Home

agrarian crisis

Conserve/Resist

Branding the farmer agitations ‘political’ betrays a lack of understanding

10th July 2017

From The Indian Express: It’s a dark satire to tell a farmer that the Minimum Support Price (MSP), CPI and WPI changes reflect farmer incomes are doubling and farmer suicides are declining. The trigger for the recent farm agitation remains the depressed farm gate price compared to previous years —that’s what matters on the ground….

Conflict/Dispossession

Only a unified Kisan identity will make politicians take notice of the agrarian crisis

25th June 2017

Devinder Sharma writes: In the past 21 years, over 3.18 lakh farmers have committed suicide; that’s one farmer ending his life every 41 minutes. Every death on the farm infuriated the farmers, their families. But political leaders have always ignored the warning. Not realising that the day farmers wake up, Indian politics will change forever….

Economy

How India is killing the country’s largest economy of the poor

24th June 2017

From Down To Earth: About 70 per cent of India’s livestock is owned by 67 per cent of the small and marginal farmers and the landless, who shifted to livestock in face of uncertain rain and dwindling income. New restrictions on cattle slaughter will severely cripple the livestock economy which is now bigger than crop economy….

Conserve/Resist

GMOs: It’s your food stupid, its your fight!

From Eartha Mag: The game of migrating farmers to GM seeds has a familiar marketing line: We cannot feed the millions without GMOs – the exact line they fed us in the 50s during the Green Revolution. With the government’s adamant attempts to introduce them without public consultation or scientific debate, Sandeep Anirudhan raises some basic questions….

ALTERNATIVES

Former Planning Commission member Mihir Shah on the farm crisis

20th June 2017

From The Hindu: For long, we’ve said that the solution is to get people off farming. While we need more manufacturing jobs, latest projections show rural India will still have 800 million people in 2050. Moving people to the cities could deepen the urban imbroglio. So solutions have to be found for agriculture, and fast….

Conflict/Dispossession

Demonetisation has failed: Farmers’ anger is the final piece of evidence

18th June 2017

R. Jagannathan, Editor, Swarajya Magazine, writes: It is time for a mea culpa on demonetisation. This writer has been largely positive on the medium-to-long-term benefits of notebandi, as opposed to its short-term downsides. Now, especially after the farmer agitations for loan waivers, I believe the negative side is larger than the positive. It has failed….

Conflict/Dispossession

P. Sainath: Why are our farmers angry?

17th June 2017

From People’s Archive of Rural India: From farmers being shot dead in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, to those across Maharashtra out on the streets, to those from Tamil Nadu on hunger strike in New Delhi not so long ago, this has been a season of agrarian discontent. Why is this happening, which way will it go?…

Circle of Blue

Conflict/Dispossession

Forbes Magazine’s ‘Go bust’ prescription for Indian farmers is a death warrant

16th June 2017

A recent article by Tim Worstall on the Forbes website states that, in effect, India’s farmers should be allowed to go bust because that’s how economic development works. This response from Countercurrents.org traces the criminal role of neoliberal policies in undermining farmer’s independence and livelihoods to favour global agribusiness. The article has since gone viral….

A scene after violent clashes between farmers and the police at Pipliya in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh

PTI

Conflict/Dispossession

Ground Report: How demonetisation brought MP farmers onto streets

13th June 2017

This series of timely reports from Hindustan Times surveys the explosive situation in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur district, epicenter of the violent protests that left six farmers dead from police bullets. The lead article looks at the impact of demonetisation in creating the crisis, while another report examines the role of social media in organising farmers….

AFP

Conflict/Dispossession

Harsh Singh Lohit: Why do farmers protest?

12th June 2017

Why, please ask yourself, does the city get 24 hour electricity, schools, colleges, dispensaries, hospitals, roads, public transport, even cooking gas and the village either not at all or services that are a pale shadow of their urban selves? Why this inequality in allocation of resources, even though 68.84% of Indians live in rural areas?…

Vehicles set on fire by agitating farmers in Madhya Pradesh on June 7, 2017.

CLIMATE CRISIS

Why a bountiful harvest drove farmers to despair and anger

10th June 2017

IndiaSpend reports: A plentiful harvest in 2016 and imports drive some prices down 63%. A shortage of cash because of demonetisation. Despite Rs 3.5 lakh crore– invested over six decades to 2011, more than half of all farms depend on rains. These are the three factors agitating India’s 90 million families who depend on farming….

Enough! Farmers have been at the receiving end for far too long.

The Tribune

Conflict/Dispossession

It’s a farmers’ movement in Maharashtra, not a strike

9th June 2017

From The Tribune: Two developments seemed to have triggered the current protest. On the one hand, bumper crops have led to crashing down of crop prices for the farmer. On the other hand, the crop loan waiver announced by the newly elected BJP government in UP has reminded the famers of their long unfulfilled demand….

Conserve/Resist

T.S.R. Subramanian: Say no to GM mustard

3rd June 2017

Former Union Cabinet-Secretary T.S.R. Subramanian writes: The promises of higher yield and lower pesticide usage which induced many, including myself as the then Textile Secretary, to welcome Bt cotton have now been belied… The main advantage now trotted out in favour of GM mustard is increased yield—there’s sufficient evidence that this claim is a myth….

William Mitchelle/Meme Super

Economy

Why India’s Competition Commission must stop the Dow and DuPont merger

20th May 2017

From The Wire: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is currently assessing the likely adverse effects on competition of the proposed merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont. If it goes through, the merger will create the world’s biggest chemical and materials company. But there are a dozen reasons and more why it must be stopped….

Development/Growth

What the data tells us about ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’

19th May 2017

From TheWire: Public memory in India is amnesiac. Still, it is difficult to forget that Narendra Modi rode to power in 2014 on the plank of promoting development, aptly captured by ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’. Three years down the line, it’s time to take stock. These findings seriously question the Modi government’s record so far….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Sunita Narain responds to comments on “Why I would not advocate vegetarianism”

18th May 2017

When I wrote about vegetarianism, or more precisely, why I as an Indian environmentalist would not advocate it, I had expected an emotional response. My article was meant to provoke a discussion. Here’s what I learnt from the responses; let’s see if we can find a middle way—not to agree, but to debate and dissent….

Conserve/Resist

GM Mustard in India: Five unanswered questions

16th May 2017

From The Indian Express: Each time with the GM debate, agro-business and biotech industry puts huge pressure on the Indian government to destroy food culture and replace many old nutritious-rich foods with by patented toxic monocultures. By threatening India with the GM Mustard, corporations are destroying the centre of diversity of mustard for the world….

Conflict/Dispossession

The devastating reality of Somalia on the brink of famine

Vice News reports: Drought has devastated vegetation and water supplies, and hunger is soaring. More than half the country — 6.2 million people — are in need of emergency aid to avoid starvation. And around 1.4 million children will risk acute malnutrition in 2017, according to UNICEF — 50 percent more than what the charity…

Conflict/Dispossession

Yogendra Yadav: Tamil Nadu’s drought is also a policy-induced disaster

11th May 2017

From The Tribune: The drought has affected 21 of the 32 districts, including the ‘rice bowl’ area of the Cauvery delta, where we travelled. Farmers’ distress was visible everywhere. This is not just a natural disaster. Our travel made it clear that a good deal of farmers’ distress is due to man-made or policy-induced disaster….

Circle of Blue

Conflict/Dispossession

Worst drought in 140 years leads to farmer deaths, riots, policy impasse in Cauvery Delta

7th May 2017

Keith Schneider reports: The thickening chain of death and sorrow in the Cauvery Delta, formed from the powerful links of water, agricultural, and industrial policy, is bludgeoning Tamil Nadu. The human toll, counted in the escalating numbers of shattered hearts, is a disturbing measure of how extravagant, water-consuming development practices no longer fit environmental conditions….