The situation for India's more than 260 million agricultural workers is dire. Nearly 30 people in the farming sector die by suicide daily, according to the most recent figures available, typically due to overwhelming debt. Indeed in 2020, more than 10,000 people in the agricultural sector ended their own lives, according to government data. India's economic backbone -- its farmers and their families -- is in collapse. They face crushing pressures: insurmountable debt, environmental degradation, and extreme rates of cancer linked to exposure to pesticides. This strain is compounded by climate change and extreme weather -- from ground water depletion to water shortages and crop damage due to rising temperatures -- effects which have been tied to increasing suicides in India. Farming is a notoriously economically unstable industry globally, but farmers in India find themselves buried under densely layered problems. Many are subsistence farmers who are drowning in the volatility caused by the Green Revolution which began in the 1960s as a way of industrializing the agriculture sector with high yielding seeds, mechanized tools and pesticides. In some cases, farmers cannot work their land due to illness linked to the revolution's pesticides and fertilizers. They are dealing with deep-rooted battles against multinational corporations. And all the while having to take out loans each year to make the agricultural cycle possible. And then, when farmers are unable to get loans from legitimate banks, illegal moneylenders -- or loan sharks -- step in, charging exorbitant interest rates and creating an inescapable debt-trap for farmers, in some instances pushing them to suicide. The state of Punjab where we visit, is known as the breadbasket of India. lawlessness in academic journals, understood the highway’s dangers and uncertainties better than most. He had been threatened in anonymous calls and messages — then abducted in November 2020 and told to keep quiet.
Another researcher documenting the destruction received this text: “You’re going to burn in the fire. It will be a barbecue. Message delivered.”
But Ferrante, 33, believed traveling here was worth the risk. He had come to see this highway, a reddish gash scarring a quilt of green, as one of the Amazon’s last stands. A photographer and I had now joined him on this journey to its further reaches.
BR-319 begins along the banks of the Amazon River and runs more than 500 miles, slicing through the largely preserved core of the Brazilian Amazon to connect the cities of Manaus and Porto Velho.
Scientists argue that the only thing protecting this reserve — one of the region’s last bastions of contiguous forest — is the profound deterioration of the road itself.
Its decay has for years left much of it impassable, repelling criminal land grabbers and helping to preserve an area scientists say is vital to the survival of the entire forest.
But that protective barrier is now being paved over.
Stretches of the highway have been improved in recent years, making travel easier and unleashing a surge of deforestation. Many in the rainforest want the government to complete the job. President Jair Bolsonaro, who has worked to ease and undermine environmental regulations to promote development, says paving the highway would fulfill “a wish of the Amazonian people.” His vice president, a general in reserve, said he’d eat his own military beret if current officials don’t get it done.
You must be logged in to post a comment.