Torn Fabric
Take the pesticide problem. Although cotton occupies only 5 per cent of India's agricultural land, it accounts for 54 per cent of pesticide use. Andhra Pradesh cotton growers use more than 30 per cent of the country's pesticides and almost 70 per cent of pesticides used for growing cotton. "Since the advent of the green revolution we have been surviving on a high pesticide dosage. We adopted alien varieties, which brought new diseases and to control them we resorted to excessive use of pesticides,' says Y S Ramakrishna, director, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture. The pattern of pesticide use that is followed has led to pests developing immunity, which in turn leads to even greater use of these chemicals. It's a vicious upward spiral that increases the cost of farming, adversely affects soil quality and, therefore, yields. This is one of the major reasons for suicides in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab.
The first major cotton crop failure occurred in the mid-1980s by the whitefly bug. The synthetic pyrethroids class of pesticides failed. It was then that farmers started using alternative pesticides like endosulphan, quinolphos, monocrotophos and chloripyriphos. But even these failed. In the mid-1990s, various varieties of the bollworm pest