In which parts of India are farmer suicides growing to be a worse tragedy, and why are they so?
| Figure 10 in Gutierrez 2015. Low crop risk Gujarat suicides trending down, and high risk Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh trending up since 1995. |
This new article also revisits the worrying farmer suicide issue that continues to be a thorny political issue that continues to attract debate world-wide, and which has previously featured in posts at GMO Pundit.
As a metric of weather-related risk, we define high-risk areas as having average yields less than 500 kg per hectare and Coefficient of Variation [crop variability] greater than 50 %. Using this metric, GJ has relatively few high-risk areas, KA has a large number, and AP and MH are intermediate… The relative level of risk for each state (i.e., GJ less than MH less than AP much less than KA) is reflected in the state’s production as a percentage of national cotton production. Specifically, during 2002–2011, production in GJ ranged from 24 to 39 %, 15 to 26 % in MH, 13 to 19 % in AP, and only 2 to 4 % in KA.
The Pundit found the graphs provided by
Gutierrez 2015 on farmer suicide numbers in different regions to be helpful for improving his understanding of what might be contributing to this distressing indicator of farmer misery.
First, from the figure shown at the top of this post, suicides in the major cotton producing state of Gujarat seem to be trending down, or at least they are relatively low in number and stable over time. That’s good to know.
But the high risk cotton states of
Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have seemingly had a rising suicide trend since 1995 and have much higher suicide numbers that Gujarat. That’s a long period of worsening misery.
It shows that smaller farm sizes are (not surprisingly, for basic economic reasons) are a likely contributor to the higher suicide rates seen in MH and AP. Furthermore, farmer dependance on rain-fed cotton seems a clear cut factor leading to farmer suicide.
From the graphs of GM cotton as a factor in farmer suicide (see above), and the fact that suicides in MH and AP seem to be rising before GM cotton was introduced around 2001, it still seems premature to link GM technology as a major cause of farmer suicide in India. But the Gutierrez 2015 focus on weather and yields of rain-fed cotton is certainly a worthy topic of further conversation.
Elsewhere in the paper there is a lot of statistical modelling of fine details relating to unreliable rain and cotton yield, and for these details the interested reader is referred to the full Open-access article.
Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2015/06/in-which-parts-of-india-are-farmer.html
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