Poultry farmers in the fatal grip of monopoly capital in Bengal
December 15, 2008
By Ajay Bera, Arambag. Translated by Debarshi Das from ShramikShakti Newsletter, November 2008.
Drawing from daily interactions with hundreds of decimated farmers of Arambag Subdivision I am writing this article to give a communicable shape to my experience. Neither the electronic media nor the newspapermen care to see their abject destitution. The government has become tactically deaf. The words which are going to follow are not mine, but of the farmers.
Around two years back the four police station areas of Arambag subdivision and the surrounding regions of Howrah, Hooghly and Medinipur districts were well known for intensive potato cultivation as well as intensive poultry farming. This area falls under the lower Damodar valley flood affected region. The farmers put their effort to potato and vegetable cultivation immediately after every annual flood. The region does not have good railway connectivity therefore has not seen flowering of industrial potential. Moreover, rampant floods have wiped out the small and cottage industries. Consequently, the educated and semi-educated sons of farmers have had to look for alternative means of livelihood. This they found by pawning away or selling off family gold and silver, utensils, lands; getting training for poultry farming and eventually opening farms. Several thousands of people earned their living from farm maintenance and marketing the produce.
They were small farmers. They would build modest chicken coops on barren farm land, pond-side, in tree shades, and depending on their budget would raise from as little as two to three hundred to as many as two to three thousand birds. They had to depend on monopoly capitalists for chicks, feed or medicine. However, the production was indigenous and small scale, and they could meaningfully challenge and corner monopoly production in the chicken market. Ordinary people could buy chicken for thirty-five to forty rupees a kg. even a year ago. To drive them off the market owners of monopoly farms started to sell chicken below-cost at thirty to thirty-five rupees. But this crisis could be fought off by the small farmers. As plan B monopoly traders more than doubled the price of chicks and feed. Harnessing their wit and experience the small players could weather even this storm.
The final attack on them came in the guise of bird flu, which could not be tackled. Facing severe debt most of them had had to close down farms. Nobody had cared to listen to what they had warned over and over again. Nor did anyone bother to reply.
Owner of fifteen hundred bird farm Satyen Ghosh bluntly says that the news of bird flu is a deliberately exaggerated and planned attack. The monopoly big business is behind the game plan. The central government, the state government, the electronic media, big newspapers have turned into its chattel slaves in exchange of cash. Gobindo Samanta, a small farmer, had said, “Mark my word. After we have closed down, you will pay seventy to eighty rupees instead of forty rupees that you are paying now.” What Gobindo-babu had cautioned one year ago has turned out to be true. Amal Sadhukhan says, “All have turned into rich men’s agents. None is there to defend us. Our family would starve to death. Suicide seems to be the only option left.” None had cared to listen to the desperate cries of farmers. Today as small farms have shut down, tiny ten-to-twenty-chicken coops of poor village women uprooted, chicken in our market is selling for as high as ninety rupees. And there is not a single murmur of protest. The forewarning of small farmers has turned to be completely true. Closed down farms have become sites for contract farming with monopoly houses. According to the contract big business would provide chicks, feed and medicine. Farmers would provide shade, water, care and nursing. For every chicken that turns to 1.5 kilogram in 1.5 months the farmer would get three rupees. It’s a nice arrangement: the self sufficient producer transmogrifies into a wage labourer.
Few question have been raised by the impoverished small farmers.
1. How many people in India were affected by bird flu last year? How many, if any, died? Would the government please inform us?
2. How many thousand of crores of rupees have the media houses earned by relentlessly spreading news of bird flu in last six months? And who has paid them?
3. Aren’t the pictures of poor farmers culling local birds spread by the media plans to annihilate local poultry farming?
4. Where can one find medicine for curing the patient after she has been killed?
5. There are plenty of ayurvedic and allopathic medicines available in the market for resistance against and curing disease. In spite of this, why were the birds culled?
6. Is it not true that many birds die during the summer and early monsoon seasons because of weather and lack of pollution resistance in the farms? Nobody kills all birds for that reason.
7. How many of the thousands of farmers who were left bankrupt due to culling were compensated by the government?
8. Is it not true that after thousands of farmers have been destroyed the entire chicken market in the country and in this states has been monopolised by two or three big players like Venky’s (founder’s logo: “My dream is to see India as the number 1 country on the poultry map of the world”), which by hiking the price one-and-half to two times have earned thousands of crores of rupees?
September 20th, 2009 at 6:25 am
that is true ans i strongly support this