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Green revolution has not only gone sour, it has now turned red. The unexplained number of huge number of suicides a testimony to the entire equation going wrong. However, the fundamental issue of destruction of sustainable livelihoods is not at all being addressed.

It doesn't shock the nation anymore. Reports saying that 65 of the 243 farmers who committed suicide in Vidhrabha region of Maharashtra had debts as little as Rs 8,000 have not shaken the conscious of the world's biggest democracy. That Meena Prakash Rechpade, widow of the 36-year-old farmer, Prakash, of village Dhanori, near Wardha, in Maharashtra, has no money to arrange for the last rites of her husband, who took the fatal route to escape the misery of green revolution no longer evokes strong reaction.

In Andhra Pradesh, ever since Y.S.Rajasekhar Reddy took over as the chief minister some three months ago, on May 14, more than 400 farmers have committed suicides. This was the official death toll in the suicides register till July15. In Karnataka, the new chief minister Dharam Singh, has no time for the farmers in distress. He has been too busy with balancing the equation of coalition politics. More than 300 farmers have committed suicide in the state, which claims to be on the highway leading to the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. The sad part of the story is that a majority of those who committed suicide were relatively young, below the age of 45 years.

In western Uttar Pradesh, more than 14 farmers have committed suicide in the month of July. Farmer suicides are topping the chart in Kerala "God's own country". In the frontline agriculture states of Punjab and Haryana, the situation is no better. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had himself gone on record (before he was elected) saying that close to 2,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past few years. While the serial death dance continues unabated, policy makers and agricultural scientists are busy laying the foundations for the second Green Revolution. The US Ambassador in India has already been addressing the industry and policy makers suggesting biotechnology as a panacea for the country's farm ills. And rightly so. After all the first green revolution was also promoted by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through its land-grant system of agricultural research, education and extension !

Sensing the uneasiness being felt by the agricultural scientists, lest they be hauled up for the blood bath being enacted in the farm sector, support has already flown in from the expected quarters -- biotechnology industry. The US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Application (ISAAA), which unabashedly promoted genetically engineered crops and 'transfer' of technology with multi-million dollar funding from Bayer, Cargill, Dow, Monsanto, Novartis, Pioneer, Syngenta, in addition to foundations and Western governmental funding agencies, is busy collaborating with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which is besotted with the vision of India as one vast genomic valley.

All this is happening at a time when high-chemical input based technology has already mined the soils and ultimately led to the lands gasping for breath, with the water-guzzling crops (hybrids and Bt cotton) sucking the groundwater acquifer dry, and with the failure of the markets to rescue the farmers from a collapse of the farming systems, the tragedy is that the human cost is entirely being borne by the farmers. In Punjab, for instance, of the 138 development blocks, 84 have already been declared dark zones, the level of groundwater exploitation in these blocks has been in excess of 98 per cent against the critical limit of 80 per cent. Six of the 12 districts in the State have recorded groundwater utilization rate of 100 per cent. The National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning in India estimates that nearly 120 million hectares of the total cultivable land of 142 million hectares in the country is degraded. Green revolution was projected to have saved the country some 58 million hectares of additional land to be brought under the plough to produce more food, whereas almost twice that land mass has been rendered degraded and ecologically devastated in varying degrees in its aftermath.

Green revolution has not only gone sour, it has now turned red. The unexplained number of huge number of suicides a testimony to the entire equation going wrong. However, the fundamental issue of destruction of sustainable livelihoods is not at all being addressed.

All these years, for instance, the dryland regions of the country, which comrpise nearly 75 per cent of the total cultivable area, have increasingly come under the hybrid crop varieties. While the crop yields from the hybrid varieties was surely high, the flip side of these varieties "these varieties are water guzzlers" was very conveniently ignored. For the sake of comparison, let us take the example of rice. In Punjab and Haryana, farmers cultivate high-yielding varieties of rice. These varieties require about 3000 litres of water to produce a kilo of grain (IRRI's compilation of the water usage for rice at 5000 litres for a kilo, is being questioned). Instead of bringing in varieties that require less water for the water deficit areas of the drylands, hybrid rice varieties with water requirement exceeding 5000 litres per kilo of grain were promoted.

Not only rice hybrids, all kind of hybrid varieties that require higher doses of water – whether it is of sorghum, maize, cotton, bajra, and vegetables are promoted in the dryland regions. In addition, agricultural scientists have misled the farmers by saying that the dryland regions were hungry for chemical fertilisers. The harmful combination of chemical inputs with water guzzling crops have played havoc with the drylands turning the lands not only further unproductive but also barren. The water table plummeted, the impact of deficient rainfall became more pronounced forcing farmers to abandon agriculture and migrate. As if this was not enough, Bt cotton requiring more water than hybrid cotton, was knowingly promoted so as to allow the seed industry to make profits. What happens to the farmers as a result was no body’s concern. It never was.

Fertilisers and pesticides were aggressivly promoted, with huge subsidies being doled out to keep the fertiliser companies afloat, without realising the resulting devastation these chemical inputs have wrought on the sustainability of agriculture. At no stage, did the scientists call for a mid-term correction to rectify the imbalance and destruction of the soil fertility through excessive application of the chemicals. The second-generation environmental impacts became so serious that the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs the 16 international agricultural centres, did launch an initiative for studying the negative impact of the green revolution model on sustainability of agriculture in the Indo-Gangetic plains but the results were never made public.

Devinder Sharma is an award-winning food and agriculture policy analyst and a regular contributor to STWR. His writings focus on the links between biotechnology, intellectual property rights, food trade and poverty.

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