The suicides of thousands of farmers tell poignant and revealing tales about our country, and the desperation that marks the lives of so many millions. Disastrous policies, woeful access to affordable credit, greedy and corrupt middlemen, and indifferent administrations have pushed farmers to the breaking point.

Statistics reveal that between 1998 and 2003, about one lakh farmers have been sacrificed at the altar of INDIA SHINING INC. That is an estimated 45 farmers per day!  These suicides, by and large involving cotton farmers, are ironic and shocking because cotton production in the country has touched a new high (roughly 4.2 m tonnes). The suicides are also happening at a time when the textile industry is booming. In other words, there is no pestilence or natural disaster hitting production, and the market is hungry.

Then why, one may ask, are farmers being pushed to take such extreme measures?

The answers are complex, varying from region to region. But the one common truth is that although the cost of inputs has increased, the farmer is not getting the price he needs. On the one hand, little is done to invest in rural infrastructure — from water for irrigation to public healthcare — that would reduce costs and increase profits. On the other hand, the market is stacked against the farmers. They have to compete against global prices, lowered by subsidies. Their own textile industry prefers to dump them, to source their subsidised cotton.

This is the national scenario. Let us zoom into a village in Raichur, Karnataka.

“Here, it is too difficult to be a farmer. I have tried everything but I always lose.” So says Gangappa, a farmer in the village of Kamalaa, 20 km from Raichur. Like others, he used to grow cotton at a profit. In 1996, from an investment of Rs 35,000, he made Rs 1,30,000. At the time, everything was cheaper. Seeds, pesticides, water, electricity, fuel and even credit was subsidised by the state. The cost price of a kilo of cotton was Rs 7 and the market price was Rs 26. Now, the situation is reversed — the cost price is Rs 25 a kilo and the market price is Rs 17!

The cotton mill in Raichur has been closed — the victim of bad management, competition, and production of low quality cotton. In 1998, an attempt to introduce a cross-fertilised variety of cotton into the region was met with a violent reaction. As a result, many cotton farmers have fallen back to cultivating rice and chilli peppers. This impact is being felt in the entire agricultural sector.

In July 2000, a publication of the Ministry of Agriculture stated, “The growth of agriculture tended to diminish in the 1990s. Agriculture has become a comparatively low-income profession due to generally unfavourable prices and low-profit margins. This has led to the departure of many farmers and an increase in migration away from rural areas. This situation will be worsened by the entry of the agriculture business into the world market systems, unless corrective measures are taken immediately.”

According to Mr. Jain, Deputy Secretary for Agriculture, “There was an erosion of 15 per cent in farmers’ income in 2001. Many earn less than the equivalent of one euro a day, and most of them are in debt.”

In fact, between1994 and 2001, the small farmers have mainly seen the negative side of things. As for imports, between 1999 and 2001, restrictions were lifted on more than 2,700 products. The intensification of the new economic policies saw an export economy being encouraged and imports dependency being aggravated.

Agricultural policy, under the diktat of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has long been based on the needs of domestic supply and self-sufficiency in food. The WTO is pushing for a greater openness to markets. The consequences of such an action will be the destruction of the agricultural sector by foreign producers, for whom the lowering of trade barriers opens up new avenues.

As a case in point — in the first years after joining the WTO, the government reduced the customs duties on vegetable oils, much in demand by both the industry and the consumer. At the time, India was almost self-sufficient in vegetable oil, and the world market prices were high. But these prices fell, and the local producers found themselves at a double disadvantage. Not only were their products too expensive to export but also they lost some of the internal market. Within a few years, vegetable oils from Malaysia, Indonesia, the US and Brazil had taken up 40 per cent of the market. For some, the result was a blessing. But for millions of small farmers and for local manufacturing factories, it was a catastrophe. In the region of Karnataka alone, more than 100 out of 115 oil mills have closed down in the last few years.

 The economy of Karnataka depends on agriculture. However, only meagre portions of cultivable land are irrigated; the other portion is rain-fed. The change to commercial crops, such as sugar cane, tobacco, and groundnuts, did sustain the agricultural economy for some time. However, even this has eroded, with the strengthening of the open market system. In an open market, an agricultural economy is unable to compete with imported food products, which are cheaper than locally produced products.

Thus, many trade agreements in the WTO tilt the balance of global trade in favour of the First World, affecting producers in the Third World. This has led to lot of instability in agricultural relations.

The increase in small farmers who are landless and their migration to cities in search of employment, and the push-and-pull factors of the economy have led to, in certain ways, breaking the relationships of bonded labour, especially in the cities. However, instances of bonded labour and child labour have been rapidly increasing in the informal, casual sector.

The general assumption is that economic growth will bring down the incidence of child labour. This notion is erroneous. There is a rise in the incidence of bonded labour but its form or its presence has shifted from the formal employment sector to the informal, home-based, contract labour sector.

In agriculture, certain forms of commercialisation and restructuring of rural labour relations have also been associated with a rise in the involvement of children. In recent years, there has been a tendency to rely increasingly on family contract labour from landless households. Such family contracts provide a vehicle for the increased induction of bonded children into agricultural labour.

The case of hybrid cottonseed production provides another insightful illustration, involving the agency of local labour contractors, who have agreements with national and multinational seed companies.

From the early seventies, girls between the ages of 7 and 14 years (as seen in Raichur and Kurnool) make up 90 per cent of the labour force. They are employed on long-term contracts, secured through loans and advances given to parents by local seed producers. It is estimated, that nearly 4,00,000 girls are employed in the cotton seed fields. In our work with domestic child labour, we are witness to many small girls, employed in cities as full-time help, coming from bonded families in agriculture.

Over the last two decades, the more traditional forms of agrarian labour employment have declined, and new forms of bondage have emerged in the more modern agricultural as well as different sectors of the informal economy. The migrant labourers thrown out of the changing agricultural economy appear particularly vulnerable to bonded labour exploitation. The landlord-serf relationship has got converted into a slave wage labour-contractor relationship.

Bonded labour identified in the 1996 survey and those subsequently identified and rehabilitated till March 2004 indicate a high incidence of bonded labour in agriculture in Karnataka.hus, there is a high incidence of bonded labour in agriculture in Karnataka.

The uneven pace of modernisation of agriculture has created new demands for a stable and servile labour force. The displacement of huge sections of small farmers and landless labourers from traditional occupations and informal contract occupations has also resulted in greater pauperisation and marginalisation of the economy. There has also been an increase in the instances of all the members of a family having to work at the cost of their holistic social and human development.