The crisis has underscored the problems facing Indian agriculture as the population expands at the same time that water resources come under greater pressure. Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala - via New York Times (Most Emailed)
Interesting look at massive drought from an economic perspective, but skips over the broader issues: without water, food, or money, what will the farmers do? And what will the educated urban entrepreneurs eat?
But the cautious optimism about the broader economy has been tempered by a historic summertime drought that has underscored the stubborn fact that many people are largely untouched by the country’s progress. India’s new economy may be based on software, services and high technology, but hundreds of millions of Indians still look to the sky for their livelihoods; more than half the country’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture for a living even though agriculture represents only about 17 percent of the total economy.
One problem now, as opposed to in the 1960s, is that there are no obvious technological breakthroughs to radically change the status quo. During the green revolution, India introduced high-yield seeds and fertilizers and expanded irrigation. Today, the challenge is more nuanced, involving a nationwide coordination effort to improve irrigation, better capture rainwater and conserve groundwater while lifting production — the type of complicated management task that critics say is rarely the strong suit of the Indian bureaucracy. Every summer, India awaits the monsoon. Some years bring too much rain and catastrophic flooding; others bring too little rain. This summer, rainfall is down 25 percent, and roughly half of the rural districts were declared drought zones. As production has fallen, prices have risen for staples like rice.
This story warrants substantial follow-up and long-term monitoring, as drought is an issue of growing importance worldwide. Though not mentioned at all in this article "climate change" is underway. It has been simplified and diminished lately in media to a vague threat of rising tides and warmer weather, but droughts are becoming increasingly serious in food-producing regions globally--including the western U.S.A. With crop failure in India comes famine and further environmental decline, while the global economic system looks to agribusiness to find a scientific cure--for obscene profits--with increasing damage to the environment. GMO crops and chemical fertilizers and pesticides deplete the soil, impoverish the farmers, and tie subsistence communities to irrecoverable debt, while other enterprising global businesses--like Coca Cola--build bottling plants and deplete the ground water supply, leaving the farmers with no options, no water, no food, and mounting debt. When the farmers lose, we all lose.