In Yavatmal, life goes on

P. Sainath

The Hindu, 13 June

This district, which President Kalam visits on June 15, has a higher concentration of families of farmers who killed themselves than most others in the country.

"THE BANK recovery teams have stopped coming to my home," Saraswati Amberwar told us in Yavatmal. She lives not far from where President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam will visit on June 15. Her husband Ramdas was the first farm suicide case in Vidharbha to be highlighted in the media, way back in 1998. Since then she has faced years of pressure from his creditors to repay his loans. So it was surprising that the bank recovery men had let up.

"Kishor Bhau gave me a letter which I showed them the last time they were here," she says. "After that, they stopped coming." Even stranger. Kishor Tiwari is the president of the Vidharbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS) and the region's foremost agitator on farm issues. Hardly a friend of the banks, given the countless times he has gheraoed and badgered them on farm loan problems. So what did his letter say?

Roughly translated, it read: "Dear Recovery Officers, Ramdas has appeared before me more than once from Heaven. He says: `I have the money and am waiting to repay you.' Please rush your team to Heaven. Yours sincerely, Kishor Tiwari." After that, says Saraswati, the team never showed up again.

Mr. Tiwari's open letter this week to President Kalam is more polite. It begs him to "spare a few minutes to meet the unfortunate widows of farmers either at Yavatmal or Wardha."

Those and Nagpur are the places the President will touch during his day-long visit. His trip takes him to an event at Amolakchand College in Yavatmal. Also to the Mahatma Gandhi Hindi International University in Wardha. It does not so far include any agrarian distress-related meetings.

Issue of cotton prices

Yavatmal, where the President's main function is, remains one of the most dismal parts of Vidharbha, the region hardest hit by the farm crisis. "This year alone, there have been 428 farmers' suicides in Vidharbha," points out Mr. Tiwari. "Unless urgent action is taken on cotton price, on debt and credit — it will be our worst year ever." And that would be something. The Government officially admits to 1,296 farm suicides due to the "agrarian distress" last year. It records a further 1,348 farm suicides in the same six districts the same year, but denies they were due to agrarian distress.

Yavatmal is one of six districts in this region that together have seen more than 6,000 farm suicides since 2001. Saraswati is among more than 100,000 women across the country who have lost their husbands to suicides driven by the agrarian crisis since the mid-1990s. There are hundreds like her in Yavatmal alone. But her home has seen many VIP visits over the years, including that of Narayan Rane when he was Revenue Minister in the Shiv Sena Government. The compensation of Rs.1 lakh she got was long ago wiped out by debt.

"We're spending Rs.30,000 on my daughter Meenakshi's illness," she says. (Another daughter died in 2004.) "We've sold off several acres and some cattle over these years to cope. But farming gets costlier and more difficult." Yet she sees few options and keeps at it, hoping things will turn around.

In Pisgaon village of the same district Varsha Rasse grabs any work she gets, no matter how poorly paid it is. For two seasons her husband Maruti had leased out their eight acres — throwing in his own labour as part of the deal. "He had to get his sisters married," neighbours told us, "and farming was collapsing." Then, with his own cultivation hit by excessive rains, Rasse committed suicide in 2004. His debt remains a problem for Varsha and their son and daughter are both under five years of age.

"They work harder and harder, and might produce more, but it only gets worse," says Vijay Jawandia, the region's foremost intellectual on agriculture. "All these farmers are fighting impossible odds. The most basic issues have not been touched. They are widows because of indebtedness. The cost of living is rising, so are farming costs. Only their income goes down."

"The Prime Minister's package helped some get fresh loans, but they got no help with the old ones. So now their debt has doubled. The central issue of price has never been addressed by the government. Nor has the issue of huge subsidies in the West for cotton producers there. So prices collapsed and these farmers cannot recover the cost of production. The new debt destroys their creditworthiness. So the banks will not touch them this season. Which pushes them back to moneylenders."

Annapurna Suroshe would agree with him. "We've paid off all our debts from the compensation," she says in Nageshwadi village, "but it doesn't end." It hasn't for her, with two boys and a girl to put through school. When the lease ends on the four acres her husband Rameshwar let out before killing himself last year, she wants to cultivate them herself. "I might as well put in my labour on our own land."

Meanwhile, she's trying to run things from the Rs.25 a full day's labour now fetches her.

Mangalabai Mokhadkar in Rampur — from the only Brahmin farm household seeing such a suicide — has held out longer. In the nine years since her husband Prabhakarrao committed suicide, she's got three of her eight daughters married. Some were married before his death. "No dowry," she makes a point of telling us. Though each wedding set her back by around Rs.40,000. She has not taken a paisa from her sons-in-law. "They took no dowry, how can I do that?" She's also managed to educate the girls. "All of them are matric pass or fail," she says. "Three completed their schooling after he died."

After years of leasing them out, "we will farm our seven acres ourselves this year." But Mangalabai knows the risks. "Look at our village. All families here are in the same boat. Unless something changes in farming, we'll all sink."

"This is the situation in Yavatmal and other districts," says Mr. Tiwari, "these widows are farmers who represent the true picture."

As Mr. Tiwari's letter to President Kalam also says: "We strongly feel that it all is not well in Vidharbha and therefore, it's not the right time for any cultural or dancing session inauguration ...We would be highly obliged if you could spare a few minutes to meet the unfortunate widows."

‘Agriculture should not be neglected’ - The Great Swaminathan's favourite refrain!

The Statesman, 29 June

In the midst of the turbulence that the Budget session of Parliament witnessed, the Rajya Sabha got a new nominated member, distinguished agricultural scientist Prof MS Swaminathan. His nomination came when the House had discussed the agrarian crisis several times and policymakers felt the need to hear a seasoned professional on the issue.
Agriculture has been a lifelong passion for Prof Swaminathan and he continues to head several institutions devoted to farm research. A plant geneticist by training, Prof Swaminathan was educated at Madras and Cambridge universities. He has received honorary doctorates from 52 universities and has been fellow of several national and international societies, including the Royal Society of London. Known for his advocacy of sustainable agriculture leading to an “ever-green revolution,” Prof Swaminathan was acclaimed by the **Time** magazine as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the 20th century, one of the three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1961, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1971 and the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, in 2000.
At present, he is the president of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and chairman of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. Recently, as the chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, he submitted five voluminous reports on the state of Indian agriculture, suggesting enactment of a Food Guarantee Act.
The 81-year-old “young” MP is now looking forward to a new career in Parliament, and hopes to interact fruitfully with the
country’s law-makers. In this interview with DEEPAK RAZDAN, he shared his views on several critical issues.

Do you think it was the government’s lack of information on agriculture that led to farmers’ suicides?

I think it was not lack of information. When the first suicides were reported from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, the Wynad district of Kerala and then Vidarbha, I think some explanations were given that it was not related to agrarian causes. You know, there was some rationalisation - suicides happen in all parts of the country, all of society. But what we
call farmers’ suicides is specifically related to agricultural causes, where farming has been either an economic disaster or an ecological disaster, and there, I think, the government took some time to wake up. In Andhra suicides were taking place, the then chief minister gave a number of reasons why, but it was not taken seriously.
Only when it started getting persistent, when it became a chronic problem in certain areas like Yeotmal district and Wardha district in Vidarbha, then I think people started realising that this is a very serious matter. It’s a blot on our nation’s conscience that we allow the people who are feeding the country to take their own lives, and therefore state governments started setting up studies and commissions. The government set up so many committees. We in the National Farmers Commission also went into it in great depth and gave a number of recommendations.
Ultimately, it related. In Vidarbha, for example, the economics of farming became adverse, the cost of cultivation was high, the output price was uncertain. Many times in rain-fed areas, purely unirrigated areas, very costly technologies were propagated and when the crops failed, the farmers did not have the capacity to withstand the shock. Our credit system is also at fault. We have recommended in the National Commission on Farmers report that the credit cycle should be at least five years. In other words, if I borrow this year, I should pay it back within five years. The present rule is if you don’t pay the same year, then you are out of the normal credit system. A farmer has to go to the moneylender. There is no other way. And the moneylenders also became merchants, they bought the crops and they became the extension input suppliers. They were all rolled into one - extension agent, credit supply, marketing and so on. As a result, the farmers were very hard hit.

Had the policy-makers been aware of the farmers’ plight, they would have taken some remedial action. Wasn’t the government adequately informed?

I would not say the government was not adequately informed, but it was not adequately activated to action. I would call it policy fatigue. They are talking about technology fatigue but for all fatigues, technology fatigue, extension fatigue, the underlying cause is policy fatigue. So, it was indifference for some time, and then the approach was: give some relief to the widow, a lakh of rupees or something. It becomes like any other disaster. This is not a disaster of that kind, it is not an earthquake, it’s the accumulated result of agrarian neglect.
So, you need a different remedy. For every malady, the remedy has to be different; some amount of relief has to be given immediately but that is not the only answer.

Agriculture is on the Concurrent List. Does it help or create confusion?

We have recommended very strongly in the National Farmers Commission report that agriculture should be on the Concurrent List for the simple reason that almost all major decisions whether external trade like WTO, or credit supply, or technology, ICAR and so on are all with the Government of India. If you take research, credit, pricing, marketing, these are all controlled by the Government of India. And all the foreign policies like farmers’ rights and so on are international. I think it is high time we recognise that both the Centre and the states should combine together. When we say Concurrent List, they should have a strong action partnership. Concurrent list or not, today the most critical decisions are taken by the Centre - interest rates, credit policy, loan policy, marketing policy, pricing. The Agricultural Costs and Prices Commission is administered by the ministry of agriculture. And the bottom line of the farmers’ fate is marketing and pricing.

In rural areas farmers are committing suicide, while in cities people are crying over high prices. Can you explain what is really happening ?

Between what the farmer gets and what the urban consumer pays - this is particularly true for vegetables and fruits - there is no relation at all. Pulses, for example, may be very costly in cities, but most pulses are produced in dry farming areas, purely rain-fed areas. The farmers get 10 to 15 per cent of what the urban consumer pays. Therefore, you must look at the whole price chain, the marketing chain and see how we can ensure that the farmer gets a fair price. Prices in cities are based on demand and supply. Today wages of all IT professionals are higher. When I was in the government, the highest salary that I got was Rs 2,250 as member of the Planning Commission. But you know we lived with that money. Today everything has gone up, rentals, prices and all the malls that have come up have high transaction costs. Formerly, you were buying from the street vendor, the lady who used to bring it you. This whole culture is changing for a few. Farmers are not benefiting from all this.

There is a lot of talk of four per cent agriculture growth. Can we take it that at four per cent, poverty will be a thing of the past in villages?

Poverty will not be a thing of the past because many people are very poor, do not own land, there is a large percentage of landless labour. Eighty per cent of our people own one acre, half acre or less than one hectare. They must have multiple livelihood. May be livestock. Agricultural growth rate of four per cent involves about eight per cent growth rate in horticulture and animal husbandry. That is not difficult. That can be achieved. Four per cent growth rate is not difficult, if all the recommendations of the National Farmers Commission are accepted. We made five major recommendations, if they are adopted, we will have even more than four per cent.

Can you briefly recount the recommendations ?

The five major recommendations are: first, soil health care. Our soils are very hungry and thirsty. They have been cultivated for a long time, micro-nutrients particularly are lacking, organic matter is lacking. We recommended a soil health card, strengthening the whole soil health monitoring system - soil laboratories, testing laboratories, mobile vans.
Second is water - water harvesting, water use efficiency. Today we are quarrelling over TMCs of water. We don’t talk about what we are doing with each TMC. On the qualitative aspects of water use, more crop and more income per crop we have given a number of recommendations. The third is credit and insurance. These two should be completely revamped because hardly four per cent of farmers are covered by insurance. Credit has to be linked with insurance. The fourth is technology and inputs. There should be the right kind of technology for dry farming.
There is no use recommending in the suicide-prone areas of Vidarbha very expensive technology like Bt Cotton. They don’t have irrigation. If the rains fail, they are in difficulty. It should have been an organic farming zone. We have recommended that in all the 33 districts which have seen farmers’ suicides.
We have asked that they be declared as Special Agriculture Zones (SAZs) like the SEZ. The fifth recommendation is on pricing and marketing.

Were some of these not to be taken care of by extension services?

If you read the Planning Commission reports, if you read the Prime Minister’s speech at the NDC, they say extension has collapsed. Even Mr Chidambaram said it in his last Budget speech - at most places there is no staff, there is no transportation. I have travelled the length and breadth of the country. I will not put the blame on the extension staff themselves. They have nothing to extend, by way of knowledge. They don’t maximise the benefits of these people.

Presenting one of your reports, you mentioned that if agriculture is neglected, extremist groups will never run short of manpower. Would you explain?

This is a serious situation. Social unrest and food riots can take place. More Naxalites will come. In the US there are one million farming families, we have 115 million farming families. Farming is not just producing food, it is the backbone of the livelihood security system of 70 crore people in our country. Therefore, we should realise the seriousness of what is happening in the countryside.

We are importing food now. Why has such a situation come about?

But we are also exporting rice. We are importing wheat because of the policy of allowing the private sector into it. Five years ago the Central government had over 60 million tons of foodgrain. The Food Corporation of India did not know where to store it. Now it has come to a stage where we have to import because whatever the government buys, Cargill and many other big people are also buying. The government buys for food security and for public distribution system, the others buy for commercial profit. If these two are to co-exist in purchases of essential staples, then you should have a long-term policy. How are you going to manage the food budget. What we are doing is a knee-jerk reaction. That is why we have recommended very strongly in the Farmers Commission report that a National Food Security and Sovereignty Board chaired by the Prime Minister should be set up with the food minister and others, but more importantly, leaders of all political parties, the chief ministers of surplus states like Punjab and chief ministers of deficit states. The food policy is too important a matter to be left to one ministry or a few bureaucrats.

Parliament functions on party lines. Are you prepared to hear remarks that can be inspired by political compulsions?

You see, I am a professional, I will never change my views. I will not compromise at this stage in my life. I am not going to compromise on my views. Parties have different viewpoints. As long as they don’t play politics with hunger it’s ok. I have always said hunger-free India must be beyond politics. What we have written in our report is pan-political. For example, the National Food Sovereignty Board is a pan-political board, not one political party, all political parties are represented. I think this is important in matters of vital importance to the future of our country, to the future of our children… because there is so much malnutrition. Newspapers are full of articles about India having the “largest number of malnourished children in the world,” “the largest number of hungry people in the world.”
On the one hand we project eight per cent, nine per cent growth rate. I agree things would be worse if we didn’t have the growth rate. It is not that growth rate is not important, but the time has come for us to really convert the concept of inclusive growth into reality, from purely jargon to something of an accomplishment.

Do you foresee farming one day becoming an attractive vocation for young people?

Agriculture will become attractive if it is more intellectually stimulating, that is why modern information technology, modern communication technology, modern biotechnology, nanotechnology, space technology are important. You can give the fishermen a cell phone and tell him where the fish are, where the high tide is, we must do technological upgrading. What did we do in the sixties, we brought technological upgrading in agriculture, it is now time for us to bring the best in modern science and technology, blended with traditional wisdom and then younger people will be interested. An educated person is not going to go behind oxen or a bullock cart. They want to have more intellectual stimulation and economic reward, and that is possible because agriculture is the only pathway for a job-led economic growth, the rest are all jobless growth. The only way you can have a job-led economic growth is by strengthening agriculture. I mean crop husbandry, animal husbandry, fisheries, forestry, agro-processing, it is not crops alone, not just wheat and rice.

(The interviewer is Editorial Consultant with The Statesman, New Delhi)

Reports of Forced Labor Unsettle China

NYT, June 16
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, June 15 — Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they disappeared.

Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.

The next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.

This story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.

The children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work under brutal conditions — scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little more than water and steamed buns — in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.

As the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved workers were recently rescued.

Mr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to make bricks. “You will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, and don’t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,” he said the children were told. “They also charged them 50 renminbi for a blanket.” That is equivalent to about $6.50.

Mr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.

In some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed kilns and resold them to other factories.

The director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker’s Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in isolated areas.

“Those factories are located in very remote places and most them are illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for people outside to know what is going on there,” said the union official, Zhang Xiaosuo. “We are now doing a province-wide investigation into them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.”

Liu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a different explanation. “My first reaction is that this seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance,” Mr. Liu said. “Forced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local governments don’t care too much.”

Zhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to Shanxi Province in search of him.

“You just could not believe what you saw,” Ms. Zhang said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Some of the kids working at these places were at most 14 or 15 years old.”

The local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, she said, they even demanded bribes.

“We finally got into that place, and I saw people hauling carts of bricks with great difficulty,” Ms. Zhang said. “Some of them were very small, and the ropes they pulled left tracks of blood on their shoulders and backs. Others were making bricks, standing by the machines.

“They had to move the bricks from the belt very quickly, because they were hot and heavy and they could easily get burned or hurt by the machines.”

By Friday, with the help of Mr. Su, Ms. Zhang finally located her son at a kiln near the one to which Mr. Su’s children had been taken.

Another father, Cai Tianliang, said he had set out to Shanxi Province in May from his native Henan Province in search of his missing 19-year-old son after a local television broadcast had shown a team of television reporters and Henan parents searching the Shanxi kilns for kidnapped children.

“I thought there was a great possibility that my son was also kidnapped, so I went there twice,” Mr. Cai said. “The usual thing is for an owner to have more than one factory, and to shift people without identification from one place to another.”

On his first trip, which he took with a group of parents, Mr. Cai said he found few clues. On a second visit to the area, he said, he was refused police permits to enter any of the brick factories but persisted anyway.

“We located a place called the Zhenjie Brick Factory in a town called Chengbei, and at first they would not allow us in,” he said, “but we kept negotiating. Finally, they let a few of us in, and they found my son inside.”

Like many other parents, Mr. Cai said he was dumbfounded by the boy’s condition when they were reunited.

“My son was totally dumb, not even knowing how to cry, or to scream or to call out ‘Father,’ ” he said. “I burst into tears and held him in my arms, but he had no reaction. He was in rags and had wounds all over his body. Within three months he had lost over 10 kilos,” about 22 pounds.

Mr. Cai said he tried to rescue a 16-year-old boy he found there, but was refused by the factory boss. “He said I could only take my own,” Mr. Cai said, “and must leave other people behind at the kiln.”