A suicide epidemic among India’s farmers has shaken the country and contributed to a doubling of the nation’s suicide rate since 1980.
It’s a widespread and intensely personal issue, one that has been difficult to tease out the root source. Debt, mental health, lack of social services, weather vagaries and even media coverage have all been put forward as part of the problem. Now, recent research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that climate change could also be playing a role.
The findings attribute more than 59,000 suicides in India to rising temperatures since 1980. With the world expected to warm further, the results suggest that adaptation could play a key role in helping farmers.
“Suicide is a heartbreaking indicator of human hardship, and I felt that if this phenomenon were in fact affected by a changing climate, it would be essential to quantify its effect and consider this relationship as we build climate policy for the future,” Tamma Carleton, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley who authored the new study, said.
Agriculture makes up 14 percent of India’s GDP, but employs 230 million people or 32 percent of the rural population. Roughly two-thirds of those farmers have poor access to irrigation and rely on rainfed agriculture, itself a crapshoot tied to the Indian monsoon. That leaves them vulnerable to not just drought but other climate shocks like rising temperatures.
“These farmers and agricultural workers face extremely stressful and difficult conditions,” Carleton said. “In this risky environment where families are very poor, any additional shock can lead to extreme economic destitution, and some individuals may cope with that hardship by committing suicide. I find that the climate, and temperature in particular, causes crop losses while also elevating the risk of suicide.”
The study shows that there’s a strong link between high temperatures in the growing season and suicide rates. Carleton found that degree days above 68°F (20°C) was a key threshold for suicide rates in India. By looking at the increase in degree days above 68°F since 1980, she was able to tease out how many additional suicides across India have likely been due to rising temperatures. Her results show the additional heat is responsible for 59,300 suicides since 1980, accounting for about 7 percent of the overall increase.
Rising temperatures essentially act as a threat multiplier, similar to how the military views climate change. Rather than directly causing suicides just because it’s hot out, Carleton’s work suggests that hotter weather can have knock-on effects like reducing crop yields and increasing financial hardship.
Outside researchers called the results a provocative addition to the discussion while also saying they’re in need of refinement.
“The notion that (climate change) will increase the rates of self-harm in India is likely correct,” Andrew Paul Gutierrez, a retired researcher who has studied farmer suicides extensively, said. “Climate change will affect crops production and may increase economic distress, and hence it is not unexpected that suicides would increase, especially in a society like India with its webbed nuance of social ecological, and economic factors of Indian agricultural society . . . but the situation is considerably more nuanced than climate warming.”
Gutierrez’s work has pointed to seven factors that influence farmer suicides in India. Chief among them is the arrival of Bt cotton, a genetically modified cotton, in India in 2002.The cotton costs more and requires different pesticides that increased the risk of farmers falling into bankruptcy.
While Bt cotton isn’t necessarily the main driver of farmer suicides, Gutierrez said the new study’s focus on temperature misses some of these important economics and social factors.
Anoop Sadanandan, a social scientist at Syracuse, called the findings “striking.” He noted, though, that the findings cover suicides across India and not just farmers, who account for for roughly 10 percent of all suicides in India.
“One has to be very careful when drawing conclusions,” he said. “It is plausible that the lower crop yields affect not merely the people directly engaged in the farm sector, but also the wider Indian population.”
Despite the criticism, he said the study showed a new pathway for research into the nuances of suicide not just among farmers but the population as a whole in India.
Carleton herself is well aware of the limitations of her approach. She said the study isn’t meant to be a panacea or suggest climate adaptation is the only way to address India’s farmer suicides.
“Suicide is an incredibly complex phenomenon, and any individual suicide is likely to have many causes,” she said. “This study shows that climate events elevate the risk of suicide in India, acting as a threat multiplier to all existing suicide drivers. This means that addressing climate change impacts is by no means the only focus one should have when seeking to reduce the number of suicides.”
No, GMOs Didn’t Create India’s Farmer Suicide Problem, But . . .
Since the mid-1990s, around 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves—a rate of about one every 30 minutes, which is 47 percent higher than the national average. The tragedy has become entangled in the rhetorical war around genetically modified seeds.
Some anti-GMO activists, including Indian scientist and organic-farming champion Vandana Shiva, have blamed the high suicide rates directly on biotech seeds—specifically, cotton tweaked by Monsanto to contain the Bt pesticide, now used on more than 90 percent of India’s cotton acreage. Shiva has gone so far as to declare them “seeds of suicide,” because, she claims, “suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced.”
GMO enthusiasts, by contrast, counter that Monsanto’s patented seeds are a boon to India’s cotton farmers: They’ve boosted crop yields, driven down pesticide use, and alleviated rural poverty, a 2010 paper by the pro-industry International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) argued.
So which is it? According to a recent peer-reviewed paper from a team led by Andrew Gutierrez, a professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley’s department of environmental policy, science, and management, the situation is way too complicated to be aptly described by sound bites in a rhetorical war.
For their analysis, the team looked closely at yields, pesticide use, farmer incomes, and suicide rates in India’s cotton regions, both before and after the debut of Bt seeds in 2002.
They found that on large farms with access to irrigation water, genetically modified cotton makes economic sense—paying up for the more expensive seeds helps control a voracious pest called the pink bollworm in a cost-effective way.
But 65 percent of India’s cotton crop comes from farmers who rely on rain, not irrigation pumps. For them, the situation is the opposite—reliance on pesticides and the higher cost of the seeds increase the risk of bankruptcy and thus suicide, the study finds. The smaller and more Bt-reliant the farm in these rain-fed cotton areas, the authors found, the higher the suicide rate. (An analysis that largely jibes with Shiva’s, apart from her heated rhetoric.)
Even so, the paper does not present Bt cotton as the trigger for India’s farmer-suicide crisis. Rather, it provides crucial background for understanding how India’s shift to industrial farming techniques starting in the 1960s left the majority of the nation’s cotton farmers increasingly reliant on loans to purchase pricey fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds, and eventually GM seeds, making them vulnerable to bankruptcy when the vagaries of rain and global cotton markets turned against them.
The authors note that cotton has been cultivated in India for 5,000 years, and until the emergence of the slavery-dependent cotton empire in the southern United States in the early 1800s, “India was the center of world cotton innovation.” In the 1970s, Indian cotton farmers turned to hybrid seeds that delivered higher yields as long as they were doused with sufficient fertilizer. Until then, the pink bollworm—the pest now targeted by Bt seeds—”was not a major pest in Indian cotton,” they write. But higher-yielding plants draw more insect pests, and so the new hybrid seeds also triggered an increasing reliance on insecticides. Bollworms evolved to resist the chemical onslaught and many of their natural predators (other insects) saw their populations decline, giving the bollworms a niche. Hence when Monsanto’s bollworm-targeting Bt seeds hit the market in the early 2000s, they were essentially an industrial-ag solution to a problem that had been caused by industrial agriculture.
As an alternative to Bt seeds, the paper shows, small-scale farmers can successfully plant varieties of cotton that ripen quickly, before bollworm populations emerge. As for the irrigated cotton farms that are now successfully using the Bt trait, the authors note that India’s large farms, like many of California’s, are tapping underground water that’s “unregulated and unpriced,” at rates much higher than natural recharge. They’re courting a problem that may make the feared bollworm look tame by comparison: “the impending collapse of ground water levels for irrigated cotton.”
Update 2018
Ashwani Mahajan, national co-convenor of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), says the pink bollworm attacks are a failure of the technology for which Monsanto charges a fee.
By G Seetharaman Jan 21, 2018, 06.56 AM IST
"Open any boll here and you’ll see it’s destroyed,” says Ganesh Shere, a farmer at a village called Jamb in Yavatmal district, about 160 km from Nagpur, in northeast Maharashtra.
He walks along the length of his bone-dry, four-acre cotton field and splits two dozen cotton bolls, with a stone or his fingers, to reveal the damage done by pink bollworms, which have become resistant to the genetically modified (GM) cotton variety he uses.
His yield this year has only been 200 kg, less than 5% of what he produced last year. Shere, a 61-year-old former police sub-inspector, pegs his losses at Rs 2 lakh.
Maharashtra is the state with the largest area under cotton cultivation in the country and Shere is among the lakhs of farmers who depend on the cash crop. The loss caused by the pink bollworm infestation have raised questions about the sustainability of GM cotton, which accounts for over 90% of all cotton grown in the country. Bt cotton, as GM cotton is known, is the only commercialised GM crop in the country. MonsantoNSE 0.22 % introduced its first-generation Bt cotton, called Bollgard I (BG-I) in 2002 and Bollgard II (BG-II) in 2006, the latter of which is still the de facto GM cotton variety.
Traditional hybrid seeds are a result of cross-pollination of two different but related plants, but GM hybrid seeds involve the artificial insertion of a gene from a different species. For instance, BG-II contains two genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (hence Bt cotton) and BG-I contains only one gene.
They are supposed to provide immunity to the plant from pests like American and pink bollworms. GM seeds are mostly either pest-resistant or herbicide-tolerant, the latter of which is still not legal in India. Despite the wide adoption of Bt cotton, India has been wary of GM food crops, withholding its nod for brinjal and mustard.
GM crops were first commercialised in the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, China and Australia in 1996, and in 2016 more than 1.8 crore farmers in 26 countries planted GM crops. Four-fifths of the world’s soybean crop are GM, as are two-thirds of cotton and a third of maize; India, the world’s biggest cotton producer, has the fifth largest area under GM crop cultivation, and Bt cotton seeds account for 40% of the Rs 14,000 crore national seeds market. Maharashtra’s neighbour Gujarat grows more cotton than any other state.
Poor Production
According to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute, the adoption of Bt cotton was low till 2005. Between 2005-06 and 2016-17, India’s cotton acreage and yields increased by a fifth. In 2017-18, while the area is bigger than last year, productivity is expected to be 9% lower.
Vijay Kumar, principal secretary in the Maharashtra agriculture department, says around 80% of the cotton-growing area is affected by pink bollworms. “But we still don’t know the extent of damage.”
While the farmers ET Magazine spoke to admitted that there was pink bollworm infestation even in the past, this year is the worst. Shere’s neighbour, Purushottam Fendar, is slightly better off, getting a quarter of last year’s yields on his sevenacre farm, where he planted Bt cotton seeds after the onset of rains in June.
Though both Shere and Fender have irrigation facilities, most cotton grown in Maharashtra is rainfed, a reason why the state’s cotton productivity is among the poorest in India. Fendar, who sold his cotton for Rs 4,600 per 100 kg, is pinning his hopes on insurance making good his loss. Kumar says affected farmers will also be compensated under the National Disaster Relief Fund, up to Rs 26,000 per farmer. The state government has also said seed companies must compensate farmers for their losses.
But Kalyan Goswami, director general of the National Seed Association of India (NSAI), an industry body, does not agree. “If the seed does not germinate or if the plant does not flower or is not healthy, then the industry is responsible. If the boll is not able to resist pink bollworms, there is nothing we can do... Monsanto will be liable and not the seed companies.”
“Resistance is a natural and evolutionary adaptation of insects and pests to widely and continuously applied stress factors,” says a spokesperson for Monsanto Mahyco Biotech (MMB), a joint venture between Monsanto and Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company.
MMB licenses the Bollgard technology to nearly four dozen seed companies, for which it charges a royalty fee. In March 2016 the government decided to cap the price of BG-II seeds at Rs 800 per 450 gm pack (it had been selling at Rs 830-1,000 in different states) and also the royalty paid to MMB at Rs 49 per packet, compared to Rs 184 earlier, despite Monsanto’s threatening to leave India. Months later, Bayer AG announced that it would acquire Monsanto for $66 billion.
Ashwani Mahajan, national co-convenor of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), says the pink bollworm attacks are a failure of the technology for which Monsanto charges a fee.
“They, not the government, have to pay compensation. We are of the firm opinion that multinational companies blackmail the government and the people. The government should take them to task and not plead with them.”The SJM is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the ruling coalitions both at the Centre and in Maharashtra.
Damage Control
“BG-II continues to substantially fulfill its intended function of controlling a majority of Lepidopteran pests including the American bollworm, which is the primary pest, thereby providing farmers with great benefits,” says the MMB spokesperson. Among the reasons for the rise in pink bollworm infestation area, according to the company, are use of unapproved Bt cotton, lack of planting of non-Bt crops next to Bt cotton and early planting and prolonging the life cycle of the plant.
Keshav Kranthi of the International Cotton Advisory Committee says the pink bollworm is a manageable insect and that it be can be tackled by opting for shorter duration crops — 140-160 days (in India the life of the crop is usually more than 180 days). Though GM crops face strident opposition due to their perceived adverse ecological and health implications, but there is not enough robust empirical data to back that, partly because GM crops have only been around for a little over two decades. A 2013 analysis by Italian researchers of 1,783 studies published between 2002 and 2012 did not find any significant hazard to human health, biodiversity, or the environment caused by GM crops.
Shere, the farmer, has burnt the stalks to prepare his farm for the next cotton crop. “I’ll see which cotton the government recommends.” Some advocate abandoning Bt cotton for local varieties, even of the organic kind, which they say will reduce farmers’ dependence on companies. “There is nothing left with the farmer except his land. He has to buy his seeds, fertilisers and pesticides,” says Suraj Bhakre, who works for Deendayal Bahuuddeshiya Prasarak Mandal, an initiative that promotes low-cost farming in Yavatmal.
Kranthi believes organic cotton needs to be backed by research. “It needs good short season varieties that are developed exclusively for organic farming. High yields can be obtained under organic systems with only such varieties.
Besides the problem of pink bollworms, cotton is also plagued by use of illegal herbicide-tolerant Bt cotton seeds. New Delhibased South Asia Biotechnology Centre estimated that in 2017-18 the sale of herbicidetolerant seeds almost trebled to 35 lakh packets from the previous year, with Telangana, Maharashtra and Andhra being the top consumers. The governments in these states are looking into the issue. After the Centre capped the prices of Bt cotton seeds in 2016, Monsanto withdrew its for sale of a herbicide-tolerant Bt cotton seed.
Farmers used to Bt cotton may not really think of an alternative immediately and may consider the pink bollworm problem this season an anomaly. But given that Bt cotton is certainly not cheap — each acre requires two packets of BG-II, costing Rs 1,600, and another Rs 12,000-13,000 on fertilisers and pesticides -those affected may not take the viability of Bt cotton for granted anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment