Even in the middle of January, a dense heat weighs on our chests as we shelter under a jagged acacia. Around us, dark hard-baked soil is scattered with the desiccated remnants of a failed harvest. It is quiet but for the incongruously cheerful chirrups of tiny birds hiding in the trees, and the occasional honking passage of distant motorbikes, or of yellow-roofed autorickshaws overflowing with passengers.
The farm is Tulsiram Kanere’s. He thinks he’s now about 63, and has worked this land since early childhood, when his father Vinayak would show him how to sow seeds, how to lead oxen to the fields and drive the plough. Tulsiram left school at 10 to help his father full time, and became the head of the family in his mid-twenties after Vinayak collapsed in the fields and died. Life has never been easy for farmers in Jalna district, in India’s western state of Maharashtra, about two hundred miles inland from the giant metropolis of Mumbai. But the past few years, Tulsiram says, have been unprecedented in their harshness.
Indian farmers are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change – and nowhere more so than in Jalna, which has always been one of the country’s most water-deprived areas. To its west, a hill range blocks moist air from the Arabian Sea. To the east, the land stretches for 600 miles. No major river runs anywhere near Jalna and, thanks in part to government corruption, irrigation is scant.
In recent years, stark changes in rainfall patterns have pushed Jalna’s farmers into crisis. More often than not, the annual volume of rain during the monsoon season, from June to September, has been falling far short of the historical average. And what rain does come, comes increasingly through sudden huge downpours that do more harm than good, the water saturating the earth and running off, taking fertile topsoil with it. As conditions worsen for farmers in Maharashtra, an epidemic of suicide among them has attracted national concern. Before the year is out, another 3,927 will have taken their own lives.
Under a soft white cap, Tulsiram’s face is thickly creased, with furrows bursting like butterfly wings from the edges of his eyes, the product of a ready grin and years of sunburn. A tasselled lilac scarf hangs over a short-sleeved white tunic; below that a coarse white sarong, hitched up on one side to reveal a shin zigzagged with scars from sharp crop stalks. In the September harvest, Tulsiram says, he gathered less than 75 kilograms of millet – from land that had produced more than 2 tonnes in good years. The yields of his maize and cotton crops were almost as bad. ‘It was said that there would be good rain, so I spent a lot on seeds, fertiliser, everything,’ says Tulsiram, his grin effaced, gnarled hands kneading at his waist.
He waited in vain for the rain that would bring a profitable harvest, gazing at clouds that skulked overhead for days on end but never burst. Then, one day in August, the weather forecast said there would be little rain for the rest of the season. ‘That,’ he says, ‘was when I realised everything I had invested was lost.’
Tulsiram is not at the bottom of India’s wealth ladder. With 10 acres of farmland, he’s much better off than the millions of landless poor. But the succession of droughts has been steadily eroding his resources, forcing him to start selling his animals and rack up growing amounts of debt.
His travails are mirrored by increasing numbers of farmers worldwide – a struggle of fearsome importance. The world’s population is set to reach nearly ten billion by 2050. With growing affluence in middle-income countries, global food demand will rise even more quickly. Yet as climate change takes hold, even traditional levels of output are becoming impossible to achieve in many places. Around the world, crops are being pummelled by repeated droughts and temperatures well outside the normal range. A few months after I meet Tulsiram, a new US study will reach a shocking conclusion: climate change has already begun reducing the yields of major crops, snatching thirty-five trillion calories a year from the global food supply.
Now Tulsiram, and millions of other Indian farmers, are at the centre of one of the most urgent problems of our age. Will humanity manage to feed its surging population from land swept by rising temperature, and all that comes with it? And are we willing to tolerate radical, even unsettling, technological interventions to do so?
***
To its opponents, the biotech industry is not a source of salvation for struggling farmers but a key driver of their problems. And the concerns about agricultural distress in eastern Maharashtra have made Usha’s and Tulsiram’s region a focal point for these activists – chief among them Vandana Shiva. A sexagenarian with a grey ponytail and a beatific smile, Vandana has become known as the ‘rock star’ of the global fight against Big Biotech, delivering thunderous speeches to adoring activists from Hamburg to San Francisco. Her fans include Prince Charles, who has installed a bust of her at his Gloucestershire estate.
For Vandana, the entire green revolution was a grievous mistake, locking farmers into a system of expensive industrial agriculture that saddled them with debt while degrading their soils. Now, she believes, that grim saga is culminating with climate change: the outcome of a pathological economic system that has modern agriculture − with its heavy machinery and fossil fuel-derived fertilisers − at its heart.
As one of the drivers of global warming, Vandana argues, industrial farming − especially in its most advanced form of GM agriculture − can form no part of the solution. She urges farmers to turn instead to traditional seeds and organic techniques honed over centuries, which she promises will protect crop yields from climate stresses far better than the products of the biotech industry. ‘We already have the seeds of climate resilience,’ she tells me. ‘And if Gandhi could pull down the British cotton empire with a spinning wheel, then we just need a simple seed to save us from this empire over life.’
We are sitting in the New Delhi offices of her activist group Navdanya, housed in a few flats on a residential street in Hauz Khas, an upscale area that grew around a medieval water tank and is now best known for its trendy restaurants. From outside come the grunts of passing vehicles and the yells of hawkers, and the acrid air of the world’s most polluted megacity.
Like Usha, Vandana was raised in a prosperous family and studied in North America – but there the stories diverge. On vacation from her doctoral course in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, in her home district in the foothills of the Himalaya, Vandana became involved with local women who were trying to stop deforestation by hugging trees en masse. Since then she’s become an icon in the movement against industrial degradation of the environment, and a missionary for traditional farming practices. But it’s for her fierce opposition to genetic engineering that Vandana has become most celebrated, with her warnings of massive health risks and a future of ‘corporate dictatorship’ over food.
Her defiant position has put her on the other side of the debate from some of the biggest players in the environmental movement – notably Bill Gates, whose huge philanthropic foundation is pouring billions into helping farmers adjust to climate change, and who has repeatedly called GM technology a vital weapon in the fight.
‘Bill Gates is a big mischief maker,’ Vandana tells me sharply. But that is precisely how her many critics see her: as a firebrand without relevant expertise (her PhD thesis was on the philosophy of quantum theory), who has slowed the implementation of a potentially vital technology. To observers like the environmental writer Mark Lynas, she has become a ‘demagogue’, guilty of the same offences committed by opaquely funded climate change denialists: making grand allegations unsupported by scientific evidence.
Leading bodies such as the World Health Organisation have found no evidence that GM foods currently on the market are any less safe than those created through traditional breeding processes. A handful of studies over the past twenty years, claiming to have found proof that a GM-heavy diet can harm animals, have been roundly dismissed by leading scientists as methodologically flawed.
Vandana, however, believes those scientists have avoided seriously investigating the safety of GM food, scared off by the power of ‘Big Ag’ conglomerates. ‘The philosophy is: don’t look, don’t see, and you can declare it safe,’ she says. In private conversation she still deploys her full range of rhetorical devices, her pace of speech alternately racing and crawling, often following a point with a momentous pause, staring at me to gauge the effect of her words. And the effect, over the years, has been profound.
Vandana’s impact has been most obvious in India, where she has taken part in several government consultations on biotech regulation, with top politicians writing glowing forewords for some of her many books. No GM food crop has ever been approved in India − only a pest-resistant strain of cotton – and, for all their long-term hopes, industry figures like Usha see little chance that the government will change its wary stance in the near future.
But Vandana’s influence reaches far beyond her homeland. She has helped to rally opposition to GM technology around the world – most notably in Europe, where there is still no large-scale production of GM crops. The European situation has had major ripple effects in Africa, where governments have resisted the technology, reasoning that concerns about contamination could hit vital exports to Europe. Scientists in countries like Tanzania and Kenya, battling to soften climate change’s impact on food production, have railed against the restrictions. If they are right, anti-GM activism is crippling one of the world’s best hopes for avoiding mass hunger in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where many are already chronically underfed.
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