Asia Times: Farmers blossom under IT revolution


	January 27, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Farmers blossom under IT revolution
By Ranjit Devraj

BANGALORE - Roses are doing more for Basavanna than "ragi", the coarse grain that his peasant family grew for generations in the small hamlet of Devenhalli near this bustling capital city of India's southern Karnataka state.

"I earned four times more, growing roses last year, than what I would normally have earned from my small plot of land. I have finally been able to pay off my debts and keep my children in school," he says.

A new optimism is spreading in village households across the lush rural landscape outside Bangalore, a city that now figures prominently on the global information technology (IT) map.

Globalization is also touching the doors of hamlets like Devenhalli. Its effects can be seen in the neat rows of air- conditioned "polyhouses" (large metal frames covered with translucent polythene) full of carnations grown for local and international markets. Gladioli, gerbera, roses and other flowers with a growing demand in European and East Asian flower markets, are bringing prosperity to once poor peasants like Basavanna.

He has a contract to supply the flowers to a large Bangalore firm, which does business with buyers in Israel, the Netherlands, the United States and Japan. "It is much more than what I can ever get growing ragi - I hope the business continues," he says.

There are risks too. Exporting firms can often reject an entire flower crop, which fails to meet stringent international quality standards, without paying compensation. The flower growers are also bound by contract not to find other exporters, though they can sell the rejected flowers locally, before the blooms wilt. An alternative for growers is to take their flowers to the daily morning auctions conducted by the Karnataka Agro Industries Corporation (KAIC), where exporters bid and the competition is keen enough to ensure sales.

It is at the Bangalore auctions that IT has finally begun to touch the lives of the peasants-turned-flower farmers, specially since the year 1999 when the old "open-cry" system at the KAIC center turned digital. The digital sales" have pushed the flower business up from a mere US$50,000 annually two years ago to well over half a million dollars now.

Nothing shows the sea change that is sweeping farming in Karnataka, more than KAIC's plans to switch from the traditional areas of fertilizers and farm tools to horticulture. ''We plan to be facilitators in horticulture, food processing, and other sunrise agri-projects,'' says KAIC's managing director T D Raghunandan.

Among the innovative projects being promoted by KAIC is ostrich farming. This is new to India, but has enriched farmers in South Africa who sell ostrich skin for making high-quality, leather cowboy boots.

According to leading Indian economist M N Panini, who has studied extensively, the impact of globalization on Karnataka's agriculture, this has brought tremendous gains to the peasants. "Farmers are now confident that agriculture can actually yield high returns and that they do not have to depend on unreliable government support to protect their interests," says Panini.

The Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) too says that the forces of globalization can be harnessed to tackle rural poverty in developing nations. "Globally, larger and freer flows of trade and investment have created new opportunities," notes IFAD's "Rural Poverty Report 2000-2001" due to be released at the UN headquarters in New York in February.

According to IFAD, set up two decades ago by the United Nations to combat global hunger and poverty, three fourths of the world's poor live in rural areas of developing nations. Improving rural incomes is the key to raising their living standards, it says. More interestingly, the new globalization-linked farm practices in Karnataka, have helped landless, low-caste farm workers, who are beginning to dictate wages and terms of work.

These are among the poorest Indians, who, in other parts of the country, have to work in harsh conditions for a pittance for feudal landlords. Now they work on the floriculture farms of big landowners, who in turn work for modern companies observing modern day labor practices.

"No laborer comes to work before eight in the morning or stays on the fields beyond two in the afternoon, unless paid overtime," says Panini. "Working in a floriculture farm is actually prestigious for an ordinary laborer because it provides steady, round-the-year employment in a modern factory-like atmosphere with relations strictly impersonal and matters like caste-equations becoming irrelevant," he adds.

According to Panini, the new developments are doing what decades of official policies, which were meant to help the poorest Indians, failed to do.

Floriculture, as practised by the big exporting firms, is labor-intensive. According to official estimates, this employs more than 100 people per hectare. Floriculture workers, specially women, carry out a variety of tasks like watering, spraying fertilizers and insecticides, weeding, temperature and humidity maintenance, besides harvesting the flowers.

As big city floriculture experts pour in to advise the flower farmers, hotels have sprung up in the villages around Bangalore, generating new jobs for the villagers.

Roadside stalls on the highway leading to the flower farms, stock seeds, fertilizers and even earthworms imported from the Philippines.

However, there is need for caution, says Panini. While the forces of globalization have helped the peasants, these have also exposed them to the risk from failures in global markets, he says. The flower farmers will have to understand that they have much more to lose now than before in the event of market failures or adverse global business factors, he explains.

Panini refers to a spate of suicides in recent years by farmers who had substituted cotton for traditional crops and found themselves deep in debt, when the crops failed.

"The lesson to be learned is that globalization can bring prosperity, but carries risks against which the government must ... support farmers at critical junctures rather than oppose globalization altogether," he says.

"There is [also] a need to ensure that floriculture, with all its fertilizers and insecticides, does not permanently damage the soil," he adds.

(Inter Press Service)