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K. P. Prabhakaran Nair

EVEN as the Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns continue to be stacked to the ceiling and New Delhi remains directionless as regards food management, down South, in Palakkad, once Kerala's `rice bowl', desperate farmers have ended their lives ingesting the very pesticide that was supposed to save their crops. This is ironically a fallout of the so-called Green Revolution — a combination of different agricultural technologies, distorted land use, failure of the financial and infrastructural institutions and, more important, the conceptual fallacy of the `commoditisation' of agriculture, at the root of which is "high-input technology".

The `ship-to-mouth' situation of the early 1960s led to a major effort to extensively grow the `miracle' dwarf varieties of rice and wheat, which needed massive doses of chemicals and pesticides to maximise yield.

In the North, Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, lured by the bountiful yields, pumped in chemicals to such an extent that soon the soil quality deteriorated and yields plateaued.

In the reform decade (1990-91 to 2001-02), agricultural growth, at a mere 1.71 per cent, was below the annual population growth of 1.87 per cent per annum, signalling the advent of the `Malthusian' phenomenon of population growth outstripping food production. The foodstocks in FCI godowns — in excess of 60 million tonnes, and expected to rise again because of a further hike in the minimum support price (MSP) of paddy by Rs 20 a quintal against the Rs 10 recommended by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) — give rise to a false sense of euphoria.

One needs to only look at the happenings in Palakkad, especially the fallacious approach of `commoditising', to get the true picture.

Going back two decades, Kerala needed around four million tonnes of rice per annum. Production was only about 0.7 million tonnes per annum, and the deficit was made good by importing from rice-rich States, either through the public distribution system (PDS) or open market purchases. Palakkad had about 1,21,000 hectares under rice and produced about 2,62,500 tonnes per annum — a mere 2.2 tonnes per hectare. During the heyday of the Green Revolution, the miracle varieties — such as IR 8, followed by IR 20, IR 36, IR 50, and so on, developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) — were widely cultivated in the district, pushing out the traditional tall varieties of thavalakannan and chenkazhama. These had the disadvantage of lodging when excessive chemical fertilisers were applied, but scored over the IR varieties in starch content and palatability and were better suited for the preparation of common breakfast food of South Indian homes. But the commoditisation mindset — of higher the yield, higher the profit — resulted, as in Haryana and Punjab, in the widespread cultivation of IR 8 varieties.

Soon, Kerala farmers, to their dismay, realised that the `high-input technology' was no longer sustainable: Inputs such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides became a lot dearer, pest infestation broke out when the `imported' IR varieties began to lose their initial resistance, mechanisation was virtually impossible — because of the Kerala Land Utilisation Act — and labour started migrating to urban areas in search of less strenuous work. Yields plummeted and those who stuck to rice cultivation started losing money. As the situation worsened, the escape route was to mortgage and/or sell the land. And when even that became impossible, ending their lives seemed the only alternative. There are farmers who, even with five-plus acres under paddy, are unable to earn Rs 50 a day. With most rice mills closed and no storage or drying facilities, many poor farmers dry their produce on the roads. If the harvested produce is not dried immediately, the grains would sprout and whatever little they might fetch would also be lost. The Government has announced a floor price of Rs 7,000 a quintal, but co-operative banks are not touching farmers' produce and distress sale even at Rs 2,500 a quintal is taking place. Ironically, rice in the open market still costs around Rs 10 a kg. All this when the rich farmer in the North makes handsome profits from five-acre farms. These are classic examples of institutional apathy or outright lack of understanding the ground reality.

For instance, farmers are persistent in their grievance that despite a sprawling agricultural university in the State, no effort to breed rice varieties suited to the ecology of the region is being made. Worse, an attempt was made to thrust basmati on the farmers, for which, it was discovered later, there was no ready market. There have been suggestions to buy a couple of `combines' from the US.

The combines do the twin jobs of sowing and harvesting, but are suited to the large, flat tracts of Punjab and Haryana and not the fragmented farmlands of Kerala. To relieve the drudgery of the rice farmer what is needed are hand-powered or small tractor-mounted transplanters and weeders, not combines. But for devising these, innovation is key, which, unfortunately, is in short-supply. The government dole of Rs 350 per hectare is tuppence and all that the agricultural extension officer is interested in is to disburse the money without follow-up. The situation in Palakkad, in many ways, reflects the plight of the small, disadvantaged Indian farmer — not the 2-3 per cent with money, muscle and political power, enjoying all the goodies, be it subsidies or the MSP largesse — who have become victims of the commodity mindset where food security is external to food needs.

Even from a physiological and scientific standpoint, the high-input technology is a low-yield system. A look at the grain-to-straw ratio of all the `miracle' varieties of rice and wheat show that the straw — eventually fodder for cattle — obtained is not enough to return carbon back to the soil. The answer to India's agricultural problems is not a centralised energy-intensive high-input technology, but following Gandhiji's dictum of "production by masses and not mass production".

The Palakkad tragedy should bring to the fore the co-operative culture, where the farmers' stakes are paramount.

If Dr V. Kurien did it with dairy farmers against all odds, there is no reason why Palakkad cannot get back its old glory of being Kerala's rice bowl.

(The author is senior fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.)

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