On July 12th, The Hindu documented the death of Renuka Aradhya, a 35 year old farmer, who committed suicide at Kaarekurchi in Gubbi taluk of Tumakuru district.
If you missed reading about his demise, you can hardly be blamed. The story is a familiar, predictable one - depressingly familiar and infuriatingly predictable - to anyone who has an ear for news that concerns the lives of 263 million farmers (the number, as per the 2011 census, that includes both cultivators and agricultural labour).
Two hundred and sixty three million human beings and their children, whose futures have been missed between two economic stools in the last twenty four years of liberalisation, who have been designated ‘laggards’ in the growth process of an emerging economy, who live outside India’s urban agglomerations and suffer the real pain of being exposed to the real costs of ‘development’.
Aradhya had four acres of land on which there were coconut and arecanut trees; apparently, he had taken a gold loan of Rs.90,000 from State Bank of Mysore, Rs.70,000 from the Primary Land Development Bank and Rs.3 lakh from private money lenders.
He killed himself because his borewell failed.
…..which meant drilling another borewell. In Tumakuru district, among India’s most water stressed districts, this is a minor form of fracking, no less; it means reaching into the depths of the Earth, over a thousand feet below the ground. The cost? At least a couple of lakhs, which he could not raise in loans.
……as a result, his coconut and arecanut farm dried up.
…..which meant he would not be able to pay the annual interest on loans of Rs. 1.30 lakhs (@ 15% on loans taken from banks, @ 36% on ‘private’ loans). The question of principal repayment must not have crossed his mind.
The only reason I remembered to cut this little news item out was that I had spent a couple of days near Tumakuru in a training campsite, a day before Aradhya killed himself.
This is original hard rock country, the outstanding beauty of the scrub and the weathered adaptation of the human and cattle contributing to an ineffable beauty at sunrise and sunset. While arecanut is a traditional crop in the area, the last two three decades have seen three changes in the economics of arecanut, each debilitating in its impact on the farmer, all taken together a recipe for a crisis
1. The first change is the intensity of arecanut plantation, driven by the rapid growth of the pan masala and the gutka industry. Walking around the area, I saw arecanut everywhere, intensely planted and profusely watered from the bowels of the Earth. Water, from underground aquifers that have been charged for decades, now being consumed with imprudence born out of ignorance, short-term economics and peer behaviour. Yet, for every two farms that exhibited the verdancy of assured, timely irrigation by borewell water, there was one that had been abandoned, the plantation standing forlorn in a caked, brown field, cast to the dry winds, just as its owner had been cast to an uncertain fate.
2. The second change is in the rainfall or, more accurately, its absence. Tumkaru has shrivelled into a dehydrated zone, its lakes long gone, the underground aquifers rapidly receding as farmers pump even more water out in a viciously spiralling downward cycle of recession.
3. Yet, this is not all. Arecanut, with its volatile economics has, over the years, become the femme fatale of the farmer. An example: the price of arecanut rose rapidly in 2014 to Rs. 900 a kilogram in August 2014; more areas were planted up, more borewells dug in a mindless frenzy, many farmers seeking a way out of earlier distress, other simply avaricious . Today the price is about Rs. 280, a drop of seventy percent in one year.
Most of us who live in cities do not really appreciate the import of such a drop. To put this in perspective and use an example, imagine you had all your income coming from an index fund on the stock market that you hoped would appreciate above the rate of inflation. Imagine now that, instead of crashing, as it did, by about 4% on Black Monday in August, it crashed 70% to about 7000 points – the number it was at about ten years ago. Considering the inflation in the last decade, you would be at least twice, possibly three times, poorer than you were then.
India’s cash crop farmers – growing cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, arecanut, ginger – have recessed into a state of permanent poverty because their Sensitive Index has crashed. It is a crash that has driven millions in the last few years to poverty from a level that might have been modest, yet above subsistence .
So, why did the price of arecanut drop precipitously?
In 2013, the arecanut crop in the Malnad and coastal Karnataka region declined by fifty percent due to heavy rain that caused a fungal infection in the plant. As the price of arecanut shot up as a result; many farmers made the switch from food crops to arecanut in a classic, much repeated, example of a failure of systems thinking – doing something without knowing that all others in the boat are doing pretty much the same thing.
The firms engaging in processing arecanut then decided to import it , triggering a slump in prices: in 2013-14, about 18,000 quintals were imported, in 2014-15, over five times this quantity came in.
.. …and why can’t the Government impose import duties on arecanut?
The answer lies in bilateral trade agreements – SAFTA and SAARC - where the member countries enjoy total exemption from import duties.
As you read this, is there the ol’ vicious cycle feeling, a sense of helplessness, a feeling of inevitability, of ineluctable decline in Agriculture’s condition?
There is, equally, the larger question to be asked amidst this tragedy: all this for what purpose?
The accelerated desertification of an entire district, the crippling of its farming community, the felling of natural vegetation and the increased wildlife conflict, all to produce a crop that is the crucial input for a final product known to be addictive and carcinogenic, the single largest cause of oral cancer in India today.
My belief - and you are welcome to agree or disagree - is that the starting point is a ban on pan masala and gutka. If you do agree, please write in to the Health and Agriculture Ministers, asking them to do what is right and, yet, provide the agrarian sector the expertise and support needed to move away from arecanut to more sustainable crops that are benign, useful and remunerative.
It's the least we can do for our planet.
If you missed reading about his demise, you can hardly be blamed. The story is a familiar, predictable one - depressingly familiar and infuriatingly predictable - to anyone who has an ear for news that concerns the lives of 263 million farmers (the number, as per the 2011 census, that includes both cultivators and agricultural labour).
Two hundred and sixty three million human beings and their children, whose futures have been missed between two economic stools in the last twenty four years of liberalisation, who have been designated ‘laggards’ in the growth process of an emerging economy, who live outside India’s urban agglomerations and suffer the real pain of being exposed to the real costs of ‘development’.
Aradhya had four acres of land on which there were coconut and arecanut trees; apparently, he had taken a gold loan of Rs.90,000 from State Bank of Mysore, Rs.70,000 from the Primary Land Development Bank and Rs.3 lakh from private money lenders.
He killed himself because his borewell failed.
…..which meant drilling another borewell. In Tumakuru district, among India’s most water stressed districts, this is a minor form of fracking, no less; it means reaching into the depths of the Earth, over a thousand feet below the ground. The cost? At least a couple of lakhs, which he could not raise in loans.
……as a result, his coconut and arecanut farm dried up.
…..which meant he would not be able to pay the annual interest on loans of Rs. 1.30 lakhs (@ 15% on loans taken from banks, @ 36% on ‘private’ loans). The question of principal repayment must not have crossed his mind.
The only reason I remembered to cut this little news item out was that I had spent a couple of days near Tumakuru in a training campsite, a day before Aradhya killed himself.
This is original hard rock country, the outstanding beauty of the scrub and the weathered adaptation of the human and cattle contributing to an ineffable beauty at sunrise and sunset. While arecanut is a traditional crop in the area, the last two three decades have seen three changes in the economics of arecanut, each debilitating in its impact on the farmer, all taken together a recipe for a crisis
1. The first change is the intensity of arecanut plantation, driven by the rapid growth of the pan masala and the gutka industry. Walking around the area, I saw arecanut everywhere, intensely planted and profusely watered from the bowels of the Earth. Water, from underground aquifers that have been charged for decades, now being consumed with imprudence born out of ignorance, short-term economics and peer behaviour. Yet, for every two farms that exhibited the verdancy of assured, timely irrigation by borewell water, there was one that had been abandoned, the plantation standing forlorn in a caked, brown field, cast to the dry winds, just as its owner had been cast to an uncertain fate.
2. The second change is in the rainfall or, more accurately, its absence. Tumkaru has shrivelled into a dehydrated zone, its lakes long gone, the underground aquifers rapidly receding as farmers pump even more water out in a viciously spiralling downward cycle of recession.
3. Yet, this is not all. Arecanut, with its volatile economics has, over the years, become the femme fatale of the farmer. An example: the price of arecanut rose rapidly in 2014 to Rs. 900 a kilogram in August 2014; more areas were planted up, more borewells dug in a mindless frenzy, many farmers seeking a way out of earlier distress, other simply avaricious . Today the price is about Rs. 280, a drop of seventy percent in one year.
Most of us who live in cities do not really appreciate the import of such a drop. To put this in perspective and use an example, imagine you had all your income coming from an index fund on the stock market that you hoped would appreciate above the rate of inflation. Imagine now that, instead of crashing, as it did, by about 4% on Black Monday in August, it crashed 70% to about 7000 points – the number it was at about ten years ago. Considering the inflation in the last decade, you would be at least twice, possibly three times, poorer than you were then.
India’s cash crop farmers – growing cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, arecanut, ginger – have recessed into a state of permanent poverty because their Sensitive Index has crashed. It is a crash that has driven millions in the last few years to poverty from a level that might have been modest, yet above subsistence .
So, why did the price of arecanut drop precipitously?
In 2013, the arecanut crop in the Malnad and coastal Karnataka region declined by fifty percent due to heavy rain that caused a fungal infection in the plant. As the price of arecanut shot up as a result; many farmers made the switch from food crops to arecanut in a classic, much repeated, example of a failure of systems thinking – doing something without knowing that all others in the boat are doing pretty much the same thing.
The firms engaging in processing arecanut then decided to import it , triggering a slump in prices: in 2013-14, about 18,000 quintals were imported, in 2014-15, over five times this quantity came in.
.. …and why can’t the Government impose import duties on arecanut?
The answer lies in bilateral trade agreements – SAFTA and SAARC - where the member countries enjoy total exemption from import duties.
As you read this, is there the ol’ vicious cycle feeling, a sense of helplessness, a feeling of inevitability, of ineluctable decline in Agriculture’s condition?
There is, equally, the larger question to be asked amidst this tragedy: all this for what purpose?
The accelerated desertification of an entire district, the crippling of its farming community, the felling of natural vegetation and the increased wildlife conflict, all to produce a crop that is the crucial input for a final product known to be addictive and carcinogenic, the single largest cause of oral cancer in India today.
My belief - and you are welcome to agree or disagree - is that the starting point is a ban on pan masala and gutka. If you do agree, please write in to the Health and Agriculture Ministers, asking them to do what is right and, yet, provide the agrarian sector the expertise and support needed to move away from arecanut to more sustainable crops that are benign, useful and remunerative.
It's the least we can do for our planet.
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