Poisoned Futures: Pesticide Usage and Agrarian Suicides in Vidarbha, India

Author(s): Hayden Seth Kantor
Completion Date: June 2008

Abstract: Over the last decade, more than 150,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in response to the mounting hardships of agricultural life.  Centered in Vidarbha, a cotton-growing region in central India, these agrarian suicides most frequently occur when farmers ingest the pesticides that were to be applied to their fields.  So why are these suicides happening and why are they happening now?  And what does the use of pesticides in this context index about the situation facing Indian farmers?  More than just enactments of despair caused by chronic drought or debt, these suicides are communicative acts--embodied rejections of prevailing agronomic practices.  Specifically, the use of pesticides in this way represents a metonymic relationship between the failures of the Green Revolution and the (mis)use of one of its supposedly productive commodities.  With these suicides-by-pesticides, farmers are expressing the perceived impossibility of imagined futures--the unfulfilled promises of the developmentalist state in the neoliberal age.  Through a consideration of the entanglement of material culture and human bodies, the intersection of subalternity and environmental history, and the shifting conceptions of development in India, this paper unpacks the social meaning of these farmer suicides.

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