New Delhi - India is in the grip of its worst agrarian crisis, witnessing unprecedented farmer suicides, at the rate of one death on the farm every 30 minutes.
The rising costs of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers have pushed peasants into mounting debts, and led untold thousands of them to commit suicide by drinking the same pesticides that created their liabilities.
India which has 600 million people engaged in agriculture and allied activities, ushered its green revolution in the late 1960s. It was apparent two decades later that chemical-intensive farming had resulted in increased costs of cultivation and far-reaching environmental damages.
The loss of topsoil, a drastic decline in soil fertility and water tables owing to the use of fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified crops, should have made a compelling case for scientists and policy makers to restructure Indian agriculture.
Instead, impoverished farmers plunged deeper into debt through trade distortions brought on by the country's economic reforms and the plummeting price of produce seen in the past 15 years.
By the government's own admission, over 100,000 farmers committed suicide in the last decade in the four states of western Maharashtra, central Madhya Pradesh and southern Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
But some farmers are now escaping the debt trap by returning to traditional low-cost farming, enriching the soil with farmyard manure or compost, using indigenous seeds and returning to biological pesticides such as nee tree oil and cow urine.
In Andhra Pradesh 300,000 farmers are reaping increased yields and earning better incomes without genetically modified GM seeds and chemical pesticides, and using local pest management techniques.
'Farmers who mortgaged their Ramachandrapuram village recovered the entire land by repaying the debts, merely by stopping use of pesticides,' food and trade analyst Devinder Sharma said.
'Over the last three years, over 700,000 acres in the state have turned pesticide-free or organic. The programme is going strong, aiming to cover 1.2 million acres this year and 2.5 million acres in two years.'
There is evidence of such success in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region, notorious for an estimated 30,000 suicides over the last decade.
About 11,000 farmers, including the worst-hit cotton growers from five villages, have pledged to practice chemical-free ecological farming under an initiative by Navdanya, an organization that pioneered the organic food movement in India.
An organic cotton project by textile manufacturer Arvind in 33 villages in Vidarbha's Akola district claims there have been no suicides in the area since farmers started avoiding chemicals and using indigenous seeds last year.
Not counting farmers in several parts of India who never shifted from traditional agriculture, an estimated 1 million farmers are estimated to have reverted to traditional techniques over the past years, some 200,000 in the last five years.
But agriculture experts contend that the solution is not as simple as going back to the basics.
One expert, KSRK Murthy, argued that organic agriculture cannot guarantee the high productivity assured by synthetic fertilizers that is necessary to feed the growing population.
Murthy said crop yields in organic farms ere up to 50 per cent less, and required big quantities of organic manure and more land under cultivation, to produce the same amount of food.
But Navdanya founder Vandana Shiva said that argument ignores the true hidden costs of industrial agriculture.
'Traditional farming seems expensive because there is a 1-trillion-rupee government subsidy for chemical fertilizers. Our experience has shown that organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming,' Shiva said.
The UN International Fund for Agricultural Development, which carried out a recent study in Vidarbha, suggested to the Indian government explore organic farming for debt-ridden farmers.
Shiva, who also chairs the independent International Committee for the Future of Food and Agriculture, said organic farming raises consumer awareness of both food quality and the link between climate change and agriculture.
'Industrial farming and unnecessary global trade in food is responsible for up to 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Organic farming contributes to mitigation and adaptation to climate change,' she said.
'Such farming can help small farmers survive, increase farm productivity, repair decades of environmental damage and lead to better food security. When chemical farming has led to a total collapse, traditional and organic farming is the solution, the way of the future.'
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