Kill the farmers only at our peril!

The sericulture farmers Swami and his wife Vasantha did not kill themselves. We killed them! It is the utmost callousness and the continuing indifference of the Government towards our farmers that made the poor farmer couple from Mandya in Karnataka State loses their precious lives! It is the eagerness of our neo-liberalist ruling ‘robbers’ to surrender our economy at the feet of the western profit mongers that made the three innocent children orphan at such a tender age! We should be ashamed for what happened on the midnight of March 5th, 2011! We are responsible for the untimely death of those two members of the very community that toil day in and day out to ensure we are fed three times a day!

Swami and his family engaged in the sericulture farming, as many other rural poor farmers, taking bank loans. Their own sweat was the only capital they had to initiate the only means of lively hood that majority of our rural populace know about. It was their hope for a better living that came crashing when the finance minister proposed a drastic reduction in the import customs duty on the raw silk and silk products from 30% to a mere 5% in his budget speech. The cocoon price plummeted by almost 1/3rd and along the way it crushed the lives of helpless small-time farmers like Swami! Faced with the grim reality that their crops now wont even enable them to replay the loan, leave alone getting any returns, they expressed their frustration and anger the only way they knew, by giving away their lives.

The blame for the pathetic condition of our farmers should squarely be put on none other than the Government itself. The amount of harm that is being inflicted on every single walk of life in the country , because of the disastrous economic policies aimed at gifting away each and every sector in the country to the western developed market forces for their unlimited profiteering, is beyond imagination. While USA and other developed economies have time and again proved that they will not think twice when it comes to protecting their economies when their own interests are in danger, our own policy makers feel no inhibitions when it comes to opening up our national treasures to these very same forces for looting. Our elitists are rather more than happy to facilitate and collaborate in this massive ‘robbery’ at the very expense of the majority of our toiling masses.

Prevailing concerns regarding the domestic agricultural sector obviously doesn’t confine to the sericulture alone. Farmers and agriculture laborers engaged in each and every crop have been finding the going difficult in the face of the global trade controlled and manipulated by multinational conglomerates coupled with the antagonist attitude of the Government. Government has been doing nothing to protect the domestic agriculture. On the contrary, our ruling elite have been very eager to allow producers from the west to enter the lucrative Indian market. For example, more than 60% of the silk was being produced in Karnataka alone. However, this is rapidly diminishing in the last few years. As cheaper Chinese silk flood the market, the Indian farmers are being driven out of the market and are being forced to move to other crops or migrate to urban areas in search of casual labor. Without fixing a minimum price for their produce, farmers will be left to the mercies of the market fluctuations and deliberate price manipulations by the transnational corporate and the domestic middlemen. Small-time farmers taking the investment risk will be ultimately ruined and will be forced to give up the farming activities all together.

India is the second largest producer of raw silk after China and the biggest consumer of raw silk and silk fabrics. Silk production in countries like Japan, South Korea, Russia etc are steadily declining because of cost of labor as well as specific climatic restrictions that would allow only 2 cocoons a year. India, because of the tropical climate conditions, thus has a distinct advantage of practicing sericulture all through the year, yielding a stream of 4-6 crops annually. In India, sericulture is practiced as a tradition and is a small-scale rural industry that suits rural based farmers and provides income and employment to the rural poor. The benefit-cost ratio in sericulture is highest among comparable agriculture crops, if managed properly. Around 5 million farmers depend on sericulture for their livelihood directly while lives of another 2million depend on it indirectly. Currently the domestic demand is nearly 25000 MT and domestic production is around 18500 MT. The deficit in requirement is met by importing largely from China. It is highly feared that the proposed move to reduce the import duty would help China establish its monopoly in the Indian market and Indian sericulture farming may soon face extinction.

While USA and Europe demand abolition of subsidies in the agriculture in India and other developing and third world countries, they themselves have no inhibition in continuing to protect their agriculture through lavish subsidies and other government funded incentives and raising barriers for imports in one or the other pretext from the third world countries. It must be still fresh in our memories how USA banned the import of raw bananas from the European Union and how the Europe had to resort to fiery fighting in the WTO forum against the ban. It was with an absurd excuse of ‘easily vulnerable to fire’ that the US government imposed ban on the import of Indian silk garments to protect their textile industry. Many African countries have been demanding for years the abolition of agriculture subsidies in Europe and America. It is common knowledge that the free trade in agriculture produces benefits the western economies the most. Dumping such subsidy funded surplus crops in countries like India, sold even at below production cost, destroy the growth of domestic agriculture. UK government spends around 6 billion pound a year on agriculture, forestry and fisheries as direct subsidies. The European Union allocates 31% of its budget to agricultural support under CAP (common agriculture policy) and was set at about 44billion euro in 2010. Continuing protectionist policy of western government to protect their own backyard is no secret at all. Ban on outsourcing in the IT industry by the US government has only been the latest in this long list. Case of cotton is another glaring example. Cotton has been in fact a symbol of inequalities of global agriculture trade. Example of cotton shows clearly how agriculture subsidies by the western countries destroy farmers in the developing countries. Western subsidies have been skewing production levels and prices undermining the income of cotton farmers in developing and third world countries. US subsidies have led to reduction in world cotton prices which have cost countries in Africa millions of dollars in their export earnings. Beginning in the late 70s, USA has been using the VER (voluntary export restraints) to impose import restrictions in many industries. Textile and Steel industries have been the biggest beneficiaries apart from the Oil industry which has always shielded itself from the competition by invoking national security clause.

In the historical process of national development, all of the today’s developed economies have resorted to one or the other form of protectionism to protect their domestic economy. Now that their economies have developed, they switch to preaching of “free trade” to get free access to the unlimited resources and markets of the developing countries should fool none. Sooner the developing countries realize it, the better. If not, the vast majority of the population of these countries will have no option but to raise their voice collectively to make their rulers listen. If a country can not protect its farmers, it has no right to hope for a secure tomorrow.

- Suresh Kodoor