DROUGHT AND DEPRIVATION:
Socio-Ecology of Stress, Survival and Surrender
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Paper presented at the Seminar on Control of Drought Desertification and Famine - 17-18th May 1986, Indian International Centre, New Delhi.
Drought and Deprivation
Socio-Ecology of Stress, Survival and Surrender
Part - One - Context
One:
Malone : My father died of starvation in the black ‘47. May be you have
heard of it ?
Violet : The Famine ?
Malone : No, the starvation. When a country is full of food and exporting it,
there can be no famine
Second:
Planner : Country has exceeded the expectation of even the most optimist
forecaster. It has a surplus of 30 million tonnes of foodgrain.
A Citizen : But how could surplus exist together with deprivation. The
technology of surplus generation is the reason for stagnation in drought prone areas.
Planners : How unpatriotic you are, you belittle such a great achievement of
food policy. It was in the best public interest.
Citizen : Protecting those producers whom market also supports is in public
interest. But how come the interest of those publics which bear the fluctuations of climate and market most is not served.
Three : "If sufficient biomass could be generated there would also be none
of those tensions we see around nature protection areas today.....
(For instance) in Punjab and Haryana, where trees are few but where green revolution has meant an enormous increase in biomass from crop lands".
Skeptic : But how is it that majority of poor farmers (as discovered through a
survey) in 1979 drought in Western Haryana disposed of livestock because of fodder stress.
How come that prices of dry fodder during this drought had increased to that of cereals (e.g. 90-120/quintal). Where did surplus biomass from irrigated areas go ? Why did fodder price increase in dry parts of Haryana, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh so much during 1979 ?
Are some commodities more mobile than others ? Whether ecology of stress and economics of surplus are related in such a manner that more increase in aggregate level of biomass doesn’t alleviate the problems of poor ?
Why it is that violence around grazing lands was noted even in Haryana and some parts of Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan near areas of forests reserves or biomass surplus ?
Four :
Activist A : Nothing could take us closer to Gandhi’s concept of gramswarajya than striving to create village ecosystem which are biologically diverse and self-reliant in their local biomass needs to the maximum extent possible ........
Activist B : But does the myth of self-reliant ‘village republic’ which Gandhi propagated provides a helpful metaphor to portray desired or expected realities ? Does local self-reliance have any meaning in a capitalistic society based on inter-penetrating factor and product markets. Do needs of a village and that of various classes inhabiting it converge ?
How is it that the foundation of micro-economic theories (which explain behaviour of markets by aggregating the sum of individual actions) disputed and discredited find such a great support in writings of an otherwise committed socially conscious activist ?
Five : a) "People must be saved from their own improvidence"
b) "..... As a consequence, the local inhabitants everywhere have been playing a role on par with the commercial interests in destroying the capital of India’s living resources."
c)"In conclusion, the ecological crisis in the agro-ecosystem is found to emerge from man’s irresponsible inteReference: with the soil and water systems than any disastrous natural situation. In an attempt to increase the economic returns from the land in the short run, biological productivity is threatened in the long run".
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How is it that the perceptions of even very committed and concerned scientists about the problem of ecological and economic stress signify assumptions of a homogeneous rural society or village ‘community’. The use of phrase like local people or men vs. environment or village communities appear innocuous. However, how do we explain the contradictions with regard to access that people within a village locality or a group have to public communal and private resources. To what extent have we learnt over all these years as far as conceptual clarity of the problem and its definition is concerned.
Six : "Solving the Grazing lands problems is the most different environmental problem in the country today".
"The effect of hazardous grazing on the environment is alarming. Land degradation due to over grazing loads to desert like conditions which in turn reduce animal productivity and increase the economic pressure on human being who depend on animals for their livelihood"
Converting a political problem into an environmental problem is one way of shifting responsibilities for degradation in the economic conditions of a certain class of people vis-a-vis others. As regards the concepts like over grazing, population pressure etc. the derive their meaning in particular technological and understandable context. Not everybody has access to a particular grazing land. Not all species contribute to regeneration or degeneration equally in a given region. Same species of livestock under different management conditions may change its behaviour with regard to browsing or grazing pattern. How do we define the so-called carrying capacity and over grazing. Is it a purely technological and ecological question. And if it is then one should not be surprised that National Task Force on National Grazing Policy recommended amongst other things sedenterisation of the migratory flocks, considers herdsmen responsible for any damage caused to the agricultural field and plantation suggests people to adopt stall feeding systems and pleads for closing the critical areas like catchment of major rivers besides asking for complete stoppage of grazing by sheep and goat in the forest areas.
How is it that such contrasting perceptions and policy suggestions as emanating in the National Grazing Land Policy document and CSE report used same concept, phrases and definitions. Not only that the technical definitions, for example, with regard to status of grazing land are based on the work of the same professional who was also the member of the National Task Force.
Obviously if drought, desertification and famine are observed to occur through same logical sequence of steps but with different implications then the science leading to such an analysis must be suspect.
The politics of conceptual frameworks used to analyse a problem and generate alternatives has been a subject of long standing interest and debate in social sciences. The evolution of welfare economics, institutional economics on the hand and the ecological economics, political economy on the other hand provide a perspective on definition of the problems in a historical context. This is a context to which we turn next.
Part - Two
Stress, Survival and Surrender
How does ecological stress generate different survival prospects for people having varying access to factor and product markets over a period of time. How is that some people accumulate surplus while others stagnate, surrender and subjugate their free will to those who find this stress as an opportunity for accumulation.
Whether the relationship between factor and product markets and evolution of economic laws is influenced in any systematic way by ecological context is a question that holds the key to the entire issue of eliminating deprivation among the disadvantaged in drought prone regions.
It is always the intersection of different disciplines which generates opportunities for emergence of new concepts. Any discipline has its own limits which can’t be transcended by using the assumptions provided for in the discipline. The Godless Theorem of Science suggests that science is possible only within a larger framework of non-scientific issues and concerns.
The values, the parameters and the causal relationship amongst these cannot be looked for in any particular discipline. The assumptions of methods like internal rate of return, discounted cash flow, benefit cost analysis, marginal productivity’s, etc. cannot be questioned by using the norms and values which legitimise the paradigm. Some, like Kahn, believe the need for the replacement of a paradigm by another paradigm. However, it is possible that at a point of time a contest for dominance amongst different paradigms could create niches for disciplines like sauce-ecology.
The sauce-ecological framework/paradigm essentially explores the precise relationship between the echo-specific nature of stress and survival mechanisms of different classes through simultaneous operations in factor and product markets. The key assumptions of this perspective is that the ecology defines the mix of economic enterprises that different classes of farmers dinned historically sustainable in that context. The scale at which different classes operate different enterprises is influenced by the respective access to credit, product and labour markets. Thus, if we find bigger farmers owning predominantly high value grazers, and the poor owning browsors, we could infer the implications for respective access and resource use options. The mean and variance matrix of this mix generated varying perceptions of the same risks. Different classes of farmers used different discount rates and different time periods to appraise the returns in various resource markets depending upon the accumulated knowledge, skills, resource, advantage, and future expectations; besides surplus, subsistence or deficit budget condition. The cash-flows resulting from the risk-return trade offs might be more unstable for some and less for others. Finally some households accumulated surpluses while other became chronically deficit budget. The decision making options of such farmers were obviously different.
Before we list the key questions that this paradigm enables us to raise, it will be useful to trace some of the arguments about the debate on policy, perceptions, process and the instruments in science.
The need for contact between scientists and their primary constituency (importance of serendipity vis-à-vis accountability) is now well recognised. An issue which is often overlooked is that perspective which may be based on grass root realities but have not be on validated formally by the people who suffer in a particular ecological stress conditions, may prove to be invalid. Thus, biased intentions may generate alternatives of limited utility because the contradictions with regard to the rules of the game and rules about making rules in the given social structure have not be made explicit. The invisible hand of the market, is admitted not being able to generate socially desirable research priorities. The implication is that "optimal amount of coercion" on the social system of social science research is not zero - as little coercion as possible but as much as necessary. The issue is how would Government, public institutions, academic establishments pursue this question in the process of generating research priorities.
One way would be to support short term projects so that questions which cannot be understood or analyzed in the short term such as relating to drought and its long term effects remain unstudied or understudied. Likewise, a student of banking should not study the problems of ecology and a student of ecology should not ask questions about public administration or design of institutions or distribution of power, etc. While there may be many other ways in which a coercion may exist the most serious is the case where the concerns of which research infrastructure is built or guided are identified with ‘science’ i.e. the rationalist reductionist meaning of science and not the users of technologies.
Let us take the example of ICRISAT where the germplasm bank of sorghum contains information on seven parameters excluding store-ability, food quality, cropping practices, etc. Those who have seen the quality of hybrid jowar/sorghum grain distributed under EGS to the poor in Maharashtra could well realize the importance of neglect of store-ability in sorghum research and its implication for post drought consequences.
Separation of technologists from the tool user carries with it a potential for the separation of the intentions the technologists wishes to embody in the Tool from those of the tool users.
Our studies in dry farming areas have provided considerable evidence about the way the objectives of the technologists and that of poor and rich users may be at variance.
The historical context in which scientists define the problems effects the answers "the choice is not extensional". To illustrate, a survey of 2072 economists from five western countries revealed that majority of economists’ from America, Germany and Switzerland preferred the free market system. They believed that competition would set the system right. However, the economists from Austria and France saw a great scope for Government intervention.
The recurrent droughts and famine made people increasingly conscious about the scarcity of certain resources which were not being renewed at the rate at which these being exhausted. Economics, as a discipline, deals with the central problems of allocating scarce resources.
In the discipline of economics, deduction drives out the empiricism. The last refuge of an economic scoundrel is the time lag. By manipulating time lag, the determined econometricians can "prove" almost anything.
This is one of the key problems in resource conservation. Poor are asked to wait till land productivity could be augmented. _______ in the long run, it is assumed will offset the loss in the short run. Discounted cash flow techniques are the instrument through which such assumptions are tested.
However, we have argued elsewhere that poor don’t use some discount rate or time frame to appraise their choices. How does one add the cash flows of different enterprises constrained by above limitations of time frame and discount rates.
Cash compulsive nature of poor makes it quite prudent for them to discount different alternatives at different rates depending upon the risk and uncertainty and their relative control over various markets.
Ecologists often define regeneration as the need of land reifying in the process, the materialistic nature of land. Land does not have needs. People owning, tilling or working on the land have needs. And these needs are not constant in different periods of stress. Higher the stress, greater the vulnerability and larger will be the need for ensuring through some means. The immediate needs vis-a-vis distant needs, needs of more vulnerable vis-a-vis less vulnerable and needs which can be met locally and which can’t be are some of the different categories.
Examples were given in Part - One to demonstrate how often, even the most sympathetic activists commit the flaw of aggregating these needs: the problems in analysis arising out of tendency to reify can be understood by the example below.
Drought deprives
But does it ?
Can drought deprive people of the right to food, employment and accumulation ?
Reification is an age old problem in studies of social problems. Converting a passive phenomena into an active entity shifts the responsibility from human actors on to the faceless institution, organisation, physical abstractions like drought or floods.
Drought is a physical phenomena characterised by mismatch between rainfall, evapo-transpiration and availability of moisture in the soil. The crop dies or an animal dies but who deprives; the drought ?
Or the people who :
The academic disciplines respond to the problems of failure to reality to conform to the theories by institutionalising such a mode of thinking which invalidates any question that does not conform to the theory. The paradigmatic shifts are often traumatic unless the reformist, gradualistic and evolutionary paradigms take over. The problem of drought and its unequal consequences for the survival of different classes or rural and urban producers and consumers has been approached over the years with different tools that provided justification for the dominant theories prevalent at the time.
History of economics innumerable examples when the questions to be asked were redefined rather than modifying the theories which could not accommodate pursuit of those questions. For instance there has been a long debate in the discipline of economics on the question of assumptions. The fact that assumptions were unreal was cited by some as a necessary condition for significance of the theory. On the other hand there were those who believed that unreal assumptions can never guide a search of real solutions. The evolution of welfare economics and in particular its variants such as institutional economics can be traced to the basic inability of given economic tools to analyse what was considered a dichotomy between private welfare and social welfare.
Discontent with the concepts like externalities, diseconomies, nuisance, ecological imbalance and bio disruption led to a belief amongst the institutional economics (Kapp, 1950) to study what could be called the cost shifters, i.e. the processes which shifted cost of environmental disruption on to those whose capacity to bear this cost was least. However, the substitutional of ‘economic man’ by an ‘institutionalised man’ attempted by the institutional economists created its own hierarchical Institutions. Disciplines as Schaffer states are establishment having their own bureaucracies. While it is recognised that every theory whether in physical or social sciences distorts the reality because it over simplified it (Samualson, 1970), but certain theories distorted the reality for more than others. Not because they involved great simplification but because the existing power structure can be legitimised through the dominance of such a theory.
Carrying capacity population pressure ecological balance are some concepts which together with concepts like benefit cost ratio, internal rate of return, discounted cash flow generate alternatives that are consistent with the assumptions of these concepts but are in conflict with the real life situations. The search for objectives of social welfare and public interest has always been a concern to welfare theorists (Bartless 1978:26). Under what condition is a society better off when a change benefits some members at the expense of others is an issue that cannot be answered if the assumptions which guide choice of policies are beyond questions.
The need for marriage between discipline of ecology and economics, political science and public administration is called for not because problems of drought and its consequences are inter-disciplinary but because the people who suffer in the event of drought suffer because of failure of public policies, organisational designs, price signals and power distribution.
It has been suggested that movement of ancient Israelites to migrate to Egypt, the potato blight and migration to the New World and many other events triggered by the plant disasters, leading to large scale migration (Carefoot and Sprott, 1974) have been related to the increasing demand for food and other biological products and inability to keep the natural hosts parasite relationship intact. The population pressure is considered the key problem responsible for human disasters but the same people who believed in free enterprise and free will do not analyse the constrained choices of poor people to have large families as the consequence of denial of basis freedom. In any case the global evidence of positive co-relation between land size and family size imply that it is not the poor always who have the larger families.
Thus the real issue is increase in whose population or demand reduces the supply of biomass for whom or what purpose ? If in an area biomass remains constant and population of cattle increases the owners of sheep would be worse off. Because while cattle can eat into the share of sheep, vice-versa is not possible. Because cattle can eat grasses which are both tall and short but sheep cannot eat grasses which are taller than 8 to 10 inches. The result is that sheep cannot cut into the cattle share but cattle can cut into share of the sheep. Cattle owners, invariably also belong to the richer castes and shepherd to the poor.
Part - Three
Drought Proofing, Escaping, Coping
Key issues in policies, programmes and perspectives aimed at reducing the probability of drought or its adverse consequences for the poor. Drought proofing implies permanent insurance against drought through creation of water-harvesting structures like tanks or installation of tubewell; drought escaping implies plantation of crops in such a manner that critical crop stages are able to escape the most probable period of drought drought coping implies that if any standing crop has been affected by drought then management of the crop by thinning / mulching / any other practice which will ensure survival of some crop of its parts. The coping strategies could include abandoning a particular crop so as to concentrate resources on the next crop; shifting focus from crop to livestock, migration, borrowing, asset disposal, etc.
A. Endowment Analysis :
Sector SPACE SEASON Interface
This matrix makes it possible to identify characteristics of a stress.
Socio-Ecological perspective implies that social structure, exchange relations and political articulations process will evolve in a particular manner in different stress prone regions. The mechanisms of articulation would be turn have a bearing or the markets which would also be shaped by the physical limits of space, transport cost/time, etc.
Let us take the case of a drought prone region with low population density, high seasonality i.e. unimodal rainfall diversified land use. Each household is engaged in crop, livestock craft, labour related activities.
Diversified land use with predominant low mean - high variance crops. Within a crop, genetic crops, Within a crop genetic diversity could be high. Incidence of intercropping or mixed cropping may be more.
Since the bulk of products say, pulses, oil seeds will be small, appearing at different points of time in a season (photo sensitive varieties); scattered, etc.; the cost of aggregating such bulk would be high and hence a layer of intermediaries jacking up the final price would emerge. Difference in farm gate and consumer end prices will be large.
State support systems are weak because state seldom seeks to enter where market forces are weak.
Credit market would be characterized with highly variable rate of interest. In some areas, special lenders offering loans of small size (Madrasi banks in Jhabua) may exist; rates of interest may be low in the pockets where minor irrigation concentration is high. Loans for consumption will be high. Formal institution will be weak. Bank branches would be concentrated in non-drought prone pockets of drought prone regions.
C. Nature of Social Relations
Extended family systems may abound, dispersed settlement structure in extreme areas would be characterized by very strong ethic/level net works (opposite may be the trends in concentrated settlements); due to frequent drought, and deficits the strength of communal norms for regulating access to common properties may be directly proportional to the extent of stress; i.e. higher the stress, greater the strength. Bonded labourers, annual contract labour (Saledar), wage rates differential among man and woman may be high though general wage rates would be quite low, the tenancy, labour and credit markets could be generally well adapted to the frequent droughts in turn of extraction mechanisms. However, surplus accumulation may not be so high even at larger holding in the dry villages such that they buy land of others. Intra-village land transfers would be few and far between. The inter-village transfer would be lesser than irrigated villages. Social stratification may be less polarised.
Informal resource pooling mechanisms might about e.g. Irjik (Bullok pooling), joint repair of huts; rotating saving and credit association etc.
Extent of Indigenous Science :
Innovation for survival are generally differently oriented than innovation for accumulation. The farmers are aimed at reducing co-efficient of variation of the entire basket of consumption goods. The latter may be concentrated in specialized activities/commodities. Considerable literature is emerging on indigenous science and speculation. Some of the practices deserve to be experimented upon.
In drought prone regions of the type mentioned earlier, varieties (local land races), indigenous plant protection methods; indigenous veterinary medicine practices, unique seed shortage devices/methods etc. may abound.
The selection criteria of the crops (the weighted index based on yield contributing characters) may be biased towards low harvest index, i.e. lesser grain to fodder ratio; non-synchronous indeterminate varieties (except in pulses), erect semi-branching plant type, etc.
What are likely to be the livestock endowments:
Diversification of species, grazers generally owned by richer people and browsers by the poor. Pastoralist caste, may be distributed over the range area.
Technological Imperatives :
Task Force on Development of Semi-Arid/Rainfed Area (DSA/RFA 1979) as well as National Commission on Development of Backward Areas (NCDBA 1981) have made such assumptions about the problems of drought prone areas that it is not surprising that nothing much has improved.
The dry farming scientists also start aiming at the least drought prone pockets as their initial target area. The technological change in the drought prone area might call for some sort of credit link insurance support so that at least for the initial period of trial risks are undertaken by the state.
The whole paradigm of generating research priorities has to undergo a shift after reviewing more than 900 post-graduate thesis titles on various subjects we had discovered only 3 thesis titles dealing with indigenous technologies during last 10 years. Obviously, the history of experimentation by farmers going on in drought prone areas with whatever little effectiveness should be last sight off.
The farm tools-hand operated as well as bull/camel operated is another area where the research focus is urgently warranted. Even though the blacksmiths have tried to keep up with the changes in the environment and technology so as to adapt plough shear size, dimensions of blade hoe, designs of sickle (for harvesting year vis-a-vis whole plant), there is a possibility of considerable sub-optimality in this regard. Both for ecological and economic reasons, farm implements deserve urgent attention. Unfortunately, in the age of tractors, combined harvesters, interest in hand tools and camel drawn, implements is rare. An example of this paradox was provided in a study on dry farming at HAU where it was noted that agricultural engineering division did not have any camel drawn implement even though camel were a major means of draft power in large part of Western Haryana.
Design of Organisations :
One of the basic feature of drought prone environment is the existence of a high degree of risk as well as uncertainty. The capacity to bear risk is not uniform amongst different classes of producers. Whenever any land improvement project is taken up some sort of closure becomes inevitable in the initial period (though innovative social insurance mechanisms are not impossible). The question is whether different classes of people need same degree of assurance so as to contribute their restraint (i.e. demand forgone towards restoration of a common property). We have earlier hypothesised that commoditisation of resource, say, fodder vis-a-vis intensification of land use may lead to break down of old arrangements of pooling bullocks.
The problem is with development analysis in the single market framework. We cannot design institution that will unable restoration of higher productivity of degraded lands unless those who have greater capacity to pay the price supply higher restraint than those who have lesser capacity. Alternatively, state must undertake setting up public distribution system of fodder in areas where pasture on private fallow, government fallow or village common lands is taken up.
Regarding watershed approach, the Task Force Report (DSA/FRA) noted that area of 1800 ha. would be treated as a unit. "Number of farming families will form themselves into a homogenous groups of beneficiaries. This would enable them to develop a socially acceptable and economically viable system to the mutual advantage of one and all, despite the physical boundaries of their individual proprietary holdings. The gains of IAWDP development would bring them closer enough to counteract the trends of social tension. Thus will emerge, in course of time, a community well set to utilise the new resources emerging out of the development efforts.
As the watershed develops, the community will become more and more development oriented lacking so far on a community basis". The observations don’t need comment. There could not be a better example about the fact that use of IADP approach in development of drought prone areas would not help in controlling of drought dersetification. What it would do / or it has already done is that is lands of prosperity would be created amidst vast expense of aridity. These islands will become suction pumps i.e. majority of resources earmarked for drought prone areas would gravitate towards these islands. Such institutional innovations are needed that can provide different degree of assurance to different classes of producers.
Can sedentary organisations design to serve sedentary population serve mobile population ?
Drought generates pressures for markets to withdraw. The public institutions being already few when remain stationed at one location, the access differential becomes very large. Exclusion from institutional support system can accentuate pressure on desertification e.g. through reduced access to kerosene. One way to augment fuel supply in stressed region may be to provide easy access to kerosene. However, care will have to be taken to make it available though small scale retailers even in remote areas.
Fodder is becoming a serious problem but research on taller varieties with lesser harvest index is still a far cry. Scientists often talk in terms of fodder or grain crops. Historically, dry region crops were multipurpose. The breeders are conspicuously ignorant about fodder quality of pulses like gram and mung bean etc. At one of the agricultural universities, the senior pulse breeder wondered if there was any fodder in gram crop ?
Socio-ecological audit of research priorities is warranted so that eco and class specific research agenda may be clearly drawn up validated by the poor people for whom research is intended.
Some of the millets (like Kaon, Foxtal millet), pulses (lathyrus) and oil seeds (non-edible seeds of different trees) are class specific enterprises. While most technologies are eco-specific, some are indeed class specific. At least the order of importance, commodity mix and species composition of research agenda could certainly be class specific. Majority of research resources on livestock are devoted towards cattle, irrigated fodder, veterinary medicines etc. the poor may be better served though research on sheep, goat, locally adapted poultry, and cattle, ducks (in areas where ponds, tanks exists) etc.
Extraordinary increase in sheep and goat population due to excessive degradation of land is a rational individual response. But collective irrationality may be quite compatible with individual rationality. Tenancy (share rearing) of sheep and goat is a dominant practice in
dry regions. Decision making option of a tenant and owner would be quite different. How do we provide incentives to poor to keep fewer productive animals when veterinary
infrastructure is so poor (and consequently survival probability of fewer but more productive animals is low).
Whenever value-addition takes place in a common property through state investment, institutional arrangements for apportioning due share for poor must be worked out. Otherwise, fences are broken when pasture development projects are handled over to so called ‘village communities’. In the name of logistic development assumptions of a conflict free village society is not very helpful in designing feasible options for future ecological regeneration.
Dr. Swaminathan (DG, IRNI) recently used a phrase - environmental refugee (CSE’s report has the term ecological refugee) to characterize the migration of poor from drought prone areas to urban areas. As, Sen rightly said, the description can be used both for predictive and also prescriptive purposes, Dr. Swaminathan has unnecessarily distracted attention from the economic processes which trigger migration to make it entirely an environmental problem.
Biggest danger of ecological movements is that in order to particularize the phenomenon of development, the contradictions of the particular group/local units/or association are sought to be marked. This is neither scientifically valid nor morally defensible (just the way, caters paribus condition is useful for comparisons in some cases but positively harmful in cases where other things do not remain same).
EDUCATIONAL :
The number of students who are doing their Ph.D. research on entirely rainfed crops is extremely negligible in a state where 30-40% area is rainfed and at least half of it is drought prone (Haryana). Paradox is tat scientists who do research on problems of drought resistance have generally taken their own degrees by working on problems of irrigated agriculture.
The norms of degree award have to be changed so that risk of not getting enough data (by using of 3 years replication) which could be analysed for obtaining a M.Sc. or Ph.D. degree does not come in the way.
How could a society expect problems of drought, desertification and famine be tackled when future supply of skilled scientists, technologists, and analysis is not assured. It is a matter of great distress that very negligible proportion of current post graduate research in Agricultural Universities is being done on problems of drought prone areas. If one looks at other elite Institutions say IITs, IIMs etc., the situation is no different. The project culture of research as mentioned earlier, comes in the way of the long term research or action-research study.
We should not give the impression that no technologies exist for combatting drought effects at present at al and that for all problems further research is needed. However, whatever technology does exist, can not be diffused under the following framework.
"It has to be remembered that the poor have little risk (bearing) capacity. They will not come forward in the initial phase of development to absorb new technologies. They would like to see their more affluent neighbours adopt the technology and establish the profitability..... the more affluent the middling and larger farmers would start the process of change allowing a year for this process to establish the profitability, the extension organisation should be tuned to expand their activities and approach to the poorer sections so as to involve them in the development.
The Committee emphasises that what they are seeking is development of the area as a whole by utilising the resources of the area and not merely a selective development of the poorer sections only." (NCDBA, 1981: 91-92, Emphasis mine).
The above statement in a way summarises the problem. We don’t need new research to prove the absurdity of above assumptions and blatant unscientific nature of these assertions.
The credit flows where water is in most of drought prone regions despite persistent lobbying and national seminars. Similar repayment schedule for same enterprises in different regions having dissimilar rates of return, probability of success is the single most important absurdity of credit policy. ; Absence of rehabilitationary credit using portfolio financing approach is a definite barrior to flow of credit in drought prone areas. Credit-linked Insurance Policies, recently announced haven’t yet borne any appreciable results; though need for precise adaptation in policies in view of peculiarity problems of different types of drought prone region remains.
Contrasting designs and deserts seem to go together. As one moved from deserts to irrigated plains. One would find ‘greys’ and ‘whites’ to take over. The tremendous richness of crafts and designs in drought prone area needs to be built upon.
Craft is a cradle of culture and without culture, no values, norms and code of conduct can survive. Value adding enterprises based on plants like sisal such that landless people can not merely participate in plantation but also buy the equity of the value adding enterprise and control its ownership are called for.
The costs of delivering services and organising activities in regions with low population density are obviously high. However, uniform budgetary resource allocation or norms of budget exhaustion is a discrimination against the people of drought prone areas.
However, should we really blame planners if they do not recognize the paradox of equal treatment. Of unequal problems ? They should be forgiven their ignorance because they are doing it knowingly, it is we who are under lined.
Population pressure overgrazing, ecological imbalances etc. are outcomes, not the causes of drought, desertification and famine.
Political economy of deprivation of poor in dry regions was to be understood in view of the policy bias which generates surplus of long staple cotton S. cane, and wheat but shortfall of pulses and oil seeds. We don’t allow prices of wheat to come down but we allow small Bajra growers to curse themselves for good rain and high labour. Because prices of Bajra and Jowar are allowed to fall because of discriminating policy of procurement and storage of only certain crops sends inappropriate signals, locks precious capital (by way of huge inventories), creates false complacence about food security and distorts resource allocation priorities. Crop diversification is lessened and genetic erosion is expedited.
Planners must recognize that drought and its debilitating effects are triggered by the same set of macro-economic policies which generate surpluses in some regions. The costs of these surpluses are paid by poor indirect tax payers of drought prone regions.
The Food for work programmes dates back to 1846 when IRISH Relief Commissioner bought American Corn. The rotten potatoes led to the birth of Food for work. It can merely act as safety valve for some time. No society can aspire for peace and stability by keeping a large mass of poor people in ecologically vulnerable regions deprived, and at the same time dependent on relief. The historic fortitude of desert population has been systematically weakened through relief oriented developmental strategy.
The developmental potential of drought prone areas through rejuvenation of livestock, craft, crop economy along with dignified employment programme (not involving breaking one mountain to create another) can indeed be achieved. Socio-ecological paradigm enables assimilation of some of the relevant questions from different disciplines like Public Administrations, Political Economy, Ecology and Regional Planning etc.
Intersection of disciplines implies admittance of inadequacy of respective disciplines. Likewise, networking of concerned professionals engaged in this debate would require each one of us to admit inadequacies of our respective framework of analysis. Finally, our understanding must be validated by these whose interests we spouse so eagerly here.