Who Killed the Farmers?

Doug's interesting blog "The Confusing Reality behind Farmer Suicides" and the insightful comments prompted me to put my thoughts together on the issue of farmer suicides and see if there is a possibility of tying together various strands of thought being expressed.

At times I wonder why is that everyone seems to have some opinionated reaction when it comes to ‘Farmer Suicides’ and not so opinionated ones on ‘Farmer Murders’ or something like ‘Non-farmer Suicides’ (economists studying crime or epidemiologists aside!). Are we still unable to identify and solve some fundamental problems afflicting our socio-economic or geo-political systems when we come across regular news items on farmer suicides or a not so regular glance through some touching statistics indicating these mortality trends?. From a policy perspective, to arrive at alternative solutions (at least workable) one needs to decipher the problem at hand from an unprejudiced Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ kind of platform. But the increasingly popular debacle of ‘Farmer Suicides’ poses some formidable challenges and it becomes even more complicated given some concealed realities and some analytical tricksteries.

‘Suicide’ is the act of intentionally terminating one's own life, or in a metaphorical sense, the "willful destruction of one's self-interest". Suicide may occur for a number of reasons, often related to depression, shame, pain, financial difficulties or other undesirable situations. ‘Suicide’ being a rare event, relatively higher incidence among a sub-group could be indicative of a larger socio-economic malaise. For every individual committing suicide, there could be many more in a state of despair (distress). There have been 1, 56,562 farmer suicides during 1995-2004. From these, more than four-fifths are males. The suicide mortality rate (SMR, suicide death per 1, 00, 000 persons) for male farmers nearly doubled in ten years from 9.7 in 1995 to 19.2 in 2004. SMR for male non-farmers has veered around 13; it increased from 12.6 in 1995 to 14.2 in 1999 and then decreased to 13.4 in 2004 (Source of SMR data is the National Crime Records Bureau-NCRB and SMR for farmers are normally based on interpolated/extrapolated population for cultivators (even age adjusted) using 1991 and 2001 census). In 2004, states with SMR for male farmers higher than the national average are Kerala (183.0), Maharashtra (57.2), Andhra Pradesh (44.5), Tamil Nadu (43.7), Karnataka (35.4), Goa (32.1), undivided MP (27.7), Sikkim (40.5), Dadra & Nagar Haveli (42.5), Delhi (49.4) and interestingly Pondicherry (1495.4)!! (Pondicherry is special because of the low population as well as lower share of farmers in the population) Together these states account for nearly four-fifth of farmer suicides in 2004, more than half from the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra.Socio-economic risk factors like indebtedness, crop failure, asset erosion (like sale of bullocks), decline in social position, burden of daughter’s/sister’s marriage, suicide in a nearby village, addictions, dispute with neighbors/others, health problem, a recent death in the family, history of suicide in the family etc. could be hypothesized to have some causality with suicide in a household. These factors are not mutually exclusive. They can be correlated as well as covariant risks. Any framework analysing farmer suicides should take into account factors like asset holding (class holding of lan-size etc.) and an effective case-control approach can show differntial impact of the identified drivers of suicide.

Farmer Suicides are clearly symptomic of the systemic agrarian crisis ailing India. It is not only the markets that have bypassed the low income farm households, but also the flippant and ill designed public policies. Vidarbha is just one popular example. And thanks to Mr.P.Sainath and the omniscient media, the issue of farmers' suicide has indeed become ubiquitous. Suicides being at the intersection of physico-psychological drivers, the socio-economic reality brings in a host of differential conditioning. Suicides stand at a critical juncture between defined rationality and perceived irrationality and is an outcome of choices made under complex conditioning. In the context of farmers’ suicides, some very interesting observations I have made:

• Suicide Mortality Rate (SMR) which is expressed as a ratio of number of reported suicidal deaths per 100000 population tend to be low, something like let us say 14 for India on an average. But if in some sub-group of the population, for instance SMR among Male farmers in geography happens to be 150, then it is symptomatic of some serious problem- Analytical or otherwise. Farmer’s suicide data in most states face credibility issues and measurement errors are rampant.
• If unnatural deaths are reported as Suicides, then we can easily increase SMR in a community and if there lies some vested political interest or other incentive structures that promote this, then things get more complex!! One reference can be made to the compensation mechanism which the state has in place for families of those farmers who reportedly committed suicide; on the other hand the Indian Penal Code has provision to punish those who attempted it: So on the whole it at times boils down to a game of incentives vs. disincentives under conditions of acute distress.
• In places like Vidarbha where we have the highest density of Pesticide consumption in India, proximity to highly subsidized state provided Pesticides are rampant and in such conditions there is bound to be higher incidence of suicides by pesticide consumption for the distressed farmers. In U.S it could well be thought of to be substituted by Shot-guns!
• Apart from acute depression out of socio-economic and physico-psychological realities, one fact remains hidden in most of these discussions. Proximity to nearest hospital for treatment of poisoning cases is a grim reality of the poor infrastructure in some parts of rural India. When someone attempts suicide, in the absence of immediate and appropriate medical attention, it might well turn out to be a fatal. This seems to be consistently transforming 'would have been attempts' into an addition to the already non authentic SMR figures.
  

Studying triggers in different states in whatever limited literature comes out on this theme, it becomes clear that factors like demonstration effect becomes a normal move under such extreme and depressing conditions, social factors like perception of status among affluent farmers in Punjab is also observed. Indebtedness and correlated issues like forceful recovery modes of the lenders are also being studied for possible causation. Lack of awareness and break down of social support structures like Joint Family System and inefficiency of limited Distress Help-lines are also indicative of the larger malice in the agrarian sector. It is also very important to explore the connect between weather events, commodity prices and agricultural outcomes (from a production risk and price risk sense). Going back to the Vidarbha story, the incidence or persistence of extreme weather shocks like droughts or famines is low compared to several drought-prone areas/talukas in the Western Maharashtra and Marathwada areas, but the SMRs are relatively higher.So what exactly is driving these farmers to commit suicide?

I will deal with the fundamental ‘Idiosyncrasies of Vidarbha’ and possible remedies in my next blog.