When It Rains, It Pours

Not a good year, Ramappa said.  

I had stopped by to chat with him.  He is normally an effusive chap, with a ready smile and the standard question, “When did you come?”  Today, the question was asked but the smile was weary and worn. 

It has been a hard year in our parts; agriculture seems increasingly stitched together by a thread that will cause it to tear further as it comes apart at the seams, a mosaic of the inevitable, the causative, the jagged and the linear.  Rice – a rich-red large grain called dodaberu nellu and the staple of a feast – was given up years ago, when the rains played truant and low-cost polished grain inundated the ration basket; the road to hell, they say, is paved with good intention.  

The ragi economy, once the palliative, inches towards history, as rains this year were on, then off, then, well, on again at the wrong time; the elephants were missing, but wild boar marked their attendance alright.  Ours is a hardy ragi-consuming landscape; it is eaten twice a day, stored for a year.  Ragi is an insurance, it is belief, faith.  An emotion. 

Ragi needs labour to harvest –now rarer than it ever has been and therefore costly - and the threshing machine is a feature these days, not a bug.  Capital and weather combined, the risk category has changed to high now, but – here’s where economics stays theoretical – the return hasn’t.  At twenty-five rupees a kilo, a price fixed by an oligopoly of buyers with capital and staying power, it has been a ruinous crop to grow this year.  The TN Government could buy ragi at the minimum support price and change the script, but wishes aren’t horses…..   

Ragi is grown for another reason, of course: its straw is staple cattle feed in our parts, but that – the cattle economy, in normal times an epitome of stability and the only source of capital gain, when a calf or milch cow is sold – has had a lightning strike with the lumpy skin disease; vets – private and Government – and quacks have made their money, a wicked transfer of wealth from the believer to the soothsayer, from the prey to the predator. Seenappa paid twenty thousand, then sold his cow for nothing, in despair; he is minus seventy overall in this asset.  

So, ragi, avarekkai and mustard, all low-input, rain-fed and low-maintenance crops, and cattle don’t work anymore; roses, chrysanthemums, beans and tomatoes are the choice for they work occasionally with fluctuating return; these are high-input, pesticide-heavy games of chance, each harvest a lottery with the price a game of Russian roulette, for the revolver is loaded with debt.  What kind of economy is that?  

Ramappa sits on his haunches & looks away.  “I will not grow ragi anymore,” he says.  I don’t believe him, for ragi isn’t a crop, you see. It is an emotion.  

It is time to fix what is broken before that changes.