An Ongoing Crisis in India
As our population continues to grow at an exponential rate, our production and consumption are growing at alarming rates as well. The two biggest things that require a large number of resources in order to produce are food and fast fashion. The one thing that they have in common: pesticides. We can’t produce these products at high quantities to meet the demands of the growing population without them and we have, unfortunately, grown reliant on them. The effects of pesticides not only destroys our environment, but the people who are using them as well. However, this is a problem that has little attention being drawn to it, or when there is light being cast upon it, it fails to accurately capture its effects. Both the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) and the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) from the New York University School of Law published a briefing paper about the crisis taking place in India amongst its cash crop farmers, particularly the ones growing cotton. There have been a large number of suicides taking place amongst this community and the most recent figures available are ones from 2009, which reported that 17,638 farmers committed suicide. That is one farmer every thirty minutes, which served as the inspiration for the name of the briefing paper, Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights, and the Agrarian Crisis in India. While this paper does try to draw attention to the matter, it focuses too much on a capitalistic perspective rather than its emotional and cultural components. A letter that was created collectively amongst Indian farmers reveals why there fellow farmers have committed suicide. With these two pieces hand in hand, we can see how this crisis came to be and what should be done in order to help farmers.
Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights, and the Agrarian Crisis in India explains how economic reforms and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market has lead to increased costs, yet reducing yields and profits for many farmers, for the past two decades. This has lead to great financial and emotional distress because these smallholder farmers are often trapped in a cycle of debt. When farmers face a bad year, the money that they earn from their sales of cotton might not cover even the “initial cost of the inputs, let alone suffice to pay the usurious interest on loans or provide adequate food or necessities for the family.” Farmers then need to take out more loans so they can buy more inputs, which contributes further to the cycle of debt.
So how did a once successful industry become a devastating cycle that has claimed the lives of so many people? It’s the pesticides themselves that have made it extremely difficult for farmers to produce yields large enough to make profits. Cotton farmers heavily used pesticides to the point that is started to poison and contaminate the soil and groundwater. Pesticides affect the fertility of the soil, so if it’s heavily contaminated, it makes it difficult to be able to grow crops. A study done in India revealed that 58% of drinking water samples that were drawn from various hand pumps and wells around Bhopal were contaminated with Organo Chlorine pesticides above the EPA standards. When groundwater is polluted with toxic chemicals, it can take years, even decades, for the contamination to dissipate or cleaned up, which can be very costly if not impossible.
The effects that pesticides can have on the human body are just as devastating as its effects on our environment. Some of the acute effects of Some of the acute effects of pesticide exposure can be nerve, skin, and eye irritation and damage, headaches, dizziness, nausea, and fatigue. However, there are also chronic disease that can also occur. They can cause numerous types of cancer in humans, such as leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, brain, bone, breast, ovarian, prostate, testicular and liver cancers. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a study in 2009 that found that children who live in homes where their parents use pesticides are twice as likely to develop brain cancer versus those that live in residences in which no pesticides are used. In addition, it is this very thing that Indian farmers are ingesting in order to commit suicide.
Several farmer groups explain in a letter that they collectively created and addressed to the Prime Minister of India why they are ingesting these pesticides in order to highlight the economic and emotional distress taking place in the countryside. It is a way for them to protest, to show how not only these chemicals are harmful to the bodies for the land as well. Within their culture, the men are supposed to be the protectors of the land and by using pesticides, they feel guilty for taking part in poisoning it. They also want to bring attention to the fact that their human rights are being violated and that the government has done very little to help them in their time of need. With the solutions that they list within their letter, they hope they can finally bring some stability back to the countryside and its farmers.
The Indian government must act now in order to prevent further suicides and economic hardships. What they have pledged to do is not sufficient to bring justice and peace to the families that have been greatly affected by this crisis. There needs to be more regulations that will not only the environment, but the rights of its farmers as well. If this is not done, we will continue to see these tragedies take place.
