SOLANUM TUBEROSUM
On a train to Shantiniketan in West Bengal in the summer of 2012, Suketu, a post-doctoral student is miffed with the demands made by his young nephew. “He wants these potato chips? I tell him to eat jhal muri (an Eastern snack-mix made of puffed rice and spices) but he wouldn’t listen,” he says scratching his head. “These companies lure them with foreign potatoes, promise higher returns because of which farmers end up taking more loans. The result is this: a farmer sells these potatoes for Rs. 6 per kg while a kilogram of chips costs Rs. 350 (57 grams for Rs. 20),” he says trying to hush up his eight year old nephew.
When a fellow passenger possibly ignorant about the skewed economics of potato trade in West Bengal – one of the highest producer of the tuber – informed Suketu about Kisan Credit Cards, a form of low interest loans for farming, he was enraged. “Only 900,000 farmers out of 10 million farmers have got this facility. And guess what? Since many suffered losses due to blight and other diseases, they had to sell off their cold storage bonds to prepare their fields for winter crops,” Suketu said muttering something against Bengali bhadralok (gentlemen), which was barely audible. The passenger moved to another seat as he started pontificating loudly about the skewed economics of potato.
As more and more fields have been brought under the imported Atlanta potatoes in Bengal, preferred by multinational potato wafer manufacturers, demand for cold storage to keep the potatoes disease-free among the farmers have gone up in Bengal, often increasing their burden of debt.
Later in 2012, in Burdwan district, about 60 kilometres from Santiniketan, five farmers killed themselves as they could not sell their potatoes due to lack of cold storage and companies’ refusal to buy these crops. In that same year, the CPI (Maoist) issued a threat to all money lenders and banks in Southern West Bengal on behalf of the farmers to face the wrath of peoples’ courts or forego the loans. In November 2013, to ensure that farmers in West Bengal get a better share of profits, the Chief Minister banned the sale of potatoes outside the state in the open market, although multinational companies procured the potatoes at a much cheaper rate from various parts of Bengal.
Suketu has been trying hard to demystify the potato trade in his state but his nephew, he says, still demands potato chips while watching cartoons on TV.
SEASONED 