Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study claims every degree of temperature above 20C increase the likelihood an Indian farmer will commit suicide. Just one problem with this claim: Indian agricultural yields are rising (see graph above).
Crop-damaging temperatures increase suicide rates in India
More than three quarters of the world’s suicides occur in developing countries, yet little is known about the drivers of suicidal behavior in poor populations. I study India, where one fifth of global suicides occur and suicide rates have doubled since 1980. Using nationally comprehensive panel data over 47 y, I demonstrate that fluctuations in climate, particularly temperature, significantly influence suicide rates. For temperatures above 20 °C, a 1 °C increase in a single day’s temperature causes ∼70 suicides, on average. This effect occurs only during India’s agricultural growing season, when heat also lowers crop yields. I find no evidence that acclimatization, rising incomes, or other unobserved drivers of adaptation are occurring. I estimate that warming over the last 30 y is responsible for 59,300 suicides in India, accounting for 6.8% of the total upward trend. These results deliver large-scale quantitative evidence linking climate and agricultural income to self-harm in a developing country.
Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1701354114
Unfortunately the full study is paywalled, so we don’t get to see the magic by which the authors process a rising agricultural yield into a climate threat. But the base OECD data speaks for itself.
Even if temperature is a negative, other factors such as global greening, CO2 induced drought resilience, improved agricultural technology and Prime Minister Modi’s efforts to improve rural access to cheap energy are more than compensating for any negative factors.
India may have a serious rural suicide problem. We can speculate about the cause. But whatever is going so wrong for so many rural Indians, the suicide tragedy is clearly not related to climate impacts on farm output. Agricultural yields are rising.
This seems like a well researched article on Indian farm suicides: debt and especially debt from healthcare costs are main reason given
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/family-debts-main-cause-of-indian-farm-suicides/articleshow/59351336.cms
rising productivity – 1.1 % according to 1 figure I found – may not translate to prosperity across all farmers…
Seems like Indian agriculture has some complicated pressures…
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/149547/1/Rada_India%20Ag%20TFP%20AAEA%20Submission_2013.pdf
As always, Griff defines science as whatever he agrees with.
“…debt and especially debt from healthcare costs are main reason given.”
Well, that makes a lot of sense. But it doesn’t make any sense to blame a 1 degree temperature rise, something that is almost impossible to detect physiologically, to 70 more people killing themselves than would have otherwise.
The paper may be well researched. The conclusion about temperature, however, is nonsense. We have seen it over and over again. Global warming verbiage is put into the conclusions of papers that have nothing to do with climate change. I guess in this case it is actually about weather, but the implication is that if it gets warmer, more people will kill themselves, and that is nothing but grant bait, NPR news fodder and paradigm propaganda.
In the US, a million people move to Florida every winter to avoid thoughts of suicide!
Griff,
When you say “a well researched article on Indian farm suicides” are you referring to the PNAS Carleton study or the two you’ve linked? BTW neither one of those links you posted supports PNAS study and if anything contradicts it.
I can understand why this shit had to be hidden behind a paywall. An actual look at the data shows that the suicide rates rises steeply between 10 and 20 degrees C (must be during winter/early spring, never that cool in summer in lowland India) and then levels off or even goes down when temperatures rise above 30 degrees.
On the other hand suicide rates decrease monotonically with increasing precipitation during the growing season, which seems reasonable since agriculture in India is extremely dependent on the summer monsoon.
Now everyone with any experience with Indian climates knows that it is extremely hot and dry during the late spring and early summer until the monsoon comes as a relief for both people and vegetation. If the monsoon fails or is late and weak it stays very hot and it is very bad both for the crops and the farmers.
There is no information why the author decided that the weak correlation with summer temperatures was more significant than the much stronger correlation with monsoon precipitation.
By the way 20 degrees celsius isn’t a “crop damaging” temperature in India, and probably not anywhere else either (well, it could be too cold for cotton which requires a long period >30 C to ripen). Drought on the other hand is crop-damaging at any temperature.
The very first example of a spurious correlation from a little book I once read called “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” was this: There is an almost perfect negative correlation between the sales of chewing tobacco and the number of car thefts per year in the United States.
“There is no information why the author decided that the weak correlation with summer temperatures was more significant than the much stronger correlation with monsoon precipitation.”
It is obvious. Correlating any scientific research with global warming increases your chance of being rewarded more grants, becoming famous, having more citations and so on. It is okay to do real science, if that is your thing, but you better figure out a way to tie it to man-made climate change in some way, if you want to continue working.
This issue has long been established to be related to GM products. If a farmer has a failed crop he cannot pay for the next plant of crops, so they drown themselves in chemicals or drink them
In a study in the 1950s it was found that baby deaths increased in New York City neighbourhoods with soft pavement.
In the 1950s it was probably true that, if the street in front of your tenement was soft, your baby was more likely to die. It was a spurious correlation though. The real correlation was with temperature. Temperatures hot enough to make the pavement soft were also harmful to babies living in tenements.
We see spurious correlations all the time from the likes of Al Gore. Yes, the temperatures went up, and yes these things did happen but correlation does not imply causality.
p.s. As far as I know the babies/pavement study was invented by my buddy’s statistics prof to illustrate the problem of spurious correlation.
I suspect a better correlation, both with India suicides and beliefs in snake oils salesmen tally with the rise in mobile phone sales, and use.
The incredible thing is wheat yields in the US- over the decades acres planted to wheat has decreased by 30 million acres-
“The number of acres on which US farmers grow wheat has hit its lowest … the amount of wheat produced per acre has increased nearly 267%”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-10/too-much-of-weed-that-feeds-forcing-wheat-farmers-to-other-crops
Nothing is new, Shakespeare explains this in Macbeth…
Here’s a farmer who hanged himself on expectation of plenty.
Generational passing on of farmland to children by dividing the land leads to small plots unable to sustain successive generations as the farmers have large families. This causes a lot of the stress.
Other societies have responded differently to handling inheritances. In the US most farms have either been kept whole generation to generation and run by the descendants as a corporation or cooperative,, or at some point the descendants decide to sell off the property
I can’t see any economic reason why, in India, the people involved wouldn’t combine forces, work together, take care of each other, and prosper with a few less children on the same land they grew up on
So many possible things and with suicide, they are all scattered and present in different ‘quantities’
THAT is why a suicide thus happens.
(Like a stroke), everyone is different and why they are not seen coming.
So, what have we got….
There’s no smoke without fire but just what are the figures for suicides. In UK, farmers are in the top 3 risk group, along with doctors and veterinarians. What gives with the vets?? Possibly access to method/materials.
As a proportion of the total Indian population, is it actually as big a problem as it’s cracked up to be?
Let’s have some context before we all kick off about how awful this is.
Let us not be like alarmists, where the simple fact that CO2 ‘absorbs’ infra-red radiation (the settled science bit) has blown right up to World Armageddon. Incredible innit?
Indian inheritance rules/laws. Namely everyone gets an equal share of a dead person’s estate. Unlike England/Scotland historically where the eldest son got ‘most everything. But when it comes to land and subsistence farming, this rule, instead of promoting familial happiness as its supposed to, will cause family disputes over who farms any particular (tiny) patch of dirt, what they grow, who gets the food/money/profit etc.
Family disputes can get very nasty and prolonged indeed and if you’ve no other escape route, then what?
Monsanto
Are Monsanto there because they are full of Good Intentions? They will tell you this of course.
Doesn’t experience back home in the USA (legally chasing folks who grow/clean/plant their own seed) tell a story of a very hard-nosed company that is ‘in it for the money’
Where’s the BS detector when you need it?
Monsanto again.
The farmers, and Indian folks are renowned for how deferential they are. They really do try ‘to be helpful, to be of service (a lot like the Chinese) and hence are absolute suckers for smart suited business folks. Folks who will assure them that ‘blah blah’ will improve your life, make you money, get the relatives off your back etc etc
Monsanto will assure them that borrowing money (to buy Monsanto seeds/pesticides/fert) is The Modern Way, while pointing to how lovely the Western World is. Because of technology, they get a glimpse of Western World and buy the dream. Using a loan, taken on the (salesman’s) assurance that the resulting crop will clear it and leave enough for everything to be rosy.
Monsanto’s chosen vehicle for these trusting if not gullible people is cotton.
For a very ancient place like India, with highly weathered (nutrient poor) soils, you Could Not Make A Worse Choice Of Plant To Grow. (yes you could, tobacco)
Cotton is a very hungry plant – hence why India never grew very much, leading to potential large profits for folks who can grow it locally. A perfect storm.
And because Indian soil is not used to growing cotton (rotational practice of a sort), for the first few years it will grow extremely well.
Then it hits its Liebig Limit and the cotton gravy train falls right off the rails.
And what do Monsanto do? Possibly blame the farmer for fooking it up, but even they cannot *that* hard-hearted so they pass the buck – to Mother Nature via ‘climate change’
We really should not mess with that girl.
We should employ/learn a bit of humility & empathy.
Well, shag me senseless, here we are come full circle.
Would not a bit of empathy, understanding those farmer’s problems, have saved them?
I’ve lost count of the number of greenies who have forcefully told me that “CLIMATE IS NOT THE WEATHER!” but all climate scares are about the weather.
I would not be in the least surprised to find that the weather influences the suicide rate. But to blame climate, you have to prove the climate has changed adversely. And again, greenies tell me that the climate changes over decades.
Finally, even if you prove climate change and even if that curve fits the suicide curve, you haven’t proved a correlation.
“Widely cited theories of economic suicide in India”
“I estimate that warming temperature trends over the last three decades have already been responsible for over 59,000 suicides throughout India”
Why does the author automatically assume that the increase in suicides are all in the agricultural industry. How do agricultural suicides compare to suicides in the rest of Indian industry?
I agree. This is all based on one person’s “estimate.”
Perhaps there is just an overabundance of dentists in India.
It’s funny that people are blaming either GMOs per se (which have nothing to do with poverty, etc) or temperatures, which has to be the most simple-minded explanation for suicides I can think of.
Monsanto, is a COMPANY. They do not have an military division to enforce their will. If a company is doing severe economic harm to a country, it is the responsibility of the country to prevent this and they certainly have the power to do so. THAT is what govts are SUPPOSED to do – protect their citizens against foreign threats. You know, what our Democratic administrations have not done when they encouraged illegal Hispanics to enter our country, for the sole purpose of importing new Democratic voters, mostly illegal.
How about drug companies, who practice mopolistic behavior under the protection of 20 year patents?
I have been personally involved in in this for over 10 years, buying all my prescription drugs from Canada..
A company that is notable for screwing their American customers is Merck. They have several pills that sell for $10 apiece at your local CVS or Walgreens. Those same pills, manufactured by their same (foreign) drug plants sell for 20 cents apiece in foreign countries, who have generic versions that force Merck to lower their prices to compete with local generics, sometimes even to undercut their prices. Our “protective” FDA prohibits these foreign generics from entry to our market, due to patent law and unwillingness to certify these pills. The solution to all this is very simple ; prohibit drug companies from charging their American customers
(private individuals or insurance companies) more than they charge in any other country. Some countries
protect their citizens by the fact that a govt purchasing agency does all pill buying – they are esentially monopolistic buyers and can match the power of a monopolistic drug company and force prices way down. English customers, for example, can buy one of the pills I take from Merck at one third the cost we pay over here.
The problem with some conservatives is that they think a “free market” means “anything goes.”
A free market which contains a monopoly is not, in reality, a free market, because there is no competition.
Without competition, nothing works. And I don’t just mean in the economic arena, either, but in all aspects of human endeavor. Why do you think unions are the enemy of consumers and have destroyed virtually all ability of American companies to compete ? We see the ridiculous state of climate science , due entirely to a
lack of competitive debate, which is the basic strength of any science. Liberals used to hate non-competitive markets when the lack of competition involved companies. But their solution enabled a lack of competition
amongst the working force, primarily because there are a lot more workers than there are companies and companies can’t vote – workers not only vote but also provide election day assistance to get out the vote.
Most elections in northern unionized states have been fraudulent/illegal for the past 60 years. Unions , not the governor, ran Michigan, Ilinois, etc Now our cities , with unionized teachers and firemen and policemen
have created unsustainable pension funds, compliments of generations of mayors who only got elected by bribing the city unions with these more or less invisible side benefits. I might add that the media, newspapers and others (all unionized) have failed completely to bring this looming financial disaster to the attention of the public for decades. Only the internet news sites have offered a means of getting around our MSM folk, who have colluded for their entire professional lives with one another. Once again – a lack of competition leads
to disaster.
Rural Indian farmers are on a permanent, 24/7, self-imposed suicide watch. The moment they receive a report that the average rural temperature has risen by 2 degrees Celsius they off themselves. Urban farmers themselves have, apparently, self-exempted themselves. This requires study.
Urban farmers?
A riff on “rural farmers” 😉
Until they can interview the deceased farmers, this study is complete fiction.
..O.T., but way cool !!
“NASA brings the new Mars rover to ‘Fox & Friends'”
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5527574224001/?#sp=show-clips
Jamal Munshi addressed spurious correlations here
https://www.academia.edu/27948083/SPURIOUS_CORRELATIONS_IN_TIME_SERIES_DATA_A_NOTE
and there are strong ocrrelations between
US spending on science, space, and tecnhology, and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation,
number who drowned by falling in swimming pools, and number of films Nicholas Cage appeared in.
per capita cheese consumption, and number of people who died by becoming tangled in bedsheets
divorce rate in Maine and per capita consumption of margarine
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Hmmm, ENSO meter is nosediving….
59,300 suicides – OK so what’s the downside?
How does that supposed number of suicides compare to the numbers of those Indians involved fatal automobile collisions?
The first is a smaller number but they could also be related .
At least they’re not burning “used” women on their husbands funeral pyres any more…mostly.
This is a country that gets less than 5% of its tax returns each year, pretty sure the 59,300 is mostly murders that nobody bothered to investigate.
More bogus science from the lewandowssky school of fiction writing.
The inhumanity of the climate committed is well documented and this sorry study does nothing but underscore that inhumanity.
As Leif is so found of pointing out, correlation is not causation.
Oh noes!!! It’s FARMAGEDDON!!!!
Biggest issue , the land keeps getting split up with increasing family size and the need to provide drowies, often means getting heavenly into debt. Often their situation has always been marginal, hence why for many years people has they have done through history, have rushed from the country to the city . Being a poor farmer in India is not has bad as it can get because in India that really is bloody awful .
We know that can’t be true because the real reason for Indian famer suicides is … wait for it … GMO cotton.
Man, you can’t make this stuff up. People will believe anything these days …
W
It took 5 minutes to find a graph showing India’s agricultural production of its 3 main crops has doubled since 1980.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EZMGVwURo3M/S-DtaieCf6I/AAAAAAAACnk/vsV0yFNlmOs/s400/Indian+Rice,+Wheat,+and+Corn+Production+(three+biggest+crops)-742694.PNG