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India’s Farming ‘Revolution’ Heading For Collapse
Daniel Zwerdling, All Things Considered, National Public Radio (NPR)
Farmers in the village of Chotia Khurd in northern India don’t realize it, but they symbolize a growing problem that could become a global crisis.
They gathered on a recent morning in a stone-paved courtyard — a circle of Sikhs with brightly colored turbans and big, bushy beards — to explain why the famed “bread basket” of India is heading toward collapse.
Their comparatively small region, Punjab, grows far more wheat and rice for India than any other region. But now these farmers are running out of groundwater.
They have to buy three times as much fertilizer as they did 30 years ago to grow the same amount of crops. They blitz their crops with pesticides, but insects have become so resistant that they still often destroy large portions of crops.
The state’s agriculture “has become unsustainable and nonprofitable,” according to a recent report by the Punjab State Council for Science and Technology. Some experts say the decline could happen rapidly, over the next decade or so.
(13 April 2009)
‘Green Revolution’ Trapping India’s Farmers In Debt
Daniel Zwerdling, National Public Radio (NPR)
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.
(14 April 2009)
Punjab farmer suicides cast shadow on polls
Suvojit Bagchi , BBC
Mandip Kaur, a 29-year-old housewife from a farming family in southern Punjab, guards her husband round the clock.
“I fear he may commit suicide,” she says in broken Hindi.
Almost every village in Punjab has witnessed a suicide in their once-prosperous farming families and it is a major issue in the general election.
Ms Kaur’s 35-year-old husband, Lakhbir Singh, a small farmer with a two-acre land holding, is a strong and neatly dressed man.
He shows no sign of irritation or discomfort when we meet him in the village of Boparai Khurd in Barnala, about 500km (300 miles) north of Delhi.
Each year before the harvest, the small farmers of Punjab, who make up nearly 85% of the state’s farming community, borrow from local rural moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates to meet production costs, including fertilisers and electricity for irrigation.
… National Crime Records Bureau statistics say close to 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.
The Punjab government says the state produces nearly two-thirds of the grain in India.
But the state has faced many economic crises since the the mid-1990s.
No comprehensive official figures on farmer suicides in the area are available.
But a report commissioned by the government of Punjab this week estimated that there had been “close to 3,000 suicides” among farmers and farm labourers in just two of Punjab’s 20 districts in recent years, agriculture ministry sources told the BBC.
(15 April 2009)
Related from DFeutsche Presse-Agentur via M&C:
Little hope in India’s ‘suicide belt’ ahead of election.
What Your Neighborhood Needs is a Seed Library
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
A while back I got an email from a guy named Ken Greene, asking if I knew about his enterprise – the Hudson Valley Seed Library. I didn’t, actually, and I was just plain thrilled to hear that it existed. Their farm and seed catalog are dedicated to preserving seeds with historical ties or specific adaptations to our agricultural region. And I can’t think of a more valuable project.
… Their work is incredibly important – for most of us not lucky enough to live near a major seed company, finding really local seed sources is tough – and even if we do live near a seed company, often most of their varieties were grown a long distance away. The commitment of the HVSL to growing out seeds locally, and choosing ones that are particularly well adapted to our region is deeply important – it isn’t just one resource, in some sense, seeds are the master resource of any regenerative future.
… But not only do I want to support this wonderful project, but I want to encourage other people to think hard about establishing local seed libraries, seed saving cooperatives and small seed companies. We are at the beginning of a fundamental shift towards home agriculture – we see it in the garden on the White House Lawn and in the rising sales of local seed companies. We see it in the sheer number of people who are recognizing that an access to food that depends on jobs in the public economy represents a vulnerability.
Having access to safe, affordable and most of all, adapted breeds of seed that thrive in your climate and location is a first step in gardening.
(15 April 2009)
