Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
centives for producing more agricultural produce from less land and less
human labor.”30 As predicted, the Green Revolution rapidly transformed
India's agrarian society to support economic growth that favored indus-
trialization and urbanization. This process ironically made agriculture
itself more factory like: mechanized, homogenized, and large scale. An
agricultural system based on chemicals and rooted in the separation of
humans from nature became the new norm.31 Maintaining biogeochem-
ical cycles, preserving cultural and community practices, and conserving
agrobiodiversity became less and less important.
The environmental toll of these new agricultural methods has included
the growing pesticide resistance of pests, the pollution of waterways from
the runoff of fertilizers and other chemicals, and the loss of biodiversity
due to the almost exclusive planting of monocrops of HYV plants. Kerala's
coastal mangroves, for example, are under threat from chemical contami-
nation and excess nutrient buildup from nearby agricultural sources. Sim-
ilarly, environmental groups lament the fact that many traditional seed
varieties planted by previous generations, some of which have desirable
traits such as drought tolerance, may have been lost forever as planting
HYV seeds has become the norm in Indian society.
Farming communities have also grown smaller and less autonomous.
Because farmers are buying more and more inputs such as seeds and
fertilizers from the market, in the hopes of obtaining higher yields (and
higher incomes), they have become more reliant on subsidies from the
Indian government. Many farmers have also taken out loans from both
formal and informal lenders to make these purchases and have gone into
debt. Such income insecurity and debt have become common in India's
agrarian communities, as farmers are increasingly completely depen-
dent on the annual purchases of chemical inputs in order to grow food.
Unfortunately, farmers have found it difficult to repay loans and cover
the costs of these inputs, as yields have been less than expected and as
the prices for particular crops have fluctuated unpredictably. Those who
planted one crop exclusively and relied on buying inputs regularly found
themselves extremely vulnerable to crises in global commodity markets.
Farmers with smaller plots of land, and consequently less access to credit,
found the benefits of chemical agriculture to be even more elusive, and
