well for years, but government studies show that farmers
have pumped so much groundwater to irrigate their crops that the water
table is dropping dramatically, as much as 3 feet every year.

So farmers like Sandeep keep hiring the drilling company to come back to
their fields, to bore the wells ever deeper — on this day, to more than
200 feet.

Farmers In Debt

The groundwater problem has touched off an economic chain reaction. As the
farmers dig deeper to find groundwater, they have to install ever more
powerful and more expensive pumps to send it gushing up to their fields.

Sandeep says his new pump costs more than $4,000. He and most other farmers
have to borrow that kind of cash, but they are already so deep in debt that
conventional banks often turn them away.

So Sandeep and his neighbors have turned to "unofficial" lenders — local
businessmen who charge at least double the banks' interest rate. The
district agriculture director, Palwinder Singh, says farmers can end up
paying a whopping 24 percent.

Another side effect of the groundwater crisis is evident at the edge of the
fields — thin straggly rows of wheat and a whitish powder scattered
across the soil.

The white substance is salt residue. Drilling deep wells to find fresh
water often taps brackish underground pools, and the salty water poisons
the crops.

"The salt causes root injuries," Palwinder says. "The root cannot take the
nutrients from the soil."

Destroying The Soil

In the village of Chotia Khurd, farmers agree that the Green Revolution
used to work miracles for many of them. But now, it's like financial
quicksand.

Studies show that their intensive farming methods, which government
policies subsidize, are destroying the soil. The high-yield crops gobble up
nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, iron and manganese, making the soil
anemic.

The farmers say they must use three times as much fertilizer as they used
to, to produce the same amount of crops — yet another drain on their
finances.

A farmer named Suba Singh has seen the good and bad effects of the Green
Revolution.

Clad in a bright blue turban and his face furrowed like a field, he opens a
squeaky wooden gate to his compound. He points to a small building made of
mud and straw, with faded green doors.

"That's where my family used to live," he says.

During the profitable years of the Green Revolution, he saw that everyone
else in the village was building brick houses.

"So I took out a loan," he says, "and built a brick house for my family,
too."

He turned the old mud house into his cattle shed. But now he is in debt.

A study by the Punjab State Council for Science and Technology calls it a
"vicious cycle of debt."

Suba and the other farmers say they've had to borrow money to buy just
about everything that makes them look prosperous — their brick homes,
tractors, cattle, even their plastic chairs.

The farmers have also built their Green Revolution farms and lifestyle on
another unstable source of money: Family members have moved overseas to
find jobs, because they couldn't make a living farming, and now they send
part of their income back to Chotia Khurd to support their relatives.

"It's like a disease that is catching on in the world," says Suba,
"building a life that is like a house of cards."

A System About To Collapse?

Some leading officials in the farming industry wonder when this house of
cards might collapse.

"The state and farmers are now faced with a crisis," warns a report by the
Punjab State Farmers Commission.

India's population is growing faster than any country on Earth, and
domestic food production is vital.

But the commission's director, G.S. Kalkat, says Punjab's farmers are
committing ecological and economic "suicide."

If he is correct, suicide is coming through national policies that reward
farmers for the very practices that destroy the environment and trap them
in debt.

Kalkat says only one thing can save Punjab: India has to launch a brand new
Green Revolution. But he says this one has to be sustainable.

The problem is, nobody has yet perfected a farming system that produces
high yields, makes a good living for farm families, protects and enhances
the environment — and still produces good, affordable food.





  • [Livingontheland] 'Green Revolution' Trapping India's Farmers In Debt, Tradingpost, 04/13/2009

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