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Undemocratic science and technology: The Green Revolution and malnutrition
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Bidar is a predominantly semi-arid region on the border of the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in Southern India . Between December 1997 and May 1998 twenty-three cases of suicide were reported from Bidar and the neighbouring district of Gulbarga. AR Vasavi had been making an agricultural and anthropological study of the area for several years, and was asked to return to Bidar to further examine the pervasive distress in the region and the suicides that are its latest symptom.
Of the total area of Bidar, 82 per cent is used for agriculture, with only 8 per cent fed by canal irrigation. The rest is rain fed, with the better-off farmers using wells or, if power can be afforded for pumps, tube wells. Bidar is one of the poorest districts in Southern India , with the majority of farmers owning less than two hectares of land, and widespread sharecropping. Limited by the low rainfall and soil type, pre-Green Revolution (GR) agriculture was mostly dry cultivation or rain-dependent cultivation in which a diverse range of local sorghum varieties were grown in combination with oil seeds, wheat and other cereals. Green manures such as sannhemp and diancha were widely grown and helped maintain the fertility of the soil, and decreased the chances of pests and diseases taking hold. Agriculturalists were thereby able to be self-reliant for most agricultural inputs. During 1966-7 Government scientists and planners, whose experience largely came from agro-ecological regions with high rainfall, introduced new varieties of sorghum, paddy, wheat and sugar. During 1972-4 the region suffered a prolonged drought that brought about widespread scarcity. Rather than evaluating the effects the introduced crops might be having on local farmers, however, the government pressed ahead with a scheme to promote GR packages of high-yielding seeds and chemical inputs.
Whilst richer farmers learn from agricultural assistants, company representatives and each other, they are unlikely to share this knowledge with the lower castes to which the poorer cultivators belong. With no formal instruction, these marginalised groups merely try to watch and guess what their more prosperous neighbours are doing. Negligence by the promoters of GR methods therefore led to poorer cultivators having much lower average yields than if the techniques had been used correctly. This is in addition to frequent health problems that arise from the incorrect and unsafe application of these chemicals, which are often poisonous.
Told that their problems are a result of their own ignorance, these lower caste cultivators feel helpless in the face of the crises that often arise. The particular trigger for the 1997-8 crisis was an epidemic of the Helicoverpa armigera insect. The 1997 insect outbreak saw widespread crop loss among smaller cultivators and consequently spiralling debt, not least because of the pesticides that the farmers had been wrongly encouraged to buy to control the outbreak. Vasavi believes that although climatic conditions created the ecological trigger for the growth of the pest, it was the agencies promoting GR pigeon peas and their required inputs that put small cultivators in the position of vulnerability to pest attack.
Having displaced "local knowledge and locally appropriate practices", GR promoters allowed the spread of a new system of agriculture without "ensuring the proper dissemination and practice of new knowledge". Finally, with a large number of small cultivators in acute distress, the extension and support apparatus was unable or unwilling to provide support, with the result that many chose to take their own lives. People who had lost hundreds of dollars ( US ) per hectare were compensated with a few hundred rupees - less than $US10. "The government," recounts Vasavi, "has disbursed cheques for sums so paltry that it does not even cover the bus ticket needed to cash the cheque."
Vasavi notes that GR technologies have led to small cultivators, who had previously shared agricultural knowledge and practices with extended family and caste, becoming increasingly isolated as atomised economic units. In communities where cultivators came to have closer links to the market than to their neighbours, crop loss becomes a personal crisis rather than something that joint households could combat together. The uniformity of loss of honour when a crops fails and debts increase is now a tragedy ghettoised to an individual family, increasing the sense of shame and isolation among those who are already the most socially excluded.
Vasavi's work points to a diverse and self reinforcing range of detrimental impacts of GR technologies on the poorest cultivators in Southern India . New technologies came to Bidar and different parts of Andhra Pradesh via institutions ranging from international agencies to local agents that had a very clear, though perhaps sometimes unconscious, bias in favour of large, English-speaking landowners. This powerful combination of the imposition of inappropriate high-input technologies and institutional bias undoubtedly acted to the detriment of small cultivators who were either non-literate or literate only in their local language.
A government-appointed commission produced a report in late 1998 implying that many of the suicides, which continued on into 1999, 2000 and 2001, actually arose from other causes and were faked as suicides to receive compensation . Other sections of the government have advised that the best solution to the crisis is to send psychiatrists to the affected regions. As Vasavi argues, "resorting to psychological arguments is to deny the social and economic basis of such distress," and "helps deflect attention from the deep rooted problems in the content, orientation, and implementation" of government agricultural policies that promote GR technologies and worsen already prevalent social exclusion.
Looking at the country as a whole, P Sainath has shown how the period during which GR technologies have been introduced in India has been accompanied by an increase in poverty and social exclusion, in rural India . Out of the eight hundred million malnourished people in the world, one third are still in India . Unlike many other Third World countries, most of these ultra-poor are in rural areas. In the1990s forty million more Indian citizens fell into destitution. Around 40% of India 's poorest are landless labourers, 45% are marginal farmers and 7.5% are rural artisans. Untouchables ("Dalits"), women and indigenous peoples ("tribals" or "adivasis") account for most of these three groups. For the bulk of the poor, land, water and (especially for adivasis) forests remain the most important resources.
Despite the headline claims for the production achievements of the Green Revolution, implying that more mouths are being fed in India , recent statistics tell a different story. Nutritional data suggest that average calorie intake declined steadily in both rural and urban areas between 1973 and 1994 - the years of greatest increase in agricultural production. There were only two states that saw calorie intake rise, which were the only ones to introduce effective redistribution of land and credit to the landless - Kerala and West Bengal . This supports Vasavi's assertion that the crisis in Bidar was caused by the imposition of GR technology in combination with the "retention of the socially iniquitous social structures that form the bedrock of producing distress".
Because of their proximity to others and to those in power, urban groups can organise more effectively in political terms, which creates anti-rural bias in policies in India, as in many other parts of the world. Yet in 2004 the backlash from the failure of GR technologies and public outrage from the thousands of such deaths as occurred in Bidar contributed to the electoral defeat of the national government; a wave of organised opposition developed in response to the Indian government's refusal to ban the agricultural technologies and corporate malpractice that had prompted the epidemic of suicides. It remains to be seen whether the new government will implement future technologies with more pre-emptive mechanisms of democratic engagement than its predecessors.