Beyond bad weather: climates of uncertainty in rural India

ABSTRACT

Drawing on research in central India, this paper argues that emerging climatic risks are inseparable from the systemic risks of capitalist production, particularly in relation to India's ongoing agrarian crisis. Drawing from classic debates in peasant studies around agrarian risk, subsistence, and moral economy, I argue that the intertwined effects of climatic variability and agrarian capitalism have produced a generalized ‘climate of uncertainty’ in rural India. The paper explores how encounters with agrarian risk reproduce social inequalities. It concludes that a deeper reckoning with regional histories of agrarian change is critical to forging just and secure rural futures in the face of the global climate crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrarian crisis
• risk
• uncertainty
• India

1. Introduction

The rainy season of 2019 was a tumultuous one across central India. In Malwa, a predominantly agricultural region in the state of Madhya Pradesh, the south-west monsoon – which brings a majority of the region’s rainfall – arrived promisingly in late June, perfectly in sync with the sowing period. The steady downpour was a relief to farmers who had been reeling from several years of poor rainfall. Within a few weeks, however, the rain came to a sudden and alarming halt, replaced with scorching heat and clear skies at precisely the period when rain was crucial to the growth of soybean, the primary monsoon crop. When the prolonged dry spell ended, the rain returned with a fury not seen in several years.¹ But farmers’ initial elation dissipated when they returned to their waterlogged fields to find wilted stalks and empty pods in the leguminous plant. With few or no other crops to compensate for the devastating season, cultivators could now only hope for a good winter harvest. Once again, it seemed that the weather had not favored their fields and fortunes.

While it is difficult to causally attribute this particular season’s weather events to global climate change, meteorologists and climate scientists confirm that climate change is making the South Asian monsoon more erratic, marked by the increased incidence of localized extreme rainfall events, including in central India (Krishnan et al. 2020). Not only will climate change exacerbate this pattern of variable and uneven rainfall, the pattern itself is becoming harder to accurately predict. In rural Malwa, however, the discourse of climate change is largely absent in everyday conversations among rural residents. Rather, most farmers understood the season to be a more extreme and intense form of the weather variability they had experienced for generations – from poor rain, untimely frost, and intense cold spells to droughts and floods. In the current historical moment, however, all discussions of extreme weather inevitably segued into debates around commodity prices, input costs, and debt (see also Eakin 2006). Indeed, for farmers, ‘bad weather’ is viewed neither as an isolated or novel problem nor as the most crucial issue for cultivators already facing serious agrarian distress.

Ethnographically examining assessments of and engagements with agrarian risk in contemporary India, this paper discusses how the emerging climate crisis intersects with and exacerbates the ongoing agrarian crisis in the Indian countryside. This terminology of ‘crisis’ is fraught and contentious, and scholars have productively interrogated how and when crisis narratives are deployed, by whom, and with what effects (Roitman 2013). Labels such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘agrarian crisis’ highlight the urgency of the problem at hand but also run the risk of flattening the plurality of farmers’ experiences (van de Meerendonk 2020) and legitimizing authoritarian and anti-democratic measures (Borras et al. 2022). Nonetheless, as Marx argued, crises are not aberrations but rather caused by specific historical developments that often become ‘normalized’. Crises, then, are revelatory since they expose the internal dynamics and contradictions of social formations (Watts 1983, 33). Analyzing how these crises conjoin and compound each other gets at the core of the current model of fossil-fueled industrial agriculture in India as well as to the structural transformations essential to addressing them.

While the agrarian crisis is sociologically complex and regionally variegated (Lerche 2011; Reddy and Mishra 2009; Shah 2012), in general, many farmers are experiencing the declining profitability of agrarian livelihoods as the viability of Green Revolution technologies – high-yielding varieties of seed, chemical inputs, private tube-wells – decline in tandem with reduced government spending on agricultural subsidies and infrastructures that undergirded increased food production and productivity in the mid-twentieth century.² Deepening agricultural risk undergirds this crisis. Farmers now face a range of intersecting economic and ecological risks: rising costs of production financed by debt alongside volatile and often unremunerative prices, degraded lands, and dwindling yields (Vasavi 2012). These risks have tragically culminated in the suicides of over 300,000 farmers over the past three decades. As more farmers are ever more deeply entwined within commercial production and deregulated markets, it is evident that rural India is facing the ‘convergence of economic and ecological contradictions in such a way that the material conditions of society as a whole are undermined’ (Foster 2013, 1).

As the JPS editorial to this special forum (Borras et al. 2022) highlights, climate change is inextricably tied to capitalist development, but the specific ways in which they intersect in rural worlds needs further examination. As conjoined socio-ecological processes, climate change and capitalism unfold in a similarly uneven and unequal manner in the countryside. How they intertwine to produce a generalized climate of uncertainty is the focus of this article. For instance, while water scarcity and insecurity is likely to worsen with climate change-fuelled droughts, the roots of this crisis in rural India can be traced back to the water-intensive model of industrial agriculture promoted by the state, largely through privatized and mechanized irrigation technologies. Climate change is not the sole driver of environmental exclusion but rather ‘articulates with underlying processes of economic and agrarian transformation’ (Kennedy 2022, 675).

In studying the micro-dynamics of agrarian change in Malwa, this paper underscores climate change as an often mundane and unspectacular process ‘occurring incrementally, over time and hidden from view’ (Borras et al. 2022, 6) in ways that make it impossible to neatly separate its patterns from long-standing ecological shifts. As science and technology studies scholars have argued, the scientific fact of ‘climate change’ as an abstract and planetary phenomenon often sits uneasily with localized experiences and subjective meanings of climate among ordinary people as they interact with the natural world (Jasanoff 2010). Indeed, for the individual farmer and at the level of the village, climate change-induced extreme weather is always perceived and experienced through already transforming socio-natures and political economies, often appearing as declining yields, drying wells, and mounting debt.³ Moreover, uneven trajectories of development and climate change demand greater attention to ‘the vagaries of intra-community inequalities and injustices’ (Paprocki and Cons 2014, 1113). The rural world is a ‘stratified human landscape in which the risks and opportunities presented by climatic change are unequally distributed’ (Taylor 2015, 319), with important implications for social differentiation. Rather than assuming how this plays out, we need to observe how different social groups respond and adapt to these shifts.

Building on these crucial premises, this paper historically locates and ethnographically grounds climate uncertainties squarely within – rather than external to – longer trajectories of political-economic and environmental change. Against these interlocking crises, my focus is on the ways in which climate change intersects with and transforms long-standing agrarian risks as well as emerging uncertainties. In doing so, the paper reflects on the relevance of classic debates in peasant studies for the climate change era. The next section (Section 2) outlines the core argument of the paper in relation to central concepts of risk, subsistence, and moral economy, and situates this study within the region of Malwa in central India. Then, I present the main case study in four parts. Section 3 examines existing assessments of risk in state policies on climate change, showing how these documents reduce climate risk to a problem of ‘bad weather’, and focus solely on its impacts on yield and productivity to the near complete exclusion of its socio-ecological implications. Section 4 counters the narrative presented by these policies through a historical overview of agrarian transformations in Malwa with the introduction of soybean. It shows how extreme weather intersects with socially and historically produced risk of input-intensive monocropping. The next two sections discuss how modes of adapting to climatic and environmental risks – both formal and informal – have maladaptive outcomes through the acceleration of social differentiation. In Section 5, I analyze a national crop insurance program to demonstrate how this increasingly popular mode of managing climate risk widens social inequalities. Finally, Section 6 focuses on the ubiquitous practice of groundwater extraction, showing how farmers must actively engage groundwater uncertainty in order to continue cultivation, a practice which demonstrates the transformation of agriculture into a precarious gamble. While these four axes – assessing, producing, managing, and engaging – are hardly exhaustive of the range of rural engagements with risk and uncertainty, they offer a glimpse into the intertwined contours of climatic and capitalist transformations in the Indian countryside.

2. Climates of uncertainty

The intertwined dynamics of neoliberal state policy, climatic variability, and capital-intensive production have produced a ‘climate of uncertainty’ for rural communities. In using the term ‘climate’, I aim to draw attention to climate (change) as a shifting set of weather patterns (evident in temperature, wind, and precipitation) reshaping rural worlds while also pointing to the broader meaning of climate as the prevailing set of conditions characterizing a group, period or place. The climate of uncertainty which pervades agrarian life today is certainly a product of climatic changes but not exclusively so. For most farmers in central India, climate change manifests in subtle shifts which map onto and compound existing threats to their livelihoods – hence, ‘climate change’ as a specific and identifiable cause of harm simply does not reflect their everyday reality.

Similarly, the analytical lens of risk and uncertainty enables attention to the emerging and endemic hazards of agrarian production. ‘Risk’ itself has been a central and contested concept within critical agrarian studies since at least the 1970s. Scholars have shown how the expansion of colonialism and capitalism greatly amplified the inherent riskiness of peasant livelihoods (Watts 1983). Drawing from E.P. Thompson’s (1971) discussion of ‘moral economy’ in relation to food access during shortages in eighteenth century England, James Scott (1976) argued that pre-capitalist peasant societies in Southeast Asia were organized around a ‘subsistence ethic’, which firmly prioritized risk-aversion over profit-maximization. Here, subsistence security was protected through norms of reciprocity, redistribution and patronage among peasants and with landlords and states. Subsistence, Scott notes, was not just an economic claim but also a moral one, undergirded by notions of justice and fairness – excessive claims on peasant produce by elites during times of dearth were deemed unjust, and therefore, met with protest and rebellion. The risks of agriculture were, therefore, minimized and managed both through agricultural practices such as intercropping and planting drought-resistant seed varieties and social arrangements of work sharing, gift-giving, and patronage.

Relatedly, in tracing the origins of famine in drought-prone Hausaland in West Africa, Michael Watts (1983) located the region’s crisis of food production and distribution squarely within the colonial intensification of commodity production. Cash-cropping coupled with volatile commodity prices and heavy colonial tax burdens destroyed the adaptive capacity and moral economy of peasant communities, thus rendering farming into an increasingly hazardous livelihood. As a result, risks that were agronomically minimized and socially managed were now heightened and individualized – even a small shock such as a poor harvest or fluctuating prices could produce a crisis of subsistence for peasant producers.

By contrast, Samuel Popkin (1980) insisted that the ‘moral economists’ had an overly romanticized view of pre-capitalist village relations and institutions. Focusing on individual decision-making, Popkin argued that peasants did in fact make risky short- and long-term investments in order to raise their subsistence levels. Moreover, he pointed out that social and moral norms of reciprocity and redistribution are dynamic and shifting in light of power relations and strategic calculations. In his view, the extension of markets did not destroy an existing moral economy but rather offered new opportunities for gain as well as long-term protections for the ‘rational’ peasant. However, just as Popkin critiqued the moral economy approach for romanticizing village communities, his perspective similarly presented a overly positive view of the role of markets in the lives of peasants.

Given the centrality of these debates around risk, subsistence, and moral economy to the field of peasant studies, it is important to consider their relevance for agrarian politics in the climate change era. In what ways does climate change transform these concepts and the socio-ecological relations to which they refer? At present, agriculturalists confront ‘subsistence crises’ in the form of droughts, floods, pests and disease at an unprecedented and unpredictable frequency and intensity. But it is not just the climate that has dramatically transformed in the decades since these canonical texts were written. For many farmers across the world, ‘the subsistence crisis has become a permanent state’ (Edelman 2005, 336). Indeed, farmers face new risks associated with industrialized monocropping (eg: water scarcity, rising input costs) alongside the impacts of economic liberalization (eg: declining subsidies and extension services). Local institutions ensuring subsistence security have been weakened while state relief is limited and directed through financial technologies.⁴ At the same time, rural expectations for accumulation and consumption have risen, with concomitant strains on household economies.

At this conjuncture, risk itself has dramatically transformed. The expansion of highly capital-intensive farming has ‘injected risk into the operating system of the agricultural order in a newly intensified way’ (Sethi 2021, 1405). Rising costs of inputs – from seeds and fertilizers to machinery and wells – combine with unremunerative prices and erratic weather to make it impossible for farmers – even the poorest peasants – to completely minimize risk if they are to continue working the land. Farmers are now compelled not just to manage risks but also to actively make highly risky investments simply in order to survive (cf. Sethi 2018). Contrary to Popkin’s argument, however, they do so not because markets offer any security but because it is increasingly difficult to divest from them. These risks – climatic and otherwise – are not (only) externally imposed, but rather differentially and unevenly produced, distributed and engaged within deeply hierarchical agrarian landscapes. If agriculture in India has always been a risky enterprise, it is now a highly precarious gamble on both the monsoon and the market (Aga 2018; Gupta 2017).

Further, with climate change, historically managed agrarian risks have transformed into chronic uncertainty (Gupta 2017). By definition, risk refers to a situation wherein probabilities of various outcomes are known and calculable while uncertainty connotes a situation wherein the probabilities are largely unknown (Knight 1921). While this distinction is rarely clear in real-life situations, it is apparent that climate change is fueling and exacerbating agrarian uncertainty, or the number and kinds of ‘unknown unknowns’. Farmers now face novel and unpredictable weather patterns which confound existing knowledge and adaptive mechanisms vis-à-vis extreme events (cf. Srivastava, Mehta, and Adam 2022). While capitalism has firmly implanted risk into the soils and waters of rural Malwa, climate change grafts new uncertainties onto these existing risks. The focus of this paper then is largely but not solely on experiences of uncertainty. I use both the terms ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ throughout the paper, but try to clarify the reason for using one over the other in each case.

The climate challenge, therefore, calls for a return to and reconsideration of the core concepts of early political ecology and agrarian studies to show that humans live in environments constituted by natural processes but also ‘in one of their own making, constituted by human practice, and subject to ongoing change and historical transformation’ (Watts 1983, 25). Specifically, critical agrarian studies offers a framework to analyze changing relations of production as well as diverse trajectories and dynamics of agrarian capital accumulation. Political ecology’s attunement to biophysical processes highlights the shifting ‘ecological relations of production’, or the ways in which capital accumulation reorganizes natural processes and reshapes the land (Beban and Gorman 2017, 751). Bringing these frameworks together, this paper highlights their combined strength in examining the specificities of agrarian change in relation to wider environmental and economic transformations.

These social conditions and transformations fundamentally shape how climate change reconfigures the agrarian landscape of Malwa. Located in the western part of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Malwa is a fertile area, well-known for its moisture-retentive deep black cotton soil. In agro-climatic terms, it is classified as a semi-arid region marked by undulating and hilly terrain and dry deciduous shrub lands. As a predominantly agricultural region, Malwa has long been entwined in regional and global markets through the cultivation of crops such as opium, cotton, and sugarcane. Since the 1970s, cropping patterns have changed dramatically – soybean now dominates in the kharif (monsoon/rainy) season, followed by a second crop of irrigated wheat and gram in the rabi (winter) season, made possible by the spread of tube wells and pumps fueled by state-subsidized electricity. In the past two decades, wealthy farmers have taken to the large-scale cultivation of high-value, high-risk horticultural crops such as onions, potatoes, and garlic. The average size of operational landholdings in Madhya Pradesh is 1.4 hectares and is unevenly distributed. While Rajputs (former landlords) are a major landowning caste, it is traditional peasant castes such as Patidars, Khatis, and Jats who constitute the class of agrarian capitalists, engaging in intensive commercial cultivation and investing agricultural surplus in mechanization and land purchases as well as diversifying into agri-commodity trade and input retailing (cf. Aga 2018). Over 75 per cent of farmers are small and marginal landholders with less than 2 hectares of land. Given these small and shrinking landholdings, most rural households currently rely on both petty agri-commodity production and various forms of non-agricultural wage labor and trade (Lerche 2021).

This paper draws on 14 months of ethnographic research conducted in the Malwa region between 2018 and 2019. During this time, I was primarily based in a single village that I call Pipliya, but my research involved travel to and interviews with a range of people in neighboring villages, market towns and government offices across three districts of Ujjain, Dewas and Shajapur. Methods included a household socio-economic survey with 60 rural households in one village, close observation of the agricultural decisions and practices of rural households (stratified by class, caste, and gender) across three agricultural seasons, semi-structured interviews with a range of key actors in the rural economy (farmers, traders, agricultural extension agents, policy-makers, insurers) in Malwa as well as the cities of Indore, Bhopal, Mumbai and New Delhi, and detailed analysis of national and state-level policy documents on agriculture and climate change in central India.

3. Assessment

Assessments of climate risk – what it is, how it manifests, and with what impacts – are central to climate action, shaping decisions about where responsibility lies and what must be done. In this section, I examine the framing of climate risk in key government documents which shape agrarian climate policy in India. Specifically, I look at how risk is understood – its causes, contours, and consequences – in these accounts as well as how this imagination shapes proposed solutions. Across these documents, I show risk is framed as changes to ‘temperature’ and ‘precipitation’ with little attention to the intersections between and imbrication of climatic factors and historical political ecologies. The dominant concern of policy-makers are risks posed to ‘yield’ and ‘productivity’, rather than the threats posed to rural livelihoods and social equity. Through a reading of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008), Indian Economic Survey (2017-18), and the Madhya Pradesh State Action Plan on Climate Change (2014),⁵ I argue that this particular constitution and delimitation of risk not only elides a range of existing and intersecting socio-ecological risks, but relatedly, produces adaptation and mitigation ‘solutions’ that circumvent – and indeed, worsen – the structural roots of risk.

The 2008 National Action Plan on Climate Change outlines eight national missions that act on different aspects of the climate challenge. Among them is the National Mission For Sustainable Agriculture which identifies four priority areas, namely dryland agriculture, access to information, risk management, and use of biotechnology. The focus is on technological solutions such as improved methods of water and soil conservation, development of drought – and pest-resistant crop varieties, and agro-climatic information sharing. For example, the plan calls for increased irrigation for rain-fed areas and innovative agricultural research and technology to increase yields and crop resilience. Insurance is also presented as a key area of development, but, as I show in detail below, it is framed as a way to further enable capitalist agriculture by covering risks incurred to enhance productivity. Across these arenas, there is no discussion about adapting to changing ecological conditions or addressing differential social vulnerabilities to climate impacts. Rather, ‘sustainable agriculture’ implies sustaining the current input-intensive model in the face of climatic variability rather than interrogating and transforming agricultural paradigms that produce and exacerbate adverse weather conditions.

The Economic Survey deploys an explicitly Malthusian framework in calling for increased productivity ‘against the backdrop of increasing resource constraints’ (2018, 82).⁶ Indeed, the report frames climate change as the harbinger of a new agrarian transition – in order to increase productivity and ensure prosperity, people must be moved out of agriculture. It insists that farming cannot remain a viable livelihood – the ultimate goal of agrarian policy must therefore be ‘to ensure that tomorrow there are fewer farmers and farms but more productive ones’ (2018, 83). In this imaginary, there is no future for the rural smallholder in the climate change era. Instead, climate change portends – and indeed, necessitates – urban migration and depeasantization in order to secure the country’s food and economic security (see also Paprocki 2020 on similar imaginaries in coastal Bangladesh).

Thus, the primary policy recommendations hinge on new technologies. For instance, it pushes for a renewed focus on irrigation technologies such as drip and sprinkler systems as emphasized by the ‘more crop per drop’ slogan. While it recognizes the problem of groundwater depletion, it fails to identify the fundamental roots of this water crisis in unsustainable cropping patterns as well as unequal use and distribution of water among and between rural and urban populations. Across the report, the discourse around climate change serves to renew and strengthen calls for a ‘New Green Revolution’, despite the considerable failures and ongoing legacies of the first one (see Patel 2013).

Although the MP State Action Plan adopts a more ecologically grounded approach, this report too relies heavily on technical and market-oriented modes of adaptation: mechanization, market access, improved seed and cropping techniques, and integrated climate information hubs. Complex principles of agroecology are reduced to organic farming and agro-climatic suitability with little attention to institutional support, resource redistribution, and market access. While the plan recognizes, for example, monocropping and attendant soil damage as an important area of concern, it recommends the ‘management of risks for sustainable productivity’ through intercropping and use of indigenous seed varieties. While these are crucial restorative measures at the farm level, they do not redress vulnerabilities at ‘the scale of the market, of territory, and access to state power’ (Holt-Gimenez, Shattuck, and Van Lammeren 2021, 720).

Although the report acknowledges the particular vulnerabilities faced by small and marginal farmers, recognizing inequality is not equivalent to analyzing power (Taylor 2015). It is the difference between recognizing vulnerability as a state of being as against ‘“vulnerabilization” as a relational process in which vulnerability is produced and reproduced over time between social groups’ (Taylor 2015, 8, emphasis mine). As a result of this framing, the policy suggestions remain limited to short-term and farm-level adaptations rather than structural transformations that address severe and socially produced disparities in access to resources or the decades of state disinvestment from agricultural development.

In distilling the complex phenomenon of climate change into a singular measure of temperature and rainfall, these documents dwell on a ‘narrow framework of interactions between farmers and climatic stresses’, although smallholders themselves recognize that a range of political-economic risks make their livelihoods insecure and unstable (Taylor and Bhasme 2021, 432). As such, they preclude discussion of the connections between climate and the current mode of production. Moreover, the causal attribution of climate change to greenhouse gas emissions from the developed world (while not inaccurate) serves to elide the ways that the agrarian landscapes of India too are unevenly implicated in the climate crisis, as I discuss in the next section.

Given that adverse climate outcomes are exclusively interpreted in terms of effects on ‘yield’ and ‘productivity’, it is not surprising that the proposed solutions are located squarely within the ‘adaptation-modernisation nexus’ (Taylor 2015),geared toward the maintenance of ‘mainstream mono-crop cereal-based input intensive production systems’ (Raina 2012, 321). Particularly glaring is the lack of concrete discussion of the ongoing agrarian crisis, which forms a key driver of the vulnerabilization of farmers. This crisis is itself transformed into a technical problem of costs and outputs rather than a complex political-economic, social, environmental, and psychic catastrophe. Ignoring these deep roots naturalizes and backgrounds the ‘pre-existing misery of precarity’ which is a product of specific state policies (Ribot 2014, 672).

At best, the focus is on improving the efficiency of agricultural production through technological innovation and for the protection of farmers through financialized risk-management tools. At worst, these policies advocate for the demise of the ‘unproductive’ peasantry, citing their incapacity to ensure productivity and food security in a climate-changed agrarian economy. Overall, these solutions broadly align with a ‘corporate-driven technological narrative’ (Borras et al. 2022, 9) or ‘a green economy discourse that is associated with business and market-friendly principles, technological optimism and neglect of issues concerning power, inequity, marginalisation and resource distribution’ (Srivastava, Mehta, and Adam 2022, 5). However, as I argue, the specific risks of bad weather are always already shaped by existing environmental relations that are historically and socially produced. It is to this production of risk that I now turn.

4. Production

This paper opened with an especially tumultuous monsoon in Malwa, which caused significant damage to crops across the region. But this was not an entirely unique season. Over the last five years, residents of Pipliya village and the broader region have faced multiple poor soybean harvests. Each year, distinct but intersecting phenomena damaged the crop: in 2017, it was the yellow mosaic virus; in 2019, a long dry spell followed by heavy rain damaged the seed; and in 2020, infestations of white fly and stem fly was followed by excess rainfall during harvest time to ruin the crop. In the latter case, heavy rain and high temperatures not only harmed the crop but also formed the perfect weather for the proliferation of pests. The harvests were so poor that farmers were unable to save even a small amount of good seed for the following year’s (2021) sowing, a practice that all farmers follow.⁷

Across Malwa, farmers despaired about the erratic weather. Interestingly, they cursed soybean as a ‘weak’ crop, one that required steady, if minimal, rainfall to survive and lamented their failure to diversify their fields by growing maize or peanuts. Indeed, as an agricultural extension agent succinctly pointed out, ‘It is not the rain that is the problem. The problem is soybean monocropping.’

This section outlines a broader understanding of risk through and beyond climate, specifically outlining how climate change ‘exacerbates the uncertainty and amplifies the risks attached to capitalist agriculture, thereby increasing the vulnerability of rural populations’ (Borras et al. 2022, 5). As weather patterns transform, farmers face not only heightened risks but also limited (albeit highly differentiated) capacities to manage these risks owing to the intersecting legacies of industrialized monocultures and weakened state supports. That is, farmers’ experiences of erratic rainfall, scorching temperatures, and the pests that follow are entangled with and inseparable from existing socio-ecological relations of production which are, in turn, shaped by state policy, global markets, and rural social structure.

Although the farmers of Malwa have long been integrated with global trade networks through crops such as cotton and opium, the past five decades have led to enormous and intense shifts in cropping patterns and production relations. Soyabean lies at the center of these transformations. In the 1960s, agronomists from the University of Illinois visited India as agricultural advisors, but brought with them expertise on the soybean crop which would, it was believed, address India’s protein deficiency problem (see Kumar 2016 for a history of soybean in Malwa). Although the Indian palate never quite took to the bean, its cultivation spread in the 1970s and 80s as a crop that was processed into oil and deoiled cake (DOC). Soybean was promoted not as much by the government but by oil mills, processing industries, and commodity trading companies which saw soybean as a lucrative source of foreign exchange. In a few decades, this region came to be popularly known as ‘Soya Pradesh’ (Soya State).

Soybean quickly became the dominant cash crop, displacing staple monsoon crops such as cotton, maize and sorghum. Its production largely eliminated existing subsistence crops. Indeed, the proportion of cropped area dedicated to food crops declined sharply from 86 per cent in 1960–61 to 72 per cent in 2000-03, largely due to this shift from cereals to oilseeds (Vijay Shankar 2005).⁸ This reflects global trends in soybean production. Global soybean production has increased over a 1000 times in the last 60 years, and land under soybean cultivation has quadrupled during this same period. As a flex crop, soybean is valued less for soy itself and far more for soybean meal and oil, which are used as cattle feed, edible oil and a range of industrial products (see de L.T. Oliveira and Schneider 2016).⁹ In contributing directly to the agro-industrial livestock sector, the landscapes of Malwa are directly tied to the industry that produces at least 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions within the agri-food sector.

This has had dramatic social and ecological effects. The introduction of soybean, a short-duration monsoon crop, created a new pattern of double-cropping in Malwa – soon after soybean is harvested, farmers plant wheat, gram and a number of other winter crops. This cropping pattern enabled wealthy, large landowner farmers to further accumulate capital through multiple cropping cycles and reinvest in mechanization technologies, tube-wells, and economic diversification. For small farmers, the coming of soybean enhanced their cash incomes and opened up the possibility of cultivating across seasons which made their small plots of land more viable. But it also undermined their food sovereignty and nutritional security. Soybean cultivation displaced sorghum (the primary food crop) in the monsoon season which was, in turn, replaced by irrigated winter wheat. This meant that smallholders would either have to drill a well to cultivate wheat or leave their land fallow for the winter, hampering their ability to meet basic subsistence needs from their own land (cf. Paprocki and Cons 2014). Marginal farmers who lack access to irrigation are therefore left food insecure, relying wholly on market purchases and (often substandard) grain disbursed through the state’s public distribution system.

This ‘yellow revolution’ (of soybean) has quickly transformed into an ecologically disastrous ‘soybean-wheat complex’, as farmers are now compelled to drill more and deeper tubewells to cultivate wheat and other winter crops, leading to declining water tables and considerable debt burdens (Kumar 2016). As yields decline in the wake of decades of soybean monocropping, farmers are now confronting falling yields and soil degradation which is met with greater investments in chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Overall, this pattern has ‘promoted yield anxiety and further pushed farmers onto a technological treadmill and into a constant state of crisis’ (Kumar 2016, 9). In many ways, these socio-ecological transformations resemble earlier shifts toward intensive cash-cropping and commodity production. In the Sahel region of Africa, for instance, Michael Watts (1983) described how the colonial state-driven ‘groundnut revolution’ decreased the area devoted to food crops and subjected communities to volatile commodity prices, thus transforming seasonal cycles of hunger into full-scale famine.¹⁰

It is only through this recent history of agrarian change that we can fully grasp the implications of the strange and erratic weather of the past few years. Many of these events – intense rainfall, extreme heat, long dry spells, and frequent pest attacks – are only likely to rise as the climate crisis worsens. But the vulnerability of farmers across these seasons arises at the conjunction of soybean monocropping, chemicalized agriculture, and climate change. As the agricultural extension agent introduced at the beginning of the section explained, the distress faced by farmers cannot be attributed solely to inclement weather. Broader structural forces that have pushed farmers into these destructive monocultures wherein high yields and high prices are the sole objectives of farming regardless of long-term sustainability.

This socio-ecological destruction unfolds at the intersection of climatic and capitalist temporalities. According to agricultural scientists, much of the damage in 2020 could potentially be traced to specific varieties of seed: JS-9560, JS-2029, JS-9305. The JS-9560 variety, for instance, is a locally developed seed variety whose primary quality is its early ripening. With this variety, the crop can be harvested in under 90 days, a huge advantage for farmers who wish to plant potatoes, garlic and onions on the same land over the winter season. However, this variety – despite its temporal benefits – is believed to be less tolerant of pests and extreme weather conditions (Niazi 2020). The push to produce more from the land within shorter periods of time runs up against specific material limits. Moreover, as established weather patterns shift, central India is receiving heavy rainfall even in the months of September and October (when the monsoon typically recedes) which hampers the harvest period for these short-duration varieties. Not only is this quasi-industrial model depleting the soil and water on which it is built but it creates new ecological crises (such as reduced resistance to pests) which then intersect with and are compounded by the climate crisis. Capitalist agriculture – in particular the obsession with yield and productivity that permeates down to the smallholder farm – destabilizes its own conditions of possibility (Fraser 2021).

It is clear that climate change is exacerbating the vulnerabilities of farmers in rural India – but it does not act alone or in isolation. Through an empirical account of soybean, I have demonstrated that climate change is always experienced through specific capitalist socio-natures of crops, soil, water, and seed. In doing so, it offers ‘a more expansive, historically informed analysis that situates “climate” within a wider set of environmental struggles in agrarian settings’ (Borras et al. 2022). Yet, as the previous section showed, assessments of risk often narrowly decouple climate from these struggles and offer techno-managerial solutions of risk-management, including crop insurance, whose dynamics I now examine.

5. Management

Cultivators have managed and minimized long-standing agrarian risks in multiple ways – from crop diversification to out-migration. A range of coping strategies exist that are both preventive and adaptive, including: state food-for-work programs, public food distribution systems, wage labor, migration, prayer, changing seed and crop varieties, selling off livestock, taking on loans, and so on (see Peterson 2012). These modes of managing and mitigating risk continue to be important in rural contexts. However, as noted above, centuries of colonialism and capitalist development have eroded deep-rooted modes of minimizing risk as well as moral economies of reciprocity and redistribution at the heart of the peasant subsistence economy (Scott 1976; Watts 1983). In Malwa, for instance, this can be seen in the spread of soybean farming which displaced local cropping practices that maintained agro-diversity and agronomic variation on farms to avoid subsistence crises.

In response to emerging climate change, states, corporations, and development institutions across the globe have promoted tools of financialized risk-management. Among these, crop insurance is now a popular mechanism of climate change adaptation and mitigation across agrarian contexts in the global south. In India, risk financing through extension of credit and insurance to enable adaptation to climate risks (and likely crop failure) is posited as a priority area of the National Action Plan on Climate Change and risk management through insurance is highlighted within the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, echoing similar emphases in other parts of Asia and Africa (Clapp and Isakson 2018).

Specifically, crop insurance is operationalized through the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Program, hereafter PMFBY). The program, launched in 2016, follows on the heels of a number of crop insurance programs that have been introduced (and often failed) in various parts of the country since the 1970s.¹¹ Under this state-funded and privately-operationalized program, insurance premiums, highly subsidized by central and state governments, are collected by insurance companies, who then conduct seasonal crop surveys and make payouts to farmers. In its current form, it marks the massive transfer of public wealth to private companies through premium subsidies. In effect, it facilitates capital accumulation by the insurance industry by enrolling rural smallholders into global circuits of finance in the name of climate mitigation and income security through a range of microfinance products (da Costa 2013; Isakson 2015).

More broadly, the way that insurance is framed as a climate adaptation strategy works to naturalize and de-historicize agrarian risk itself. Overall, the risks against which it protects all appear to be naturally occurring events, rather than historical outcomes of socio-natural processes – from soybean monocropping to unequal land ownership. The program is advertised as protecting farmers from ‘contingencies’ and ‘unforeseen events’. Although this is crucial especially in light of shifting and unpredictable weather patterns, it entirely elides the ways that structural inequities, political-economic transformations, and policy decisions interact with inclement weather to produce adverse outcomes for farmers. Marcus Taylor (2016) notes a similar process in his analysis of a livestock insurance scheme for Mongolian pastoralists. There, the World Bank aided the Mongolian government in setting up a livestock insurance scheme for pastoralists, appearing to be a neutral outsider facilitating adaptation to climate risk. However, Taylor demonstrates that it is the Bank's structural adjustment policies that produced these risks in the first place – through the privatization of herding and the undermining of collective risk-pooling institutions. In response, herders increased their livestock population as a mode of survival, which turned out to be disastrous both ecologically and socially, propelling degradation of pastures and decimation of herds by extreme weather. The crisis which the Bank intended to solve with insurance was one partially of their own creation.

Moreover, insurance necessarily delimits what is classified as ‘risk’ (and therefore, what losses can be monetarily compensated) while also actively promoting the same risky practices that produce vulnerability to climate hazards. The PMFBY covers risks such as yield losses (caused by adverse weather) and prevented sowing as well as post-harvest losses and localized calamities such as hailstorms, landslides, and inundation. While this scope is fairly broad, it is premised on numerous elisions and erasures, revealing a ‘gap between real-world dangers on the one hand and insurable risks on the other’ (Aguiton 2019, 285). For instance, certain crops cannot be insured at all if they are not ‘notified’ crops, leaving farmers who grow them entirely outside the scheme’s purview and certain risks are entirely unrecognized such as damage caused by frost or by stray cows and wild animals. These pre-defined risks do not adequately account for emerging climate uncertainties – for example, the potato crop is only protected against extremely low temperatures (being a winter crop sown in October), but this does not safeguard against untimely rainfall which is increasingly expected to occur well into the sowing period and beyond.

More fundamentally, the goal of these programs – as also outlined in the policy documents reviewed earlier – is to maintain the status quo of capitalist agriculture. The rationale of programs such as these is not to adapt and transform farming to suit an increasingly precarious present and future but rather to locate ways to continue and intensify current models of production while minimizing loss of income. In its own words, the program aims to provide financial support and income stability in the aftermath of natural calamities, to encourage ‘innovative and modern’ agricultural practices, and to ensure agricultural credit flows. Climate change is deployed as a discursive tool to further bolster an input-intensive and debt-financed model of agrarian development by offering a (minimal) buffer against weather shocks. Indeed, despite the lack of empirical evidence for this, policy-makers and the insurance industry insist that access to insurance will ‘embolden farmers to abandon time-tested practices and technologies that generally ensure stable yields in favour of riskier yet potentially more lucrative activities’ (Clapp and Isakson 2018, 57). Better risk management is, therefore, associated with growing riskier and more profitable crops – regardless of its social and ecological consequences.

Further, access to insurance has become another mechanism of differentiation among farmers. The program directly excludes the most marginalized of cultivators from its fold – including small and marginal farmers, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. Although these classes of cultivators can in theory take out an insurance policy, field data shows that it is immensely difficult for them to do so. Even subsidized premiums are a considerable sum of money, an impossible investment for smallholders, especially at the beginning of the agricultural season when sowing expenses (seed, fertilizer, tractor costs) are considerable. Often, bank officials are often unwilling to issue policies to smallholders. As one marginal farmer insisted, ‘They don’t give loans and insurance to people like us, those with just one bigha [of land].’

Although the program itself is faulty and limited, being excluded from its purview is not entirely inconsequential. Direct relief to farmers in the wake of crop losses is shrinking, andpoor farmers are chided by state representatives for not taking out insurance to protect their crops and livelihoods. Nonetheless, when claims payouts are made, they further enable insured farmers – mostly large- and medium-scale farmers with access to credit and cash reserves – to withstand climatic extremes. Their crops are insured, but they also have the savings to weather crop failures and have diversified into non-farm trades and occupations which afford more secure and steady incomes. Insurance itself becomes another route through which the state subsidizes and supports wealthy landowners while largely abandoning smallholders. If anything, insurance only protects those who already have the means to secure their livelihoods. Meanwhile, in the wake of climate-induced calamites and losses, small farmers are further proletarianized, pushed into exploitative wage labor and forms of ‘distress diversification’ (Srivastava, Mehta, and Adam 2022). They take on more debt and agricultural labor, often from and on the fields of large landowners, which locks them into cycles of debt, dependency and even dispossession as when they sell parcels of land to pay off loans or withstand repeated crop failures.

At their core, then, adaptive mechanisms such as insurance are primarily geared toward enabling the continuation of technologies, practices, and relations of production that perpetuate the current model of commercial farming, regardless of their sustainability in the face of the climate challenge. In reducing systemic socio-ecological risks to singular occurrences of bad weather, measuring loss solely in terms of yield, and serving as a buffer for the dangers of industrialized farming, it elides the production of risk and, more significantly, amplifies these risks. Similarly, differentiated access means that the poorest and most vulnerable farmers are entirely excluded from even the meager social safety net that insurance offers. Climate change, as well as dominant adaptation mechanisms, thus heightens processes of social differentiation and widens rural inequalities, as I show in more detail below.

6. Engagement

As the JPS editorial highlights, the differentiated impacts and responses to climate change in particular and environmental risk more broadly mean that some suffer while others prosper (Borras et al. 2022, 6). Certain agrarian classes are better able to manage emerging climate uncertainties – to survive and in some cases, thrive despite and through them. This is true of India’s agrarian crisis as well. Scholars have shown that experiences of this crisis are socially and spatially uneven (Jodhka 2012; Sinha 2020). For large landowners, new uncertainties can become opportunities for accumulation such as when they sell soybean seed at exorbitant rates in the aftermath of poor harvests or have access to storage infrastructures that enable speculation on harvested crops through spells of heavy rainfall (Matthan 2022). At the same time, nearly all farmers, including smallholders, are compelled to actively engage risk, albeit to different extents and with varied consequences. The focus of this section is on how they do so in relation to groundwater, a resource under particular stress in the current moment. Under changing socio-environmental conditions, land-water must be considered as a ‘coupled resource’ (Chung 2019) whose use, extraction and enclosure cannot be disconnected. Land is now increasingly valued ‘as the topographical basis on which to gain access to water’ (Taylor and Bhasme 2021, 436). That is, while farmers insist that land can be easily leased or bought, it is becoming far more difficult and lucrative to secure access to water.

Water scarcity is, however, a relatively recent historical and social phenomenon in many parts of India. This is made evident, for example, in historical accounts of droughts and famine in western India which show that shortages of food were common but not shortages of water (Bhatia 1992). The problem of water depletion emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century with changing cropping patterns and expansion of mechanized extraction technologies. Scarcity is not natural in a physical sense, but rather, socially produced through capitalist farming and over-extraction. In Malwa, the soybean-wheat complex is undergirded – quite literally – by groundwater to irrigate water-intensive crops such as wheat and increasingly, capital-intensive vegetables.

Water is now vital to commercial and subsistence cultivation. It is also an enterprise plagued with uncertainty for several reasons: first, with uneven groundwater mapping, the location, depth and quantity of water in subsurface aquifers is itself unclear, causing many wells to fail or quickly run dry; second, drilling tube-wells is an expensive endeavor often financed by debt (Taylor 2015; Vasavi 2020); and third, Malwa’s hard rock aquifers have a low replenishment rate, making over-extraction especially dangerous in the long-term (Vijay Shankar 2005). These risks of access are not evenly distributed and experienced. Access to water, as with other environmental resources, is reflective and productive of social inequality (Swyngedouw 2009). The topography of Malwa is such that villages comprise fertile valleys surrounded by rocky hills. In general, while wealthy and upper-caste households own land in the valleys, poor and Dalit (‘low-caste’) households own land in the rocky and arid hills where groundwater is scant. Given the connected nature of subsurface aquifers, this also means that those who can drill more and deeper wells can deplete water resources to the detriment of smallholders who must also draw water from the same hydrogeological system. As a result, a common property resource is effectively privatized by wealthy farmers through their larger land parcels, deeper wells, stronger pumps, and bigger storage tanks. With limited state investment in public water infrastructures and the absence of a moral economy of ‘just’ water use, these risks are entirely individualized with serious impacts on the subsistence security of small farmers.

Groundwater depletion and attendant inequities are well-documented, exceeding and preceding the impacts of climate change (see Bhatia 1992; Moench 1992; Shah 2008). Indeed, these inequities of water access are not directly tied to climatic variability but rather to intensive cash-cropping over the past half-century. Nonetheless, scholars point out that climate change will act as a ‘force multiplier’ to further threaten secure access to water for millions of farmers (Shah 2009). For India, hydro-climatic change has multiple effects: monsoon crops face greater risk of both flooding and drought, while late winter and summer crops will experience higher evapo-transpiration and lower soil moisture due to excess heat, thus requiring more frequent irrigation. Given the highly vulnerable irrigation economy, addressing these hazards and their uneven social impacts will necessitate not just technical interventions such as better storage facilities and efficient irrigation systems but also a reckoning with the current unsustainable and inequitable model of water-intensive farming.

For small farmers, investment in irrigation is already incredibly risky. Yet, these cannot always be avoided and indeed, must be engaged. For instance, Gopal, a Dalit smallholder farmer who owns about half an hectare of unirrigated land, drilled four tube-wells over three years. A good supply of water would enable him to cultivate an additional winter crop on the land. None of the wells yielded water, preventing him from planting wheat or onions, as he had hoped. Following these failed attempts, he leased out this land to a neighbor for the winter season and took up factory work in a nearby town, insisting that farming without access to water was unviable. In this situation, more farmers like Gopal will be pushed to lease or even sell their land, potentially undermining their food security, autonomy, and leading to greater concentration of land and water in the hands of rural elites.

Indeed, farmers who have ready access to capital, credit and social networks reported drilling or deepening wells every year as wells run dry ( Dubash 2002). This is not just for their own use but also for sale. In villages in Malwa and elsewhere, it is common for water merchants to sell water through tankers at a high cost during the summer months or enter into share-cropping contracts based on their contribution to irrigation (cf. Bhatia 1992; Taylor 2015, 90). Further, it is these big farmers who can more swiftly adapt to and capitalize on short-term fluctuations in water availability. In 2019, rainfall was plentiful, if devastating to the soybean crop. Streams were full and wells overflowed. While one might have expected most farmers to take advantage of this rare situation, small farmers proceeded to plant water-intensive but low-investment wheat to recover their losses from the heavy rain. Wealthy farmers, however, had the capital to invest in water-intensive but also high-yielding and profitable vegetables, thereby garnering substantial profits despite and through this extreme weather, thus furthering processes of stratified accumulation.

Moreover, in Malwa, capitalist farmers of the dominant Patidar caste are now leasing land in the neighboring Nimar plains (south of Malwa) through which the Narmada river runs. Water, they insist, is more plentiful in this region given its proximity to the river and land is relatively inexpensive. This region comprises both wealthy Patidar farmers and, importantly, a substantial adivasi tribal population. It is the land of these latter communities that farmers from Malwa tend to lease (non-adivasis cannot buy land here due to constitutional laws protecting adivasi land rights).¹² What is unfolding then is a form of ‘water grabbing’ since land leases are primarily driven by the desire to capture water resources (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012). Moving into new lands has become a crucial (mal)adaptation strategy among wealthier households. Although this form of water appropriation is relatively small-scale, it nonetheless reallocates water away from poor, Dalit and adivasi peasants and undermines the quality of their land.

Formal adaptation programs can also become a key mechanism of differentiation. In the water sector, their overall focus is on improving the efficiency of the existing system of production. The solutions offered largely fall into one of two broad categories: techno-managerial and traditionalist. Techno-managerial solutions from drought-resistant seed varieties to drip irrigation are presented as panaceas to climate impacts. Traditionalist solutions call for a return to older modes of conservation and adaptation such as water harvesting techniques and drought-coping mechanisms. While certain technologies may be necessary and welcome, unless they are tied to farmers’ needs and address rural hierarchies, they will end up reproducing unequal social and ecological relations of production. For instance, a valorization of traditional water-management systems that does not confront caste-based ritual segregations that exclude Dalits from access to common water resources will only worsen enduring hierarchies.

Watershed development, a cornerstone of climate and development policy in India, is a prime example of this. It generally involves the construction of concrete run-off structures, check dams, and individual farm ponds for the purpose of rainwater harvesting and aquifer recharge. As a study of climate resilience initiatives in a drought-prone region of India (Taylor and Bhasme 2021) demonstrates, while these water infrastructures are publicly funded, the uneven geography of land ownership and water flows as well as the large investment demands of ponds, pumps, wells, and tanks required to utilize harvested water makes it far more difficult for small and marginal farmers to access its benefits. In this way, project dynamics are remarkably similar to earlier watershed development programs which concentrate resources in the hands of already privileged individuals in order to ensure the achievement of project ‘success’, thus reproducing structures of inequality (Baviskar 2007). In Malwa’s villages too, it was primarily upper-caste farmers who had the capital required (over and above minimal state subsidies) to invest in water-efficient technologies that ensure their water security and enable agrarian accumulation.

Thus, ‘the impacts of climatic change combine with the commodification of water and new forms of market-entrepreneurship’ (Taylor 2015, 90) to deepen rural inequality. On the one hand, big farmers respond to water uncertainties by expanding their search for water (both above- and under-ground) and through taking advantage of short-term fluctuations in water availability. On the other hand, Dalit and adivasi smallholders tend to be cornered into two (im)possible situations: they can either continue to make these uncertain investments in water (and other inputs) or abandon cultivation altogether. As grave risks morph into perilous uncertainties, agriculture itself turns into a gamble, but one whose odds are firmly stacked against the small farmer.

7. Conclusion

While the tumult of the 2019 monsoon, with which I began this paper, is not quite a direct outcome of the climate crisis, it portends an emergent present and near future of volatility and uncertainty for farmers. Across South Asia, cultivators are expected to increasingly face extreme and unpredictable weather in the form of intense bouts of heavy rainfall, longer dry spells, and frequent heat waves. While farmers have always confronted erratic weather, they now do so under dramatically changed conditions of production, ones which often preclude risk aversion and demand everyday engagements with economic and environmental uncertainties simply in order to remain cultivators of the land. This ‘climate of uncertainty’ is produced at the conjuncture of anthropogenic climate change and capitalist modes of cultivation.

In the context of industrialized monocropping, an erratic monsoon is not only felt as more or less rainfall but equally as additional investment in expensive inputs (seeds for re-sowing or chemicals to deal with new pests), delayed harvests, extensions on loan repayments, or the need to drill a new well. Ordinary risks of inclement weather turn into puzzling and treacherous uncertainties, upending established agricultural practices and raising new dilemmas: how to cultivate lucrative short-duration varieties when rainfall now continues into harvest time? Can the standing wheat crop withstand the extreme heat that seems to arrive earlier every year? Will there be enough water to irrigate a field of onions? When the costs of production are so high and returns already minimal, even incremental shifts in weather patterns can engender devastating losses (cf. Gupta 2017; Sethi 2021).

And while these uncertainties structure the everyday decisions and practices of all classes and castes of farmers, it has particularly devastating impacts on small farmers who are unable to consistently engage with these uncertainties or repeatedly withstand losses. For smallholders, farming itself becomes unviable, leading to distress diversification, land dispossession, and worsening poverty. Big landowners are not only better able to withstand and capitalize on these uncertainties owing to their access to capital, credit, and knowledge, but they are also often the primary beneficiaries of state-sponsored climate adaptation programs from crop insurance to watershed development and beyond.

This ‘climate of uncertainty’ that envelopes rural lives and livelihoods has important theoretical and political implications. In the current moment, the intertwining of capitalist and climate risk does not generate practices of risk minimization. As this essay has shown, most farmers are now compelled to engage in risky practices in order to remain as agriculturalists, achieve basic subsistence standards, and enact upward class mobility. This marks a partial but significant shift in peasant orientation toward agrarian risk. Moreover, previously known risks have mutated into hard-to-predict uncertainties which can disrupt long-standing modes of prediction and adaptation. This calls for a deeper understanding of quotidian experiences of risk and uncertainty among farmers in order to better grasp the desires and compulsions, knowledge and practices, generated at the intersection of climate change and agrarian capitalism. Doing so is crucial to imagining and building more socially and ecologically just modes of engaging with uncertain agrarian futures.

Relatedly, the study of agrarian risk holds value for theorizing and enacting struggles for subsistence security and agrarian justice in the climate change era. Importantly, risk draws our attention to questions of responsibility and redress. Writing half a century prior, scholars working at the intersection of peasant studies and political ecology argued that peasants found some succor in social norms and institutions which minimally ensured the right to subsistence, especially in times of crisis. Today, in the villages of Malwa, there are few village-level safeguards against subsistence crises, and entrenched hierarchies of caste and class often preclude communal sharing and collective action. Without simplistically romanticizing traditional village institutions, global markets, or even state welfare programs, we might ask what moral economies (understood as notions and practices of justice, fairness and security), both extant and emergent, are available and adequate to the current rural predicament.

Crop insurance, discussed above, is one such site that might be retooled for more progressive and transformative ends. As a mechanism of risk-management and social security, insurance programs can be socialized and expanded in ways that are inclusive, accessible and redistributive – as against its current exclusionary, technocratic, and financialized form. The successful protests by north Indian farmers in 2020–21 against the dismantling of an established system of support prices and regulated markets represents another such site of mobilization, even though this system of security is itself tragically built on an unsustainable model of input-intensive farming. Nonetheless, demands for insurance against crop loss and insistence on fixed prices for produce represent dynamic moral-economic struggles that claim protections against agrarian risk and uncertainty from the Indian state. Often, these unfold in expected spaces and have contradictory effects. The question for contemporary agrarian movements then is how to strengthen, extend and reorient these demands in ways that connect issues of fair prices and resource redistribution with broader concerns around climate resilience as well as stable employment, food security, and human dignity.

Forging viable agrarian futures in the face of climate change demands an expansive, relational and historical understanding of risk and uncertainty, one that roots climatic stresses firmly within longer histories of uneven development. Indeed, analyses of the social and historical roots of risk demonstrate how experiences of climate change are always refracted through existing production relations and power structures (Paprocki 2021). As Malwa’s farmers well know, the climate of uncertainty that engulfs their livelihoods and life-chances emanates not just from fleeting rain clouds and scorching temperatures, but also from the soybean seed and the tube-well, and the model of industrialized agriculture that brought these technologies to their lands. Placing the seed, the well, and the weather within a unified frame of analysis and action might lead us toward the structural transformation of this model (Borras et al. 2022). Doing so is essential to ensuring that rural producers are able to not simply manage risk or survive uncertainty but also thrive and flourish through a life on the land.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank four anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments which greatly improved this article. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the UCLA International Institute provided essential funding for this research. The S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, afforded me the time to write this article. My greatest thanks go to the many people of Malwa with whom I worked. All faults are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author names

Tanya Matthan is a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley. As an economic anthropologist and political ecologist, her research examines agrarian capitalism, rural aspirations, and financialization in central India.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number 9661].

Notes

1 This heavy rainfall was attributed to a positive Indian Ocean Dipole event (also known as the Indian Nino) which, in 2019, was one of the strongest ever on record.

2 Since 1991, the agricultural sector in India has largely stagnated. For instance, its contribution to the GDP was about 15% as of 2011–12 even though nearly 60% of the country’s population depended on the sector for their livelihood. Over half of the country’s farmers are in debt, and for 85% of farmers, there are no savings in agriculture – that is, they make less than they spend on farming on average. Alongside, landholdings are small and fragmented with over 70 per cent of farmers classified as ‘marginal’, owning less than one hectare of land.

3 Even if aggregate rainfall remains constant, it is expected that localized extreme rainfall events will increase as will variability in patterns of rainfall dispersal. According to the Government of India's Economic Survey (2017-18), temperatures in South Asia are likely to increase by about 3–4 degrees by the end of the 21st century. As a result, farmer incomes could decline by 15–18 percent, or as high as 20 per cent for unirrigated areas. In central India where Malwa is located, there has already been a three-fold increase in extreme rainfall events in central India since 1950. Here, a 10 per cent decline in average rainfall has been accompanied by a 75 per cent increase in extreme rainfall events (daily rainfall exceeding 150 mm) over the same period. Among the major crops affected by temperature increases, soybean and chickpea rank among the highest, both important crops in Malwa.

4 The large-scale protests (2020-21) by farmers, particularly from the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, against the proposed deregulation of the sale and purchase of agricultural commodities can be read as rebellion against the state’s violation of the moral economy of fair prices.

5 These reports are prepared by different state agencies: the National Action Plan by the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, Government of India, the Economic Survey by the Ministry of Finance, and the MP State Plan by the regional government’s Housing and Environment Department.

6 While the report discusses a range of issues, I focus here on Chapter 6 on ‘Climate, Climate Change and Agriculture’ (p. 82-101).

7 Most farmers were then forced to purchase seeds, often from wealthy farmers who had managed to save and stock good seed. During sowing (late June), seed prices skyrocketed, leading many farmers into debt to buy seed or to reduce their cultivation altogether. As a result, soybean acreage declined by 10% in the 2021 season compared to 2020.

8 India currently ranks fifth in global soybean production but its output is far lower than other major producer countries such as Brazil, USA, and Argentina. Much of India’s soybean exports are to the US and Southeast Asian countries such as Taiwan and Vietnam, but exports fluctuate depending on global prices, especially since Indian soybean varieties are seen as ‘non-competitive’ (higher priced) than those produced in places such as Brazil and Argentina.

9 In 2020-21, soybean production in India was estimated at roughly 11 million metric tons, and about 2 million metric tons was exported as soybean meal, though annual exports vary considerable from year to year.

10 The expansion of shrimp aquaculture in coastal Bangladesh reveals similar dynamics. As Kasia Paprocki (2021) notes, even though development practitioners view shrimp farming as a solution to climate change, it is actually the violent and dispossessive legacies of shrimp and the displacement of rice cultivation that produced new social and environmental threats for peasant cultivators. Commercial shrimp production caused waterlogging and soil salinity, leading to the destruction of trees, grazing lands and gardens - in other words, damaging the means of production and reproduction in the region.

11 While the program is now voluntary, until 2020, it was mandatory for all loanee farmers (farmers availing of crop loans from public and private banks). That is, any farmer who had taken a crop loan was automatically insured - in part as a way for banks to hedge against risk of loan default (Sheth 2017).

12 This practice is further justified through dominant discourses that castigate adivasi farmers for their ‘unproductive’ and ‘wasteful’ use of the land (and water) which are, in turn, tied to racialized stereotypes of adivasis as ‘lazy’.