Would You?

To be a farmer in India takes so much more effort that I ever thought as someone who simply consumes the food produce. It is amazing how much these farmers have to have faith in so many unknown and unpredictable factors that have proven unreliable. If one factor of the extensive process fails the whole livelihood of a whole family and anyone in the community who depended on them for food and a repayment of lent money is now severely threatened. For example, if there is a drought and then an excess of rain washes away all that was sown in the land, the farmers are completely out of luck. Even provided the farmers do harvest what they’ve sown, they then proceed to try and get a fair price for what they do produce because they have debts to pay on their seed purchases and other supplies to make the crops grow. It seems that farming is pretty risky business, so I am find myself wondering why so many people (about 75% or Indians) do this potentially costly, backbreaking work when any reward at all is not guaranteed.
Much of the land in India is very arable and the warmer climate allows for more than the one growing season and thereby it would seem that farming in this country could be highly successful. India actually has a surplus of food that it is being exported to other countries even though many of its own citizens are starving and there are thousands of farmer suicides each year. Where did things go wrong? It seems that before colonizers came in people were much better able to provide for themselves without the competition of today’s Multinational Corporations. To date back to the research I did on the Green Revolution earlier this semester, because of the role India was pretty much forced to play in World War II this country was left deprived of many resources and that’s why cheap goods from subsidized farming done in the US came in and destroyed their markets. On top of that, the farmers were given seeds for crops ill-suited to their land and huge mega-projects in the form of dams either flooded the good land upstream or dried out the land downstream. Farming in India seems to have a completely different face today than it has ever had. In this country I see so many examples of extreme contrasts as the consequences of globalization and I think farming is just one of these. The farmers are trying to use farming techniques that are wise and have worked for centuries on their lands but outside factors are undercutting their practices in the markets and the whole practice is being negatively manipulated by the technologies of the Green Revolution and former president Nehru’s “modern temples,” the dams.
It’s clear that there are discouraging factors within the faming industry and it looks like these farmers a trapped. Who is doing the trapping? It would be really easy to just blame the large agri-businesses and government schemes for the problems, and granted they seem to be the most prominent instigators of the hardships placed on farmers, but we all need to look at ourselves too. We are the consumers and thereby benefit tremendously from the labour of people who we will never even meet. From my mom’s dad on back in that side of my family they were all farmers and worked hard in the fields and supporting their family and, although I have had only a few opportunities to do field work in my life, I can say that I am not willing to easily give up the lifestyle I have developed as a student to grow all my own food. I enjoy a little hard labour every once in awhile, but farming is more than exercise and, being honest, I am not willing to give up my hopes for a career that has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture and I think there are many other people who share my view. So what do we do? I know that buying locally, organically, and supporting businesses like Fair Trade are viable options, but I am a college student who needs to try and save at every corner. Is the cost of my education worth supporting US agricultural subsidies that aid in the oppression of farmers who already have to take the risk in simply planting their seeds?