Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
emergency accommodation is higher than it has ever been, because they can't buy into the
market. In the poor world, the same thing happens with food.
If the causes of famine are usually political and economic, what about the causes of the
'moderate shortfalls in production' which trigger famine? How much are these shortages
attributable to animal husbandry, and how much to agriculture? Should we pin all the blame
upon Abel? It might be that Cain has better PR?
The great famine of 1876-8 in India affected two areas most severely, Bengal and the
Deccan plateau in southern India. The Deccan suffered badly because
policies initiated by the British had undermined the agricultural economy:
After the 1857 Mutiny, the British pursued a relentless policy, especially in the
Deccan, against nomads and shifting cultivators whom they labelled as 'criminal
tribes'. Although the agro-ecology of the Deccan for centuries had been dependent
upon the symbiosis of peasant and nomad, upon valley agriculture and hill-slope pas-
toralism, the colonial state's voracious appetite for new revenue generated irresistible
pressure on the
ryots
(peasants) to convert 'waste' into taxable agriculture. Punitive
grazing taxes drove pastoralists off the land, while cultivators were lured into the pas-
toral margins with special leases.
The traditional Deccan practices of extensive crop rotation and long fallow, which
required large farm acreages and plentiful manuring became less numerous. Between
1843 and 1873, cattle numbers in the Deccan fell by almost five million. The 1876-8
drought killed off several million more, with cattle populations plummeting by nearly
60 per cent.
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It is only slightly reassuring to note, in passing, that the proportion of people who died
in the famine - about 25 per cent in many regions of Mysore and Madras states - was less
than the number of cattle which died. Some farmers clearly had enough food reserves or
money to ensure not only their own survival, but their stock's as well. But the main obser-
vation to be made here is that a low impact grazing regime was replaced by an ecologically
inappropriate agricultural regime. (We have seen that happen in the UK, with less loss of
life, where large areas of downland pasture have been ploughed up for subsidized wheat.)
We are not told in this account where the pastoralists were shifted to, but it stands to reason
that they increased grazing pressure wherever they went.
This is a common story, repeated up until modern times. For example, Vandana Shiva
reports that: 'Under Ethiopia's Third Five Year Plan, 60 per cent of the lands brought under
cultivation in the fertile Awash valley were devoted to cotton production. The local Afar
pastoralists were evicted from their traditional pastures and pushed into fragile uplands,
contributing to the deforestation that has been partly responsible for Ethiopia's ecological
decline.'
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