Farmers, Livelihoods, and Food Politics in India

Noted on January 22, 2009 by Natanya in

Tuula Rebhahn spent fall term on a farm in Western India working with sustainable agriculture. As part of her internship with Vanastree she attended an Organic Farming conference in Bangalore - and ponders whether there is any solution to the challenges facing India's rural populations.

My 10-hour bus journey to Bangalore is actually quite comfortable thanks to the marvel of sleeper busses. After a month of cramming in dilapidated local busses to get back and forth to my host organization’s office in rural Karnataka, the sleeper bus’s narrow bunks seem incredibly spacious. The privacy afforded by the thick blue curtains around my bunk is a luxury, and I waste no time in getting comfortable and placing my earbuds in ear. Before too long, the financial news (which I have a sick fascination with, like watching a car accident) lulls me into dreams of credit default swaps and naked short sellers.

I’m temporarily departing my internship site for Karnataka’s capital city for a conference on the country’s growing market for organic produce and its impacts on farmers. While my organization, Vanastree, doesn’t work with many large-scale organic farmers, we do have quite a few small farmers who are by default organic (uncertified, but growing food in the traditional chemical-free way).

When I reach Bangalore, it’s raining. Monsoon season seems to be lingering longer than usual this year, and the gloom makes the sight of the poverty outside my window all the more depressing. I see families living under tattered tarps, mothers with young babies begging for change, and streetside vendor after vendor selling the same unwanted wares. It’s my first real encounter with a major Indian city, and the area where I work is by comparison very well off. Farmers there produce enough food to sustain the population – cash crops and sprawling cities have not yet taken over the landscape. With at least 7 million people and growing, Bangalore truly is a different side of India, I realize as I stare glumly out the rain-streaked window.

“Farmers, Livelihood and Trade” is the title of the two-day conference my internship supervisor and I are attending here, a series of small workshops and lectures concerned primarily with increasing the market share of small organic farmers in India. It’s taking place at a nicely landscaped, walled-off university campus with security guards at the gates. Once I check into my room near the conference hall, I can almost pretend I’m back in at my familiar village internship site. The biggest difference is nobody stares at me here – they’re all used to foreigners.

After a short nap, I head for the breakfast buffet. Soon after that, the conference kicks off with a lecture by Devinda Sharma, a journalist who has become well known in India for speaking out on issues concerning food security. I’ve been given the intern’s honor of taking notes for the next two days, but I would have been riveted anyway: this guy is incensed about the state of agriculture and India’s farmers.

Most of Sharma’s talk relates to the World Trade Organization and its liberalization of international food grain markets. Before the WTO, India’s GDP was 25% of the world total. It was a net exporter of food grains, meaning it shipped out more than it bought from other nations and could amply feed its population. 80% of Indians were employed in the agricultural sector.

Under the new rules laid out by the WTO, however, the food situation in India began to shift. Heavily subsidized grains from the US flooded the market, and India was told to focus its agricultural production on exports – in the form of cotton, spices, arecanut and other nonstaple items – to keep up with global trade. The result was predictable. As Sharma put it, “Importing food is importing unemployment.” Today, India is headed down a path to attain a similar socioeconomic profile to the US, where less than 1% of the population is employed in the agricultural sector (the documented population, that is; undocumented workers contribute a whole lot more hours). The problem is, there are simply too many people and not enough land for this industrialized system to work in India. Somewhere, something or somebody has to give, and I saw those somebodies outside my bus window on the way here. Most of those millions of homeless in India’s cities are refugees from villages, where they’ve given up on the agricultural life because they can’t afford it (and because it doesn’t provide the glitzy urban lifestyle they’ve been watching on TV).

What caused farming to become a profession unaffordable by those with small, organically managed plots of land? For one thing, urban, upwardly mobile Indians prefer to buy white rice and imported wheat, not traditional grain varieties that can be grown in the traditional ways. If farmers switch to high-value export crops, their product must meet standards only attained through chemical inputs (large size, consistent color and texture, perfect skin). And the necessary chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides inevitably place farmers in a cycle of debt that is difficult to escape from.

As Sharma and the other speakers at the seminar explained, organic farming is supposed to be the antidote to all this mess, but it lacks the government backing to really make it work. Commercial, “conventional” agriculture (using chemical inputs) is subsidized in India, just as it is in Western nations, which makes crops grown this way very price competitive. India’s organic farmers receive no such help from subsidies. In fact, they have to pay for organic certification by often-sketchy certification boards, who in classic Indian style create a tangled network of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork.

Although I’ve been studying this stuff for a while, hearing it again and talking to the people who are running against these problems in real life leaves me feeling frustrated and a bit hopeless. It isn’t just the depressing figures; I’m also discouraged by what I hadn’t heard in the two days I of conferencing – an actual solution or at least a plan. Sure, in our air-conditioned rooms with meals provided every four hours, we’d come up with a list of “policy recommendations” for the Indian government. But after witnessing during the last few weeks the clumsiness of India’s bureaucracy and the ease with which it is ignored by most citizens, I have my doubts that policy recommendations will have any impact at all. In fact, many of the policies we’d recommended – like setting up farmer-owned organic brands and providing subsidies to organic farmers – already exist, they just aren’t working. While it’s nice to have neat summations of the problems, their solutions, I suspect, are hiding somewhere else, outside the guarded gates of this university.