Agricultural Distress Research Articles

Protecting land and livelihood under climate risks: What hinders crop insurance adoption?

Small-scale agriculturists in developing countries face continuous weather-related risks, which are exacerbated by the growing issues of climate change (See Shah et al., 2018 for Pakistan; Zakaria et al. (2020) for Sub Sahara Africa). Despite efforts to introduce formal crop insurance at a subsidized rate by many governments, including in India, insurance penetration rates remain low in less developed countries (LDCs). One reason for this is continued reliance on informal credit as a risk-coping mechanism in poorer regions in times of agricultural distress. This prompts the question as to why farmers rely on these methods when apparently less expensive formal crop insurance is available. To answer, we investigate the link between the conditionalities of informal credit and the decision to adopt crop insurance together with other factors such as farmers’ socioeconomic class, education, and attitude to risk. Thereby, we derive policy implications for enhancing insurance penetration among poor farmers. A theoretical model is first constructed to provide a motivation for the empirical relation examined. An analysis of the decision to adopt crop insurance and the extent of insurance coverage availed is undertaken using a two-part fractional logistic regression with crop insurance data from India (provided by the National Sample Survey Office). The results demonstrate that informal interest rates are significantly and positively correlated with the probability of taking up crop insurance, and disparities between economic and social classes in the adoption of crop insurance exist. Although the ills of usurious informal interest rates are often highlighted (Bhaduri, 1997), this indirect positive effect on crop insurance penetration has not been established heretofore. The exercise also looks at the possibility of loss expected by a farmer and their insurance adoption behaviour by relating it to Prospect Theory (Kanheman, Tversky, 1979).

Is migration an effective adaptation to climate-related agricultural distress in sub-Saharan Africa?

Migration is often considered a form of climate change adaptation by which individuals, households, and communities seek to reduce the risks associated with climate change. In this study, we examine first-time seasonal migration out of a village in North-Western Burkina Faso to neighbouring countries, triggered by more irregular rainfall patterns. Through a set of 52 qualitative interviews, we analyse the perceptions of migrants themselves as well as the sending community regarding migration consequences. Men migrated in the off-season, whereas women stayed behind. Most migrant men and wives of migrants perceive migration to have negative consequences for their socio-economic situation and their health. Despite this, a lack of options and deteriorating environmental conditions might force the men to move again. We interpreted the range of narratives provided by women and men against the background of the scientific literature on migration as climate change adaptation. While migration could be beneficial, this study challenges the notion of migration as an effective adaptation strategy for people in climate-vulnerable settings, who lack other options.

Debates on agricultural loan waiver schemes in India: myths and realities

ABSTRACT The agriculture sector in India is marred with several problems, which have resulted in farmers’ distress. To address the distress of the farmers, both Central and State Governments of India implemented agricultural debt waiver schemes (ADWRSs) as major policy interventions in recent years. These schemes differ in terms of coverage of the farmers and lending agencies. However, all of them aim to benefit millions of small and marginal farmers of India. The implication and evaluation of these schemes has invited serious criticisms from both policy makers and researchers. It is true that these schemes have created fiscal pressure on the implementing governments. In addition, some degree of corruption has become an integral part of the schemes. However, given the extent of the indebtedness of the farmers, waivers may also be crucial as a temporary measure to mitigate agricultural distress. This paper explores the debate and examines the criticism of the ADWRSs from various quarters. We have found that the majority of arguments against the debt waiver schemes widely accepted amongst bankers, policy makers and even economists are based on perceptions and are not backed by sound economic logic and analysis.

A Class-Focused Theory of Minimum Support Price and Agricultural Distress in India

Minimum support price (MSP) is posed as a remedial response to the distress condition of Indian farmers. This essay dissects MSP and the debate regarding it from the class-focused theory of surplus labor. The analytical tool of class sets shows the limited scope of MSP compared to the disaggregated nature of the Indian agricultural sector and shows that the MSP policy debate is blind to class questions and their consequences. Bringing in various overdetermining and contradictory effects of class-related production and circulation processes, value theory is applied to unravel the dissimilar crisis conditions of agrarian enterprises. Once MSP is combined with class and other nonclass processes, it follows that the MSP outcome will not have uniform effects across enterprises and will not secure its self-proclaimed objective of redressing farmer distress.

An Analysis of Antecedent Causes of Agricultural Distress in Haryana

Background: Haryana is an agricultural developed state of India but fluctuations in growth rate of agriculture and allied activities are very fast from last two decades. Some symptoms of agrarian distress have been observing in Haryana. In this paper a concrete analysis of prevalent situation to understand the antecedent causes of agriculture distress has been discussed. Methods: The study has been made intensive reference to secondary data (from 1966 to 2018). The study has been descriptive in the nature and percentage method has been used to analysis the objectives of the study. Result: The study has concluded that main causes of agricultural distress were cost of all main inputs increased over the long time, an imbalance generated in NPK ratio of consumption of fertilizer, not getting proper remunerative prices; poor infrastructure development process and only few crops were procured by government.

Issues and Challenges of MSP as an Income Enhancement Approach in India

Given the proliferating agricultural crisis and cumulative farmer distress, minimum support price (MSP) as an income enhancement approach in Indian agriculture has been contextualised in this study using the unit-level data of NSSO on Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households (2013). The study tries to understand level of awareness and accessibility of MSP, magnitude of difference among the states and reasons for poor accessibility. The classification of states based on awareness about MSP and procuring agencies (PA) and magnitude of sale to PA at MSP shows that Bihar, including the North-Eastern states of Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, is the low-ranking state. Although MSP works as a safety net for market risk, low level of awareness, pre-harvest sale and non-availability of PA are some of the important issues which need to be addressed for achieving the goals.

British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

AbstractThis article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

Laboratory Calibration and Performance Evaluation of Low-Cost Capacitive and Very Low-Cost Resistive Soil Moisture Sensors.

Soil volumetric water content () is a vital parameter to understand several ecohydrological and environmental processes. Its cost-effective measurement can potentially drive various technological tools to promote data-driven sustainable agriculture through supplemental irrigation solutions, the lack of which has contributed to severe agricultural distress, particularly for smallholder farmers. The cost of commercially available sensors varies over four orders of magnitude. A laboratory study characterizing and testing sensors from this wide range of cost categories, which is a prerequisite to explore their applicability for irrigation management, has not been conducted. Within this context, two low-cost capacitive sensors—SMEC300 and SM100—manufactured by Spectrum Technologies Inc. (Aurora, IL, USA), and two very low-cost resistive sensors—the Soil Hygrometer Detection Module Soil Moisture Sensor (YL100) by Electronicfans and the Generic Soil Moisture Sensor Module (YL69) by KitsGuru—were tested for performance in laboratory conditions. Each sensor was calibrated in different repacked soils, and tested to evaluate accuracy, precision and sensitivity to variations in temperature and salinity. The capacitive sensors were additionally tested for their performance in liquids of known dielectric constants, and a comparative analysis of the calibration equations developed in-house and provided by the manufacturer was carried out. The value for money of the sensors is reflected in their precision performance, i.e., the precision performance largely follows sensor costs. The other aspects of sensor performance do not necessarily follow sensor costs. The low-cost capacitive sensors were more accurate than manufacturer specifications, and could match the performance of the secondary standard sensor, after soil specific calibration. SMEC300 is accurate (, , and of 2.12%, 2.88% and 0.28 respectively), precise, and performed well considering its price as well as multi-purpose sensing capabilities. The less-expensive SM100 sensor had a better accuracy (, , and of 1.67%, 2.36% and 0.21 respectively) but poorer precision than the SMEC300. However, it was established as a robust, field ready, low-cost sensor due to its more consistent performance in soils (particularly the field soil) and superior performance in fluids. Both the capacitive sensors responded reasonably to variations in temperature and salinity conditions. Though the resistive sensors were less accurate and precise compared to the capacitive sensors, they performed well considering their cost category. The YL100 was more accurate (, , and of 3.51%, 5.21% and 0.37 respectively) than YL69 (, , and of 4.13%, 5.54%, and 0.41, respectively). However, YL69 outperformed YL100 in terms of precision, and response to temperature and salinity variations, to emerge as a more robust resistive sensor. These very low-cost sensors may be used in combination with more accurate sensors to better characterize the spatiotemporal variability of field scale soil moisture. The laboratory characterization conducted in this study is a prerequisite to estimate the effect of low- and very low-cost sensor measurements on the efficiency of soil moisture based irrigation scheduling systems.

Changing Employment Pattern and Agricultural Distress in Rural Areas of Jammu and Kashmir

A study of employment pattern in a society reflects the economic profi le of its people. It is an indicator of the economic diff erentiation of people in an area. In a traditional agrarian society, the population though engaged in agriculture was largely classified as landowners or as landless labour with a small proportion engaged in artisanal activities. Land as an asset provided power and authority in this context. In a capitalist society, the occupational diversification moves from agriculture to industry and finally to the services sector. The development of the industrial sector was historically seen as advancement for the rural population with the predominance of better employment opportunities as industrial workers. In the case of developing countries, there has been growth in services sector rather than employment in industries. This growth in employment in favor of services is skewed as most of the people are employed in the unorganised sector. This paper will study the movement of labour out of agriculture to other sectors of economy in rural areas of Jammu and Kashmir. It will try to analyse the direction and reason for movement of this labour. This will be preceded with a brief theoretical discussion on changes in employment patterns in rural areas.

Climate and Weather Induced Agricultural Distress and Migration: Characteristics and Evidence

From the study it is concluded that after implementation of the scheme, 93% respondents stated that they have been provided irrigation facilities for farming to enhance agriculture productivity. Around 91.8% respondents admitted that due to the provision of irrigation facilities for farming, the production of commercial crops (89.5% respondents) have increased and 91.8% respondents stated that agriculture lands have been covered under cultivation.

Trends in Agricultural Credit

Agriculture sector is playing a significant role in the development of rural areas in our country. Agriculture is the main occupation and still is a strong means of livelihood and there is necessity for ensuring sustainability in these livelihoods. Agriculture and allied sectors contribute nearly 22% of GDP of India and further 9.93% contribution in total export of India. Rural indebtedness, agricultural distress, dependency on private money lenders, and farmers suicides are common features surrounding Indian Agriculture. For more than 100 years RBI and Central Government have been making efforts to enhance institutional credit in rural areas particularly to assist agricultural operations. But economic survey (GOI) 2010 shows that out of 27 public sector banks, only 14 sector banks achieved the agricultural credit target of 18% agricultural credit and in case of private sector banks only 8 achieved the target of 18% for lending to agriculture in 2009. In order to increase productivity a huge investment on agriculture is essential. Farmers need more capital in order to buy qualitative seeds, agricultural implements, power tiller, adoption of latest technology. But Indian agriculturist is not only capital scared but also faces natural vagaries in addition to unfavorable voltaile marketing conditions. Hence he needs credit for the agricultural expansion programmes. Credit enables the agriculturist to extend control over his ownership of resources. The much spoken debt relief and waiver only touched the rich agriculturist leaving small and marginal farmers not caring. Further debt waiver and relief a most ambitious programme did not succeeded as expected and programme could not be carried out successfully because of faulty implementation.

Migration Estimation in India: A Monsoon Migration Model

Rural-Urban and Rural-Rural migration has become one of the most common phenomena of population demographic changes. Several factors which contribute towards the improvement of the livelihood and opportunities to the migrated labourers have been studied. More than 69 per cent of the 1.21 billion people live in rural India (2011 Census) and agriculture is their main source of income. Agriculture contributes to 18 per cent to the GDP of India. Due to lack of adequate public irrigation facilities, most of these farmers are dependent heavily on monsoon as the main source of water for agriculture. Since a large percentage of these farmers are into subsistence farming, they lack the capital required to set up their own irrigation facilities. When the monsoon fails, or when there is excess rain, there is loss of crop and hence rural-to-urban migration results. There are many factors influencing rural to rural and rural to urban migration. One such important factor is agricultural distress. Agriculture being predominantly dependent on monsoon in India, there is an immediate need in accessing the relationship among agriculture, migration and rainfall. This paper analyses the role of quantum of rainfall in determining the rate of migration with empirical evidence from India and proposes a model to estimate the migration rate based on the quantum of rainfall.

1815-6年のイギリス農業不況 : 「1815年恐慌」分析の一節

1815-6年のイギリス農業不況 : 「1815年恐慌」分析の一節

Local adaptation strategies in semi-arid regions: study of two villages in Karnataka, India

Rural people in India, particularly farmers, are exposed to climate variability and risk, which is likely to increase due to climate change. This study assessed current adaptation strategies adopted by rural households in two dryland villages of Bagepalli Block, Chikballapur district, Karnataka, in southern India. The adequacy of adaptation strategies was also assessed. The study showed that rural households, and farmers in particular, adopted several practices to cope with current climate risks which include irrigation provisioning (depending on groundwater), shifting cropping pattern (to more resilient but low economically valued crops and varieties), mixed cropping, agroforestry (as a long-term strategy), diversified livestock holdings, and reliance on government development programmes. The adaptation measures also included leaving croplands fallow, sale of assets such as livestock and trees, and migration. Current climate-related responses to agricultural distress are not adequate to cope with even existing climate risks. This further indicates that rural households may not be able to cope with increasing climate variability and climate change. Thus, there is an urgent need to better understand current adaptation strategies and to enhance resilience, and to develop structured adaptation strategies to cope with the risks associated with current and long-term climate change.

INFLUENCE OF WEATHER ON TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT MIGRATION IN RURAL INDIA

While a wide range of factors influence rural–rural and rural–urban migration in developing countries, there is significant interest in analyzing the role of agricultural distress and growing inter-regional differences in fueling such movement. This strand of research acquires importance in the context of climate change adaptation. In the Indian context, this analysis gets further complicated due to the significant presence of temporary migration. This paper analyzes how weather and its variability affects both temporary and permanent migration in India using National Sample Survey data for the year 2007–2008. The paper finds that almost all of the rural–urban migrants are permanent. Only temperature plays a role in permanent migration. In contrast, many temporary migrants are rural–rural and both temperature and rainfall explain temporary migration.

Phoenix und Asche

Against the backdrop of the Global Economic Crisis India's neoliberal elites initially argued, that its economy was safely decoupled from that of western countries, giving way to the fashionable 'decoupling theory': The evolving debate centered on whether or not, and later on how, India would be affected by the global crisis, but failed to recognize that any analysis attempting to grasp the current development fully, must not only connect the crisis to the economic development preceding it but also consider effects beyond the economy's internationalized sectors. We argue that while the economic crisis does affect India's internationalized economic segments adversely, particularly via the channels of foreign trade, international capital flows and availability of credit, the majority of the Indian population suffers from social crises, rooted in the country's economic strategy and expressed through agricultural distress combined with precarious employment conditions, which have persisted for much longer than the current global crisis. The majority of the population which suffered from 'Incredible India's' 'predatory growth' will have to carry the burden of its economic recovery and continued pursuit of the status of a major economic power.

Not Guilty? Agriculture in the 1920s and the Great Depression

Agricultural distress in the 1920s is routinely quoted among the causes of the Great Depression. This article challenges the conventional wisdom. World agriculture was not plagued by overproduction and falling terms of trade. The indebtedness of American farmers, a legacy of the boom years 1918–1921, did jeopardize the rural banks, but the relation between their crises, the banking panic of 1930, and the Great Depression is tenuous at best.

Douglas Jerrold: A Life (1803-1857) (review)

Reviewed by: Douglas Jerrold: A Life (1803–1857) Sally Ledger (bio) Douglas Jerrold: A Life (1803–1857), by Michael Slater; pp. xii + 340. London: Duckworth, 2002, £25.00, $35.00. Douglas Jerrold (1803-57) was regarded by the mid-Victorians as part of a triumphant comic triumvirate. Now known only to the most committed of Victorian scholars, Jerrold was, in the 1840s and 1850s, regarded as the satirical equal of two of the most successful novelists of the period: Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray. He is a greatly underestimated literary figure, one to whom Michael Slater's richly detailed biography does ample justice. The son of strolling players, Jerrold started out in life as a boy-sailor on The Naumur, a ship captained by Jane Austen's younger brother Charles. In the early 1840s Jerrold became the driving force behind the newly established Punch, and in this role had a sometimes fraught relationship with Thackeray, the genteelly bred younger man apparently objecting to Jerrold's propensity to eat peas off his knife. A key player in Dickens's amateur dramatics troupe, and broadly sharing Dickens's social vision, Jerrold fell out with his illustrious friend over the issue of hanging: whilst Jerrold would countenance nothing less than abolition, the more famous novelist was willing to settle for the banning of public executions as an interim measure. A prolific playwright who made so little money from his theatrical endeavours that he sometimes ended up absconding to Boulogne to escape his creditors, Jerrold was imprisoned for debt. Ending his life as the highly successful editor of Lloyd's Weekly News, Jerrold, like Dickens, regarded his chief journalistic rival, George Reynolds, as a "ruffian," neither man admitting to a niggling frustration that the sensational style and content of Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper sold better than their own journalistic enterprises. [End Page 353] All these details about Jerrold's life, and many more, are put to the reader in a lucid and engaging way. But this is a biography that is much more than a sum of its parts. Much more, in fact, than a biography: Slater has in fact produced a cultural history of the theatre and the newspaper press, two of the key components of the popular and radical cultural landscape of the first half of the nineteenth century, in both of which Jerrold played a major role. Jerrold's theatrical and journalistic career had its roots in the Regency period. Jerrold's early career as a printer's apprentice finds him in London during what E. P. Thompson has described as the heroic age of popular radicalism, the years between 1815 and 1820 that witnessed the Spa Fields riots, the Cato Street Conspiracy, Peterloo, and the Queen Caroline Affair. The dominant generic modes within which Jerrold worked both as a dramatist and as a journalist were melodrama and satire, cultural modes that dominated popular radical culture of the Regency period and that Jerrold would later transplant into his mid-Victorian writings. The inheritance of radical melodrama and satire is identifiable not only in Jerrold's Victorian writings, but in those of his better-known contemporaries, not least Dickens. Slater's book does valuable service in illuminating these popular and radical trajectories in nineteenth-century literary culture, trajectories that have until recently been relatively obscured by a critical preoccupation with the aesthetics of Romanticism and realism in the nineteenth century. Jerrold set out as a young writer with determinedly theatrical aspirations, his first play performed as early as 1821 when he was a boy of eighteen. He enjoyed huge popular success with his nautical melodrama Black-Eyed Susan (1829) and, in the politically fraught year of the Reform Bill, The Rent Day (1832), written in response to the agricultural distress that propelled the Swing Riots. For all his success, Jerrold made very little money from his theatrical endeavours. Dramatists were badly rewarded in the first half of the nineteenth century: inflated salaries were paid to star performers on the stage and a great part of a theatre's income also had to be used to fund the spectacular kind of theatre (aquatic dramas, hippo-dramas, and so on) favoured by the...

Why Do Banks Fail? Evidence from the 1920s

This paper examines the causes of rural bank failures during the 1920s using a newly created state-level data series. By focusing on rural banks we are able to investigate the impacts of agricultural distress and government policies on the class of banks accounting for 80% of the failures in the decade. Failure rates were highest where farm acreage and land values had increased the most before 1920 because these regions suffered the worst agricultural distress subsequently. Agricultural distress caused more bank failures in states with deposit insurance systems, suggesting that insurance encouraged banks to increase risk as their net worth declined.

Regulation and Bank Failures: New Evidence from the Agricultural Collapse of the 1920s

This article examines the contribution of government policies to the high number of bank failures in the United States during the 1920s. In the state of Kansas, which had a system of voluntary deposit insurance and where branch banking was strictly prohibited, bank failure rates were highest in counties suffering the greatest agricultural distress and where deposit insurance system membership was highest. The evidence for Kansas illustrates how prohibitions on branch banking caused unit banks to be especially vulnerable to local economic shocks and suggests that deposit insurance caused more bank failures than would have occurred otherwise.