Caught in the act: A farmer burning straw stubble after harvesting a rice field on the outskirts of Jind in India’s Haryana state. — AFP
Blazing flames light the sky as Indian farmer Ali Sher burns his fields to clear them for new crops, a common but illegal practice that is fuelling deadly pollution killing millions.
Burning strips the fertility of fields, has a ruinous impact on India’s economy and sends plumes of acrid smoke packed with dangerous cancer-causing particles drifting over a densely-populated belt of northern India, including capital New Delhi’s 30 million people.
But it is cheap – for farmers at least – to carry out.
Small-scale growers like Sher with less than 2ha of land – who make up 86% of Indian farms, according to the World Economic Forum – say alternatives to burning simply do not allow them to make the profit they need to survive.
The 55-year-old farmer is just one of the many thousands who torch the stubble left after their rice harvest to prepare the fields to plant a winter crop of wheat.
“I am scared of the authorities finding out, but I can’t help it,” said Sher, from Haryana’s Jind district, as black plumes rose from his fields some 115km from the capital.
He faces a hefty fine and loss of critical government farming subsidies if caught.
But he said burning provided the only way to clear the land in time to ensure wheat seeds are planted in the narrow weather window.
“If I don’t plant the wheat now, it will be too late,” he said.
Several studies indicate that farm fires turn the air in Delhi – a city already choked by too many polluting vehicles and regularly ranked as the worst capital city in the world for air quality – even more lethal.
Those fires form a key part of the toxic smog impacting the health of millions, which, along with vehicle and factory emissions, create choking air that surges to more than 50 times the World Health Organisation recommended limit of hazardous PM2.5 pollutants.
A study in the Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths in India to air pollution in 2019.
India’s federal government has pumped in millions of dollars of subsidies to encourage modern machinery to stop the burning.
That includes baling machines that gather the straw into blocks, as well as combined ploughing and planting tools, which return the stubble back into the soil while sowing the next crop.
It makes economic sense on paper for the long-term, but the wider cost of burning is vast.
Burning fields also “reduces water retention and soil fertility by 25% to 30%”, according to the UN Environment Programme, thus requiring farmers to pay more in expensive fertilisers and irrigation systems. — AFP
