Tropic of Chaos (21 page)

By the late 1990s, many farmers had run out of options—they were too far in arrears to borrow more, too broke to produce crops. For thousands, the only escape from this debt trap came in the form of suicide—often by swallowing pesticides. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, 150,000 Indian farmers killed themselves between 1997 and 2005. But as Anuradha Mittal reports, “Farmers' organizations believe the number of suicides to be even greater.”
³⁰
In Andhra Pradesh, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 farmers killed themselves between 1998 and 2004. As one creditor told the
New York Times,
“Many moneylenders have made a whole lot of money. . . . Farmers, many of them, are ruined.”
³¹

When the links between drought, irrigation, debt, and suicide were becoming clear a dozen years ago, the
Political and Economic Weekly
investigated. “A study of 50 deceased farmers in Warangal District [near Adilabad] shows that well [water] is the largest source of irrigation for about three-fourths of the farmers. Only about one-third of the wells were dug under the subsidy schemes of the government. In the rest of the cases farmers themselves have borne the expenses for digging of wells. Besides this the depletion of groundwater in recent years has necessitated deepening of wells and laying of in-well bores.”

The cost of such a well in the late 1990s averaged between $1,400 and $3,000.
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As a World Bank study on drought and climate change in Andhra Pradesh found, that means debt. The Bank noted, “Household responses to drought have been largely reactive and do little to build longterm drought resilience. Credit remains the most common coping response to drought.” In fact, 68 percent of households in the study took loans due to drought, with large landholders borrowing “from formal sources (such as banks), while the landless and small farmers borrow from moneylenders at inflated interest rates.”
³³
Not only are the rates usurious, but these more informal contracts rely on brutal and humiliating enforcement mechanisms.

Another cause of debt is seed purchase. The zenith of this trap is Monsanto's genetically modified Bt cotton. The story of Bt begins back in the halcyon days of modernization theory and the Green Revolution, when Walt W. Rostow's 1960
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
held the intellectual high ground among Western scholars and policy makers.
³⁴
The general goal of the moment was to industrialize agriculture, thus boost yields and free up labor that could be harnessed in cities as part of the new manufacturing sectors. Toward that end, new seed varieties were introduced.

The term
Green Revolution
is attributed to William Gaud of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and dates back to about 1968.
³⁵
In a strict sense, the Green Revolution comprised a set of planned
and targeted agricultural-intensification programs supported by the World Bank and USAID. Experts introduced high-yield-variety seeds, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and intensive, groundwater-dependant irrigation. Governments and foundations supported farm extension and education programs to inculcate the methods of these new technologies among the farmers. More broadly, the Green Revolution refers to the unplanned spread of these same methods and technologies throughout the Global South.

In Andhra Pradesh, the official wing of the Green Revolution was confined to the coastal deltas. The first crops targeted were rice and wheat. The program's goal, in India as a whole, was to achieve food self-sufficiency and to create surpluses of labor and capital in the countryside that could be urbanized and facilitate industrialization. According to Rostow, this would enable economic “takeoff ”—the onset of rapid, modernizing industrialization and economic growth.

Environmentalists have greatly criticized the Green Revolution in India for its wanton use of toxic chemicals, while Marxists have attacked it for creating greater inequality among farmers.
³⁶
But this modernization drive had the support of many populists and involved redistributive forms of government aid, like price-stabilization programs and basic income support for farmers.
³⁷
By comparison to the neoliberal austerity of today, the state played a robust, almost socialistic role. A government-owned company, the National Seed Corporation, provided financing and guidance, and yields did increase, essentially doubling during the 1960s. These yields, however, were a function of greater capital investment. Farmers required more capital to buy fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation piping, and machinery.
³⁸
Thus, debts rose along with output.

Soon cotton became one of the main crops. Now the issue was no longer food security but instead victory and profit on the international commodity markets. Very problematically, cotton also needs large amounts of water. Within a decade yields began to drop as the soil was stripped of its nutrients and poisoned by pesticides. The only solution for many farmers was to double down: borrow more and invest more, use more technology, take on more debt.

The Green Revolution came to the Deccan Plateau indirectly and informally, when prosperous farmers of the Kama caste migrated inland from the coast in search of land on which to farm cotton and chili peppers. The migrants settled together and maintained strong marriage links with the coast, but they brought with them and disseminated the new capital-intensive farming methods.
³⁹
Again, the pattern repeated elsewhere: at first yields were good, but then invariably declined.

With the rise of capital-intensive cotton farming in Telangana over the last thirty years, two strange contradictions have arisen.
⁴⁰
First, the primary cash crop, cotton, continues to decline in value; yet, farmers continue to plant more of it. Why do the farmers not shift to other crops? Second, while the region's overall growth in agricultural output has been robust—more than 4 percent per annum for many years—the incomes and consumption of most farmers have declined precipitously, and this manifests as farmers' suicides and support for the Naxals.
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The question now becomes: Why do farmers go into debt so as to plant a crop (cotton) for which the price is falling?

A brilliant young economic historian, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, has identified and explained the politics of this contradictory, seemingly nonsensical set of facts. The answer, he writes, lies in the credit system. The moneylenders demand that cotton be planted with their capital because cotton is
inedible
, so during times of crisis, producers cannot “steal,” that is eat, it. Moneylenders essentially give advances on crops, then receive the harvest. If a farm family is dying of hunger and their crop is grain, chances are they will eat the collateral crop to stay alive, rather than give it to the moneylender. Cotton avoids that problem. Thus, even when food crops, like grains, command higher prices, they carry greater risks
for the moneylenders
. Cotton is the moneylenders' biological insurance; they steer farmers away from food crops, even if the potential for profits is higher, because only cotton is guaranteed collateral. Using this insight, Vakulabharanam shows that since 1980, farmers in Telangana have moved away from planting coarse grains, like jowar, barley, and millet, toward growing cotton, even as the price signal should have them doing the opposite.

This shift has coincided with the neoliberal reforms that removed from agriculture many legal protections and government subsidies—including public credit and public investment in irrigation.
⁴²
In response to the relative withdrawal of the state, farmers took on more expenses themselves and, in turn, had to raise capital wherever they could—that meant from moneylenders. The more farmers turned to private moneylenders, the more they were under pressure to grow more cotton. And the more cotton they grew, the lower its price sank.

Thus, Telangana farmers become trapped in a downward economic cycle: they need expensive inputs and capital to produce a crop that drops in value even as they invest more heavily in it. And the central equipment—especially as climate change makes the region drier, due to extreme weather and frequent drought—are the well and irrigation systems. So, the farmers borrow. Vakulabharanam calls it “immiserizing growth”—agricultural output rises but incomes sink. Others have described the same set of contradictions as “modern poverty” or a form of “development-induced scarcity.”
⁴³

Recent mismanagement and political meddling have compounded the climate-change-driven water problem in Andhra Pradesh. In particular, the neglect of the traditional water-management system is due to the interventions of N. T. Rama Rao. A Telugu-speaking film star, N. T. Rao, as he was known, scripted himself into the political scene by founding the Telugu Desam Party, a Telangana regionalist party that sought greater development in northern Andhra Pradesh and governed throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. He made his charismatic appeals directly to the people with a populist mix of ideas from the Left and Right.

On the one hand, he fought vigorously against the Naxalites, presiding over the creation of the Greyhounds—those police counterinsurgency forces. On the other hand, he did much to disrupt old power groups and deliver services to the popular classes of the region. As part of this attack on established and inherited privilege, he abolished the feudal
munasob
and
karanam
system in which local dignitaries inherited tax-collection, water-management, and irrigation maintenance jobs—all opportunities to shake down the farmer. The film star did away with these village satraps—a bit of justice but also just one more layer of political interference between himself and the masses—but, unfortunately, nothing better fully replaced them. Some village committees,
raitu sangam,
were organized but not funded. The transition to a different, more democratic system of water management remained incomplete and disorganized, so local irrigation has suffered.

Corruption is also a problem affecting water management. In the village of Patagvada, a few kilometers down the road from Jaamni, across the Big Stream and up a small hill, the people are in thrall to the Congress Party. The reasons for that are very concrete (forgive the pun): Congress paved the village's main street with cement and has promised to legalize and upgrade the jerry-rigged electrical connections that the village has been using to pirate power. The villagers tell me how five boreholes were promised, and five boreholes are listed in district records as having been drilled, but only one was actually completed. And so, the people suffer diminished yields, lower incomes, greater stress, illness, fear, and frustration. The winter rains having failed, the Big Stream is but a few stagnant pools.

All these social factors—the withdrawal of the state, the rise of capital-intensive farming and the depredation of moneylenders, and the incompetence and corruption of the local state, all in a semiarid climate—make up the preexisting crisis upon which climate change now descends. This, like counterinsurgency and war, contributes to the catastrophic convergences of climate, poverty, and violence.

From under the arbor, I can see why Linga Reddy Sama and the other farmers in Jaamni are so pessimistic about farming. They have a clear a set of ideas about the environmental politics of what they are doing: the Bt
cotton they use is killing the land. A few say that population growth has led to overharvesting of the forest, which they (correctly) believe is adversely affecting rainfall. Further away in the hills there's been commercial and often illegal logging. Here, though, the deforestation is a by-product of their local fuel and construction needs.

In the remote forests of Chattisgarh, Naxalite activity is so intense that the paramilitary state police are largely pinned down, restricted to their fortresslike compounds—redoubts reinforced with sandbags, wire, log walls, and gun turrets. When the police venture out, the Naxals ambush. The guerillas also mass their troops for large attacks that sometimes overrun the paramilitary police compounds and detention centers. For example, in November 2005 Naxalite guerillas stormed a jail in Jehanabad, Bihar, “firebombing offices and freeing several hundred prisoners.” In March 2006 “they attacked a police camp in Chattisgarh, killing fifty-five policemen and making off with a huge cache of weapons.” They have bombed railway stations and transmission towers. During the 2009 elections, they took a whole passenger train hostage and attacked a multibillion-dollar iron ore slurry pipeline.
⁴⁴

The Naxalite weapon of choice is the command-activated landmine. As these are not pressure-detonated mines, they can be planted in a road months before use: rain, mud, traffic, and sunshine bake the road above the mines into perfect camouflage. The buried mines become impossible to detect under the hard-packed tracks, but the explosives are active and linked to long wires that can be connected to detonators and triggered whenever the guerillas are ready.

Like improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Naxalite landmines are effective on several levels simultaneously. Tactically, landmines maim and kill the paramilitary police. Psychologically, the explosives wear down and demoralize the enemy. Politically, the mines function as a social barrier between the counterinsurgency forces and the people whom they seek to control. The situation is so bad that elements in the Indian air force are lobbying to start an aerial bombing campaign upon the parched lands of the Red Corridor.
⁴⁵

Instead of robustly embracing new, green agricultural technologies and supports for farmers facing an uncertain climate, the state is focusing on repression. The relative victory over the guerillas in Telangana results from a near-perfect mix of classic guns-and-butter counterinsurgency. At the thin end of the wedge are the above-mentioned Greyhounds, the paramilitary special forces of the state police. Established in the early 1990s, this counterinsurgency force has been highly effective, never hesitating to use violence but also investing enormous energy in intelligence. That is to say, the Greyhounds target their terror effectively. Often they travel in civilian dress, out of uniform, heavily armed but undercover, passing among the population unannounced, largely unseen, as teams of assassins rather than as occupying soldiers. They are part special forces, part death squad.