The saga of marginalised farmers
Monday, 27 July 2009
Maswood Alam Khan
We who live in towns and cities and occasionally make some jaunts to villages for a picnic or for a sojourn in our grandparents' homes, but never did spend our childhood in villages, are starkly unaware how a farmer had lived his life in the past and now has been marginalized to eke out a miserable existence.
With wallets full of money we walk into a flea market or a grocery store and feel that it is our basic right to find rows and rows, aisles and aisles of shelf and space filled and stacked with cereals, meats, fishes, vegetables, cooking oils, fruits, dairy products etc.-all fresh and crisp to be available in large quantities, at modest prices, and in the best condition imaginable.
That is our way of urban life, our angle of looking at shops. But, have we ever paused in our shopping sprees to reflect on how a farmer in a village toiled to grow those fresh produces and whether he did get the genuine price for his physical labor? Do we know the social cost of what we are buying to dress our dinner tables?
On Thursday evening as I was returning home after a few rounds of brisk walk in a nearby field I was humbly approached by an old man in his sixties, a basket full of mangoes on his head, begging me for buying at least half a dozen of his mangoes at half the price he expected to sell at in the market. "Why so much discount?" I enquired.
"Not even a dozen out of sixty mangoes I could sell the whole day. Everybody suspected the mangoes were laced with poisonous chemicals for artificial ripening and a few though were eager to buy offered only one-third of my cost price."
In spite of myself, I bought half a dozen 'fazli' mangoes from the frustrated hawker. Back home, I peeled the skin of a mango off, cut it into pieces and sampled two small bits. It was simply uneatable. The probing buyers in the market were right in their suspicions.
Has the hawker cheated me? No. It must be the wholesale market from where the hawker had bought the mangoes the responsibility of such fraudulent transactions should rest with.
Nowadays, many conscious citizens prefer to shop at franchised stores and shy away from flea markets because they are concerned about the unknown effects of genetically modified food products, beefs injected with growth hormones, bananas ripened by hazardous chemicals, fishes kept fresh with formalin acid, chickens raised on antibiotics, and the like.
If we all the buyers become so hypochondriac and go shopping only in franchised stores to buy organic foods branded and seal-packed by mega agrifirms where will the old man with a basket full of fruits go hawking? What fate a peddler selling vegetables on footpaths would wait for?
Where will a marginalized farmer go for a living when he will not be hired in his own village to till the landlord's cultivable field on crop-sharing basis?
If we dig deep to probe into the genealogical background of the old man who sold mangoes to me on Thursday or into the genealogical tree of a rickshaw-puller who transports you to your office every morning there is a chance that we may discover that their ancestors could never dream that their sons or their grandsons would one day have to sell their physical labour to earn their breads.
There was a maxim that "our farmers would not need cash for their living if they had not to buy kerosene and salt that could not be grown in their own fields". There was a time, not many years back, when there was a farmer who did not own at least ten acres of cultivable land.
Our farmers "hauled the hay that fed the cows that fertilized the fields that grew the grains that fattened the ducks and thickened the milk that fattened the calves and beefed up oxen that pulled the plough and supplied the meat that fed the family that hauled the hay".
But, those pristine days of rural families making a living off their own land cultivated in traditional methods are over and the rhythms and variables of small-time mixed farming are gone forever. The heroic days of the self-sufficient farm with its varied crops and animals are now mere a chapter of our distant rural history. Pressures of industrialization have increased making traditional modes of farming economically unviable leaving the farmers too weak to run with the machines.
A great many small farmers, suddenly finding themselves unfit-and, indeed, almost irrelevant-in the face of a radically altered rural dynamics have chosen to leave the countryside in search of an uncertain future in urban settings. Farm population is fast declining in rural areas. The number of old people hawking mangoes in cities and the number of younger people pulling vans and rickshaws in towns are increasing at rapid paces.
A great many Bangladeshi family farmers, caught in a whirlpool of pressures and demands for which they were largely unprepared, are gradually finding themselves out of their farming business or being reduced to one anomalous link in a food-production chain that is controlled by big players of agribusiness firms busy maximizing their profits, leaving the marginal farmers at their complete mercy and also leaving the hawkers of unbranded fruits or vegetables, who were once marginal farmers themselves and whose ancestors were landlords, to wait for the day when they would have to drop dead finding no means for a living-neither in his own village nor in a town nearby or far-flung.
The writer is a banker. His
e-address: maswood@hotmail.com
We who live in towns and cities and occasionally make some jaunts to villages for a picnic or for a sojourn in our grandparents' homes, but never did spend our childhood in villages, are starkly unaware how a farmer had lived his life in the past and now has been marginalized to eke out a miserable existence.
With wallets full of money we walk into a flea market or a grocery store and feel that it is our basic right to find rows and rows, aisles and aisles of shelf and space filled and stacked with cereals, meats, fishes, vegetables, cooking oils, fruits, dairy products etc.-all fresh and crisp to be available in large quantities, at modest prices, and in the best condition imaginable.
That is our way of urban life, our angle of looking at shops. But, have we ever paused in our shopping sprees to reflect on how a farmer in a village toiled to grow those fresh produces and whether he did get the genuine price for his physical labor? Do we know the social cost of what we are buying to dress our dinner tables?
On Thursday evening as I was returning home after a few rounds of brisk walk in a nearby field I was humbly approached by an old man in his sixties, a basket full of mangoes on his head, begging me for buying at least half a dozen of his mangoes at half the price he expected to sell at in the market. "Why so much discount?" I enquired.
"Not even a dozen out of sixty mangoes I could sell the whole day. Everybody suspected the mangoes were laced with poisonous chemicals for artificial ripening and a few though were eager to buy offered only one-third of my cost price."
In spite of myself, I bought half a dozen 'fazli' mangoes from the frustrated hawker. Back home, I peeled the skin of a mango off, cut it into pieces and sampled two small bits. It was simply uneatable. The probing buyers in the market were right in their suspicions.
Has the hawker cheated me? No. It must be the wholesale market from where the hawker had bought the mangoes the responsibility of such fraudulent transactions should rest with.
Nowadays, many conscious citizens prefer to shop at franchised stores and shy away from flea markets because they are concerned about the unknown effects of genetically modified food products, beefs injected with growth hormones, bananas ripened by hazardous chemicals, fishes kept fresh with formalin acid, chickens raised on antibiotics, and the like.
If we all the buyers become so hypochondriac and go shopping only in franchised stores to buy organic foods branded and seal-packed by mega agrifirms where will the old man with a basket full of fruits go hawking? What fate a peddler selling vegetables on footpaths would wait for?
Where will a marginalized farmer go for a living when he will not be hired in his own village to till the landlord's cultivable field on crop-sharing basis?
If we dig deep to probe into the genealogical background of the old man who sold mangoes to me on Thursday or into the genealogical tree of a rickshaw-puller who transports you to your office every morning there is a chance that we may discover that their ancestors could never dream that their sons or their grandsons would one day have to sell their physical labour to earn their breads.
There was a maxim that "our farmers would not need cash for their living if they had not to buy kerosene and salt that could not be grown in their own fields". There was a time, not many years back, when there was a farmer who did not own at least ten acres of cultivable land.
Our farmers "hauled the hay that fed the cows that fertilized the fields that grew the grains that fattened the ducks and thickened the milk that fattened the calves and beefed up oxen that pulled the plough and supplied the meat that fed the family that hauled the hay".
But, those pristine days of rural families making a living off their own land cultivated in traditional methods are over and the rhythms and variables of small-time mixed farming are gone forever. The heroic days of the self-sufficient farm with its varied crops and animals are now mere a chapter of our distant rural history. Pressures of industrialization have increased making traditional modes of farming economically unviable leaving the farmers too weak to run with the machines.
A great many small farmers, suddenly finding themselves unfit-and, indeed, almost irrelevant-in the face of a radically altered rural dynamics have chosen to leave the countryside in search of an uncertain future in urban settings. Farm population is fast declining in rural areas. The number of old people hawking mangoes in cities and the number of younger people pulling vans and rickshaws in towns are increasing at rapid paces.
A great many Bangladeshi family farmers, caught in a whirlpool of pressures and demands for which they were largely unprepared, are gradually finding themselves out of their farming business or being reduced to one anomalous link in a food-production chain that is controlled by big players of agribusiness firms busy maximizing their profits, leaving the marginal farmers at their complete mercy and also leaving the hawkers of unbranded fruits or vegetables, who were once marginal farmers themselves and whose ancestors were landlords, to wait for the day when they would have to drop dead finding no means for a living-neither in his own village nor in a town nearby or far-flung.
The writer is a banker. His
e-address: maswood@hotmail.com