Re: [nukkad] Farmers' suicide

["Indian Rediff" <>]

Only two points that I would like to refute:

On 9/30/06, Rohit Zaveri  wrote:
> All other things being equal, after grossly over simplifying across
> the board, the US farmer can make 30 times the amount of money that an
> India farmer can.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> yes, by thumb rule reckoning.
> ==================================================
> Of course, because of the efficiencies of using large machines, you
> can expect the US farmer to be making at least 10 times more money
> (scaling factor of 1 machine - 10 people after taking care of costs of
> 1 machine v/s 10 people). That makes it 300 times more money. Hence
> more efficient. Hence more productive.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Usage of large machines, heavy dosage of fertilizers, powerful pesticides,
> sweet incentives, ample irrigation water, high efficiency of farm labour
> etc. etc. produce a yield barely twice or thrice than otherwise. 300
> times is bombastic !! Let us take wheat. India on an average reaps
> 3.0 - 3.2 metric tons of wheat per hectare of land whereas agriculturally
> advanced countries like USA, Canada, Japan, Australia get a yield of
> 7.0-8.0 metric tons per hectare, not more. Our best lands in Punjab,
> Haryana and western UP yield as high as 6 tons. Hopeless logic holds
> no water.

As I said, this is a huge guess. I have no idea what the actual
numbers. The factor is 10 times the 30 (which you had 'accepted'). The
10 times is obviously a wild exaggeration. The 300 times (if you still
take my 10 times as a point) is not per hectare - but per person
employed in agriculture. I thought it up.

> =================================================
> I am sure that if you take into account the larger tracts of land that are
> professionally managed in Punjab and the more fertile parts of India,
> the plots of land per farmer will be reduced even further.
> Since I have used total population, this will skew things more in
> favour of the US if we take into account the larger families in India
> and look at land under cultivation per family.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This point has logic but has no much bearing or relevance to ground
> realities.

The DOES have relevance. If you take out the larger farmers from the
reckoning, the remaining farmers are MOE and have LESS land between
all of them. This makes them less effecient.


> If a farmer is able to turn around 2 crops a year from his tract of
> land, and is fully dependent on both of them being successful in order
> to survive till the next year, is setting himself up for a disaster. A
> crop is bound to fail
> 
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Why must ? This is crap.

What I was attempting to state is as follows: If the farmer is making
(say) x lakhs per annum from 2 crops a year and is spending the y
lakhs, there is a very high probability that a crop will fail between
once every 4 years to once every 7 years. The logic behind this is the
reliance on the monsoons which fails around that frequency.

If x is more than y then the farmer has to save enough to pay for that
one failure every 4 years (I am being pessimistic). The smaller farmer
will, in all probability, have x = y leading to zero savings. Hence
the statement that they will inevitably be forced to take loans.

> - and this will start the inevitable slide down
> to the money-lender and usurious rates of interest. Once the farmer
> borrows money from the money-lender, there is almost no way for him to
> come out of debt - so high are the interest rates.


I thank you for the remaining comments. At least 2 people have read
the entire letter.

Annaji,

I hope you can see how my 'analysis' works towards alleviating the
problem. The problem of the suicides is due to the farmers not being
able to get out the vicious spiral.

I didn't think up the entire explanation. A lot of this, if not all of
it, has been predicted by Alvin Toffler in 'The Third Wave'. In a
nutshell, we (humanity) have seen 3 waves around the world. The first
wave was agriculturalisation. It took 100's of years to go around the
world. The second wave was industrialisation and this took 10's of
years to propogate. The theird wave is the spread of technology - and
this is happening in years.

We are in the midst of the third wave - and you can see the turmoil
being caused by it. Our peoblem, in India, is that we are also in the
midst of the second wave.

Sai


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