Rules of Thumb
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06/07/07, Gwynne Dyer, The End of Cheap Food, Source.
31/07/04, Devinder Sharma, So-Called "Green Revolution" Driving Thousands of Indian Farmers to Suicide, Source.
02/03/05, Vandana Shiva, Farmers' Suicides, Hunger Deaths and Globalization, Source.
07/07/07, Doug Saunders, Dream farms turning into nightmares, Source.
17/07/07, President Bush Presents Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Norman Borlaug, Source.
06/07/07, Gwynne Dyer, The End of Cheap Food, (Back).
The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11 percent in one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not going to come down again.
Cheap food lasted for only fifty years. Before the Second World War most families in the developed countries spent a third or more of their income on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still do). But after the war a series of radical changes, from mechanisation to the Green Revolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long, steep fall in the real price of food. For the global middle class, it was the Good Old Days, with food taking only a tenth of their income.
It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and it may go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are starting to eat significant amounts of meat.
Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming trends, the United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than ten years from now, people in the developing countries will be eating 30 percent more beef, 50 percent more pig meat and 25 percent more poultry. The animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting that demand will require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human to animal consumption -- so the price of grain and of meat will both go up.
The global poor don't care about the price of meat, because they can't afford it even now -- but if the price of grain goes up, some of them will starve. And maybe they won't have to wait until 2016, because the mania for "bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. One-sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this year will be "industrial corn" destined to be converted into ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are all heading in the same direction.
The attraction of bio-fuels for politicians is obvious: they can claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global warming (though the claims are deeply suspect), without actually demanding any sacrifices from business or the voters. The amount of US farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48 percent in the last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plough to replace the lost food production. In other big bio-fuel producers like China and Brazil it's the same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food market and the energy market are becoming closely linked, which is very bad news for the poor.
As oil prices rise (and the rapid economic growth in Asia guarantees that they will), they pull up the price of bio-fuels as well, and it gets even more attractive for farmers to switch from food to fuel. Nor will politics save the day. As economist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute told the US Congress last month: "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people." Guess who wins.
Soaring Asian demand and bio-fuels mean expensive food now and in the near future, but then it gets worse. Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer, published in "Environmental Research Letters" in March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California and David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is quite simple: for every 0.5C (0.9F) hotter, crop yields fall between three and five percent. So two degrees C hotter (3.6F), the lower end of the range of predicted temperature rise in this century, means a twelve to twenty percent fall in global food production.
This is science, of course, so that answer could be wrong -- but it could be wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New Delhi, I interviewed the director of a think tank who had just completed a contract to estimate the impact on Indian food production of a rise of just two degrees C in global temperature. The answer, at least for India, was 25 percent. That would mean mass starvation, for if India were in that situation, every other major food-producing country would be too, and there would be no imports available at any price.
In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.
31/07/04, Devinder Sharma, So-Called "Green Revolution" Driving Thousands of Indian Farmers to Suicide, (Back).
It doesn't shock the nation anymore. Reports saying that 65 of the 243 farmers who committed suicide in Vidharbha region of Maharashtra had debts as little as Rs 8,000 have not shaken the conscience of the world's biggest democracy. That Meena Prakash Rechpade, widow of the 36-year-old farmer, Prakash, of village Dhanori, near Wardha, in Maharashtra , has no money to arrange for the last rites of her husband, who took the fatal route to escape the misery of the green revolution no longer evokes a strong reaction.
In Andhra Pradesh, ever since Y S Rajasekhar Reddy took over as the Chief Minister some three months ago on May 14, more than 400 farmers have committed suicide. This was the official death toll in the suicide register till July 15. In Karnataka, the new Chief Minister Dharam Singh has no time for farmers in distress. He has been too busy with balancing the equation of coalition politics. More than 300 farmers have committed suicide in the state, which claims to be on the highway leading to the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. The sad part of the story is that a majority of those who committed suicide were relatively young, below the age of 45 years.
In western Uttar Pradesh, more than 14 farmers have committed suicide in the month of July. In the frontline agriculture states of Punjab and Haryana, the situation is no better. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had himself gone on record (before he was elected) saying that close to 2,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past few years.
Sensing the uneasiness being felt by the agricultural scientists, lest they be hauled up for the bloodbath being enacted in the farm sector, support has already flown in from the expected quarters - the biotechnology industry.
The US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Application (ISAAA), which unabashedly promotes genetically engineered crops and 'transfer' of technology with multi-million dollar funding from Bayer, Cargill, Dow, Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, Syngenta, in addition to foundations and Western governmental funding agencies, is busy collaborating with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is besotted with the vision of India as one vast genomic valley.
02/03/05, Vandana Shiva, Farmers' Suicides, Hunger Deaths and Globalization, (Back).
Globalization is killing the people of India . Farmers are being pushed to suicides with rising debts due to deregulation of inputs such as seeds and chemicals and imports by the removal of quantitative restrictions. The poor are facing starvation. Reports of hunger deaths have become routine even as 65 million tonnes of foodgrain are rotting in godowns.
At a seminar on Food Sovereignty organised by Sustainable Agriculture Movement - Navdanya, as part of the Asian Social Forum, farmer leaders and food right activists presented analyses and testimonies on why are farmers committing suicide and why are the people being starved to death.
* Over 8000 children have died of malnutrition in Maharashtra since Globalization
* Nearly 2000 farmers have committed suicide in Rajasthan in the last 3 years
* More than 100 farmers from three villages - Rentachintala, Khambhampadu, and Macherla in East Andhra Pradesh have sold kidneys to avoid starvation.
* Between 1997 and 2000 in just one district - Anantpur - in Andhra Pradesh, 1826 people, mainly marginal farmers, committed suicide.
* Wheat is being exported at Rs. 3.96 a kilo even while the BPL price is Rs. 4.20 and the economic cost to FC I is Rs. 8.30
* The Supreme Court's Commissioners on Food found that almost 70% of the food offtake by Rajasthan government was for exports.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, the founder of Navdanya, and a leading figure of the anti-Globalization movement, said these glaring facts show that under Globalization, the Indian food system is being hijacked for super profits of MNCs and is no longer designed to serve either peasants or the poor. She gave an overview of the impact of a decade of Globalization on the food sovereignty of the country and the food entitlement of the people of India . She also laid out the strategies for fighting WTO and agribusiness at the national and international levels, especially in the context of the upcoming Ministerial meeting of WTO in Cancun and the total collapse of the negotiations on agriculture.
07/07/07, Doug Saunders, Dream farms turning into nightmares, (Back).
Thousands who found success in the Green Revolution have become suicidal as they face smaller yields and bigger debts.
WARDHA, INDIA -- Only a few years ago, the Bandharkawda family considered themselves one of the developing world's great success stories. From the depths of rural poverty, on farm-labour earnings of a few cents a day, they had saved for 40 years to attain the old Indian dream of owning land and becoming actual farmers.
When the patriarch, Barku Bandharkawda, 80, bought his hectare of fertile land in the sun-baked centre of India for the equivalent of $375 in 1997 and planted it with hybrid cotton seeds, he was joining the tail end of the country's so-called Green Revolution, growing a high-yield cash crop destined for world markets. He was part of the Indian agricultural success story.
This summer, his dream came to a despondent end. While he was attending a wedding in a neighbouring village a few weeks ago, Mr. Bandharkawda's only son, Ishwar, 45, strolled into his parched fields with a glass bottle in his hand. The next morning, Mr. Bandharkawda found his son's body amid the furrows. He had taken his life, leaving a wife and two beloved children, in a symbolic manner that has become alarmingly popular around here: drinking a litre of agricultural pesticide.
"Going into farming was the worst mistake I ever made," Mr. Bandharkawda said as he surveyed the lifeless fields from the porch of his mud house. "I didn't know what it was doing to my son - he hadn't bought any seeds for this year's crop because he couldn't afford to keep up with his debts. He never said anything, so I never knew about his suffering."
Mr. Bandharkawda's peculiar form of suffering is part of an epidemic that is leading thousands of this region's farmers to take their lives. The extraordinary rise in suicides among farmers, a phenomenon that has grown dramatically in the past few years, has the government of India scrambling to respond, embarrassed by this shadow on the country's great economic rise.
Politicians and lobbyists are competing to explain this wave of self-induced death. Some point to U.S. cotton subsidies, others to genetic-engineered hybrid seeds, to the prevalence of chemical-fertilizer farming or to the rise of consumerism among the world's poor. While these factors all play a role in the region's problems, it is clear that there is a deeper and more fundamental cause, one that governments of rich and poor countries alike have failed to address.
In short, unlike farm crises of earlier generations, these farmers are victims of success, driven to death by an agricultural boom that has produced more food than the world needs, more cotton than markets can bear, more crops than the land can sustain and far too many farmers. The Green Revolution, which 30 years ago put an end to India's famines and food shortages and turned farming into a profitable business, has self-destructed in a spiral of bankruptcy and death.
Last week, as farmers in this dusty region awaited the monsoon rains and prayed for better crops after years of dwindling yields, the suicide numbers once again began to mount. In a three-day tour of a few of the region's 1,400 villages, it was easy to find a dozen families who have lost their fathers to suicide in recent weeks.
In 2006, a record 746 farmers took their lives in this heavily agricultural state of Maharashtra (whose population of 100 million includes the giant city of Mumbai), a number that has risen rapidly from 50 in 2001. Few have left notes or explanations. But, tellingly, in 79 per cent of cases, they have killed themselves by drinking pesticide.
Anecdotally, it appears that this summer will produce a similar or even greater number of deaths.
In the past five years, 11,387 farmers nationwide have committed suicide, according to a study completed by a group of Indian think tanks this month. These numbers finally forced Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take action last year, offering more money to support farmers - a move that may have inadvertently increased suicides by encouraging family farmers to stay on unprofitable land. Despite this, many Indian politicians still say that the farmer-suicide crisis is a myth.
"There is no suicide crisis - it's just something the media likes to say," said Jambuvantrao Dhote, a local political leader with a large following among farmers, as he held court at his street-side office in the regional capital of Vidarbha. "People in cities commit suicide, police commit suicide, people in the U.S. commit suicide ... yet they are picking on us."
That view was demolished this year by the Mumbai-based economist Srijit Mishra, who examined the actual suicide rates. What he found was shocking: Among poor labourers in Maharashtra state, suicide rates rose slightly during the past decade from 17 per thousand people to 20. Among male farmers, though, the rate has almost quadrupled from 15 to 57 per thousand - one of the highest suicide rates in the country.
"All of us are getting these kinds of feelings: What can I do? How can I afford it? How can I ever manage? It's a real temptation to go and drink pesticide and end your problems," said Gopal Dafere, 28, whose younger brother, Ganesh, killed himself in May, leaving behind an 18-month-old daughter and a mountain of debt.
"But I look at the children and it stops me. For my brother, it just became too much to bear."
Why so many dead farmers, and why now? This is not a case of abject poverty: In fact, these are among India's less destitute farmers, in material terms. The villages are prosperous, most houses have colour TV and access to telephones, and most larger villages have excellent schools and agricultural universities. This has baffled authorities in India and the West. After visiting a dozen families, though, a surprising set of patterns becomes clear.
Mountain of debt
The village of Rehaki is home to 5,000 people in a tightly packed enclave of tiny dung-walled houses painted a cheerful blue, its dirt streets packed with bicycles, cows and three-wheel auto-rickshaws. Along one bumpy lane you will find the narrow, one-room house of the Chaple family.
Six family members were sitting in the narrow lane alongside their house the other day, wondering what they were going to do. A few mornings before, Mukta Chaple, 45, had poked her head out of the house to find her husband of 20 years, Ramaji, lying in this lane, his body stiff, a pesticide bottle clutched in his hand.
"I had no indication that anything was wrong," Ms. Chaple said, barely able to speak through her tears. "He didn't give any indication that he was depressed or in despair. He never told me anything."
A few days after Mr. Chaple's funeral, his brother Shaligiam, who runs a roadside snack stand, came over and began to discover things. His brother had a long-outstanding loan of about $500 from a local moneylender at the traditional village rate of 25 per cent every four months, a larger bank loan equivalent to $1,750 and an unpaid electrical bill of several hundred dollars. In a very good year, his farm might have made $1,000.
The family's 1.2-hectare plot had produced good yields of cotton a decade ago, giving them high hopes of saving money, buying a bigger house and maybe sending one of their three teenaged children to university. But it simply became impossible to make money.
The amount of cotton they were able to produce kept dwindling. Last summer, Ramaji spent $300 on cotton seeds and fertilizer, and in the autumn he sold his cotton for a mere $400, leaving $100 for the year. His other brother, who grows oranges, gave him enough money to feed the children for the winter.
"He had all this debt, and he hadn't made any money last year. We should have realized that this meant he couldn't buy any seeds or fertilizer this year," Shaligiam says. He was in despair. And on top of that, he had been unable to save any money for his 20-year-old daughter Shilpa to get married. In rural India, marriages remain central to a family's self-respect, but they have become increasingly expensive: Around here, $1,000 or more in dowry and gifts isn't unusual.
"We'd bring prospective grooms over, but they'd take one look at this house and the way we were living, and they'd say they couldn't marry me," Shilpa said. "My father got very upset because he couldn't do anything to help me."
As countries such as India have improved rural services to advance health and education, the cost of being a poor farmer has increased considerably. Along with increasingly expensive marriages, there are now monthly bills for electricity, cable TV and sometimes telephones. Many farmers, excited by the money they made from their early high crop yields, have bought motorcycles, DVD players and other goods they can't really afford.
But the cost of farming has also increased.
"When I started out 40 years ago, it didn't cost anything," veteran agriculturalist Anand Subhedar said.
"You'd use the seeds from the previous year's crop, and your cow's manure for fertilizer. If you had a bad crop, you'd eat poorly for the year, but you'd be able to start again the next year."
Starting in the 1970s, India's farm economy changed. The Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds, allowing huge yields. On the whole, this was very successful: Since the seventies, there have been no major famines in India, and the country usually produces large food surpluses.
Many farmers switched to cotton, with government encouragement: The Mumbai-based fabric industry was hungry for the fibre, and new techniques promised big yields.
In the 1990s, new genetically engineered cotton seeds became available, which produced far higher yields and healthier crops with less use of pesticides. Most Indian farmers switched to Bt seeds made by Monsanto Co., which can produce rewarding results in large-scale farms. But they have one flaw for the small farmer: New seeds must be purchased each year, at a high price. Counting seeds and fertilizer, the cost of starting each year's crop has jumped from zero to hundreds of dollars.
At the same time, cotton prices have plunged, mainly because of oversupply but also because the United States, the world's largest cotton producer, provides generous government subsidies to its farmers, allowing them to sell at a far lower cost.
This has led many in India to blame the Americans for producing both the expensive farming techniques and the declining cotton prices.
"Our farmers are victims of a global economic system that provides all the benefits to the United States at the expense of the world's poor," Vijay Jawandia, head of the local farmers' union, said.
"Globalization has supposedly been good for India's economy, but it is killing the farmers, and nobody seems to care."
India recently walked out of World Trade Organization talks over this unfair situation.
But it is not the whole story. If you examine the farmers' balance sheets, you find that, even if cotton prices were double what they are now and the input costs disappeared, most of them would still be plummeting into debt. Their intensive, high-yield farming methods, aggressively pushed in the Green Revolution, have exhausted their soil, reducing their annual yields, in many cases, to one-tenth the level they saw a decade ago. Larger farms can afford to regenerate soil by leaving a third of their fields fallow for long periods. This is impossible for tiny family farms.
"The farmers have still not escaped the old mindset that cotton is a good cash crop," said Mr. Subhedar, an agricultural researcher and farmer in the nearby town of Yavatmal. "What happened in the United States in the 20th century is beginning to happen here - it's becoming apparent that cotton is not an economical crop. Yet the universities keep on teaching the mantra of the Green Revolution, which is to maximize yield at all costs. That made sense for India at one time. Now it's just hurting people."
The small farms, combined with the intensive, soil-exhausting farming techniques that promise great rewards at enormous risk, have made farming an ill-fated pursuit for small families. Yet the Indian government's solution to the suicide crisis has been to offer more money to farmers - an important humanitarian move, but one that offers few incentives for people to leave farming.
According to Mr. Subhedar, who stopped growing cotton a decade ago, most of these small farmers would make more money, and have more stable incomes and no debt, if they were farm labourers rather than farmers.
But this is unthinkable for farmers and the government.
"Indians are very passionate about owning the land," Mr. Subhedar said. "It isn't a passion for any sensible financial reason; we consider the land a goddess, we actually pray to her. It is very difficult emotionally for a man to sell his land and become a labourer, even though it makes more sense. It came from his forefathers."
At a moment when poor countries should be winding down the Green Revolution and reducing the number of farmers, countries such as India find themselves trapped: The cities lack the infrastructure for another urban population surge. And the kind of agriculture that employs large numbers of labourers - the medium-sized, well-managed farm - isn't taught in universities.
"The farmer here is stuck," Mr. Subhedar said. "He doesn't know how to invest the money and make a better future for himself, or get out of farming - so he will wait around until the last straw breaks."
Turning points
FAMINES IN INDIA Before the 1950s, India suffered a series of famines that killed millions of people and depopulated entire provinces. At times, the famines lasted longer than the periods between them. Since gaining independence from Britain, however, it hasn't had a significant famine.
THE GREEN REVOLUTION In the 1960s, Western industrial farming techniques, including chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified high-yield seeds, were promoted in the developing world to solve food shortages.
NORMAN BORLAUG The U.S. scientist developed strains of high-yield crops, and has promoted their use worldwide as a solution to food shortages. For this, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, but has faced criticism over the long-term sustainability of his techniques, his promotion of genetic modification and his dismissal of organic farming.
HOW IT TRANSFORMED INDIA Among the first countries to adopt the techniques, India raised rice yields by 30 per cent to quickly go from the world's largest food importer to a self-sufficient food exporter.
THE DOWNSIDE The intensive farming techniques deplete the soil and require a large investment. The high-yield seeds don't naturally reproduce themselves, so farmers must buy new seeds each year. As well, the fertilizers and pesticides needed are more expensive than natural aids such as manure. As a result, Green Revolution techniques are of questionable long-term value to small-scale farmers.
Source: Staff, Indian Institute of Science
17/07/07, President Bush Presents Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Norman Borlaug, (Back).
United States Capitol
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, all. Madame Speaker, thank you. Madame Speaker, Mr. Leader, members of the congressional leadership, members of the Iowa delegation, fighting Texas A&M Aggies, Dr. Borlaug and his family:
All around us are testaments to our republic's young and storied history. Yet sometimes it takes a ceremony like this to remind us what a special place America is.
Ours is a land of hope and promise and compassion. And we see that compassion and promise in the man we honor today -- a farm boy, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, who left the golden fields of Iowa to become known as "The man who fed the world."
Many have highlighted Norman Borlaug's achievements in turning ordinary staples such as wheat and rice into miracles that brought hope to millions. I particularly appreciated the story about a former Vice President, and fellow Iowan, named Henry Wallace, who once came to observe Norman's grain experiments up close. The Vice President looked around, and then asked why a good Iowa boy like Norman wasn't working on something to do with corn. (Laughter.)
Norman Borlaug's life has taken him from laboratories in America and Mexico to dusty villages throughout the developing world. He has consulted with presidents and prime ministers in important countries like Pakistan and India. He's helped inspire students at Texas A&M, where an institute bearing his name is dedicated to completing his life's work. To this day Norman leads an active life -- listen to a friend, who said that Norman spends half his year in Texas, half his year in Mexico -- and the other half wherever else he's needed. (Laughter.) That is interesting math. I was going to say that I bet some of us wish we could use that kind of math during the budget process here in the Capitol. (Laughter.) I'm afraid sometimes we do.
What that friend meant was that Norman Borlaug has lived his life with urgency. He has long understood that one of the greatest threats to global progress is the torment of human hunger. And we've seen that plague haunt history many times. Famine in the mid-1800s forced hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens to take a sad and desperate journey to America -- and turned the Atlantic Ocean into what an Irish poet called "a bowl of bitter tears." More than a century later, wrenching images of emaciated children in Ethiopia rallied the world to the tragedy of famine. Hunger continues to cast its miserable shadow across much of the developing world -- robbing villages of children, and forcing human beings to make desperate and daily searches for food and clean water.
Wealthy and prosperous nations have a moral obligation to help poor and struggling people find their own paths to progress and plenty. To whom much is given, much is required, and we've been given a lot here in America. It's the calling of our conscience, and it's a compelling national interest. A quote that Dr. Borlaug made reference to when he received the Nobel Prize says it well: "You can't build peace on empty stomachs."
In the past half-century, we have seen a glimpse of the world that is yet to come. Since the end of the World War II, the advance of trade and technology has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That's really the triumph of human liberty stretching across natural boundaries. It is a tribute to innovation and entrepreneurship. And these are the characteristics that can be found in the very best of our citizens, such as the man we honor today.
When Dr. Borlaug received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from one of my predecessors, Gerald Ford, the citation noted that Norman's work "has pushed back the shadow of hunger on this planet and given us precious time to force its final retreat." That final retreat will come only as long as we hold in our hearts the revolutionary spirit of men like Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution brought hope to troubled corners of the world, where grateful villagers still praise his name.
The most fitting tribute we can offer this good man is to renew ourselves to his life's work, and lead a second Green Revolution that feeds the world, and today we'll make a pledge to do so.
Dr. Borlaug, I thank you for your vision and dedication. I thank you for leading a life of great purpose and achievement. I thank you for proving to Americans that what we learned as children is true, that one human being can change the world. May God bless you, sir. May God continue to bless our wonderful country.
And now I ask the Speaker and Senator Reid to join me for the Gold Medal Presentation.
(The Congressional Gold Medal is presented.) (Applause.)
(Back)
31/07/04, Devinder Sharma, So-Called "Green Revolution" Driving Thousands of Indian Farmers to Suicide, Source.
02/03/05, Vandana Shiva, Farmers' Suicides, Hunger Deaths and Globalization, Source.
07/07/07, Doug Saunders, Dream farms turning into nightmares, Source.
17/07/07, President Bush Presents Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Norman Borlaug, Source.
06/07/07, Gwynne Dyer, The End of Cheap Food, (Back).
The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11 percent in one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not going to come down again.
Cheap food lasted for only fifty years. Before the Second World War most families in the developed countries spent a third or more of their income on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still do). But after the war a series of radical changes, from mechanisation to the Green Revolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long, steep fall in the real price of food. For the global middle class, it was the Good Old Days, with food taking only a tenth of their income.
It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and it may go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are starting to eat significant amounts of meat.
Early this month, in its annual assessment of farming trends, the United Nations predicted that by 2016, less than ten years from now, people in the developing countries will be eating 30 percent more beef, 50 percent more pig meat and 25 percent more poultry. The animals will need a great deal of grain, and meeting that demand will require shifting huge amounts of grain-growing land from human to animal consumption -- so the price of grain and of meat will both go up.
The global poor don't care about the price of meat, because they can't afford it even now -- but if the price of grain goes up, some of them will starve. And maybe they won't have to wait until 2016, because the mania for "bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. One-sixth of all the grain grown in the United States this year will be "industrial corn" destined to be converted into ethanol and burned in cars, and Europe, Brazil and China are all heading in the same direction.
The attraction of bio-fuels for politicians is obvious: they can claim that they are doing something useful to combat emissions and global warming (though the claims are deeply suspect), without actually demanding any sacrifices from business or the voters. The amount of US farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48 percent in the last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plough to replace the lost food production. In other big bio-fuel producers like China and Brazil it's the same straight switch from food to fuel. In fact, the food market and the energy market are becoming closely linked, which is very bad news for the poor.
As oil prices rise (and the rapid economic growth in Asia guarantees that they will), they pull up the price of bio-fuels as well, and it gets even more attractive for farmers to switch from food to fuel. Nor will politics save the day. As economist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute told the US Congress last month: "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people." Guess who wins.
Soaring Asian demand and bio-fuels mean expensive food now and in the near future, but then it gets worse. Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer, published in "Environmental Research Letters" in March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California and David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is quite simple: for every 0.5C (0.9F) hotter, crop yields fall between three and five percent. So two degrees C hotter (3.6F), the lower end of the range of predicted temperature rise in this century, means a twelve to twenty percent fall in global food production.
This is science, of course, so that answer could be wrong -- but it could be wrong by being too conservative. Last year in New Delhi, I interviewed the director of a think tank who had just completed a contract to estimate the impact on Indian food production of a rise of just two degrees C in global temperature. The answer, at least for India, was 25 percent. That would mean mass starvation, for if India were in that situation, every other major food-producing country would be too, and there would be no imports available at any price.
In the early stages of this process, higher food prices will help millions of farmers who have been scraping along on very poor returns for their effort because political power lies in the cities, but later it gets uglier. The price of food relative to average income is heading for levels that have not been seen since the early 19th century, and it will not come down again in our lifetimes.
31/07/04, Devinder Sharma, So-Called "Green Revolution" Driving Thousands of Indian Farmers to Suicide, (Back).
It doesn't shock the nation anymore. Reports saying that 65 of the 243 farmers who committed suicide in Vidharbha region of Maharashtra had debts as little as Rs 8,000 have not shaken the conscience of the world's biggest democracy. That Meena Prakash Rechpade, widow of the 36-year-old farmer, Prakash, of village Dhanori, near Wardha, in Maharashtra , has no money to arrange for the last rites of her husband, who took the fatal route to escape the misery of the green revolution no longer evokes a strong reaction.
In Andhra Pradesh, ever since Y S Rajasekhar Reddy took over as the Chief Minister some three months ago on May 14, more than 400 farmers have committed suicide. This was the official death toll in the suicide register till July 15. In Karnataka, the new Chief Minister Dharam Singh has no time for farmers in distress. He has been too busy with balancing the equation of coalition politics. More than 300 farmers have committed suicide in the state, which claims to be on the highway leading to the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. The sad part of the story is that a majority of those who committed suicide were relatively young, below the age of 45 years.
In western Uttar Pradesh, more than 14 farmers have committed suicide in the month of July. In the frontline agriculture states of Punjab and Haryana, the situation is no better. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had himself gone on record (before he was elected) saying that close to 2,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past few years.
Sensing the uneasiness being felt by the agricultural scientists, lest they be hauled up for the bloodbath being enacted in the farm sector, support has already flown in from the expected quarters - the biotechnology industry.
The US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Application (ISAAA), which unabashedly promotes genetically engineered crops and 'transfer' of technology with multi-million dollar funding from Bayer, Cargill, Dow, Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, Syngenta, in addition to foundations and Western governmental funding agencies, is busy collaborating with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is besotted with the vision of India as one vast genomic valley.
02/03/05, Vandana Shiva, Farmers' Suicides, Hunger Deaths and Globalization, (Back).
Globalization is killing the people of India . Farmers are being pushed to suicides with rising debts due to deregulation of inputs such as seeds and chemicals and imports by the removal of quantitative restrictions. The poor are facing starvation. Reports of hunger deaths have become routine even as 65 million tonnes of foodgrain are rotting in godowns.
At a seminar on Food Sovereignty organised by Sustainable Agriculture Movement - Navdanya, as part of the Asian Social Forum, farmer leaders and food right activists presented analyses and testimonies on why are farmers committing suicide and why are the people being starved to death.
* Over 8000 children have died of malnutrition in Maharashtra since Globalization
* Nearly 2000 farmers have committed suicide in Rajasthan in the last 3 years
* More than 100 farmers from three villages - Rentachintala, Khambhampadu, and Macherla in East Andhra Pradesh have sold kidneys to avoid starvation.
* Between 1997 and 2000 in just one district - Anantpur - in Andhra Pradesh, 1826 people, mainly marginal farmers, committed suicide.
* Wheat is being exported at Rs. 3.96 a kilo even while the BPL price is Rs. 4.20 and the economic cost to FC I is Rs. 8.30
* The Supreme Court's Commissioners on Food found that almost 70% of the food offtake by Rajasthan government was for exports.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, the founder of Navdanya, and a leading figure of the anti-Globalization movement, said these glaring facts show that under Globalization, the Indian food system is being hijacked for super profits of MNCs and is no longer designed to serve either peasants or the poor. She gave an overview of the impact of a decade of Globalization on the food sovereignty of the country and the food entitlement of the people of India . She also laid out the strategies for fighting WTO and agribusiness at the national and international levels, especially in the context of the upcoming Ministerial meeting of WTO in Cancun and the total collapse of the negotiations on agriculture.
07/07/07, Doug Saunders, Dream farms turning into nightmares, (Back).
Thousands who found success in the Green Revolution have become suicidal as they face smaller yields and bigger debts.
WARDHA, INDIA -- Only a few years ago, the Bandharkawda family considered themselves one of the developing world's great success stories. From the depths of rural poverty, on farm-labour earnings of a few cents a day, they had saved for 40 years to attain the old Indian dream of owning land and becoming actual farmers.
When the patriarch, Barku Bandharkawda, 80, bought his hectare of fertile land in the sun-baked centre of India for the equivalent of $375 in 1997 and planted it with hybrid cotton seeds, he was joining the tail end of the country's so-called Green Revolution, growing a high-yield cash crop destined for world markets. He was part of the Indian agricultural success story.
This summer, his dream came to a despondent end. While he was attending a wedding in a neighbouring village a few weeks ago, Mr. Bandharkawda's only son, Ishwar, 45, strolled into his parched fields with a glass bottle in his hand. The next morning, Mr. Bandharkawda found his son's body amid the furrows. He had taken his life, leaving a wife and two beloved children, in a symbolic manner that has become alarmingly popular around here: drinking a litre of agricultural pesticide.
"Going into farming was the worst mistake I ever made," Mr. Bandharkawda said as he surveyed the lifeless fields from the porch of his mud house. "I didn't know what it was doing to my son - he hadn't bought any seeds for this year's crop because he couldn't afford to keep up with his debts. He never said anything, so I never knew about his suffering."
Mr. Bandharkawda's peculiar form of suffering is part of an epidemic that is leading thousands of this region's farmers to take their lives. The extraordinary rise in suicides among farmers, a phenomenon that has grown dramatically in the past few years, has the government of India scrambling to respond, embarrassed by this shadow on the country's great economic rise.
Politicians and lobbyists are competing to explain this wave of self-induced death. Some point to U.S. cotton subsidies, others to genetic-engineered hybrid seeds, to the prevalence of chemical-fertilizer farming or to the rise of consumerism among the world's poor. While these factors all play a role in the region's problems, it is clear that there is a deeper and more fundamental cause, one that governments of rich and poor countries alike have failed to address.
In short, unlike farm crises of earlier generations, these farmers are victims of success, driven to death by an agricultural boom that has produced more food than the world needs, more cotton than markets can bear, more crops than the land can sustain and far too many farmers. The Green Revolution, which 30 years ago put an end to India's famines and food shortages and turned farming into a profitable business, has self-destructed in a spiral of bankruptcy and death.
Last week, as farmers in this dusty region awaited the monsoon rains and prayed for better crops after years of dwindling yields, the suicide numbers once again began to mount. In a three-day tour of a few of the region's 1,400 villages, it was easy to find a dozen families who have lost their fathers to suicide in recent weeks.
In 2006, a record 746 farmers took their lives in this heavily agricultural state of Maharashtra (whose population of 100 million includes the giant city of Mumbai), a number that has risen rapidly from 50 in 2001. Few have left notes or explanations. But, tellingly, in 79 per cent of cases, they have killed themselves by drinking pesticide.
Anecdotally, it appears that this summer will produce a similar or even greater number of deaths.
In the past five years, 11,387 farmers nationwide have committed suicide, according to a study completed by a group of Indian think tanks this month. These numbers finally forced Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take action last year, offering more money to support farmers - a move that may have inadvertently increased suicides by encouraging family farmers to stay on unprofitable land. Despite this, many Indian politicians still say that the farmer-suicide crisis is a myth.
"There is no suicide crisis - it's just something the media likes to say," said Jambuvantrao Dhote, a local political leader with a large following among farmers, as he held court at his street-side office in the regional capital of Vidarbha. "People in cities commit suicide, police commit suicide, people in the U.S. commit suicide ... yet they are picking on us."
That view was demolished this year by the Mumbai-based economist Srijit Mishra, who examined the actual suicide rates. What he found was shocking: Among poor labourers in Maharashtra state, suicide rates rose slightly during the past decade from 17 per thousand people to 20. Among male farmers, though, the rate has almost quadrupled from 15 to 57 per thousand - one of the highest suicide rates in the country.
"All of us are getting these kinds of feelings: What can I do? How can I afford it? How can I ever manage? It's a real temptation to go and drink pesticide and end your problems," said Gopal Dafere, 28, whose younger brother, Ganesh, killed himself in May, leaving behind an 18-month-old daughter and a mountain of debt.
"But I look at the children and it stops me. For my brother, it just became too much to bear."
Why so many dead farmers, and why now? This is not a case of abject poverty: In fact, these are among India's less destitute farmers, in material terms. The villages are prosperous, most houses have colour TV and access to telephones, and most larger villages have excellent schools and agricultural universities. This has baffled authorities in India and the West. After visiting a dozen families, though, a surprising set of patterns becomes clear.
Mountain of debt
The village of Rehaki is home to 5,000 people in a tightly packed enclave of tiny dung-walled houses painted a cheerful blue, its dirt streets packed with bicycles, cows and three-wheel auto-rickshaws. Along one bumpy lane you will find the narrow, one-room house of the Chaple family.
Six family members were sitting in the narrow lane alongside their house the other day, wondering what they were going to do. A few mornings before, Mukta Chaple, 45, had poked her head out of the house to find her husband of 20 years, Ramaji, lying in this lane, his body stiff, a pesticide bottle clutched in his hand.
"I had no indication that anything was wrong," Ms. Chaple said, barely able to speak through her tears. "He didn't give any indication that he was depressed or in despair. He never told me anything."
A few days after Mr. Chaple's funeral, his brother Shaligiam, who runs a roadside snack stand, came over and began to discover things. His brother had a long-outstanding loan of about $500 from a local moneylender at the traditional village rate of 25 per cent every four months, a larger bank loan equivalent to $1,750 and an unpaid electrical bill of several hundred dollars. In a very good year, his farm might have made $1,000.
The family's 1.2-hectare plot had produced good yields of cotton a decade ago, giving them high hopes of saving money, buying a bigger house and maybe sending one of their three teenaged children to university. But it simply became impossible to make money.
The amount of cotton they were able to produce kept dwindling. Last summer, Ramaji spent $300 on cotton seeds and fertilizer, and in the autumn he sold his cotton for a mere $400, leaving $100 for the year. His other brother, who grows oranges, gave him enough money to feed the children for the winter.
"He had all this debt, and he hadn't made any money last year. We should have realized that this meant he couldn't buy any seeds or fertilizer this year," Shaligiam says. He was in despair. And on top of that, he had been unable to save any money for his 20-year-old daughter Shilpa to get married. In rural India, marriages remain central to a family's self-respect, but they have become increasingly expensive: Around here, $1,000 or more in dowry and gifts isn't unusual.
"We'd bring prospective grooms over, but they'd take one look at this house and the way we were living, and they'd say they couldn't marry me," Shilpa said. "My father got very upset because he couldn't do anything to help me."
As countries such as India have improved rural services to advance health and education, the cost of being a poor farmer has increased considerably. Along with increasingly expensive marriages, there are now monthly bills for electricity, cable TV and sometimes telephones. Many farmers, excited by the money they made from their early high crop yields, have bought motorcycles, DVD players and other goods they can't really afford.
But the cost of farming has also increased.
"When I started out 40 years ago, it didn't cost anything," veteran agriculturalist Anand Subhedar said.
"You'd use the seeds from the previous year's crop, and your cow's manure for fertilizer. If you had a bad crop, you'd eat poorly for the year, but you'd be able to start again the next year."
Starting in the 1970s, India's farm economy changed. The Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds, allowing huge yields. On the whole, this was very successful: Since the seventies, there have been no major famines in India, and the country usually produces large food surpluses.
Many farmers switched to cotton, with government encouragement: The Mumbai-based fabric industry was hungry for the fibre, and new techniques promised big yields.
In the 1990s, new genetically engineered cotton seeds became available, which produced far higher yields and healthier crops with less use of pesticides. Most Indian farmers switched to Bt seeds made by Monsanto Co., which can produce rewarding results in large-scale farms. But they have one flaw for the small farmer: New seeds must be purchased each year, at a high price. Counting seeds and fertilizer, the cost of starting each year's crop has jumped from zero to hundreds of dollars.
At the same time, cotton prices have plunged, mainly because of oversupply but also because the United States, the world's largest cotton producer, provides generous government subsidies to its farmers, allowing them to sell at a far lower cost.
This has led many in India to blame the Americans for producing both the expensive farming techniques and the declining cotton prices.
"Our farmers are victims of a global economic system that provides all the benefits to the United States at the expense of the world's poor," Vijay Jawandia, head of the local farmers' union, said.
"Globalization has supposedly been good for India's economy, but it is killing the farmers, and nobody seems to care."
India recently walked out of World Trade Organization talks over this unfair situation.
But it is not the whole story. If you examine the farmers' balance sheets, you find that, even if cotton prices were double what they are now and the input costs disappeared, most of them would still be plummeting into debt. Their intensive, high-yield farming methods, aggressively pushed in the Green Revolution, have exhausted their soil, reducing their annual yields, in many cases, to one-tenth the level they saw a decade ago. Larger farms can afford to regenerate soil by leaving a third of their fields fallow for long periods. This is impossible for tiny family farms.
"The farmers have still not escaped the old mindset that cotton is a good cash crop," said Mr. Subhedar, an agricultural researcher and farmer in the nearby town of Yavatmal. "What happened in the United States in the 20th century is beginning to happen here - it's becoming apparent that cotton is not an economical crop. Yet the universities keep on teaching the mantra of the Green Revolution, which is to maximize yield at all costs. That made sense for India at one time. Now it's just hurting people."
The small farms, combined with the intensive, soil-exhausting farming techniques that promise great rewards at enormous risk, have made farming an ill-fated pursuit for small families. Yet the Indian government's solution to the suicide crisis has been to offer more money to farmers - an important humanitarian move, but one that offers few incentives for people to leave farming.
According to Mr. Subhedar, who stopped growing cotton a decade ago, most of these small farmers would make more money, and have more stable incomes and no debt, if they were farm labourers rather than farmers.
But this is unthinkable for farmers and the government.
"Indians are very passionate about owning the land," Mr. Subhedar said. "It isn't a passion for any sensible financial reason; we consider the land a goddess, we actually pray to her. It is very difficult emotionally for a man to sell his land and become a labourer, even though it makes more sense. It came from his forefathers."
At a moment when poor countries should be winding down the Green Revolution and reducing the number of farmers, countries such as India find themselves trapped: The cities lack the infrastructure for another urban population surge. And the kind of agriculture that employs large numbers of labourers - the medium-sized, well-managed farm - isn't taught in universities.
"The farmer here is stuck," Mr. Subhedar said. "He doesn't know how to invest the money and make a better future for himself, or get out of farming - so he will wait around until the last straw breaks."
Turning points
FAMINES IN INDIA Before the 1950s, India suffered a series of famines that killed millions of people and depopulated entire provinces. At times, the famines lasted longer than the periods between them. Since gaining independence from Britain, however, it hasn't had a significant famine.
THE GREEN REVOLUTION In the 1960s, Western industrial farming techniques, including chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified high-yield seeds, were promoted in the developing world to solve food shortages.
NORMAN BORLAUG The U.S. scientist developed strains of high-yield crops, and has promoted their use worldwide as a solution to food shortages. For this, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, but has faced criticism over the long-term sustainability of his techniques, his promotion of genetic modification and his dismissal of organic farming.
HOW IT TRANSFORMED INDIA Among the first countries to adopt the techniques, India raised rice yields by 30 per cent to quickly go from the world's largest food importer to a self-sufficient food exporter.
THE DOWNSIDE The intensive farming techniques deplete the soil and require a large investment. The high-yield seeds don't naturally reproduce themselves, so farmers must buy new seeds each year. As well, the fertilizers and pesticides needed are more expensive than natural aids such as manure. As a result, Green Revolution techniques are of questionable long-term value to small-scale farmers.
Source: Staff, Indian Institute of Science
17/07/07, President Bush Presents Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Norman Borlaug, (Back).
United States Capitol
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, all. Madame Speaker, thank you. Madame Speaker, Mr. Leader, members of the congressional leadership, members of the Iowa delegation, fighting Texas A&M Aggies, Dr. Borlaug and his family:
All around us are testaments to our republic's young and storied history. Yet sometimes it takes a ceremony like this to remind us what a special place America is.
Ours is a land of hope and promise and compassion. And we see that compassion and promise in the man we honor today -- a farm boy, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, who left the golden fields of Iowa to become known as "The man who fed the world."
Many have highlighted Norman Borlaug's achievements in turning ordinary staples such as wheat and rice into miracles that brought hope to millions. I particularly appreciated the story about a former Vice President, and fellow Iowan, named Henry Wallace, who once came to observe Norman's grain experiments up close. The Vice President looked around, and then asked why a good Iowa boy like Norman wasn't working on something to do with corn. (Laughter.)
Norman Borlaug's life has taken him from laboratories in America and Mexico to dusty villages throughout the developing world. He has consulted with presidents and prime ministers in important countries like Pakistan and India. He's helped inspire students at Texas A&M, where an institute bearing his name is dedicated to completing his life's work. To this day Norman leads an active life -- listen to a friend, who said that Norman spends half his year in Texas, half his year in Mexico -- and the other half wherever else he's needed. (Laughter.) That is interesting math. I was going to say that I bet some of us wish we could use that kind of math during the budget process here in the Capitol. (Laughter.) I'm afraid sometimes we do.
What that friend meant was that Norman Borlaug has lived his life with urgency. He has long understood that one of the greatest threats to global progress is the torment of human hunger. And we've seen that plague haunt history many times. Famine in the mid-1800s forced hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens to take a sad and desperate journey to America -- and turned the Atlantic Ocean into what an Irish poet called "a bowl of bitter tears." More than a century later, wrenching images of emaciated children in Ethiopia rallied the world to the tragedy of famine. Hunger continues to cast its miserable shadow across much of the developing world -- robbing villages of children, and forcing human beings to make desperate and daily searches for food and clean water.
Wealthy and prosperous nations have a moral obligation to help poor and struggling people find their own paths to progress and plenty. To whom much is given, much is required, and we've been given a lot here in America. It's the calling of our conscience, and it's a compelling national interest. A quote that Dr. Borlaug made reference to when he received the Nobel Prize says it well: "You can't build peace on empty stomachs."
In the past half-century, we have seen a glimpse of the world that is yet to come. Since the end of the World War II, the advance of trade and technology has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That's really the triumph of human liberty stretching across natural boundaries. It is a tribute to innovation and entrepreneurship. And these are the characteristics that can be found in the very best of our citizens, such as the man we honor today.
When Dr. Borlaug received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from one of my predecessors, Gerald Ford, the citation noted that Norman's work "has pushed back the shadow of hunger on this planet and given us precious time to force its final retreat." That final retreat will come only as long as we hold in our hearts the revolutionary spirit of men like Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution brought hope to troubled corners of the world, where grateful villagers still praise his name.
The most fitting tribute we can offer this good man is to renew ourselves to his life's work, and lead a second Green Revolution that feeds the world, and today we'll make a pledge to do so.
Dr. Borlaug, I thank you for your vision and dedication. I thank you for leading a life of great purpose and achievement. I thank you for proving to Americans that what we learned as children is true, that one human being can change the world. May God bless you, sir. May God continue to bless our wonderful country.
And now I ask the Speaker and Senator Reid to join me for the Gold Medal Presentation.
(The Congressional Gold Medal is presented.) (Applause.)
(Back)
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