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Climate Change, Biggest Global Health Threat of the 21st Century
India's Scorched Earth
by Alex Renton
A farmer's widow & her daughter walk through fields in Andhra Pradesh. Her husband committed suicide, after the worst drought in 20 years
Suicide is the latest epidemic among farming communities as climate change parches the heart of India, destroying agriculture and plunging the poorest families into crippling debt. In Andhra Pradesh, everyone we met had lost faith in the weather. "It is," said one woman, a groundnut farmer and a mother of five, "like a bad husband. You cannot understand his behaviour." Across the state and much of India the July monsoon had gone missing: it finally turned up 45 days late, and inadequate. "Scanty rain," we were told. "Maybe just five minutes one day. Raining on one field but not the next." No one had much idea why this had happened, and not many have heard the term "climate change". What they do know is that it is getting hotter, and that you can't rely on the rains any more.
By the end of September, a drought had been officially declared in Andhra Pradesh. Food prices were rising – rice up 20%, sugar 45%, most vegetables by even more. In Anantapur, the driest district of this dry state in the centre of the subcontinent, farming families – some of the poorest people in India – are in crisis. Adults are going without meals to save money, children were being taken out of school, the older ones sent off to the city of Bangalore to look for work. Farmers are selling animals, registering for the government's rural employment scheme, doing anything they could to stave off the moneylenders. Then early this month, massive storms brought floods that drove nearly half a million people in Andhra Pradesh from their homes.
But no amount of rain could have helped Naryamaswamy Naik. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," said his wife, Sugali Nagamma. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we can sell the salt from our table. Everyone has debts." Her voice was low, her head bowed, as her tiny grandson played at her feet. She looked much older than her 41 years. Nagamma took the portrait of her husband from the wall to show him off, good-looking with an Elvis quiff when they met a quarter of a century ago. In July, Mr Naik took a tin of pesticide from the cupboard, opened it and drank it. He died in front of us. The head of the family died in front of his wife and children – can you imagine?"
There has been an epidemic of suicides of farmers across India's drought-stricken regions these past few months. The stories behind them are all tragically similar. Debt is the driving force. Then came the failure of the monsoon. Here in Andhra Pradesh, the farmers would expect to plant their staple crops of groundnut and sorghum in late June or early July, but no rain fell until 20 August. By then it was too late for groundnut, and the farmers of Kadiripalli village bought seeds of other crops, such as red gram and millet, to see if they would work. Though the smattering of rain has now turned the countryside green, the weak seedlings pushing through the red earth show that this effort won't come to much. It is another bad year.
In Sugali Nagamma's hut, under the portrait of her dead husband, we saw a pile of full sacks of jawa – sorghum seed that she'd bought with the help of a local NGO supported by Oxfam India. It was a last attempt to get a food crop this season, but in the parched ground the sorghum could not germinate. With the wells dry, there was no way to water it. So Nagamma and her three younger children are all working as labourers – the children have dropped out of school. They get 30 rupees (about 40 pence) a day from farmers, or 100 rupees if they can get on to a government scheme designed to help the rural poor. She says. "It's only the thought of my children being alone that stops me killing myself…This year is the very worst year since I was a child. This year the main crop, groundnut, has failed. In the past we could go elsewhere to labour but not now, because the drought is everywhere. Clouds are not coming into our area to give us rain."
Few people we met knew the meaning of the term “climate change” But everyone has stories to tell of changes in the weather, of the unreliable seasons, of rain that came too late, or too strong, washing away carefully planted fields in a single downpour. The extreme heat of summer is another common complaint. The director of a network of environmental NGOs training and organising the farmers of Anantapur, says that summer temperatures can be 10°C hotter now than in the past, reaching 45°C, and making work outdoors near impossible.
A 35-year-old farmer told us that he had sold his last goats to buy rice for his family – they were existing now on that and mashed herbs. "When I was a child everywhere there was water, and rains. I suppose those were the golden days – now we're always looking to the sky, looking for the rain. It was 10 years ago that things started changing. Every year since has become worse, and food problems have got worse. People can't afford to share or help any more. Everyone is in crisis."
Alex Renton's website: www.alexrenton.com