ABSTRACT
India has more area under cotton than any other country in the world, but cotton lint yield has been among the lowest. India’s 22 million acres represents about one quarter of the world’s total cotton area and occupies 5 per cent of India’s cultivated area (for comparative data, James, 2002b). Farmer suicides in India’s cotton belt, especially in l998 and especially in Warangal district, Andhra Pradesh, underlined the risk of growing cotton. Debts sometimes overwhelmed farmers caught in a cost-price squeeze. 1 Farmers most at risk are those with fewest resources. To the extent risk-reducing innovations are scale-neutral, there is considerable potential to improve the condition of small producers (DuPuis and Geisler, 1988). This is the pro-poor potential claimed for biotechnology. But no insurance is risk-free (Eyzaguirre et al., 2004; Smil, 2004). Agricultural history is replete with cases in which early adoption of technology disproportionately advantaged more prosperous farmers (Dovring, 1973). Risks tend to intensify during experimental phases of new technologies. Thus, as Ortiz (1990) observes, peasant farmers cope by continually modifying their ‘insurance’ strategies and often pay a premium for seeds and other inputs to avoid worst-case income or property losses. Michael Lipton (1968) emphasised in a classic treatment that it is a rare farmer who does otherwise.
