Gobind Thukral

INDIA is a sad witness to hundreds of farmers taking their lives each year. Their desperation finds no other expression when they see themselves trapped neck deep in debt. The union government’s policies, particularly after the economic reforms read pro business and pro industry were introduced. The terms of trade have never favoured the farmers, but after the advent of the Green Revolution and commercialisation of farming, these became worst. The cost of all inputs, machinery like tractors and tubewells’ equipment besides labour have been overshooting what farmers got for their produce.

This is a major reason why cotton growers have taken their lives to escape the debt trap in many parts of the country including Punjab. Now BT cotton where the cost is still higher is troubling them.

On other hand traders, middlemen of kinds have prospered disproportionately. Tractor and other farm equipment producers and sellers have minted money. Traders who buy produce of the farmers are filthily rich and lead comfortable lives as do those who produce chemicals, pesticides fertilizers and other such stuff. Neither the government nor the policy planners offer any explanation. Occasionally some loans are waived. Even on this Republic Day, Indian President, Mrs. Pratibha Patil paid some lips sympathy for the farmers and called for second green revolution. She did not bother to tell the nation that during the last 20 years, over twenty million farmers have left this profession.

The loan waiver year of 2008 when the central government provided Rs 70,000 crores also saw 16,196 farm suicides in the country. According to the National Crime Records Bureau compared to 2007, that’s a fall of just 436. This gives little comfort. There were no major changes in the trend that set in from the late 1990s and worsened after 2002. The tragic truth is that very high numbers of farm suicides still occur within a fast decreasing farm population.

Between just the Census of 1991 and that of 2001, nearly 8 million cultivators quit farming. A year from now, the 2011 Census will tell how many more quit in this decade. It cannot be less. In fact, exodus from farming has intensified after 2001. Since the State-wise farm suicide ratios — number of farmers committing suicide per 100,000 farmers — are the same as 2001 figures, so the 2011 Census will provide an update.

Farm suicides are rising within a declining farm population. Two, an all-India picture disguises the intensity. The devastation lies in the Big 5 States (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh). These account for two-thirds of all farm suicides during 2003-08. Take just the Big 5 — their percentage of all farm suicides has gone up. Worse, even their percentage of total all-India suicides (all categories) has risen. Poor States like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are doing very badly for some years now.

In the period 1997-2002, farm suicides in the Big 5 States accounted for roughly one out of every 12 of all suicides in the country. In 2003-08, they accounted for nearly one out of every 10. Punjab farmers now reeling under heavy private debt often end their lives.

The 12-year period data permits comparison of farm suicide numbers for 1997-2002, with how they turned out in the next 6-year period of 2003-2008. All 12 years were pretty bad, but the latter six were decidedly worse. Maharashtra saw a decline in farm suicide numbers in 2005, but the very next year proved to be its worst ever. Since 2006, the State has been the focus of many initiatives. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Vidharbha that year brought a relief package” of Rs.3, 750 crore for six crisis-ridden districts. Add Chief Minister’s Rs.1, 075 crore relief package. Then followed the nearly Rs.9, 000 crore that was Maharashtra’s share of the Rs.70, 000-crore Central loan waiver for farmers. To which the State government added Rs.6, 200 crore for those farmers not covered by the waiver. The State added Rs.500 crore for a one-time settlement for poor farmers who had been excluded from the waiver altogether because they owned over five acres of land.

In all, the amounts committed to fighting the agrarian crisis in Maharashtra exceeded Rs. 20,000 crore across 2006, 2007 and 2008. It does not include huge money given to the sugar barons. Yet, that proved was the worst three-year period ever for any State at any time since the recording of farm data began. During 2006-08, Maharashtra saw 12, 493 farm suicides. That is nearly 600 more than the previous worst of 2002-2005 and 85 per cent higher than the 6,745 suicides recorded in the three-year period of 1997-1999.

The idea of a waiver was not a bad thing. And it was right to intervene. But specific actions were misguided and bungled. Yet it could also be argued that but for the relief the waiver brought to some farmers at least, the suicide numbers of 2008 could have been a lot worse. The waiver was a welcome step for farmers, but it ignored debt from the money lenders and that is why Punjab could not benefit much. It dealt only with bank credit and ignored moneylender debt. So only those farmers with access to institutional credit could benefit. Tenant farmers and poor farmers get their loans mainly from moneylenders. only Kerala addressed the issue of moneylender debt.

The 2008 waiver also excluded those holding over five acres, making no distinction between irrigated and dry land. This devastated many struggling farmers with eight or 10 acres of poor, dry land.

Every suicide has a multiplicity of causes. But when you have nearly 200,000 of them, it makes sense to seek broad common factors within that group. The suicides appear concentrated in regions of high commercialisation of agriculture and very high peasant debt. Cash crop farmers seemed far more vulnerable to suicide than those growing food crops. Yet the basic underlying causes of the crisis remained untouched. A massive decline in investment in agriculture coupled with the withdrawal of bank credit at a time of soaring input prices caused misery. The crash in farm incomes combined with an explosion of cultivation costs, the shifting of millions from food crop to cash crop cultivation with all its risks, the corporate hijack of every major sector of agriculture including, and especially, seed; growing water stress and moves towards privatisation of that resource. The government was trying to beat the crisis with a one-off waiver. Where is the policy for the farm sector that takes care of 60 per cent population and provides food sovereignty?

In late 2007, Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar confirmed those figures in Parliament citing the same NCRB data. The number has climbed to nearly 2 lakh. The crisis is very much with us. And cosmetic changes just do not help. During 2006-08, Maharashtra suffered 12, 493 farm suicides.

That is 85 per cent higher than the 6,745 suicides it recorded during 1997-1999. And the worst three-year period for any State, any time. that is Sharad Pawar’s home state.

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The French burqa ban

Ishtiaq Ahmed

THE Commission recommended that if the government was going to ban the burqa, it should compensate by declaring as public holidays the religious festivals of Muslims and Jews. It also recommended that steps be taken to integrate Muslim and other minorities into the French mainstream.

A non-binding recommendation of a French Parliamentary Commission saying that the burqa (complete veiling of women from head to foot) should be banned in public institutions, including banks, post offices, schools and even on public transportation is indicative of constant tension between immigrant Muslim communities and host countries in the West. The security risk linked to the burqa and it clashing with French republican values are the two main arguments that have been put forth.

The Commission members maintained that their recommendation was by no means an invasion of or trespassing into the privacy of a Muslim woman or an attempt to curtail her human rights. It was agreed, however, that donning the burqa was a sign of the demeaned status of Muslim women. It may be recalled that the controversy started when French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared last year that such attire had no place in France. He asserted that the burqa was not a religious symbol; rather it symbolised the subjugation of women. He called for a law banning the burqa.

Polls have indicated that 65 percent of the French population, including Muslims, would like a law banning the burqa. The interior ministry says an estimated 2,000 women out of a total French population of 65.4 million, of which 5 million are Muslims, wear the burqa. The 32-member parliamentary commission that drew up the report claims that all of France is saying ‘no’ to the burqa because the garment is “contrary to the values of the republic”. And if it is not religious attire, then, argue the parliamentarians, the Muslims should support the release of Muslim women from an outdated and outmoded garment that only reinforces the inferior status of women in ultra-traditional Muslim societies.

The commission recommended that if the government was going to ban the burqa, it should compensate by declaring as public holidays the religious festivals of Muslims and Jews. It also recommended that steps be taken to integrate Muslim and other minorities into the French mainstream. It took the stand that cultures change and transform and, therefore, to essentialise the burqa as part of Islamic identity would be wrong. It also makes a strong plea to combat Islamophobia. The members of the commission range from far right to far left; the chairperson is a member of the French Communist Party.

Not surprisingly, some Muslim organisations have protested against this, calling it a gross violation of the human rights of Muslim women. Human Rights Watch has described it as forced integration that is bound to fail because it could mean that burqa-clad women may not be able to come out of their homes because their families may prefer to keep them indoors rather than let them go out without a burqa. That would only result in their greater isolation and insulation.

Indeed, all sides of the debate on the burqa have legitimate concerns. The security risk factor needs to be grasped properly. For a long time now, al Qaeda and the Taliban have been drafting young men and occasionally women into suicide bombing missions. While such tactics have created fear and anxiety among governments, they have failed to bring down the US or any other state. Rather, the privacy of each and every individual, including that of pious Muslim women, has now been made irrelevant. The new screening machines that are being installed in international airports will make possible an inspection of even the private parts of individuals. So, if anyone is responsible for undermining Islamic values, it is the terrorists who have been using the human body as a weapon of extensive if not mass destruction. Obviously the French cannot install such screens on roads and streets or in buses and markets. Therefore, banning the burqa is one way of reducing the risk factor if not eliminating it.

My second reason for supporting a ban on the burqa is that it represents a perverted view of piety. Many years ago, I interviewed the well-known Islamist, Dr Israr Ahmed, on a number of subjects at his residence in Model Town, Lahore. Naturally, his egregiously reactionary views on women were one of the subjects I probed with him. To my utter surprise and shock, he told me that men in the West have lost their manliness because they see and work with women. That kills their sexuality. By strictly segregating men and women, Islam keeps men in their most natural state of virility. The burqa thus helps when a woman must sometimes come out.

If we ignore such bizarre ideas for a moment and investigate if the burqa was worn by the earliest generations of Muslims, then the facts tell another story. Historians have pointed out that the tent-style burqa became the dominant form of veiling only after the Muslims defeated the more advanced Persian and Eastern Byzantine empires. Their nobilities kept their women away from the gaze of other men. This was a symbol of affluence and power. When these empires fell to the Arabs, the latter began to imitate this practice since they were the new upper class in society. Thus when the caliphate of Baghdad, under the Abbasids, had consolidated, the black burqa became a status symbol of upper class families and naturally those from the lower orders who wanted to enhance status would require their women to follow the same. Most of the ahadith, which prescribe complete coverage of women, were a product of the period that corresponded to the annexation of Asia Minor and Persia by Muslims. Therefore, the French parliamentarians seem to have done their homework seriously.

There is, of course, a deeper philosophical aspect to it too. Can a civilisation that treats its women as inferior and its men as sexually uncontrollable claim to be the bearer of the best values of common humanity? I have my very serious doubts. Saudi Arabia, Iran and the defunct Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan briefly during 1996-2001, and later the different parts of the NWFP, all represent, without any doubt, the worst offenders against the dignity of equality of women. A young Pakistani scholar, Taimur Rahman, has prepared a list of all the atrocious rules and laws the Taliban imposed on women to keep them out of the public eye. It can be accessed at: http://criticalppp.org/lubp/archives/5150.

A ban on the burqa may not help liberate the 2,000 or so women in France but it will symbolise the need for Western societies to take an interest in the welfare of the weakest section of their immigrant populations. These always happen to be women and children.

[Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg Daily Times, Tuesday, 02 February 2010]

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Recession and recovery: The lucky are unemployed

IPS Correspondents

THE agreed, if dubious, solution to the financial crisis was to get people and governments – in the richer countries – to borrow more in order to spend more. What is not in doubt is the growing numbers of people who will be able to neither borrow nor spend. A report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released Wednesday points to dramatic levels of unemployment in the developed countries.

The unemployment rate in industrialised economies jumped to 8.4 percent in 2009, up from 6.0 percent in 2008 and 5.7 per cent in 2007, the report says.

“The number of unemployed in the (developed economies and European Union) region is estimated to have surged by more than 13.7 million between 2007 and 2009, with an increase of nearly 12 million unemployed in 2009 alone.”

Despite comprising less than 16 percent of the global workforce, “the developed economies and European Union region accounted for more than 40 percent of the increase in global unemployment since 2007,” the report says. “Unemployment in the developed economies and European Union is expected to remain elevated, with a projected increase in the regional unemployment rate to 8.9 percent in 2010.”

“These are dramatic figures,” Jeff Johnson, chief of the ILO employment trends unit told IPS in an interview from Geneva. “But we are also saying that it is not only about unemployment. Of the six billion people on the planet, three billion are engaged in economic activity. So when we say that of these, 212 million are unemployed, it does not sound like a lot. But 1.5 billion of them, about half, are among the ranks of the vulnerably employed.

“Unemployment is the tip of the iceberg. The long-term issue is a massive decent work deficit throughout the world.”

Essentially, the report is also saying that the poor countries may appear to have lost less, because they had less to lose in the first place. They are included in what the report refers to as the working poor and the vulnerably employed.

It might seem, almost, that unemployment in the developed countries is, relatively speaking, a privilege.

“Most workers in developed countries have a social protection mechanism, in terms of unemployment insurance schemes, whereas in the developing world they oftentimes do not,” Johnson says. “They can go down and apply for unemployment protection, so they have an income substitution mechanism.

“If you have a person in Ethiopia in a manufacturing plant that closes, there is no income protection, they have to be able to provide a livelihood for themselves and their family, and so they take up any job. They may set up something like a small food stall, but they will work. In the developed world they transition to unemployment; in the developing world they transition into vulnerable employment.”
The headline figure may be just that; and the ILO report seeks to look beyond it to a collection of factors. And where the fall comes from: in many developed countries salaried work “may be as high as 90 percent; whereas in many developing countries it can be as low as 20 percent or even 10 percent,” Johnson says.

But there are other ways in which the statistics may conceal more than they reveal. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS), the unemployed in the U.S. now make up 10 percent of the potential workforce, or 15.4 million people. However, the real number might actually be a good deal higher.

The figure does not include individuals who have given up looking for work, says Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Centre for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank.
“The 10 percent is based on a household survey conducted by the BLS every month, asking ‘Were you available for work last week and were you actively seeking a job?’” Boushey tells IPS. “When there are more than six workers for every job available, there are a lot of folks who quite frankly have given up.”

The likely figure is around 17.2 percent, said Boushey. “Most economists think the unemployment rate will remain high through 2010 and is likely to continue to rise for some months.

“Given that growth was only 2.2 percent in the third quarter, and that all economists say that was due to the recovery package primarily, there’s a lot of concern that economic growth will be slow through 2010. If that’s true, it will be hard to get the unemployment rate to come back down,” Boushey said.
Fewer jobs mean less buying. “Seventy percent of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer demand, by consumption,” says Boushey. “You can’t have a robust recovery if you’ve got record high shares of folks out of work.”

And for that reason the dip in consumption in the U.S. – due partly also to a rise in savings – is going to hurt the economy and jobs in the rest of the world, which looks to the U.S. as a big market.
Similarly with Western Europe, where unemployment is worsening as official economists boast green shoots of recovery – rather weedy shoots as a commentator called them. In France too unemployment has risen to 10 percent. “Among youth under 25 years of age, unemployment is much worse, and affects almost 25 percent of the population,” Philippe Frémeaux, former director of the Agency for Economic Research and Forecast, and now chief editor of the monthly magazine Alternative Economiques, tells IPS.

“The crisis will continue destroying jobs, which in turn will affect domestic demand,” Xavier Timbeau, director of the French Economic Observatory (OFCE), tells IPS. “In addition, banks and insurance companies suffered losses of well over 1,000 billion euros, and are facing very obscure prospects.”
The statistics themselves are often uncertain, even official ones. In Germany, the Federal Employment Agency reported it expects the number of unemployed to rise to 4.1 million this year. In December it reported a total of 3.3 million jobless, about 8.1 percent of the workforce.

But the Federal Labour Office says unemployment has been declining these past months, and that the number may stop short of four million, though a rise in unemployment is expected this year.
In Britain, meanwhile, a continued rise in unemployment is forecast until at least the middle of the year, to 2.8 million.

Some figures speak of 4.3 percent unemployment in China, but the more likely accepted figure for urban areas is between 8 and 10 percent. And again, these figures may refer to explicit unemployment rather than to large-scale underemployment.

Add that figure to the official unemployment figures in countries as large as China and India, and the number of people counted as unemployed, along with those in vulnerable employment and working poverty, is gigantic, and a very large part of the 1.5 billion that the ILO says are without decent work.
The unemployment rate in India stands officially at 7.32 percent. As with China, the real figures are likely a good deal higher. And in both cases, given the size of the population, that means the real numbers are huge.

*In this set of three reports, IPS correspondents look at the impact of recession by way of unemployment, the push for more people-friendly government, and moves within developing countries to reduce reliance on the industrialised world. [Courtesy IPS]

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