September 19, 2006

India’s farmers are committing suicide by the tens of thousands, and globalization is partly responsible.

In a well-written story on the front page of the September 19 New York Times, Somini Sengupta highlights the despair that has led more than 17,000 Indian farmers to commit suicide in 2003 alone, the last year for which numbers are available. An Inter Press Service story from July quotes the Indian agriculture minister as admitting that as many as 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003 due to financial distress.

Among the negative roles has been that of American seed companies, which, encouraged by Indian governments, have entered into India’s rural areas.

“Frustration is building in India with American multinational companies peddling costly, genetically modified seeds,” writes Sengupta. “They have made deep inroads in rural India—a vast and alluring market—bringing new opportunities but also new risks as Indian farmers pile up debt.”

The seed companies have been aided by legislative changes to make India conform to the imperatives of globalization.

“The New Seed Policy announced in 1998 allowed large private sector entry in India across a range of crops and relaxed restrictions on seed imports,” writes Professor Anitha Ramanna of the University of Pune in India. “Different private sector seed producers, including multinational companies (MNCs) like Novartis, Cargill and Pioneer Seeds, have been active in India for several years. A number of mergers and acquisitions between MNCs and domestic companies have taken place in India.”

A proposed bill in the Indian Parliament goes even further in the service of these multinationals. It directs all farmers to get their seeds registered with the authorities, hence making it easier for multinationals to keep track of who is using their seeds. Seed inspectors will have the authority to search farmers’ premises to make sure the law is obeyed.

The bill “has nothing positive to offer to farmers of India but offers a promise of a monopoly to private seed industries, which has already pushed thousands of our farmers to suicide through dependency and debt caused by unreliable, high dependency and non-renewable seeds,” writes Vandana Shiva, an articulate critic of globalization’s impact on India.

The hypocrisy of free trade is also taking its toll on Indian farmers. “Mr. [Manmohan] Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers,” Sengupta writes.

In fact, it has been the refusal of the Western countries to reduce their subsidies that has derailed global trade talks repeatedly over the past few years, most recently in July.

But globalization marches on, extolled to no end by cheerleaders like Thomas Friedman in his astonishingly best-selling “The World Is Flat,” in which India is among his prime exhibits for the beneficial processes of globalization.

To do this, he has to ignore massive evidence to the contrary. The huge number of farmer suicides in India in recent years has been partly due to “price uncertainty due to trade liberalization and rise in costs due to domestic liberalization,” according to a study quoted in Economic and Political Weekly, India’s premier publication tracking socioeconomic trends. If Friedman doesn’t read Economic and Political Weekly, he hopefully does read his own publication, and reports such as Sengupta’s should cause him to stop writing his nonsensical paeans to globalization. One can only wish.

Somebody who has done really great reporting on the underside of globalization in India has been Palagummi Sainath, who has garnered international awards for his work. Sainath, who has written numerous articles on the rural poor for the Times of India (collected in the book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”) and The Hindu newspaper (where he is now the rural affairs editor) has made clear the linkages between globalization and the plight of India’s hundreds of millions of farmers.

“After 15 years of a battering from hostile policies and governments, the world of the peasant has turned highly fragile,” he writes in a recent piece. “But the onus of changing is on the farmer. Not on those driving a cruel process and system, who have only contempt for ordinary folk.”

Maybe Friedman needs to get together with real reporters like Sainath on his next India visit, rather than just hobnobbing with the Indian elite.