It's been called the largest protest in human history for more than a year hundreds of thousands of farmers choked off three highways leading into new delhi they faced several violent crackdowns more than 700 people died during the demonstrations this attack was carried out by a politician's son farmers were willing to stake their lives because they feared corporations would have taken over their arms if the government did away with a guaranteed minimum price subsidy on certain crops,
Then in november prime minister narendra modi announced that he'd take back the laws it was a huge victory for the farmers while their win was a blow to corporate interests the subsidies they fought to keep prop up a way of farming that's destroying their finances their health and their land this is sukpura a village in punjab state which is known as india's breadbasket almost everyone here had been to the protest last year including just for years farmers here are mainly in the business of harvesting wheat and rice the only two crops subsidized by the government's price floor guaranteed singh's father committed suicide eight years ago after finding himself almost 48000 in debt and he's not alone financial stress drives about 10000 indians in agriculture to take their own lives each year,
His family had to sell off all but their last acre of land to pay off what his father owed but that's still not enough the generational debt began after the government incentivized farmers like his dad to give up traditional crops for wheat and rice the green revolution started in the 1960s when parts of the country were crippled by famine the immensity of india's food problem is baffling and frustrating punjabis were always farmers but they took on the burden of feeding india by switching to wheat and rice strains developed by american scientists many new types of hybrid seed have been developed,
And the farmer remains unaware of their potential even though punjab is just one and a half percent of the nation's land area the state supplied up to 70 percent of the country's wheat and 40 of its rice for decades after making the switch to monocultures those are crops designed to be grown one at a time in order to boost yields but they require chemical fertilizers toxic pesticides heavy machinery and use up lots of water this particular model of industrial agriculture the only value it has is quantity it's giving you a lot more but it's also giving you a lot more because you're putting a lot more into the system dr richard kumar is an agricultural policy expert she says these practices were unsustainable for family farmers,
We know punjab farmers have the highest debt rate in the country they basically got locked on to what is known as the technological treadmill of monoculture farming at first farmers were given monoculture seeds funded by the rockefeller and ford foundations and the us government they continued to buy those varieties because they were the only crops their government would subsidize cultivating the same monocultures year after year depletes the soil and makes pests more resistant so farmers must continue to buy more toxic pesticides more fertilizers and newly engineered seeds that can tolerate those extra chemicals so farmers are constantly taking out loans larger than the last growing monoculture rice,
And wheat is hugely costly that model can only work until and unless there is some kind of price guarantee support for farmers and what you're seeing in the farm protest is this realization of farmers that you remove that and we are going to collapse farmers like singh get that subsidized rate at a government authorized auction yard the earnings are enough to pay back loans he took out for the fertilizers pesticides and machinery he's used for this harvest he's left with less than 20 of the profits and most of that is used as down payment on the seeds of his next crop singh's children hardly ever see him these days to pay for the rest of his family's bills,
He has to drive a truck for months at a time after he finishes his harvest if monoculture techniques are ruining their finances it's because they're destroying their farms too punjab literally means the land of five rivers but growing rice here is super water intensive and will turn the state into a desert within 25 years according to government data the environmental damage isn't confined to the region either it's got global impact honda india ranks third in greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture is its second largest source of the pollution an estimated 84 million metric tons of stubble are burned on farms around the country each year,
And at the end of punjab's rice harvest a smog cloud can be seen from outer space north indian cities like new delhi have the worst air quality in the world in part because of stubble burning unless and until we take the agricultural logic and redefine it within ecology we are not going to be able to find solutions not only is there runaway climate change not only is it affecting our health but farmers will not be able to farm tomorrow no the resources on the farm are finished but it doesn't need to be this way rough deep singh is a farmer who saw the harm in monoculture techniques,
And joined a movement that's trying to make farming sustainable apparently foreign he does polyculture which means he grows more than 30 kinds of fruits and 40 crops on this farm altogether his farm used to look much like his neighbors he grew rice and wheat for eight years because that's what he learned at the punjab agricultural university being called india's cancer capital and studies have linked the overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to the disease singh ditched them in 2011 when he met human foreign farmers to transition to organic since he started the heritage farming mission in 2005. subsidized foreign the protests ended farm unions are waiting on the government to make good on a promise to expand the wheat and rice price floor subsidies to more crops,
They say it'll help farmers diversify to other
monocultures but that says that's a temporary fix because it props up a system
that's fundamentally broken the green foreign also in india didn't happen
overnight and it only happened because a lot of investment was put behind it
and so if that kind of system can actually be put behind natural farming but
you'll see a transformation farmers themselves will jump on board to want to do
things differently but everybody m singh's village sukpura maintained the presence
of at least 10 people at the new delhi protests for more than a year harchar
and singh is their union representative foreign says all but two households from his village
of 3 500 people had sent family members to the protest.
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