Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the voices of the dozens of colorfully turbaned Sikh farmers—was
anything but success.
Gesturing with intensity, their faces strained, the farmers
shared with us stories of falling income and mounting debt, as
the world prices for their crops sunk and sunk. We heard about it
all: banks foreclosured, exhausted soils, depleted groundwater.
And we heard about the epidemic of farmer suicides plaguing the
region, part of a staggering nationwide trend of farmer suicides,
which have claimed an estimated 150,000 lives in the country from
1997 to 2005.
Their suffering confirmed the logic my mother and her col-
leagues at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food
First) laid out in the early 1970s: that increasing yields through
input-intensive agriculture in the developing world would not itself
end hunger. Without farmers gaining a voice to secure a fairer sys-
tem, greater production would inevitably drive many farmers off
the land,
increasing
their hunger. Furthermore, with the expansion
of industrial agriculture, more and more grain, even in the poorest
countries, would go to farmed animals or export, not to the hun-
gry. With economic inequality increasing in countries containing
80 percent of the world's people, elites in poor countries can now
afford grain-fed meat. And as the taste for factory-farmed meat is
sold to populations globally, the burden on the land increases as
well: feed-crop production now uses up one-third of all arable land
worldwide.
At the end of our stay in India, my mother and I met with a head
of India's food distribution system. We told him that in addition to
talking with desperate farmers, we had seen football-field-sized
hillocks of surplus grain, barely protected from the weather by
plastic tarps.
“Oh, yes, we now have the biggest surpluses in history—16 mil-
lion tons above our 24 million ton buffer stock,” he proudly said.
