THOUGHTS on Maharashtra
State, INDIA
Of all the exploited workers in the world today, the vast majority continue
to live and work on the land
The venue of this section of Women’s Agricultural Labor Project is Maharashtra State. (Mumbai is the port city.) The land is quite poor, most of it ancient black lava. Rainfall is low and about 5% of the state is irrigated. Small amounts of acreage are in wheat and vegetables; and next to the ocean in the west, rice is grown. Jowar (large millet) is the state’s principal crop, followed by cotton. Jowar grows well in the black heavy soils, doesn't require much manure, and can be raised year after year on the same land. Cotton was first introduced by the British East India Company in 1839; and they hired planters from the United States to teach cultivators to grow and clean cotton. Prior to this time, self-sufficient production of garden (vadis) crops of plantains, vegetables, beets, potatoes, onions and chilies grew on the land.
In the early 1990s, the Indian elite embraced World Bank and International Monetary Fund neo-liberal restructuring that placed emphasis on production for export rather than domestic consumption. More acreage was allotted to cotton. However, competition is in a market based pricing arena where the U.S. government subsidizes its corporate cotton growers has driven the market price of cotton down. Wealthy landowners of countries like India producing for export compete by expanding their vast tracks of land through impoverishing small cultivators and further exploiting field labor. Seed prices have inflated 300 to 500 per cent and fertilizer prices are beyond the reach of all but the large landowners. In1991 the cost of cultivating an acre of cotton was around $50. Today it is $300. In the past, peasants used credit and loans to survive bad years. Loans and credit are no longer available from traditional sources, but from the seed and fertilizer sellers. Loans are exceedingly hard to obtain and interest is in the 40 plus percentile. The government further implemented World Bank and IMF mandated economic reforms by making deep cuts in life support systems and in reducing agricultural budgetary expenditures from 14% in 1991 to 5.9% in 2005.
The resulting situation has become one where the majority of small and medium sized cultivators have not be able to grow enough on their small plots to feed themselves and their families. Approximately 60% of his $12 per month income goes for transportation, education, food, clothes and fuel costs. Precious little is left to hire labor to work along side the family in the fields or to pay for chronic and seasonal illnesses or common work accidents. Upwards of 75% must find supplementary employment and hire out their labor, locally if possible. If all else fails and they are unable to function at this level and unable to secure loans, many loose the land and join the ranks of landless peasant laborers to become part of vast internal migrations from one place to another looking for work on the land or in factories. Others have chosen suicide. Indian journalist P. Sainath reports more than 10,000 per year. These are males, the ones who own the land in India. The option for those left behind---wife, children, elderly---is to become migrants. And, as elsewhere, poverty forces a number of the family’s young girls and women into selling their sexual labor.
This is the context within which movements of rural poor peasants resist and organize for systemic changes. Their numbers and leadership are prominent in movements targeting environmental destruction, growing terminator seed hegemony, land eviction, and inflated prices in state-controlled markets. Women are a part of this larger movement and at the same time have developed women peasant organizations of considerable numbers and organizational strength that target alcohol consumption, dowry practices, rape, and domestic violence.
An impressive and quite distinct factor in these peasant movements and in urban labor movements is the active participation of formally educated from elite backgrounds. The cultural and political inheritance of Gandhi, as well as generations of political and spiritual intellectuals and reformers, as well as a Marxist and Maoist analysis adapted to Indian conditions, informs many of these individuals. Obviously quite diverse, but the one thing that unites is the opposition to exploitation in its many forms and a determination to building a society based on social and economic justice for all peoples.
I know of no other country in Asia, or elsewhere for that matter, where this solidarity is so profound and long lasting. Certainly the wealthy of India’s embrace of World Bank and IMF structural reforms that has brought them into the monied side of a worldwide growing inequality is a further galvanizing reality informing this generations long process. Indian has 53 billionaires that own 31% of the gross domestic profit in an economy that has an annual growth rate 9%/ per year. This puts them fourth on the list of the world’s billionaires after the United States, Russia and Germany.
Saundra Sturdevant, 2009
sandysturdevant@gmail.com