Dirty White Gold

Nearly 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves due to the pressures of debt between 1995-2011. In the state of Maharashtra in 2006, 4453 people committed suicide. That’s around one every eight hours. At the time of writing, I receive word of another seven farmers who died over the course of three days.

Maharashtra is located near the middle of India, appearing on a map not far from the town of Wardha in Vidarbha. Nestled between the cities of Amravati and Nagpur, Wardha has a population of just over a million people – most of them cotton farmers.

I met a farmer called Hanuman who borrowed 80,000 rupees (£950) from the bank so that he could farm their average sized 5-6 acres of land with cotton. A father of two, he spent almost all of the loan on boxes of Bt (Bacillius Thuringienis) cotton seed and pesticides. The technology behind Bt is owned by Monsanto and is licensed to seed companies for use and sale across a range of crops. The seed Hanuman uses costs 950 rupees (£11) per kg, and Monsanto receives around a quarter of this amount. Hanuman also has to buy fertilisers to help the cotton grow and chemicals to keep the bugs away. He hires labourers at 100 rupees (£1.20) a day to spray those chemicals. In an average season, he sprays between 8-10 times.

This year, the rains hadn’t fallen and the wells were running dry. The monsoons finally came, but they came late. Hanuman won’t know how much yield he will get from his cotton crop until he goes to pick it in a few months. He won’t know how much he will make from it until he takes it to market, where buyers pay him the same price for Bt cotton – which produces higher yield and is grown with pesticides – as they would for organic cotton (lower yield, no pesticides). Hanuman says the only reason that he might consider choosing organic farming would be to cut back on the costs of chemicals. He fears that he might lose too much money.

The seeds are sterile, and therefore unable to be used year on year, meaning Hanuman will have to buy a fresh batch of seeds the next time around. When we last spoke, he said he’d have to borrow money to buy more pesticides and pay for his sons’ schooling. Somewhere in that narrow margin of debt he has to find cash to keep his family together.

I befriended Prathiba, a widow who wasn’t aware that her husband was in debt until she found a note in his pocket when her daughter found him dead, having hung himself inside their one­-room house in 2007. Now sweeping floors for a living, Prathiba has a second daughter, as well as a son who had to live somewhere else because she couldn’t afford to raise him. Unlike many in her situation, she received some compensation from the government of one lakh (around £1,000). The family was able to keep one quarter of this under the terms of the compensation, with the rest put in a bank where they could only skim the interest at the end of the year. The men to whom Prathiba’s husband owed money keep coming round for cash. Her in-laws now completely ignore her.

I also met Kantibai, the widow of a man who drank the chemicals he used to farm with on 9th August 2012. Like Prathiba, she didn’t know her family was in debt. Her husband asked her to look after their two sons and daughter before he was whisked off in an auto-rickshaw towards a hospital. He never made it. A month after his death, I encountered Kantibai in a state of desperation that will always stick with me. She appeared to have no idea where her life would go from this point.

Kishore Jagtap, a man who runs a local NGO with a widows’ and women’s empowerment programme, rode with us to meet Kantibai, who lived in a village an hour away from his usual patch. Kishore taught Kantibai what she needed to do in order to apply for compensation, what sort of help was available to her, and taught her sons how to sign on to a welfare work scheme. He also gave her his direct contact details and said to call him anytime. Kishore didn’t have to come with us. But he did. And for the first time, as we were leaving, Kantibai managed a smile.

India is around 60% agrarian, so I started at the bottom, with the farmers whom the country’s economy relies upon. I found that they were the first to give of themselves and yet the first to be abandoned as India is thrown about in the dizzying ether of free market economics (or as free as you can get when you’re bound to the WTO and dole out corporate subsidies).

I encountered stories that challenged preconceived notions of poverty and need. I spent a day looking for the poorest farmer in a village only to be welcomed into his house and greeted with a brand new television with a dodgy colour tube. He’d spent a week’s wages on it. I saw farmers who grew chickpeas and sold them at the market for 30 rupees a kilo, before travelling down the road to buy chickpeas for 50 rupees a kilo. I saw gaps in basic education and farmers who had no one to teach them how to farm apart from the men who sold them the seeds and the chemicals.

I met economists, intellectuals, activists and scientists who lived lives dancing on dualities. Like the man who runs an organic seed bank but farms Bt cotton to fund it. Or the entomologist developing a GM cottonseed that thrives in drought, can be farmed using organic methods and will undercut major seed companies if he is able to open-­source the technology.

Throughout my travels, I encountered enthusiasm, apathy and hostility. Sometimes within the same exchange. And I have only just started. I will need to work my way up the cotton supply chain and get to know the workers, the brokers, the manufacturers, the buyers, the dealers, the designers, the retailers and the consumers.

• If you want to help us spread the word about unsustainable cotton farming and the need for supply chain transparency in fashion [and maybe stop people killing themselves], we’re running a crowdfund to help us get back to India and finish the shoot.

By Leah Borromeo (@monstris)