India has long been plagued by unscrupulous moneylenders who exploit impoverished farmers. But with crops failing more frequently, farmers are left even more desperate and vulnerable.
By Mark Magnier, 1 December 2009 … Here in the Bundelkhand region in central India that is among the nation’s more impoverished areas, the problem is exacerbated by climate change and environmental mismanagement, they say, suggesting that ecological degradation and global warming are changing human life in more ways than just elevated sea levels and melting glaciers. “Before, a bad year would lead to a good year,” said Bharat Dogra, a fellow at New Delhi’s Institute of Social Sciences specializing in the Bundelkhand region. “Now climate change is giving us seven or eight bad years in a row, putting local people deeper and deeper in debt. I expect the situation will only get worse.” Human tragedies are the direct result of local abuses of the environment, said Sanjay Singh, founder of Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sansthan, a charity focused on Bundelkhand. Starting in the 1980s, powerful local interests started cutting down hardwood trees for furniture. Local governments then encouraged sand, gravel and granite mining for construction, scarring the landscape. Farmers were encouraged to grow soybeans as a cash crop, which requires more water than the area can sustain, forcing them to take out loans to pay for water even as weather patterns changed, reducing rainfall. “This led to a never-ending cycle of loans,” he said. “Droughts and climate change after 2000 were the final nail in the coffin.” In recent months, a series of sensational cases involving moneylender abuses in Bundelkhand have underscored the problem as drought conditions prompted farmers and local workers to sell wives and daughters to meet burdensome debt obligations. …
Amid droughts and failed crops, a cycle of poverty worsens
