Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
vegetables consistently anymore. Even purchasing rice on a regular basis
was a struggle. These were not surprising claims, given that the price of
grain and food commodities reached record highs in the 2000s and were
expected to rise further
—more evidence of the effects of the commer-
cialization and globalization of agriculture intersecting with local condi-
tions.61 Neela lamented that if only cofee outputs and prices were beter,
she could have a beter life and perhaps even repair her dilapidated house.
She worried, though, that she would eventually have to sell her land to
make ends meet. “As the years pass, we're geting old. Already, our bodies
are weak and becoming weaker. I have that hardship, that fear. We might
have to sell our land after a while.”
Like Neela, many farmers in Kerala
—and India as a whole—found
themselves unable to afford food, let alone pay their debts from one grow-
ing season to another. Thousands of these farmers resorted to suicide.
In 2006, one of the worst years for this phenomenon, over one hundred
thousand Indian farmers commited suicide.62 Journalist P. Sainath, who
has extensively documented India's agrarian crises, claims that close to
a quarter million farmers commited suicide in India between 1995 and
2010. Many of these individuals were coton growers—farmers who spe-
cialized in commercial crops, as opposed to subsistence crops.63
At one point, Kerala had the third highest suicide rate in India, de-
spite being one of the smallest states in the nation.64 Between 2003 and
2007, close to one thousand farmers took their lives in the state. Many
were deep in debt and food insecure. They possessed less than one acre
of land, which they used mostly for the cultivation of commercial cash
crops, such as coffee and pepper. Several of these farmers had also taken
out loans to purchase agricultural inputs, like HYV seeds and chemical
fertilizers. Farmers in areas of Kerala such as Wayanad District had be-
come extremely dependent on loans for agricultural activities: in fact, one
study found that all of the farmers who commited suicide in this region
had outstanding debt.65
Environmental activists such as Vandana Shiva blame these suicides
on the marketization of agriculture in India, which was accelerated by the
Green Revolution. India's economic restructuring of the 1990s—during
