Dimensions of Agrarian Crisis in Kerala

There is a fairly wide recognition that Indian agriculture has been passing through serious crisis over a decade. Two different faces of crisis are always differentiated, ‘agrarian crisis’ and ‘agricultural crisis’. ‘Agrarian Crisis’ is structural and institutional in nature, as could be seen in growing marginalization and failure of support system due to the unfinished agenda of shifting institutional emphasis from state to the market. ‘Agricultural Crisis’ may be seen as referring to performance of agricultural sector in terms of changes in growth of productivity and production and input and technology related factors. The most striking feature of Indian agriculture over the last decade is the reinforcing and interacting of agricultural and agrarian crisis culminating in ever increasing incidence of farmers suicides. Any policy adopted in reviewing this sector and correspondingly providing livelihood security to the farmers requires an indepth understanding of different dimensions including causes, extent and consequences of the crisis. Only with a comprehension of this, intervention strategies can be adopted so as to prevent such situations in the future and also rebuild household livelihood on a sustainable basis. Based on this background, the book intends to unravel the factors and processes underlying the agrarian crisis on the one hand and the consequences of it on the other. The study is particularly focused on the state of Kerala, since Kerala’s agriculture has some unique features including highly fragmented and small size of holdings, homestead farming with mixed crops, larger area under commercial crops, export orientation crops, high credit and hired labour intensive cultivation and higher indebtedness of farmers which exacerbated the crisis resulting in a suicide of around 2000 farmers and snatching the livelihood security of a vast majority.

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Agrarian crisis: a national perspective. 3. Agrarian crisis in Kerala: a macro perspective. 4. Agrarian crisis: an empirical analysis on causes. 5. Agrarian crisis: the extent, consequences and strategies adopted. 6. Summary and recommendations. Bibliography.