In a place where population growth is moving incredibly fast, added pressure on farmers in India in the wake of crushing debt and failed crops calls for a new agricultural approach. Genetic modification and organic farming present promising solutions. Young Explorer Andrew Flachs will investigate the effect of both growing strategies by interviewing farmers in Southern India.
“You’re going back?” Anthropologists have to get used to this question from their family and friends, because we specialize in long-term fieldwork. Going back to the same places, in my case to the same handful of genetically modified Bt and organic cotton planting villages in Telangana, India between 2012 and 2014, allows us to get a better perspective on the rhythms that define life in different places, even if it means more time away from home.
This is truer for the study of agriculture than for many other research topics: one or two bad seasons aren’t enough to study the future of farming, especially when I’m trying to get to the bottom of something as contentious and important as the future of agriculture in a country that one-seventh of the world calls home. This summer is my chance to follow up on interviews, surveys, plant collections, and informal tea breaks that I use as data.
It’s been an eventful year for cotton in India. In an encompassing review of the tragic epidemic of farmer suicide, a social statistician concluded that he could find no systematic relationship between suicide and Bt cotton planting, despite longstanding claims that Bt cotton caused suicides. An insect research team discovered resistance to the genetically modified Bt cotton genes across five continents, compromising the effectiveness of the genetic modification itself. Some of my own work suggests that genetically modified cotton continues to pose a problem for farmer learning, hurting its long-term sustainability, and a three year field trial showed that organic production can have similar yields and be more profitable for soybeans and cotton when compared with conventional and genetically modified crops, suggesting that both forms of production have potential.
All of this happened in a year when India cultivated almost a third of the world’s cotton fields, and over 90% of cotton farmers planted Bt cotton.
How to sort through all this? Is organic better than genetically modified? These are big questions, difficult to answer because they ask, “What does it mean to say that something is successful?” Do a lot of farmers plant the genetically modified Bt cotton? Absolutely. Have yields increased and sprays decreased since they started? Definitely, if not as dramatically or consistently as we might’ve hoped.
But for my work as an anthropologist, it all comes down to the farmers. No solution, organic or genetically modified, can be truly sustainable if farmers can’t try out these technologies and trust their results, and that’s the kind of information that gets lost in the sweeping national surveys or field trials mentioned above. In fact, something always gets lost: for example, what does it mean that cotton pesticide sprays aren’t disappearing as quickly as scientists hoped? In an area where farmers plant food and medicine crops right next to their cotton, it means that pesticide consumption remains high. How can we judge the impacts of organic or Bt cotton? The only way we can—ask the farmers, year after year, after year.