Last fortnight, Kerala’s paddy farmers took a strong beating after the state was lashed by strong, unseasonal showers: 1.4 lakh tonnes of paddy worth crores of rupees was damaged in 28,231 hectares. Even as politicians squabbled and the state government announced Rs 10,000 per hectare as special financial assistance, the calamity underscored the many ills plaguing paddy cultivation in Kerala.

Rice is a staple in a state that requires nearly 40 lakh tonnes annually, but produces barely enough to last a couple of months or meet 40 per cent of its needs. It is forced to import the rest from neighbours—as it did a century ago. Unexpected rains may not have much to do with the dismal record.

Kerala is a wet, tropical state that receives about 300 cm of rain a year and has 44 rivers. Even the Green Revolution that many states leveraged to great success didn’t have too great an impact on the state. In fact, an IIT-Chennai study had pointed out how its high-yielding variety seeds led to less than 40 per cent increase in paddy output.

A decade ago, the Kerala Agricultural University’s action research programme—Group Approach to Locally Adopted and Sustainable Agriculture (GALASA)—had said that Kerala’s paddy farmers were not accessing or using easily available technology, neglecting scientific planting of good quality seedlings, and not using enough organic manure or going for properly integrated water and pest management.

Little wonder then that even pioneering legislations have failed to rescue paddy farming. The Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act of 1969 aimed at breaking the feudal farm land ownership and sought to give farms to actual tenants and put a firm cap on land holdings. However, the ironic fallout was that 88 per cent of the land came to be owned by people who did work other than farming. No less than 94 per cent of farm land was fragmented to less than one hectare holdings, implying that many new owners found farming unviable and continued to sell their labour to survive.

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