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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Poisoned roots-Vandana Shiva
-The Asian Age


"The replacement of the rich diversity of Punjab with monocultures of rice in the kharif season and wheat in the rabi season has also contributed to the impoverishment of the soils and farmers"

The year 2014 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Bluestar, a military operation which took place in June 1984 in Punjab. It was ordered by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers from Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.

There's a connection between Operation Bluestar and the introduction of Green Revolution in Punjab that is often forgotten.

The Green Revolution began in India in 1966 and in Punjab in 1968. It involved a change in the pattern of crop production - from a diversity of crops to just rice and wheat monocultures - needing intensive chemical inputs. The chemicals and seeds were initially subsidised. Within a decade the cost of inputs rose and subsidies were slashed. The incomes of farmers began to fall and discontentment rose.

Around this time Bhindranwale went from village to village as a missionary and asked people to live according to the rules and tenets of Sikhism. He encouraged dissatisfied young Sikhs to return to the path of the Khalsa by giving up vices like pornography, adultery, drugs, alcohol and tobacco, which had crept in as a result of the "prosperity" that the Green Revolution had ushered in.

By 1984, Punjab was marred by violence as some of the proponents of Khalistan turned to militancy, resulting in counter-militancy operations by the Indian security forces. It was this difference between the myth of the Green Revolution - for which Norman Borlaug, the "father of the Green Revolution", was given the Nobel Peace Prize - and the unfolding reality of violence that compelled me to research what was happening in Punjab for a programme on Peace and Global Transformation of the United Nations University. My book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, was a result of my research on the conflicts and violence in Punjab.

The Green Revolution was unsustainable - ecologically, economically and socially. Ecologically it led to the death of the soils due to excessive use of chemical fertilisers. On two per cent of cultivated area, Punjab uses 10 per cent of synthetic fertilisers. Between 1970-1971 and 2010-2011, the overall fertiliser usage jumped from 213,000 tonnes to 1,911,000 tonnes.

Synthetic fertilisers needed intensive irrigation. Eighty-nine per cent of the land in Punjab was irrigated with 27 per cent surface water, and 71 per cent ground water. Over-irrigation created salinated and waterlogged deserts and started pushing Punjab to a water famine.

The pain of the negative economy started to be felt in the late 1970s as inputs increased and subsidies got reduced. By 1980, Punjab farmers were organising themselves on grounds of being treated like a colony of the Centre to feed India. The Gurmata, an order passed by the Sarbat Khalsa (a Sikh convention) in the presence of Guru Granth Sahib, on April 13, 1986, reiterated their grievances, adding, "Today, the Sikhs are shackled by the chains of slavery."

In 1984, Punjab farmers started protesting against this slavery. On January 31, they organised a "rasta roko" agitation. On March 12, they gheraoed the governor's house. In April 1984, farmers organised a campaign against indebtedness called "karja roko". In May, the governor's house was again gheraoed. On May 23, a call was given to not sell grains to the Food Corporation of India.

Violence rooted in a violent agriculture, whose seeds had been sown by the Green Revolution, led to the militarised violence of Operation Bluestar, and the vicious cycle of violence deepened with Indira Gandhi's assassination and the anti-Sikh riots. The issue of justice for the Sikhs and farmers of Punjab is still alive.

Even today the farms of Punjab are diseased and dying since synthetic fertilisers do not return organic matter to the soil. The replacement of the rich diversity of Punjab with monocultures of rice in the kharif season and wheat in the rabi season has also contributed to the impoverishment of the soils and farmers of Punjab.

When measured in terms of nutrition and health per acre, Punjab is actually producing less food and nutrition as a result of the Green Revolution. Before the Green Revolution, Punjab farmers grew 41 varieties of wheat, 37 varieties of rice, four varieties of maize, three varieties of bajra, 16 varieties of sugarcane, 19 species/varieties of pulses and nine species/varieties of oilseeds. In place of wheat with names like Sharbati, Darra, Lal Pissi, Lal Kanak, Bansi, Kathia, Malwa, Pakwan and Dawat Khan, which describe the quality and origins of the crop, we have the personality-less HD 2329, PBW 343, WH 542 - infested with pests and diseases, requiring ever higher doses of pesticides.

While the cost of production in 2011-12 was Rs. 1,700 for rice and Rs. 1,500 for wheat, the minimum support price was lower, at Rs. 1,285 and Rs. 1,110 respectively. Between 1995-2001 and 2001-2005, the net income of Punjab farmers dropped from Rs. 77 to Rs. 7 for rice and Rs. 67 to Rs. 34 for wheat. As a consequence, farmers are in deep debt, an average of Rs. 41,576 per acre. The high cost of external input has turned farming into a negative economy.

The democratic response to the anger and discontent building up in Punjab would have been to listen to the protesting farmers and respond with a policy for ecologically, economically and socially sustainable agriculture. If in the 1980s, the crisis led to militancy, today it finds its manifestation in the form of suicides by farmers and cancers. Yet, instead of learning lessons from 1984 and discontinuing the legacy of a violent and toxic Green Revolution, the Punjab government is signing memorandums with Monsanto, America's biotechnology corporation.

Pesticides are poisons. Genetically modified organisms are poison-producing plants. Bt genes in Bt crops, and herbicide resistant genes in herbicide resistant crops are toxins. There is no place for poisons and chemicals in our food and agriculture.

We can grow more food, be more prosperous through ecological and organic farming. We need to make a national commitment to a poison-free agriculture and food system. That will be the real tribute to the victims of a violent agriculture.

The writer is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust