Remember the farmer

Jaipal singh
Pen is the sister of farmers.
Remember what I had told you?
When I made you hold the pen?
Mother was bellowing.
I got up startled, dripping with sweat
The dream was of Singur.
– Devbrat Joshi, Sapne me Singur

First, the good news. According to all projections, the southwest monsoon this year is expected to be almost normal. More importantly, the Southasian monsoon has been estimated to arrive a week early. While the volatility of Typhoon Yutu in the West Pacific has made the exact arrival date a bit uncertain, risk analysts remain upbeat about the rains that directly affect nearly one-fifth of the world's population.

Monsoon-gazing is important in Southasia for several reasons. Agriculture continues to be the mainstay of the population and economies of the region. While the direct contribution of the farming sector to the regional GDP is only about 20 percent, nearly half the population of Pakistan and two-thirds of Indians depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods. An even higher proportion of Bangladeshis and Nepalis survive on the cultivation of farmland that has little or no irrigation facility. A good monsoon for most of them is synonymous with good times, despite the increased risk of landslides, flash floods and inundation.

When the harvest is good, farmers buy better toothpaste, more soap, expensive razorblades and, increasingly, colour television sets, refrigerators and motorcycles. Manufacturing and services get a boost, as purchasing power increases and expenditure patterns veer towards higher consumption of finished goods. An important cause behind the consistent performance of the Indian economy has been the benevolence of the rain gods: the monsoon has not failed Southasia for several years in a row (touch wood).

Everybody benefits from the munificence of the monsoon. Abundant rains, however, do not necessarily imply all gain and no pain for the farmers of Southasia. Due to the unreliability of government policies – no less volatile than the vagaries of nature – agriculture has become an unrewarding vocation. The romance of farm life disappeared a long time ago. With sustenance itself becoming undependable, the future of agriculture and food security will become issues of vital concern in our region in the years ahead. 

Forgotten farmers
The current buzz in India is all about IT, though this is a source of livelihood for no more than a miniscule section of the national populace. In a country where fishing supports more people than sewing, the citizens of Bangladesh nonetheless love to talk about garments exports. Tourism this and tourism that is the national obsession of Nepal, but the sector's contribution to GDP is less than five percent. While it is true that the fuel of remittances drives the economy of Pakistan, agriculture continues to be the mainstay of Sindh and Punjab. However, the absence of agriculture from the headlines is not a case of 'no news is good news'. The plight of Southasian farmers is out of sight – and hence, out of mind.

Once upon a time, agriculturists dominated parliaments and legislative assemblies, but today their central place has been taken by others. Manmohan Singh is an economist who crept into the Rajya Sabha for the fourth time from Assam. General Pervez Musharraf is, well, an army general from a bourgeois background. The shadowy current rulers of Dhaka are also mostly soldiers. Girija Prasad Koirala was once a factory hand. Other than notable 'sons of the soil' like H D Deve Gowda, and Tau Devi Lal, next to none of the chief ministers of India's major states have ever set hands on a tractor, let alone a plough. Mulayam Singh Yadav may have known how to climb onto a buffalo's back, but Mayawati is a popularly elected queen astride a bedecked elephant, her Dalit background notwithstanding.

Immediately after de-colonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, first-generation college-goers from rural backgrounds brought their farming experiences to the professions. They helped in the success of green and white revolutions. These days, the professors' progenies become district collectors, who encourage their sons and daughters to become ICE professionals. They then marry doctors, engineers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, who in turn inspire their own offspring to become non-resident Southasian entrepreneurs – NSEs. Empathy for farmers and farming is now almost completely absent among the region's rapidly expanding urban middle class. The less said about the media, the better. There are now over 100 channels beaming satellite signals down on us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but none deem it fit to chronicle the struggle for survival of Southasian farmers. Suicides do make news – there has been a surfeit of them to report, with more than 25,000 recorded cases in less than ten years in India alone. Even so, little investigation of circumstances that force a farmer into self-annihilation has made its way into the mainstream media. Major newspapers offer the same fare to villagers that they serve to their urban readers: cricket, cinema and sensationalism.

Credit crunch
Land, the fundamental factor of farming, is under attack from several quarters. Rising sea levels and the salinity of backwaters are forcing Bangladeshi farmers to grow shrimp in their former paddies. Unlike rice, which requires constant attention and provided yearlong employment for many, shrimp grow by themselves, and get exported making hardly a contribution to the rural, local economy. Farm owners are growing rich, but farm labourers face destitution. In West Bengal, the automobile industry seems set to gobble up land left over by smokestack industries, which had previously displaced the jute-growers that had forced rice farmers of yet an earlier era into the slums of Calcutta.

Skewed landholding is another problem. Nearly three-fourths of all farmers in Southasia cultivate less than five acres, and many have no land at all. In Sindh, zamindars that make up six percent of the farming population control 44 percent of all farmland, and 80 percent of the farming population are haris who own no land at all; they cultivate their landlords' holdings on the condition of sharing the harvest, usually on a 50/50 basis. Meanwhile, with the public commons quickly disappearing, the landless have less pasture to graze their goats. The fencing of forests under various pretexts curtails the freedom of indigenous communities to forage.

The mismatch between the cost of production and income has also begun to pauperise the peasantry. In Sri Lanka, the cost of producing rice – the staple diet of Sinhalese and Tamils alike – has recently exceeded the market price. While Punjabi farmers estimate that wheat must fetch INR 11.4 per kg to make a modest profit, the price fixed by the government is only INR 8.4. There is a vast difference between what a farmer gets for wheat and what a consumer pays for flour, even after taking into account the cost of collection, transportation, processing, distribution and taxes – although that is a different story altogether. It has been estimated that the cost of input in growing grains has gone up by more than 300 percent in the last few years, while market prices have remained more or less the same.

Mismanagement of land, infrastructure and input supplies has made things bad enough, but the direct cause of the desperation of farmers is the credit crunch that nearly everyone faces. Some time ago, journalist P Sainath reported that 70 percent of farmers in the state of Andhra Pradesh were in debt. The figure for Indian Punjab was around 65 percent; Karnataka, 61 percent; and Maharashtra, 60 percent. Most of these loans are made out by private entrepreneurs who supply inputs at inflated prices and charge usurious interest rates to hard-pressed and marginalised farmers.

City slickers sneer at such figures. Of course, it can't be all that bad. Look at all those rural slobs riding Bullets in the countryside, exclaims one New Delhi socialite. While the prosperity of some farmers on the peripheries of metropolitan cities cannot be denied, the fact is many of them have bought their cars and Bullets by selling farmland to real-estate developers. A few sell their property to migrate, paying upwards of a million rupees to sneak illegally into Canada, Australia or Europe.

Landless sharecroppers have to adopt more desperate means of survival when the crop fails, interest accumulates, and debt exceeds repayment capacities. Some sell their children as domestic workers to fill the demand of the urban middle class. Slightly more enterprising ones borrow, beg or steal to go to West Asia in search of work, any work. When all else fails, there is always the recourse of suicide of the breadwinner or of the whole family. It is only then that the media wakes up to notice – momentarily – the forgotten farmers of Southasia.