भिडियो हेर्न को लागि तलको बिज्ञापन लाइ हटाउनुहोस्
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Andhra Pradesh is a state located just below the midpoint of the subcontinent. It is India’s own version of the Great Plains, its flat expanses stretching out to the horizon line in every direction with the dull greens and muddy browns of cultivated fields. There are seemingly endless fields. We were there in mid October doing a pan-India bicycle tour, pedaling our way north from Bangalore to a small farming hamlet where we had been invited to stay with a friend’s uncle.
“Just follow the church towers,” we had been told. Sure enough, Brahmanapally was easy to spot from a distance. Its two pink church towers were the tallest thing in sight, only a few palm trees to compete with. It is a town tucked miles off the main highways, split up into two mini villages –- Old and New; one Hindu and one Catholic. The two clusters of homes are separated by one bridge and more than a few cultural antagonisms. We were staying in the Catholic side of town, the “New.” Our host was the priest.
Father Raja and his village had been expecting our arrival and were excited for it. It is not common for Americans to visit such a rural part of India. The region is far removed from India’s tourist belts of fancy hotels and agency-approved restaurants; there is no A/C and the mosquitos come in droves. Brahmanapally is a place of real struggle, a town in transition, where a dependence on cotton has hit people hard. Everyone there knows their farming days are numbered, and the hardship showed upon the faces of those who gathered to welcome us at the church. Each member of the parish was facing his or her own struggles in yet another year with King Cotton failing to bring in a profit.
Mereddy Duggimpudi is one such farmer. He hasn’t had a positive balance in his bank account since 1992. With his wife and grown son’s family beside him, and a backdrop of his latest cotton harvest heaped in fluffy white mounds at the side of his porch, Mereddy explained why it’s been so difficult for him to come out ahead. “Every year I have to take out another loan.”
Like most cotton farmers in Brahmanapally, Mereddy doesn’t have enough surplus capital at the beginning of the April planting season to cover all the costs associated with cotton production. Before the time he can sell to the ginning mills each November, Mereddy must account for seven months of buying seed, fertilizers, pesticides, and paying off day laborer and transportation costs. So he takes out two separate loans every year. One of them covers his farming costs, the other is so his family has enough to eat. The Duggimpudis manage to scrape by on just 10,000 rupees ($200) a month.
“I’m lucky my relatives let me borrow from them at 18% interest,” he said.
Lucky indeed. Many other farmers we spoke with said they were obtaining their loans at an alarmingly high interest rate of 36%. They feel as if they have no choice. Over the past five years, they have all been squeezed by the international market into buying genetically modified BT cotton seeds, as well as expensive pesticides and fertizilers designed by large agrifirms in Europe and the United States. The use of GMO cotton has increased traditional yields fivefold, but has reduced raw cotton prices so dramatically that it hardly makes a difference. The higher yields have had the cascading effect of requiring more day laborers to pick the cotton, and additional transportation fees to move it all to the ginning mills.
“Still, cotton is the only way to rise up,” Mereddy said.
He acknowledges that sizable profits can still be made, but that it all depends on the farmer’s appetite for risk and reward. The best way to get ahead is to lease additional land for the season. But leases require additional loans, and how those investments play out all depends on factors well outside the farmer’s control. Namely, cotton prices on the international market, and the weather.
Mereddy chooses to leave the gambling to his neighbors, and instead sticks with what he knows best: the 10 acres of land he owns and has been farming since he inherited them from his father. That decision comes with its own limitations, however. With no risk comes no reward. Every year Mereddy barely manages to pay off his loans. His last bumper crop was decades ago. “Only 20 years ago have I ever seen money with my own eyes,” he lamented. In that year he had used his surplus to buy seven additional acres of land. He had to sell it soon after to pay for his daughter’s dowry.
It’s been a difficult run for the 53-year-old farmer, and the stress of Mereddy’s cotton woes showed. It was only 11a.m. when we went to talk to him, but already his eyes were red and bleary from the bite of cheap country alcohol. As he sat slouched in his chair, we couldn’t help but think of the name we’d heard townspeople calling him behind his back –– “The Drunkard.” It’s hard to escape the gossip in such a small, enclosed community.
Regardless of what people say about him, Mereddy maintains that he’s content with where things are at the moment; he doesn’t mind forgoing a profit if he can continue to support his family. “I don’t want to come up, I don’t want to come down. Things are fine where they are.” He said with a nod towards his son, who stands to inherit the fields from him.
But that land may not be enough to support his son for very long. Life in Brahmanapally is getting more expensive by the year.
The rocketing ascent in the costs—and comforts—of life are visible everywhere in the village. The homes are solid constructions of concrete, many new enough that the pink and orange paints with which they had first been coated remain smooth, abscent any cracks. They have iron gates at their fronts, the mass-produced fancy kind with lots of superfluous decorative twirls, and tall sheds stand beside the porches to store fluffy mountains of the year’s harvest. Inside the homes are gas stoves running off propane bottles, and flat screen TVs that blare soap operas in Telugu (the South-Central Dravidian language spoken here in Andhra Pradesh). The wealthier families even have backup batteries, to keep their lights and fans running when the power goes out. All these luxuries have been purchased largely with the profits of cotton, or at least with the loans taken out against their land, secured by the power of BT seeds, a few years of good rain, and an exploding global culture of consumption that keeps the looms of China humming.
But the biggest expense, the one that has stretched the citizens of Brahmanapally to their knees, are their children. Almost none of them live in the village. King Cotton is working hard to put 95% of them through boarding school in Hyderabad. Most of the families, with red-ink ledgers that cotton could barely keep down, would bet the farm to put their children through a good degree. Some did bet the farm, every year, and they knew how much it hurt to pray as the pickers went out into the field, knowing that they weren’t really collecting cotton, they were collecting the house, and they never wanted their children to have to know that. Debt is the sacrifice made so that the next generation can move up.
The young generation was in town while we were there, back from school for a two-week vacation. We were a source of tremendous interest to them, generators of electric excitement, and the boys took it upon themselves to be our entourage. They travelled in a pack, whose standard of acceptance was being old enough to swing a cricket bat, and ranged in age from 12 to 22. They would wait patiently outside Father Raja’s house for us to come out, and then would crowd around us, each hurtling his own questions. The boys took us out on the village, a 15-strong band of dragoons that introduced us to anyone we passed.
On the streets we met the girls. The girls stayed at home with their mothers, or sat with them on their dusty porches and gossiped with neighbors. There was much to gossip about. Sound carries far in a quiet village, and the sound of the neighbor’s husband popping the top off a Kingfisher foamer could wake even the sleepiest from a nap. Other people’s family matters, like the Mereddy’s, were a favorite topic of discussion. Father Raja had told us that the whole village knew what we were having for dinner every night, courtesy of the cook. Someone had even sought confirmation of the menu.
It was no surprise, then, that our passage with an army of escorts made the streets stop; the women smiling and the men, in a separate group, leaning back and watch us go by. Crowds seemed to gather around whichever porch had arrested us. They asked us questions for a while, but nobody over 25 spoke much English, so the interactions were simple. We often spent meetings just observing one another — they watched us drink our tea, we watched them in the business of their lives.
भिडियो हेर्न को लागि तलको बिज्ञापन लाइ हटाउनुहोस्
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