Migrant labour and globalisation

Millions of rural workers migrate seasonally, circulating between their villages and work elsewhere:

• to the rich farms of Punjab and Haryana at harvest time;
• to brick kilns in Uttar Pradesh;
• to construction sites in cities.

Jan Breman called them 'footloose labour': workers who move from place to place, with few rights, no job security, and poor living conditions.

When men migrate, women left behind take over farm work. This is the feminisation of agricultural labour: women becoming the main agricultural workers, often without owning the land.

Globalisation and agriculture: with liberalisation in the 1990s and India's membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Indian agriculture was opened to global competition and imports.

Contract farming: a company (the book's example is PepsiCo) agrees to buy a farmer's crop at a fixed price, and supplies seeds and advice.

• Advantage: a guaranteed buyer and price.
• Problems: farmers become dependent on the company; land shifts from food grains to export crops; and the methods (heavy chemicals, single crops) are often not ecologically sustainable.

Input companies have also changed farming. Their agents now advise farmers in place of government extension workers, selling costly seeds, fertilisers and pesticides.

Farmers' suicides: the book links them to several causes together: costly inputs, debt to moneylenders, crop failure, falling prices, and the risk of growing cash crops without support.

Open markets bring new opportunities, but also new risks, which fall hardest on small farmers.