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Development Nepal |
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Development and Stability |
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Article |
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Haat Colors |
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October 30, 2005 |
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-Raji Dhital raji_dhital@yahoo.com
Published in: Tropical resources [New Haven] Vol. 23. Spring 2004. p. 67-74. |
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Introduction Every 75 out of 100 people in Nepal are farmers and the majority are involved in the agriculture market system. Whether in a small haat street market or as part of the greater global economy, farmers have to face the uncertainties and complexities contingent on the market system. In a politically and economically faltering nation like Nepal, what does it mean to be a small farmer? The forces that determine the lives of farmers in this tiny landlocked nation between India and China, aptly referred as yam between boulders, extend well beyond its borders. How do the farmers in Nepal survive in the face of these forces, forces which they have no power to alter?
The Haat Rangeli glows in an amalgamation of colors as the sun begins to wane in the early dusk. Rang translated into English means colors, and colors are the first thing that strike me in this small town in a flat strip of plain called “Terai” that lines the southern border of mostly mountainous Nepal. Brilliant red, yellow and blue saris of women, pure green color of vegetation and bright but gaudily painted shutters in Rangeli create a unique collage of colors. Every afternoon a small muddy street corner comes alive with hundreds of bustling locals hurrying to get their goods into the street market called haat at the right time. ‘Right time’, people say, means the ‘right price’. You can get everything here: from local fresh vegetables to Indian ‘Fair and Lovely’ cosmetic cream and cheap Chinese electrical goods, compared to my hometown, Katmandu, everything seems very cheap, especially the fresh green vegetables. But there isn’t enough of a market in Rangeli for all the vegetables produced here and people have to look beyond the haat. Biratnagar, the second biggest city is just 22 kilometers away, but with a lot of competition it is difficult to get the ‘right price’ there too.
A quaint little town on the Indian border, Rangeli is not the sort of place where one goes for no apparent reason. “Why would you want to go to Rangeli,” lots of people have asked me. There was a time when Rangeli was the major trade point between India and Nepal. But after the Mahendra highway was built, and Biratnagar became the trade center, Rangeli has become just a colorful town near the great city, a place where peri-urban farmers try hard to survive in the urban market. Rangeli is obscure but it is far from the most rural place in Nepal. I find it hard to describe Rangeli in superlatives: it is poor but not the poorest; it is remote but not the remotest. It just is there, struggling everyday, receiving scant attention: one of those villages where poor farmers work to grow food seven days a week, 12 months a year and sometimes cannot afford to eat what they grow.
The Research I went to Rangeli hoping to understand what it means to be a farmer there and in places like it. I hoped to be acquainted with farmers’ lives, their dreams and expectations, their involvement in the market economy and how it has affected them. Both Rangeli and Biratnagar share an open border with India. The flow of Indian products and Indian policies has a major impact on almost all of the market decisions made by its tiny land-locked neighbor, Nepal. Rangeli provided a perfect location for me to study the farmers’ positions in the complex system of agriculture marketing from the street market haat to the urban markets. I wanted to know their relationship to urban consumers and whether farmers are the beneficiaries or the victims of the agricultural market system.
Though I am Nepalese, I am from Katmandu and this part of Terai is entirely new to me. Yet after spending a year in the USA, I feel great warmth and familiarity in the colors that Rangeli infuse in me. On a sultry July morning I feel comfort in the earth radiating beneath me as I rush to keep my first appointment with the small farmers in a little teashop.
The Farmers At seven in the morning the teashop is already brimming with activity. The aroma of strong tea wafts from a dusty teapot steaming on a big earthen stove. A young girl with bright eyes rushes back and forth with big cauldrons full of chickpeas. Dark-skinned farmers are clustered in a semicircle on the wooden benches that creak every time someone sits down. The farmers are getting ready for yet another laborious day, but they always seem ready to have an extra cup of tea and talk. “Do you have some time to talk to me?” I ask. “ Are you working for the government?” they ask. Luckily, I am not, nor am I a development worker.
I say I am just a student without any paychecks waiting for me at the end of the day. “Like us, labor in the field 24 hours a day and no money,” someone reciprocates. We have a common ground. Vishwanath Mandal seems to be the most talkative one; his wit and wisdom pleases us all. “What is the most important thing for a farmer?” he asks, answering immediately. “Grains, people think they can just buy them, but we actually produce them.” “What about vegetable farmers, I heard that they make more money?” I question. “Money is important for farmers but so is grain; we can never afford to buy them if we don’t grow them.” His sentences carry a profound meaning. Poor farmers, all over the world, hold subsistence crops sacrosanct. In this part of the world, the majority of farmers plant rice and wheat as subsistence crops, some of which they sell in the market. Small farmers mostly plant vegetables for commercial purposes and a few big farmers plant jute and sugarcane.
The Nepalis As the morning ripens, two landlords also join the teashop. The difference in status is visible as chairs are pulled out hastily for them and some farmers stand to make room for them. The farmers refer to them as Nepali, from up in the hills. Steaming tea arrives swiftly before Nepali landlords ask, and probably they won’t pay for it either. I find it disturbing that the farmers from the plains; themselves referred to as Madhesi, distance themselves even further from their country and their landlords by calling the latter Nepali and not Pahadi, the correct word for people from the hills.
The Madhesi, literally meaning people from the lowlands comprise of an immigrant Indian population that migrated to Nepal in the beginning of the 20th century. They still share strong cultural and social ties with India. The majority of the lowland region’s 11 million people are struggling below the poverty level, and very few Madhesi hold a high government or military post. Still considered somewhat uncouth and uncivilized by the Nepali elites, Madhesi-Nepali social relations extend one step beyond the regular conflicts between the richer and the poorer. They are poor AND Madhesi.
The discomfort written visibly on their faces, Madhesi in the teashop now fidget with their food and look towards the Nepali whenever I ask a question. “Why don’t you ask them, they own lots of land,” Vishwanath says. “Vishwanath if she is asking you, you must answer her,” one of the landlords says before adding, to me, “What is it that you want to know?” His condescending tone reminds me of other Nepali landlords I met the day before. “Nobody can give you more detailed data than us,” they prophesize, “what can these Madhesi possibly tell you that we don’t?” That is precisely what I want to know. And the Madhesi, it turns out, have a lot to say.
Vishwanath Vishwanath, to my gratitude, is very forthcoming. Clad in checked mens’ lungi1 and long shirt, he looks like a typical middle-aged Madhesi. His eyes are exceptionally light in color but alert. “I didn’t know that you were following us to the fields too,” he says showing his caffeine-stained teeth, as we head off together after the Madhesi breakfast: tea, chickpeas and roasted rice. His Nepali is heavily accented and I can’t speak Maithili, the language Madhesi speak. With a few Hindi words here and there, however, we manage to get along just fine. He is ready to answer my questions and makes me think of others that cannot be answered easily. Remarks that farmers casually make like “How will we survive if we don’t produce grains?” hold deeper meaning. I know it is not only they, but we too, in far away Katmandu, who can’t survive if they don’t produce. But the rural urban gap in this tiny nation is so wide, Kathmanduites get further and further away from the problems that farmers like Vishwanath face to feed themselves and us.
The Problems “Ah, ask me what is not the problem? Everything is so expensive. Money is a sizable problem. Hunger is a big problem, and this life is the biggest one,” Vishwanath says. “Tell me about your life then,” I encourage. Like the vast majority of farmers in Nepal, who own less than a hectare, Vishwanath owns just 0.66 hectares (1 biga) of land and sharecrops another biga from a big farmer. The disparity of landholding in Terai and elsewhere in Nepal is huge; roughly 30% of the households own 70% of the land, with the richest 2% owning about 18%. Concentrations of land in the hands of a few elite and severe exploitation of the farmers through labor expropriation have long been characteristic of the Nepalese political economy (Central Bureau of Statistics Nepal 2000, Arjun 2002). Various state-led grants and land tenures have ensured semi-feudal agrarian relations that still determine landlessness and agricultural underdevelopment. Land constitutes not only the predominant source of income but is also a symbol of significant social status and power in Nepal. The small size of landholdings pose a series of problems for subsistence farmers like Vishwanath, who are without any other skills and job opportunities, limiting their chances of raising themselves in the class hierarchy.
Money Matters Vishwanath plants rice and wheat, the major subsistence crops in his little piece of land, and some lentils and vegetables. He would like to plant more vegetables for commercial reasons but doesn’t have the means to do so. Without any kind of government subsidy or support, even planting subsistence crops is very expensive for the Madhesi here. “A farmer needs to invest in labor, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation pumps and also on seeds for vegetable farming” Vishwanath says, “and everything costs money.” Farming patterns are traditional and very labor intensive and traditional. Irrigation facilities are almost non-existent. Most people have to pump ground water by electric pump for irrigation, a substantial cost to small farmers while benefiting big. “I have to rent a machine for Rs. 80 per hour,” Vishwanath says, and “I need around 10 hours for a crop.” Ironically, electricity for irrigation is the only thing that is subsidized by the Government.
Vishwanath meets all production costs through loans, either from a bank with 11% annual interest or from the landowners or middlemen, who lend at the rate of 3%-5% monthly interest. In spite of the higher interest, Vishwanath prefers taking loans from the landowners, because they are more flexible and there is little delay. Oftentimes repayment involves fixing the price of the crop even before harvesting. These conditions distance farmers from the market economy and greatly favors the middlemen. After the hard work of one season, when Vishwanath harvests the crop, he divides it into three parts: for the middlemen as loan repayment, for the landowner as rent and, the little surplus that is left for his family. “I have a family of five and the grains last only for six to eight months. After that I have to buy the same rice for much higher price. I feel like I am paying for the rice I labored to grow, but there is no way out. Sometimes I can’t afford to eat what I grow.” For Vishwanath, stuck with his little piece of land, high production investment, and unfair pricing mechanism, the agricultural market is unable to provide the means to break the debt and poverty cycle. He takes all the production risks without any form of insurance.
Natural disasters make these risks worse. I witnessed Rangeli being flooded in what farmers described as the worst flood in seven years. Tense faces watched with worry as their mud huts, newly planted seedlings and newly caught fish submerged in water. Farmers scurried to find a relative’s house to spend a night, as their own houses lay inside the flood. The colorful town had a look of a smeared painting as the downpour threatened to wash all its colors away. Will Vishwanath endure heavy losses because of the flood? Luckily, he says, the planting season had just started and very few farmers had actually planted the seedlings. Farmers were saved this year but it was a close call. Farmers’ own perseverance, sense of community and close network are all that are keeping them alive through the bad and good times.
Good times are when the production is high and farmers have a surplus to sell in the market, their only source of income. But with very low resources to invest on production, impoverished farmers like Vishwanath have no power to control the price of their product, which is in the hands of middlemen and a few wealthy businessmen.
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