Cotton, Pesticides and Suicides
by Jitedra Verma

INDIA – Death has walked through the village and the dying crop whispers a dirge for the body of Kaselte Sammiah, a poor cotton farmer who committed suicide in the village of Sitarampur in Andhra Pradesh.

Sammiah died on February 1 after consuming one half liter of Moncrotophos, a pesticide that failed to protect his cotton crop. He is survived by seven children.

Since June 1997, at least 80 farmers have committed suicide in the state. On February 3, Mutyalapali Subbaiah, a farmer from the district of Prakasam, attempted to commit suicide in front of public official at a rally in Markapur.

“Since the beginning of the new year, not a single day has passed without one cotton farmer committing suicide,” says a farmer in Warangal, where almost the entire standing cotton crop had been devastated , placing communities on the brink of starvation.

Faced with a raging attack on the cotton crop by Spodoptera litura (tobacco cutworm) and Heliothis armigera (American bollworm), frantic Andhra Pradesh farmers were sitting ducks for pesticide suppliers offering to sell pesticides on credit. But the indiscriminate application of pesticides onlyled to increased resistance in pests. While pests continued to ravage crops, expenses mounted and the noose tightened. What followed was a spate of suicides.

Despite the efforts of national and state agricultural research institutions, losses from pests were ranging from 10 to 30 percent, according to officials with the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR). On January 7, the government decided that loss of crops constituted a “national calamity” and began extending debt relief to farmers – a humiliating acceptance of the failure of crop science.

Desperate farmers used pesticides in quantities that astounded even pesticide dealers, who reaped a rich harvest with sales of methomyl and other highly-poisonous pesticides.

The powerful pesticide lobby was one of the chief promoters of the switch from sustainable, low-yielding traditional cultivars to cash crops like cotton that, because they are susceptible to a host of pests, require frequent applications of pesticides.

A Fall from Grace
Andhra Pradesh produces Suvin, one of the world’s finest cotton varieties. Before 1970, the state produced only 200,000 bales of cotton annually. After construction of the Nagarjunasagar dam in the 1970s, however, areas under cotton cultivation shot up.

Under government patronage, farmers shifted from self-sufficient paddy- pulses-vegetable crop rotation to the more profitable cotton growing. But as village after village shifted to cotton, they soon began to experience pest attacks and quickly climbed aboard the pesticide treadmill.

Severe pest attacks occurred in 1987 and 1994. In an attempt to make up for accumulated debts, more land was brought under cotton and more money was borrowed.

But in the 1996-97, the monsoon failed. Nearly 70 percent of the cotton in Andhra Pradesh is rainfed. Instead, excessive rains fell during the harvesting season. The irregular rains were followed by the arrival of S. litura and H. armigera in numbers never before seen.

“The fields should be called insectaries rather than cotton fields,” says Indian Council of Agricultural Research scientist G. C. Tewari. Entire stretches of standing crop were eaten away overnight.

“All the pests known to scientists were there to see on all the crops; something I have never noticed in my 50 years of experience,” declared I.V. Subba Rao, vice chancellor of Acharya N. G. Ranga Agricultural University in Hyderabad.

In the past, the cultivation of intercrops such as soybean, greengram and castor helped keep pest populations under control by providing shelter to the natural predators. But the indiscriminate use of pesticides has eliminated the region’s natural predators – including the mynah birds that used to feast on harmful insects.

In some cotton-growing areas of Andhra Pradesh, entire ecosystems have been destroyed. “In Warangal,” Tewari. notes sadly, “no natural parasite or predator can be seen today.”

Sidebar: Farmers’ Suicide and Farmers’ Rights Resolution Jitedra Verma is a reporter for Down to Earth magazine [Society for Environmental Communications, 41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 062, India; cse@sdalt.ernet.in].