There are two basic reasons why farmers kill themselves worldwide. The first is Droughts that go on and on and the 2nd is when floods wash all their topsoil and fields away and they have no good land to farm at all that year or those years. But, both of these things are a part of the Global Warming and Global Climate Change cycle. For example, fires in California change weather patterns as the smoke goes generally from west to east across the U.S. and sometimes up into Canada and over into Europe more dispersed.
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- Aug 20, 2016 · Why are India's farmers killing themselves? By ... He set out to document the conditions that would lead farmers to kill themselves because of the debt ...
Why are India's farmers killing themselves?
Photos:Women in Karigaon, India, draw water from a well that is replenished once a day with water from tankers.Hide Caption8 of 14Photos:A woman uses a tumbler to fill her pot from a small puddle on the bed of a well in Atola, India.Hide Caption9 of 14Photos:Every year, thousands of farmers and landless farm workers from the Marathwada region migrate to western Maharashtra and neighboring Karnataka to harvest sugarcane for the mills there, usually for a period of six months. Here, migrants returning from Karnataka transfer to smaller vehicles in Dharur before traveling back to their respective villages.Hide Caption10 of 14Photos:A cattle fodder camp in Siddewadi, India. The state government has opened 327 such camps in the three heavily-affected districts of Beed, Latur and Osmanabad, providing water and fodder to over 300,000 cattle.Hide Caption11 of 14Photos:Deubai Disle, 60, winnows the family's harvest of bajra (pearl millet) in Dislewadi, India. She said the yield from the 12-acre farm was only 1,000 kilograms against the normal yield of 5,000 kilograms.Hide Caption12 of 14Photos:Baliram Jadhav, a 40-year-old farmer, waits on the operating table for anesthesia before a surgery to remove kidney stones in Latur. Jadhav blames the stones on the water he had been drinking water from a borewell, which he says is more alkaline than the water he used to drink from his well, which dried up two years ago. He lived with the pain for two years until he finally borrowed money for a procedure.Hide Caption13 of 14Photos:The lack of work in villages during the summer months has forced many farmer families to migrate to cities such as Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad. Here, a migrant family from Nanded, India, spends an evening at a Mumbai playground, just outside an open ground where a number of families have set up camp.Hide Caption14 of 14
Photos:India's drought of 1972 is a reference point to calculate the age of Vyjayanta Ithape, 70. Ithape, seen here in March, gave birth to a son and also lost her husband that year. She now lives alone in the town of Chincholi, which has been relying on water tankers for the past three years. "This one is unlike any other drought in the past," she told photographer Harsha Vadlamani. "We have grain to eat but no water to drink."Hide Caption1 of 14Photos:A blackbuck, aka the Indian antelope, sprints across a road in Beed, India. Farmers say the drying up of watering holes in the jungles has led to an increase in wild animals on their farms.Hide Caption2 of 14Photos:A man rushes with a water drum as a water tanker arrives in Latur, India.Hide Caption3 of 14Photos:Dead trees dot the hills near Dharur, India. In 2015, the state of Marathwada received only 49% of what is considered normal rainfall, according to Vadlamani.Hide Caption4 of 14Photos:A family in Latur gets a borewell dug at the height of the water crisis.Hide Caption5 of 14Photos:Jaldoot Express, a train bringing in water from Meraj, India, is emptied at the railway station in Latur.Hide Caption6 of 14Photos:A four-member band plays at a wedding in Manjrath, India. "If not for the drought, the wedding would have been a much (more) lavish affair," said a relative attending the wedding.Hide Caption7 of 14Photos:Women in Karigaon, India, draw water from a well that is replenished once a day with water from tankers.Hide Caption8 of 14Photos:A woman uses a tumbler to fill her pot from a small puddle on the bed of a well in Atola, India.Hide Caption9 of 14Photos:Every year, thousands of farmers and landless farm workers from the Marathwada region migrate to western Maharashtra and neighboring Karnataka to harvest sugarcane for the mills there, usually for a period of six months. Here, migrants returning from Karnataka transfer to smaller vehicles in Dharur before traveling back to their respective villages.Hide Caption10 of 14Photos:A cattle fodder camp in Siddewadi, India. The state government has opened 327 such camps in the three heavily-affected districts of Beed, Latur and Osmanabad, providing water and fodder to over 300,000 cattle.Hide Caption11 of 14Photos:Deubai Disle, 60, winnows the family's harvest of bajra (pearl millet) in Dislewadi, India. She said the yield from the 12-acre farm was only 1,000 kilograms against the normal yield of 5,000 kilograms.Hide Caption12 of 14Photos:Baliram Jadhav, a 40-year-old farmer, waits on the operating table for anesthesia before a surgery to remove kidney stones in Latur. Jadhav blames the stones on the water he had been drinking water from a borewell, which he says is more alkaline than the water he used to drink from his well, which dried up two years ago. He lived with the pain for two years until he finally borrowed money for a procedure.Hide Caption13 of 14Photos:The lack of work in villages during the summer months has forced many farmer families to migrate to cities such as Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad. Here, a migrant family from Nanded, India, spends an evening at a Mumbai playground, just outside an open ground where a number of families have set up camp.Hide Caption14 of 14Photos:India's drought of 1972 is a reference point to calculate the age of Vyjayanta Ithape, 70. Ithape, seen here in March, gave birth to a son and also lost her husband that year. She now lives alone in the town of Chincholi, which has been relying on water tankers for the past three years. "This one is unlike any other drought in the past," she told photographer Harsha Vadlamani. "We have grain to eat but no water to drink."Hide Caption1 of 14Photos:A blackbuck, aka the Indian antelope, sprints across a road in Beed, India. Farmers say the drying up of watering holes in the jungles has led to an increase in wild animals on their farms.Hide Caption2 of 14Photos:A man rushes with a water drum as a water tanker arrives in Latur, India.Hide Caption3 of 14Photos:Dead trees dot the hills near Dharur, India. In 2015, the state of Marathwada received only 49% of what is considered normal rainfall, according to Vadlamani.Hide Caption4 of 14Photos:A family in Latur gets a borewell dug at the height of the water crisis.Hide Caption5 of 14Photos:Jaldoot Express, a train bringing in water from Meraj, India, is emptied at the railway station in Latur.Hide Caption6 of 14Photos:A four-member band plays at a wedding in Manjrath, India. "If not for the drought, the wedding would have been a much (more) lavish affair," said a relative attending the wedding.Hide Caption7 of 14
Story highlights
- India's water shortages have gotten worse, according to photographer Harsha Vadlamani
- "If this is not climate change, I don't know what is," he says
John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN Opinion who focuses on climate change and social justice. Follow him on Snapchat, Facebook and email. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN)Harsha Vadlamani knows India's drought cycles.As a photographer, he's documented life without water.But then he heard about crops turning to dust and farmers committing suicide.How could this have happened?"People here, they're used to water shortages and they know how to deal with it," Vadlamani told me by phone from Hyderabad, India, where he's based. "But these last three years, it's gotten worse."He set out to document the conditions that would lead farmers to kill themselves because of the debt and crop loss caused by the changing weather. It's a crime scene that likely has all of our fingerprints on it."If this is not climate change, I don't know what is," he said.
Photographer Harsha VadlamaniVadlamani's photographs of drought in Maharashtra, India, which were taken between March and May of this year, stand as evidence of the human toll of climate change. By burning fossil fuels and chopping down rainforests, we humans are destabilizing the climate. That has life-changing consequences for all of us.We're too hesitant to connect these dots. Floods in Louisiana, fires in California, towns in Alaska voting to move because the Earth is melting out from beneath them. While it's somewhat difficult to pin any individual weather event on climate change, it's clear that in the last two years we are getting a peek at what a warming world looks like.We ignore these warnings at our peril.The writer Bill McKibben has called for an all-out war on climate change. While that language is strong, I have to agree. Climate change is a war we're fighting against ourselves. We've become slaves to fossil fuels. We think the energy we're using is cheap, but its costs are actually deferred. Or they're passed on to the world's poorest people.That's certainly visible in Vadlamani's photographs and stories. He shows wells that are all but dry, or that must be replenished by tankers carrying water for hundreds of kilometers. Crop yields that are one-fifth of normal. One woman collapsed and died in front of a well as she struggled to get water, he wrote. He tells of men borrowing money to remove kidney stones, which can form without proper hydration. And families being chased off the land they cherish only to find themselves living in squalor in India's megacities.Social media
Follow @CNNPhotos on Twitter to join the conversation about photography."Wherever I went, people would invariably offer me water, often from the pots that they're carrying home after walking a great distance or waiting for hours for the water tanker to show up," Vadlamani said. "I'd politely refuse, having just seen how much they struggled to get those few pots of water, but they always insisted that I drank the water they offered."Vadlamani, a former IT worker who became a photographer to try to better understand his country, told the farmers he visited over the course of four trips that their weather was changing because of the actions of people on the other side of the world -- because of SUVs in the United States or factories in China. India, too, is the world's third-biggest climate polluter. All three countries say they want to shift away from coal and toward clean energy sources like solar power and wind. But it's happening far too slowly."We're all not islands," Vadlamani said. "Our actions affect those living thousands of miles away."It's a truth that's difficult to grapple with.But it's one we must confront.
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