India's suicide epidemic is blamed on the British

adihere

India's suicide epidemic is blamed on the British
By Cahal Milmo
16 May 2005


Trade reforms backed and funded by the British Government have caused an agricultural crisis in India which has sparked an epidemic of suicide among impoverished farmers, a leading charity claims today.

More than 4,000 farmers have killed themselves in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh since a programme of free-market measures was implemented by a "hardline liberalising regime" with the help of a £1.65m grant from the Department for International Development (DfID).

A study for Christian Aid claims that the dramatic increase in the suicide rate, which saw 2,115 farmers take their lives last year compared with 588 in 2003, is directly linked to British support for policies joining aid to economic liberalisation in developing economies.

Research found that farmers in Andhra Pradesh who had traditionally grown their own food were persuaded between 1999 and 2004 to swap to cash crops and incurred large debts which they were unable to pay due to wildly fluctuating global prices.

The result has been a catalogue of family tragedies among thousands of peasant farmers who were forced to approach unscrupulous money lenders to fund fertilisers, pesticides and water boreholes that produce little or no financial return.

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Daleep Mukarji, director of Christian Aid, said: "It is a scandal that the British Government has backed policies and pumped British taxpayers' money into schemes which have contributed to poor Indian farmers killing themselves.

"The report shows in stark detail the damage that is done to poor people when the dogma of so-called 'free' trade is pursued in the name of poverty relief."

The study commended DfID, which has spent £248m on aid to Andhra Pradesh since 2000, for its work on improving health and education in the region.

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The programme, run by the ultra-liberal state government of Andhar Pradesh until it was voted out of office last year, was advised by consultants from the London-based Adam Smith International - a commercial enterprise affiliated to the right-wing free-market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute.

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Professor Jayati Ghosh, an academic in Delhi who chaired a commission on farmers' welfare charged with investigating the results of free market reforms, said it was clear that there was direct link between the suicides and the liberalisation measures.

He said: "The crisis of suicides is very clearly a result of public policy. And this has been guided by and substantially determined by agencies like DfID."

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Among the measures taken by the Implementation Secretariat in Andhra Pradesh between 1998 and last year was the closure of four state agencies, including one which sold farmers machinery and tools at subsidised rates. Another body which provided a reliable source of seed to poor farmers was reduced to a "dormant" state.

In the decade from 1991, the area of farmland in India used to grow traditional grains such as rice declined by 18 per cent. In the same period, land dedicated to the production of cotton and sugar cane increased by 25 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. At the same time, subsidies for fertilisers were slashed and cheaper loans from banks were reduced, resulting in farmers going to private lenders charging interest rates of at least 36 per cent to fund new crops that rapidly became worthless on the global market because of over-production and cheap imports.

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The Christian Aid report said: "These are not deaths from just one area or from just one type of farming. This is suicide on a scale that is surely unique in modern times. The immediate cause of these deaths is debt. This debt was brought on by a number of factors, all of which, except for the weather, can be ascribed to liberalisation."

Both Adam Smith International, which said it had had no role in drawing up the liberalisation policy, and DfID denied that there was a direct link between the high levels of suicide and the market reforms.

The Government announced earlier this year that there should no longer be a formal link between aid and economic liberalisation.

A DfID spokesman said: "Our support for economic reform in Andhra Pradesh, including the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, has helped safeguard the livelihoods of around 2 million people. Without reform, the state government would have continued to spend hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising loss-making enterprises."

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mira4bai4

While this is certainly a tragedy and it is fairly obvious that debt is the cause, something that does trouble me is that school children, servants, and daily wage earners in cities are committing suicide in greater numbers every year. Many of these have been caught up in domestic troubles, financial and a growing number are suffering from depression.

While India becomes a developing nation and the accumulation of wealth and possessions is expected the price is higher than many can afford. In many ways people are gambling far to much for a realistic return, in farming the gamble is based on world prices and their are far to many losers there, education is another gamble, the dream is created through education and how many women are allowed to have a career, how many really find employment worthy of the qualifications and how many just can't achieve the desires of the family. So many educated people become servants or daily wage earners along side those that have little education, lose their self respect, suffer abuse from not only family members but those that they work for. A great example of this is seen in the news papers, great praise is showered on the successes of individuals and families after examinations and the greater majority that are not so successful are sidelined and notably scorned by their family.

So in many different areas there is this big push to achieve greater wealth and education but when you don't there is nothing but rebuke and depression, being in debt not only to banks but families is both humiliating and gives rise to abuse when the debt cannot be repaid, children feel this when they let down their families who went without in order for the child to have an education and when they fail to achieve then their ability to provide in return is gone, they then feel that they are a greater burden on their families and have no value. They feel that they have nowhere to go, nowhere to turn to, nothing left.

Nick-H

I'm shocked and horrified by both the previous posts.

I read the papers in India every day, and I am often amazed at the suicide reports: reasons given can be anything from political demonstration to domestic problems.

Sometimes the problems seem almost trivial: one person's small trouble is another's unbearable weight, perhaps because of family or social pressure. How important can failing an exam be? and yet...

By the way, causing a person to comit suicide is regarded as criminal here, and reports of domestic-situation suicide often include the arrest of family members.

I know almost nothing of rural, agricultural India ---except that, surely, it is what most of the country is? Interferance in this by the world's free-tradeites can surely only be disasterous. Won't the lesson of human disaster associated with the transfer of subsistance farming to cash crops ever be learnt?

Whenever I read of a dead farmer I think also that there is now a starving and destitute family. The horror is not in the suicide figures alone.

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Digital Drifter

The Guardian had an article by george Monbiot regarding this in a related tangent. One might think, the fallout of the implementation is the suicides. Note this article is from 2004.

OK, it's a lefty rag but all I'm asking is , is there a correlation between the paper's 2004 article and the current situation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...218982,00.html

Nick-H

"Lefty rag" much more in reputation than actuality!

A very disconcerting article, and yet more disilusionment to those of us who welcomed Labour into power without realising that we were getting New Labour...

However, I hope what DD says is true. Certainly I have not been seeing daily farmer suicide reports this year as I have in the past.

zenkris

It's interesting that the first time i was in india i thought suicides were not as common in india, but even though the number of males comitting suicide is still much less percentagewise than say in europe, the number of female suicides is like in europe.
shocking to say the least.
( too lazy to provide the link of the w.h.o. )

it's even more interesting that sri lanka is in the top 10 in the world regarding suicides.

terra1

I know this is a little off subject and not. I am on a GBLT listserv from India and the News comes way to often of another lesbian suicide. Overlooked by the media for the most part is the number of Lesbians who get married in India, only to be rejected by family and end up committing suicide. And this to is a result of public policy.


Violence against Lesbians in Indiahttp://www.altlawforum.org/Resources...-21.9555696555

We'll marry or die, says lesbian couple
http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f =13&t=000722

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Nick-H

It can be hard to be non-conformist in India

There is a big difference in reporting here. In UK neither suicides nor car accidents are news any longer so, without personal involvement, it is easy not to consider them. Both seem to merit column space here.

jennifericous

i learned about there being many ritual suicides in india as a result of the green revolution, farmers were killing themselves by ingesting the industrial pesticides requred of the GR.i dont know if that was primarily brittish, but certainly many western countries were involved. i think it was aggrevated also because the techniques being used favoured large farmers and so small farmers had to borrow to try to make profit. gm crops are very sensitive to climate and conditions, and so if they had a bad crop they were unable to make repayments. the GR also created a divide between the north and south. i cant remember which region it favoured. but i read that that exaccerbated the problem also. it really is a tragedy when anybody feels they must take their life