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 looks like a grea candidate for the entertaining website “Spurious Correlations”. Check it out at http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.
From Wikipedia: “About 800000 people commit suicide worldwide every year, of these 135,000 (17%) are residents of India, a nation with 17.5% of world population.”
What an absolutely bizarre and astounding correlation and coincidence. Imagine that, a country with 17% of the world’s population has 17% of the world’s suicides!
Thank you Taphonic, for proving that ‘climate change is real’ and punishing everyone in the world in a fair and balanced manner. I expect nothing less from Gaia. The Great Gaia is also fair in the distribution of loan sharks and enslavers of the children of those who don’t pay.
The balance continues.
The blame game, especially of foreigners, was a major pastime long before global warming advocacy showed up.
The suicides are caused by debt. The solution is to have the losses of farmers absorbed by the whole community. Modern agriculture should not be denied to poor farmers just because they might have a total loss one year.
We all need food, and we all need to share in the risk of producing it. When things are good, they should pay a portion into the fund, and when things go bad they can draw from it for their necessary expenses until they can get the next crop in. It would operate much like a community bank. It is not capitalism, it is not socialism, it is not communism. It is simple and effective. Some social groups have done it for centuries.
Greg postulated:
“Expensive grain is putting whole families into debt to Monsanto for generations and starving them.”
Without knowing how farm credit has worked in India for centuries. It is village moneylenders who loan money to poor farmers. Today those are usually Brahmin supporters of the BJ Party of PM Modi. He will not want to squeeze them to treat their debtors better as a result. He may not be allowing easy competition with them from services reached by cellphones, either.
When loans cannot be repaid, even the whole value of the farm may not pay back what is owed. So, farmers may try to get their family out of debt by suicide once the farm is seized. The answer to this is not hating on Monsanto, but ensuring competition in both the sale of seed and the sale of loans to farmers by stimulating wider markets in these loans through cell services.
Once again, it is government, and those government favors at the root of a social evil, not the freedoms of action of innovators.
One fifth of world suicides in one fifth the world’s population. Who’d a thunk? Poverty and grief can do that. India is already stoking the coal to that problem.
Correlation does not prove causation. Good examples:- The number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with the number of films Nicolas Cage starred in. The number of people who drowned by falling out of a fishing boat correlates with the marriage rate in Kentucky. The number of Japanese cars sold in the USA correlates with the number of suicides by crashing a car. Are Japanese cars really that bad that their owners commit suicide?
Farmers suicides in India relates to two basic issues, namely poor governance, low income from the agriculture. I presented a report to government on this few years back titled “Farmers Suicides: A brief Analysis”. The main reasons for farmers suicides related to high input cost technology, genetically modified seed, facilities, minimum support price, employment. I don’t want put the entire report here. Some of the salient features of these headlines are (1) High inputs [input costs] under highly variable weather both in terms of space and time lead to farmers suicides; (2) This is clear from the farmers’ suicides in these four states after 2005, where Bt-cotton was grown with steep increase in area [heavy private barrowings lead debt trap]; (3) government luke warm attitude in procurement [middlemen benefitted], stepmotherly treatment to storage-transport facilities, rapid decline of groundwater and poor quality power supply; (4) farmers are not getting minimum support price with politicians-bureaucrats joining hands with middlemen; (5) food processing and animal husbandry was neglected. All these are clearly discussed with facts and figures in my two books referred earlier [available on net free].
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Suicide is much more prevalent in first-world countries. The richer a population is, the more they commit suicide. Dr. Reddy’s analysis may correlate with this. More loans and more input costs to chase higher expected earnings, cause more risk and more stress. Also, government involvement, leading to a lack of control over outcome, possibly suddenly deleterious changes in outcome by changing regulations, leading to feeling the deck is stacked against the farmer and a feeling of hopelessness.
Poverty does not cause suicide. An increase in living standards with expectations of further increase and then seeing those hopes dashed can cause suicide.