Middlemen, government apathy drive farmer to commit suicide in West Bengal.
A bumper crop, government apathy and exploitation by middlemen has driven a debt-ridden potato farmer to commit suicide in North Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district this week.
Many, however, are not ready to give in without a fight although the odds are against them. Farmers from Burdwan and Hoogly districts in south Bengal demonstrated at a number of places by destroying their crop.
The steps taken by the state government to help the community have also proved to be inadequate. According to state agriculture minister Naren De, this year the total production of potato has been over 9.5 million tonnes — much above the average annual yield of 8-8.5 million tonnes.
“The state has only 375 cold storages with a total capacity of 4 million tonnes, thus there is a glut in the market and a good amount of potato has still not been harvested and rotting in the fields.”
Finance minister Ashim Dasgupta in his budget speech said, “This year, we have seen a fall in the prices of potato due to excessive production. As a consequence, the potato growers have suffered loss. The state government has decided that in order to protect the interest of potato growers, potato will be purchased through cooperatives and the West Bengal Essential Commodities Supplies Corporation (WBECSC) at a price of Rs 3.50 per kilogram and stocked in cold storages.”
Naren De said the state government has decided to buy one million tonnes of potato from the farmers. Although various cooperative societies have started buying potato in Hoogly and Burdwan — the two major potato-growing districts — so far the state’s intervention has yielded little positive result.
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According to officials of the agricultural cooperative banks, which offer credit to farmers, the problem stems from the fact that farmers don’t have direct access to the market. “The entire market is controlled and operated by middlemen who also act as moneylenders and control cold storage facilities. The poor and marginal farmers often depend on them for credit and in turn give their produce to these middlemen at a much lower price.”
“To add to their owes, the government arrived in the market when most farmers had sold their produce to middlemen. The government agencies found it difficult and time consuming in buying potato from individual farmers, and started buying from the middlemen,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.
The chairman of Burdwan Central Cooperative Bank Chittaranjan Banerjee admitted that there was a strong apprehension that cooperative societies were buying potato from middlemen ignoring small farmers.
This year, moneylenders and middlemen paid the farmers Rs 160 per quintal while the average cost of production was around Rs 170-175.