WHY ARE SO MANY FARMERS KILLING THEMSELVES ?

Many Farmers Killing Themselves?

In India 

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WHY ARE SO MANY FARMERS KILLING THEMSELVES ?

The roots of Indian farmer despair have been well researched and documented: livelihoods drained away by spiralling debt; crops and livestock destroyed by drought or unseasonable monsoon rains associated with climate change; plummeting water tables from rampant groundwater overuse; the loss of agricultural land to development; a collapse in cotton prices and a dependence on expensive genetically modified seeds; WHEN IN THE NAME OF DEVELOPMENT, THE WESTERN POWERS WANT INDIANS TO EXIT VILLAGES AND OVERCROWD URBAN CITIES SO THAT THEY MAY BECOME THEIR CLIENTS FOR THEIR PRODUCTS. 

ANY MEASURE THAT MAY REDUCE ARABLE LAND AND SEND FARMERS TO URBAN CITIES CAN ONLY MAKE THE COUNTRY WITH SUCH POLICY EXPERIENCE ACUTE FOOD INSECURITY ;  IMPORTING  FOOD GRAINS FROM USA AND EUROPE IS NOT A SOLUTION FOR INDIA. IT IS ANOTHER NAME FOR HOLDING OUT A BEGGING BOWL TO AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CORPORATE FARMERS WHO CONSTITUTE 10 % OF THEIR POPULATION BUT POSSESS ALL ARABLE LAND OF THEIR COUNTRIES.

FRENCH AND AMERICAN FARMERS SHOULD RECLAIM LANDS THAT HAVE BEEN SEIZED BY CORPORATES BY FIXING A CEILING FOR EVERY COMPANY THAT WILL ENCOURAGE THEM TO SHARE THEIR LANDS WITH OTHER SMALL FARMERS. DE-CONCENTRATION OF LANDS WILL BRING JOY TO THE WORLD.

The changing climate seems to also have played a part. Karnataka, where Rama Krishna lived, is just across the border from Andhra Pradesh, two of the five states –the other three are Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh— marked by increasingly extensive droughts and disappearing aquifers. In the mid-1990s, these five states accounted for half of all farmer suicides. Now they are where two-thirds of all of India’s farmer suicides occur, according to government census data. Farmer suicides are surging upward even as the number of farmers in these states is going down.
The Global Problem

But India is far from the only place that has seen farmers commit suicide at alarming rates.

The French research institute INVS released in October a preliminary study finding that French farmers commit suicide at a rate of once every two days, 20 percent more than the French population as a whole. Cattle farmers were killing themselves the most, and during a prolonged depression of French milk prices in 2008 a previous INVS investigation discovered suicide among dairy farmers was 47 percent higher than for the rest of France.

In China, farmers are turning to self-immolating or suicide by other means to dramatically protest land expropriation. As reported in a three-part investigative series by Ian Johnson in September in The New York Times, Chinese farmers are turning to suicide while the country’s overall suicide rate has sharply declined. The government’s blueprint to move 250 million rural dwellers to cities by 2025 has roiled the Chinese countryside, instigating tens of thousands of village-level political protests.

Australia, which overall has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, according to the World Health Organization, has an even higher proportional rural suicide morbidity rate –some years 20 percent higher. A spike occurred in the mid-2000s, during the country’s worst drought in a century. The UK’s foot-and-mouth crisis was the backdrop to a study in the academic journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine that concluded, “farmers are one of the professional groups at highest risk of suicide in England and Wales” and even singled out one farming community, in Devon, as a “particular cause of concern.” The paper also found British farmers are twice as likely to contemplate suicide against the overall population. Identified factors for the high farmer suicide including access to firearms, the prospect of unemployment, financial difficulties, and a sense of personal failure.

The same problems may stalk American farmers. There is evidence that farmer suicide, while not surging, is continuing to steadily plateau in the United States. Suicides already occur the most in predominately rural states (the top ten in descending order: Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Idaho, Oregon, Colorado, South Dakota, and tied for tenth, Arizona and Utah).