By Maryna Prykhodko

Yesterday, members of the Uttar Pradesh General Assembly walked out of a meeting, frustrated by the state government’s denial of farmer suicide being a current and pressing issue affecting the Indian population. Cabinet Minister Shivpal Yadav addressed the House when asked about farmers committing suicide in a particular region because of debts, saying that the government did not have information about the suicides. Yadav also asserted that suicide was a crime.

Essentially, Yadav was ignoring India’s current phenomenon of increased suicide rates among the farmer demographic since the 1990s. In fact, since 2001, one farmer in India has committed suicide every 30 minutes.

In 2010, 190,000 people committed suicide in India. 10 percent of those suicides were farmer suicides but farmers make up only 20 percent of India’s population. The population of India is rising, but the number of farmers across the country is declining.

The most alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that farmer suicides have yet to be addressed properly by the Indian government and they are largely left to be dealt with by authority figures in isolated villages and, of course, the families of the deceased who inherit the farmers’ debts.

Those debts, which can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, are the very reason farmers commit suicide. There are many reasons for debt: drastic decreases in the price of cotton (the main cash crop in India), climate change that has negatively affected yearly crop yield, and the introduction of GMOs into international and Indian agriculture.

Controversially, the agricultural company Monsanto has been blamed more than once by human rights communities and organizations for farmer suicides. Monsanto essentially has a monopoly over cotton seeds in India, which destroys any chance of fair competition between a farmer and a multi-billion dollar company.

It’s a vicious cycle. Organic crops fail, so farmers turn to genetically modified crops such as the Bt cotton produced by Monsanto. Monsanto’s seeds are overpriced to an extreme, but the selling price of cotton is at an all-time low and farmers take out loans with high interest in order to pay for a GMO crop. The GMO crops fail as well, and now farmers are in debt. The only way to get out of debt if you’re a farmer is if you grow more crops, so farmers are forced to take out more loans and buy more seeds. And so the wheel turns.

At this point, life spirals out of control for the farmers with unbelievable amounts of debt on their shoulders with no one to turn to, and consequently, some commit suicide.

Of course, some farmers realize they need to quit farming and find another means of making ends meet and paying their loans. Things don’t get better, however. That’s where human and labor trafficking come in.

The former-farmers find a company that promises them a job abroad. The catch is that the farmers have to take out another loan in order to pay for transportation and accommodation from the company. The money that the farmers hoped to make now goes to paying the company back and not to paying their already existing loans or their families back in India. Because of this unbearable burden, they commit suicide.

Christine Janumala, an NYU student in GLS and intern at Media4Humanity, elaborates from a human trafficking perspective saying farmers “are oftentimes considered inefficient remnants of India’s old agricultural age, but when they try to join the rest of its advancing economy, they don’t have the skill set or the resources to educate themselves towards a better position in life, often leading them towards exploitative work environments, illegal activity, or suicide.”

Janumala, and many other human rights and agricultural freedom organizations, recognizes the deep struggle Indian farmers face in the modern world and explains that “killing oneself in the midst of a rock and a hard place and a harder place seems easier than the surety of continued struggle.”

Unfortunately, Cabinet Minister Shivpal Yadav echoes the current view of India’s government towards farmer suicides. When a suicide because of debt is claimed, the police do not believe it and often dismiss it as the farmer being an alcoholic and drinking too much. A popular opinion amongst officials is that farmers get themselves into debt because they become arrogant and send their children to expensive private schools. While suicide may not be a solution to any problems, no one would argue that it is an arrogant thing to do.

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