Accidental gamblers: Risk and vulnerability in Vidarbha cotton by Sarthak Gaurav and Thiagu Ranganathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. pp. 497. £150 (hb) / $150 (e-book). ISBN: 9781108832298; ISBN: 9781009276597

Abstract

This book considers cotton cultivation as a farmer's ‘gamble with the rains and a gamble with the markets’ (p. 317). The authors analyse these gambles, the decisions that come with them and the structures that shape them through great empirical depth making it a highly relevant contribution. Vidarbha, a region in Central India and the focus of this book, is of particular interest regarding these gambles because of the region's extreme vulnerability to climate change.

It is perhaps the most fascinating characteristic of the book that the authors take the farmers seriously as cotton specialists (p. 4) who are well aware of the risky business they engage in. This is possible because both authors spent long periods in the field during several phases of fieldwork from 2008 to 2020, using the methodology of longitudinal study of villages. The so-called agrarian crisis, unfolding in India since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, serves as a backdrop of the book. Vidarbha is one of the epicentres of this crisis and became infamous for the farmer suicides that have swept the landscape—particularly, as the authors claim, in the cotton growing areas.

The authors do not disagree about the devastating impacts of the neoliberal reforms but show that agrarian distress in the region has been going on for longer. They start with a detailed and determined historical account of Vidarbha in particular, adding up to scarce (at least English) literature (see, e.g., Satya, 1997). The historical review gives a detailed account of how Vidarbha became a ‘cotton frontier’ (p. 376) whereby ‘accidents’, events completely external from the perspective of a Vidarbha farmer, influenced the cotton economy and the structure in which the farmers' gambles have been taking place.

The book closely analyses the colonial takeover and the subsequent phenomenal rise in the area under cotton, when farmers started to grow for world markets, though still under a predominantly rain-fed environment. This, the authors argue, caused deforestation and increased water use and ‘rendered the population vulnerable to ecological and environmental degradation’ (p. 82). They also describe how the American Civil War as a major boost for cotton production generated unprecedented wealth for merchants and large landholders while peasants and agricultural labourers became even more vulnerable to food inflation and adverse income shocks.

Guarav and Ranganathan clearly show how these developments and the change in local institutions still shape today's agriculture in Vidarbha. For example, they highlight how forced commercialization resulted in the expansion of area on which cash crops are cultivated, in increased indebtedness and—together with the development of a land market—in land concentration. They describe how

However, the authors do not engage deeply with how this historical legacy influences the caste-class structure of the present.

The book then discusses how, in the early 20th century, farmers increasingly became reliant on purchased inputs for cotton, cultivation costs increased and debts were a constant problem. It is a pity that post-independence agriculture is discussed with much less detail, perhaps and correctly assuming that there is a lot of literature doing that (e.g., Gulati, 2002, Ramachandran & Rawal, 2010, De Roy, 2017, or Ramakumar 2022). The authors do however make connections to the post-independence period, when they write that ‘real wages declined … to such an extent that late twentieth-century real wages were considered to be lower than those of the late sixteenth century’ (p. 41).

The authors dedicate an entire chapter on inputs in agriculture where they show, based on their dense data, how farmers routinely experiment with different crops, seeds, pesticides or agronomic practices. In particular, they provide a very detailed description of how farmers choose their crops and seeds and describe how marketing and sales strategies of input dealers and seed companies make it more difficult for farmers to make informed choices. For example, ‘ingenious seed brand names’ (p. 280) lure farmers into buying certain seeds. Consequently, farmers use ‘multiple seed brands as a “rule of thumb” in the absence of knowledge on what works and what does not’ (p. 277), instead of multiple trials of a single seed brand.

For the pesticides, the authors show how Vidarbha is in a pesticide treadmill and the costs are rising. Even banned pesticides (like monocrotophos) are widely used, leading to a high number of pesticide poisonings. At the same time, alternative non-pesticidal management methods are not widespread. The authors seem to uncritically endorse zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) here, an agricultural production system professed to work without chemical inputs. The book does not discuss the many questions regarding ZBNF's efficacy as well as its uncanny misuse towards furthering the cultural politics of the current dispensation ruling India. 1

A particularly relevant case in point is Bt-cotton, which is near universal in Vidarbha as farmers enthusiastically adopted it. Net returns grew steadily until 2017, but in 2018, the yields decreased dramatically due to the pink bollworm outbreaks. Through all the years of study, however, cotton returned the highest income compared to all crops, and therefore, farmers stayed with Bt-cotton. Interestingly, the authors discuss the rise in (illegal) herbicide tolerant Bt seeds. Farmers express the belief that these seeds would solve the arising problems with pest outbreaks and yields but show a limited understanding of what these seeds are exactly, a symptom, the authors write, of the deskilling of farmers.

While the real costs of cultivation increased sharply, the real prices of cotton did not go up much in the period of this study (2008–2020) and the real incomes were stagnant. The situation is particularly dire for farmers on rain-fed lands without groundwater-based irrigation. On average, about one in ten households earned a revenue less than the costs, that is, incurred losses, more likely those with less capital in the form of land.

Gaurav and Ranganathan then come to the part of the book where it all started for them thematically: to show all the aspects of farmers' decision making, risk hedging and risk taking. Empirically, they show that the cycle of debt is indeed a vicious cycle, but not always for the same households. It is landholding and class that determine who goes into it and comes out of it while some other households then enter this debt cycle. The authors argue that ‘on an average, households experiencing yield shocks in 2015 were able to recover and even surpass the incomes of those who did not experience these shocks over a short span of five years’ (p. 358). It is an interesting argument that the farmers might just stick with cotton because of its variability rather than despite of it. ‘Some like the thrill’ (p. 6), one cotton farmer is quoted. However, the interconnected nature of land, class and risk-mitigation abilities ensures that households with small and marginal landholdings may sometimes never come out of it.

The authors describe in detail how the farmers undertake risk hedging in creative ways and how their opportunities to do so depend on the size of their landholding and gender. Ex ante risk hedging includes crop diversification, intercropping and other adaption practices of cultivator households. Mainly, farmers experiment with a variety of crops. Here, soybean has become the second important cash crop in the region, but with declining importance as its promises for farmers have been thwarted by recurring poor yields. In a different function, red gram can be an effective hedge and source of nutrition, considering that sorghum has declined massively affecting food security and livestock rearing.

Ex post risk coping mechanisms include labour market adjustments such as diversification outside of agriculture, borrowing, asset sales and a reliance on formal and informal insurance arrangements. The book describes diversification out of agriculture as an ex post coping mechanism coming into play in times when incomes are low and distress is high. Interestingly, farmers ‘do not acknowledge crop insurance or weather insurance as a risk coping mechanism’ (p. 351), mostly because of poor experiences in the past and a failure of insurance markets.

Gaurav and Ranganathan show that vulnerability is ‘asymmetrically borne by the small and marginal farmers, and women in the household’ (p. 358). Landless and marginal cultivator households ‘have limited financial strength to cope with idiosyncratic and covariate shocks compared to those with the means to cope with the same’ (p. 347). This is an important finding because it puts into perspective an earlier finding, namely that wages increased as the interaction between farmers and agricultural labourers changed considerably, for example, with rising opportunity cost for farm labourers.

Here, the authors emphasize how particularly non-cultivator households rely on the Public Distribution System (PDS) for food security. On several occasions, the authors show the crucial role of the state for all households. The government frequently issues debt waivers and relief ‘packages’ to cushion shocks. Despite these ‘packages’ being politically motivated in many cases, they do serve as a ‘lifeline to the beneficiaries’ (p. 356) empirically.

Another arena of state intervention is the pricing, crucial as ‘downside price risk is perceived as the most critical risk factor’ (p. 358). The authors describe the different measures of the state and how they have been dismantled or weakened again. The most interesting part is where the authors describe how selling and price-making in local market yards actually takes place. For example, the farmers lose their bargaining power and rely on middlemen from the moment they enter the yard as the auctioning processes can be chaotic causing a very high and not necessarily justified price variability. The authors show that the activity of the public procurement system has been highly variable during the period of the study, but that officials from the public Cotton Corporation of India played an important role in the market yards intervening to support the minimum prices.

The book shows how the vulnerability of households has worsened by the end of the study period in 2020 as land sizes have fallen and Bt-cotton yields have declined. Data indicate that households in the sample are substantially indebted, and the authors give a fine-grained picture of how and why. Households with a lower asset base are more vulnerable to relying on high-cost non-institutional credit. For all groups though, the authors emphasize that ‘informal credit from kinship network, that is, friends and relatives was common’ (p. 200) and that ‘the informal ties are a much-needed lifeline during financial hardship’ (p. 201).

This is highly interesting. It is a pity, however, that the authors pay very little attention to what these findings in particular mean in terms of caste. In an Indian context, access to such networks are, in almost all cases I assume, determined or at least strongly influenced by one's caste. Gaurav and Ranganathan do touch the question when they write that ‘so far as representation of SCs [scheduled caste] and STs [scheduled tribe] is higher among the landless households relative to other caste groups in the villages, their vulnerability and risk coping strategies are of immense significance’ (p. 359), but the authors do not elaborate much.

The lack of engagement with caste as a social reality is perhaps linked with the conceptual perspective of the book that is comfortably placed in some sort of a modified neoclassical view of farmers as efficient actors. Within this framework of methodological individualism, the authors produce remarkable insights and great analytical narratives on the perspectives of farmers and their decision making. This framework is, precisely, what makes the book so rich while it seems to preclude the authors to engage more deeply with social embeddedness of individuals in social structures like caste or class. Already Ambedkar (1917) wrote that

Class and caste then greatly influence an individual's choices and options within the gamble of Vidarbhan cotton farming.

The book also asks why Vidarbha farmers do not become more politically active. The authors state that the Vidarbha farmers failed to form politically relevant alliances to protect the ‘interest of the agrarian communities of the region’ (p. 360) and get a larger share of resources for Vidarbha, a region with a considerable developmental backlog. While the book does show inner-village economic inequalities in many instances, they seem to gloss them over too easily as a reason when they argue that ‘the disconnect among the farming communities was bolstered by the process of mass consumerism that distorted collective identity of the village, and individualism and competitiveness became the norm’ (p. 400). In the concluding part, they also indirectly blame caste as a factor for breaking farmers and regional solidarities. Frankly speaking, this Gandhian notion of a unified village community that has been overrun by the ideologies and institutions of the market has been challenged quite thoroughly in sociology and other disciplines, and its presence in the book is uncanny to say the least.

Nevertheless, the book ends with a conclusion that focuses very much on suggestions on how to improve the situation, and for this, the authors are to be commended. This part of the book is based strongly on its empirical findings and therefore particularly valuable and relevant. To name a few, the authors call for seed sovereignty and for more research on locally adapted seeds, for public investment in irrigation and a revival of traditional community-based water management systems. In terms of credit market, the authors say that the ‘question of sustainable agricultural credit in a high-risk environment continues to be unanswered’ (p. 394) and that credit and insurance might need to be bundled for insurances to pick up.

What is missing though are more structural suggestions. While the authors give a very insightful understanding into how local institutions developed and how price uncertainty actually presents itself to the farmers, any suggestions on how to restructure price and agriculture are lacking. It is easily forgiven as the book is focused on Vidarbha, and the policy suggestions are, implicitly, addressed to people who might have power in the region but not in India as a nation state or beyond. It is still an interesting gap to reflect on what histories of cotton cultivation have taught us with regard to what structures of means of production or what organization of agriculture would benefit (which) Vidarbha farmers.

This book is a highly valuable contribution, making thought-provoking conclusions based on an impressive body of data. That Gaurav and Ranganathan also extensively wrote about how historical ‘accidents’ and economic and political structures and institutions shaped cotton cultivation makes it a particularly significant read. The authors' passion for the cotton cultivators in Vidarbha allows the reader to understand the farmers' decision-making, their risk hedging and vulnerabilities in fine-grained detail, including their hopes and desperations. These aid towards a deeper understanding of how rain-fed and groundwater-based agriculture might develop in the hotspots of the climate crisis.