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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's sugarcane farmers: A cycle of debt and suicide -Janos Chiala & Vinith Xavier

India's sugarcane farmers: A cycle of debt and suicide -Janos Chiala & Vinith Xavier

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published Published on Apr 11, 2017   modified Modified on Apr 11, 2017
-AlJazeera.com

How rising debts, pesticides and erratic rainfall are pushing some farmers in southern India to suicide.

Karnataka:
Farmers have worked the land of southern India for more than 10,000 years, making use of its fertile soil and abundant rains.

Mahatma Gandhi placed Indian farmers at the centre of his vision for independence. In his 1909 book about Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), he argued that farmers had "managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago" and that rural India remained untouched by the corruptions of modernity.

India achieved its independence in 1947 and in the 1960s, in order to feed its growing population, it embraced the Green Revolution and introduced modern technologies, chemical fertilisers and pesticides to its agriculture.

In the 1990s, the country embarked on a series of neoliberal economic reforms, deregulating the markets and opening them up to international trade. Free from foreign domination and working in a modern, developing country, it seemed as if the farmers of India could finally work for themselves, and enjoy the fruits of their labour.

Yet millions of Indian farmers barely make a living, and many are choosing to end their lives: hundreds of thousands have committed suicide in the past three decades.

In the southern state of Karnataka, more than 1,000 farmers killed themselves in 2015. About 90 of them were from the sugarcane-growing district of Mandya. While the data for 2016 is still unavailable, some 200 suicides had already been reported by the month of July.

There is no single explanation for this wave of suicides, but there are several common elements. The growing level of personal debt is one of them.

Alongside countless other farmers throughout India, sugarcane growers are struggling to earn enough to survive and are being forced to borrow money to continue farming. The crisis doesn't just affect the farmers, but the widows and children they leave behind, as well as relatives and fellow farmers, who also fall into the cycle of debt.

It's part of being a sugarcane grower, they say.

Sugarcane was once one of the most profitable crops, they explain. But, things have changed.

Please click here to read more.

AlJazeera.com, 3 April, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/01/india-sugarcane-farmers-cycle-debt-suicide-170115102045731.html


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