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E-book Debt as Power

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Penilaian

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On November 20, 2003, in the rural countryside of India, Nagalinga Reddy, a farmer of rice and sunflowers, committed suicide. At fifty years of age, Reddy took his life by ingesting ammonium phosphate tablets—a pesticide used in modernized farming. His rice crops had just failed due to pests and he was deeply in debt to usurious moneylenders, three banks, and a cooperative. He was harassed regularly by his creditors, and he finally put an end to their tyranny by taking his life.1 But Reddy’s suicide was no isolated incident. Since 1995, there has been what can only be described as an epidemic of farmer suicides in India. The Hindu reports that from 1995 to 2010, 256,913 farmers have taken their lives—the vast majority by ingesting the very same pesticide swallowed by Reddy.2 According to the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and P. Sainath, who has covered the epidemic in India, the common link between these suicides is punishing personal indebtedness to local moneylenders and/or microfinance institutions (2011: 1; Deshpande and Arora 2010; Young 2010; Taylor 2012). But the epidemic has another contributing factor: the neoliberal reforms introduced in India in 1991. To regain the confidence of creditors in its burgeoning budget and trade deficit as well as mounting national debt, the Indian government accepted neoliberal reforms in exchange for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Chossudovsky 2002: 149ff; McCartney in Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005: 238).3To ensure debt service to rich creditors, economic reforms hit many agricultural communities particularly hard. Many farmers experienced mounting costs for energy and basic inputs like fertilizer. These goods were once subsidized by the government, but with the turn to neoliberal austerity in the 1990s, farming was increasingly financed through the personal debt of farmers and their families. This politico-agricultural transformation has led to land dispossession, the concentration of land in fewer hands, and widespread farmer suicides (Mohanty 2005; Levien 2011; 2012; 2013).In the rural countryside of Thailand, we find another story of humanity in the global age. Nok is a woman raised in rural Thailand and a seemingly willful participant in her own trafficking to Japan. According to her own account, her father was deeply in debt to credit and agricultural cooperatives because the money the family made from rice farming was insufficient to repay the interest, let alone the principal. In this predicament, Nok’s older sister had agreed to be trafficked to Japan in return for paying a debt of 3.5 million yen (about $34,000) to her traffickers. She worked in the sex industry and eventually paid down her debt, enabling her to send more money back home. Nok soon followed in her sister’s footsteps and used the same trafficker to become a sex worker in Japan (Aoyama 2009: 85ff ). Like the farmer suicides of India, this is no isolated incident. Countless Thai women have been trafficked not only to Japan and surrounding region but also to brothels in their home country.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

336.3 DIM d

Penerbit

London : Manchester University Press., 2016

Deskripsi Fisik

217 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781526101013

Klasifikasi

336.3

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

-

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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