Inderpal Singh, 66, grows sugarcane over 2.5 acres in Bhatipura village, Uttar Pradesh. He supplies it to the local sugar mill, Nanglamal Sugar Complex.

Nanglamal Sugar Complex is owned by Mawana Sugars, one of India’s largest manufacturers. It supplies sugar to multinational companies including Nestlé, Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Singh used to almost harvest 90,000kg of cane in a typical season. This year it will be closer to 70,000kg. He told Climate Home droughts, floods and heatwaves in Uttar Pradesh make his livelihood increasingly precarious.

“No one comes to our help. Neither the mills nor the government,” Singh said.

Some farmers take out insurance against pest damage and weather extremes, but can only claim when a majority of the crop is damaged. Government-promised compensation for climate-related losses, Singh said, is “largely not effective”.

Climate Home News travelled to Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to investigate the plight of workers in the industry. These two states account for 71% of the country’s sugar exports, which could end up in cans of Diet Coke, KitKat chocolate bars and Häagen-Dazs ice cream tubs sold around the world.

Smallholders like Singh told Climate Home that they felt abandoned and exploited. While the government sets a minimum price per quintal (100kg) of raw sugarcane, erratic yields, changing quality demands and late payments strain their finances.

Climate Home News invited Nestlé, Coca Cola, Pepsi and Mawana Sugars to comment on these concerns and explain how they looked after the welfare of suppliers. At time of publication, they had not responded.

A sugarcane field in Lakhimpur, Uttar Pradesh

Sugar boom

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar, and second largest exporter after Brazil.  The Indian government described last year as a “watershed season” for sugar production. The country produced a record 35.9 million tonnes of sugar and exported a record 11 million tonnes to more than two dozen countries. The major importers of Indian sugar were Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sudan, and the UAE. Indian sugar also went to the EU, US, Singapore, and Australia.

Consumer goods firms are doing good business. Nestlé India reported post-tax profits of over 2,000 crore rupees ($250 million) in 2021. Coca Cola and Pepsi are not publically listed companies in India but, according to business intelligence platform Tofler, each reaped operating revenue of more than $60m.

Climate Home traced the supply chain of sugarcane grown at farms in Nanglamal village in Uttar Pradesh to mills owned by Mawana Sugars, one of Nestlé’s main sugar suppliers in India.

Mawana Sugars is India’s sixth largest sugar manufacturer, operating two mills in Uttar Pradesh. Mills are critical to the sugar supply chain. They procure and process the harvest from the fields, then send the resulting sweeteners to buyers including the government.

‘Responsible sourcing’

Nestlé, a Swiss multinational that owns brands including KitKat, Smarties and Häagen-Dazs, procured sugar in 2019 from two Indian mills in Uttar Pradesh, including Nanglamal mill which is owned by Mawana Sugars, according to its sugar supply chain disclosure, published in April 2020.

Nestlé claims to follow responsible sourcing principles, which include the provision of safe and healthy workplaces and a ban on forced or child labour. The company states on its website that it only works with farms that “meet at least legal or mandatory industry standards” for workers’ pay and conditions.

Coca Cola says it follows the principles for sustainable agriculture, with an emphasis on prohibiting child labour and abuse of labour and ensuring a healthy and safe working environment. Pepsi says it follows a positive agriculture agenda under which it is trying to source crops and ingredients in a way that accelerates regenerative agriculture and strengthens farming communities.

Climate Home did not find any child or forced labour in farms linked to Mawana Sugars and its customers. The investigation did identify poor working conditions and low pay, however, which made suppliers vulnerable to climate-related losses.

Smallholders told Climate Home that Nanglamal Sugar Complex delays payment, makes unreasonable demands and offers no protection from extreme weather impacts. This traps them a vicious cycle of loss and debt, they said.

Unaffordable seeds

The dominant variety of sugarcane has become prone to pests that thrive under rising temperatures. Mills such as Nanglamal are encouraging farmers to grow new varieties, said Nawab Singh Ahlawat, district president of Bharatiya Kisan Union Arajnaitik, which represents many sugarcane farmers in Uttar Pradesh. But seeds for better varieties cost 3-5 times more, around 2-3,000 rupees ($24) for 100kg. “Only a few farmers can afford it,” said Ahlawat.

“They do not give good prices for [the] old varieties,” said Singh. “They want farmers to sow early and to sow new varieties but they do not give us (sufficient) seeds.”

“Mills don’t help the farmers,” said Omvir Singh Tomar, 65, a Nanglamal resident who supplies to Mawana. He lost 15-20% of his harvest to heavy rainfall in September and October. “No one will pay for this damage,” he said.

Then the Naglamal Sugar Complex was slow to procure Tomar’s surviving crop, he said. “So far, only 10,000-12,500 kg of my sugarcane has gone to the mill… I shudder at the thought that the remaining 70,000-80,000kg of sugarcane may stretch to April or May 2023.”

Unlike some milling companies, Mawana had not invested in healthcare or education facilities for sugarcane workers and their families, Tomar said.

Climate impacts are creating dangerous working conditions for India’s sugar workers and pushing them further into debt

Late payments

A common complaint among farmers supplying sugarcane to Nanglamal is that they are not paid on time, which pushes them into debt.

Tomar said Nanglamal Sugar Complex once paid him nearly a year late. He resorted to selling land to pay for his daughter’s marriage. Smallholders like him are investing more and more in fertilisers, pesticides, better seed varieties and diesel for their irrigation pumps “but the rate of sugarcane and our income are not increasing in the same proportion,” said Tomar.

Ahlawat said several sugar mills in the Meerut area owe farmers money. “Until last year Mawana Sugars also used to delay the payment,” he said, sometimes by months. The delays have not been as long this year, but farmers are still not being paid within 14 days, which according to the Uttar Pradesh Sugarcane Supply Act is mandatory, he added. If mills do not meet this deadline, they are liable for interest of 15% a year on the overdue sum.

VM Singh, the national convener of the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, has been fighting for 25 years to get sugarcane farmers paid on time. Many mills in Uttar Pradesh owe several hundred crores of rupees (millions of dollars) to farmers, he told Climate Home. “The money that had to be paid to farmers is pending. Some owe money from last year too.”

‘Exploitation breeds exploitation’

Uttar Pradesh officials are trying to tighten the rules so farmers get paid for sugarcane within 10 days of supplying it. Under its Panchamrut scheme, the state government aims to double farmers’ incomes with initiatives to diversify into other crops, introduce drip irrigation and efficient sowing methods.

Kulveer Singh, a 62-year-old farmer from Seohara village in Uttar Pradesh Bijnor’s district, told Climate Home these were empty promises. “To my knowledge no farmer has benefitted from these schemes,” he said.

The Indian government claims that “timely payment and low carrying cost of stocks for sugar mills resulted in early clearance of cane arrears of farmers” last season. Observers told Climate Home that this is not the reality on the ground.

“Farmers are not paid on time. This sometimes translates into farmers not being able to clear their dues to others, including labourers. All this together leads to issues in the whole supply chain. It is like a vicious cycle. To put it briefly exploitation breeds exploitation,” said Abhishek Jani, chief executive of Fairtrade India.

On the way forward, Jani said, “brands need to take action in their entire supply chain. For instance, in the case of cocoa from the African region, a programme has been created and consumers in Europe are willing to pay extra for sustainable and ethically sourced cocoa. On sugar, we are far from that right now but there is a huge need for it,”  he said.

Deepak Guptara of the Uttar Pradesh Sugar Mill Association said no labour or human rights were violated during the production of sugar in the state.

Welfare board

So what is being done to improve the welfare of sugar farmers, in the face of climate threats?

In Uttar Pradesh, there is no specific scheme in place to protect the welfare of workers in sugarcane fields.

In 2019, the Maharashtra government established a welfare board for sugarcane workers to provide them with social security benefits and insurance and improve their overall standard of living.

Shekhar Gaikwad, Maharashtra’s sugar commissioner, told Climate Home that a corporation was initiated in November “for the welfare of farmers under which sugar mill owners and Maharashtra government will put money.” To date the government has paid in 40 crore rupees ($4.8m). The target is $30m.

Maharashtra is the first state to set up such a scheme for migrant workers, said Gaikwad. “Registration of labourers under the corporation has started. As of now, 200,000 farmers from the Beed district of Maharashtra have been registered,” he said.

‘Not functional yet’

But farmers told Climate Home they did not know anyone who had been registered under the programme.

The government scheme was meant to provide sugar workers with insurance, financial assistance and medical aid. Registration would be the first step to access these benefits, according to Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, a group that works for the rights of farmers.

But, Shetti said, “all these plans have just been in the air.”

Sunil Munde a small labour contractor from Ambajogai in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that the scheme “is not functional yet”. He manages 16 labourers and none of them are registered. “There are no funds in it,” he said. “The scheme has not yet been implemented on the ground.”

18-year-old Dhanvir Kumar, of Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh, labours on his family farm alongside studying at school. His family income cannot keep up with rising costs of living, he said. “We grow sugar but can’t afford to buy sugar. Drinking tea with sugar is like a crime.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal, Arvind Shukla and Isabelle Gerretsen. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post Cost of a KitKat: Big brands leave sugar farmers at the mercy of climate extremes appeared first on Climate Home News.

15-year-old Meera Gaikwad*, who is six months pregnant, knows her life will change forever when she moves 100km to cut sugarcane in Karnataka this season. There is no work at her drought-prone home of Paargaon, a small village in western India’s Maharashtra state.

Gaikwad told Climate Home News that she is afraid she will have to deliver her baby in a hut next to the fields, without access to medical care.

Thousands of girls like Gaikwad migrate from their villages every year to join in the sugarcane harvest from October until April. In total, more than 1.5 million workers leave their homes for the sugarcane fields.

Climate impacts, in particular heatwaves, droughts and floods, are worsening their plight. Women, some of whom are pregnant, cut and package sugarcane in temperatures of up to 46C.

In August and September, Climate Home travelled to the states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, where most of India’s sugarcane is grown and manufactured. Reporters found women and girls working in in dangerous conditions for up to 18 hours a day, without access to health or sanitation facilities.

Climate Home spoke to dozens of women who have had their wombs surgically removed, in the misguided belief it would help them to cope with the intensive workload.

Thousands of young girls and women migrate from Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district each year to harvest sugarcane

Double shift

Climate change is aggravating an already dire situation for women in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Beed district, where farming grinds to a halt for almost eight months due to a lack of rainfall. The region suffered from droughts in four separate years between 2010-2019, according to a government report.

Sugarcane cutting is physically demanding. Women work the fields in all weathers, they told Climate Home – and are also expected to do the heavy lifting at home.

Typically, they wake up at around 3am, two hours before the men, to fetch water and carry out domestic work before heading to the fields at 6-7am. After returning home in the evening or late at night, the women cook dinner for the family and finish off other tasks, such as cleaning and washing clothes.

“The men get some rest, but the women don’t,” said Arundhati Patil, executive member of Marathwada Navnirman Lokayat, an organisation working on socio-economic issues in Beed.

A 2020 study by researchers of Pune-based Symbiosis International University concluded that the working and living conditions of these women “violate basic human rights”. They have to bend for hours, pick up very heavy cane bundles and mount them at risky heights, sometimes in complete darkness at night.

Inadequate healthcare

Many women, like Gaikwad, carry out this backbreaking work while pregnant. They work in all weathers right up until their delivery.

20-year-old Anisha Sharad Bhavale, from Koyal village in Maharashtra, gave birth in a hut near a sugarcane field in 2020. Her baby boy died two weeks later. The nearest hospital was 30km away.

She had borrowed 70,000 rupees ($840) from a labour contractor for her son’s medical care. A week after the birth, she was back at work to start paying it off.

A teenage girl sits on a suitcase in her family’s hut near the sugar fields in Beed, Maharashtra

The unsafe working conditions in the sugar fields also sometimes result in miscarriages. One of Bhavale’s relatives was six weeks pregnant when she tripped and fell into a hole, which led to a miscarriage. Her husband, Sharad Bhavale, said there was no vehicle available to take her to the hospital or a nearby healthcare facility where she could have treatment.

The lack of healthcare and sanitation facilities is a major concern, Patil said. “There is no provision of medicines or doctors that can address their issues.”

A 2020 report by Oxfam India said “public health facilities at the villages are inadequate to address [women’s] ailments”, making medical treatments “impossible”, and prolonging any illnesses they suffer from.

Constant harassment

Gaikwad was married two years ago, when she was just 13. She became pregnant earlier this year. “Until we have a baby, we are considered young and poachable, even after we are married. That is why, we try to become mothers as soon as we are married — to avoid any disgrace to our family,” she said.

Thousands of girls are forced to marry by their parents soon after they start having their period – between 12-15 years of age. According to social activists, parents insist on this to ensure their daughters’ safety and because couples are hired more easily and earn more money in the sugarcane fields.

Thousands of young Indian girls like Meera Gaikwad* migrate from their villages every year, to work as labourers harvesting sugarcane

During their early teenage years, many girls also start working in the fields, said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Wardha, Maharashtra. This is partly to avoid them staying behind at labour tent camps, where parents fear they will be abused and harassed by men, he said.

“If a girl is good at cutting sugarcane, she starts getting a lot of marriage proposals. Single men are on the lookout for life partners as couples get a better advance for working in the fields,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Marriage [eligibility] is mostly dependent on a girl’s skill in the field rather than her education or how she looks.”

A married couple receives a higher amount as an advance for cutting sugarcane – in the range of 150,000 to 300,000 rupees ($1,800-3,600), whereas a single woman is paid 50,000 to 150,00 rupees ($600-$1,800).

Abuse goes unreported

Sexual harassment and abuse are rife in the sugar fields, the investigation revealed. More than a dozen women and girls told Climate Home, on the condition of anonymity, that they had suffered or witnessed abuse.

“When I stay back in the tent and my parents go to the sugarcane fields, sometimes men come to the hut and say bad things… and harass us. They come when they see I’m alone at home… I feel scared,” a 20-year-old widow, who has one child, told Climate Home.

According to a study by Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, “physical abuse and rapes [by male contractors at the worksite] happen quite often though they are not formally reported”.

Chunche spoke to more than 400 women in Maharashtra for his PhD on India’s sugar labourers, seen by Climate Home News. He said that almost 80% of them told him they faced sexual harassment, were molested or raped by male sugar labourers, drivers and middlemen.

“Usually no one says anything or files a complaint,” Chunche told Climate Home News. “Sometimes the pressure is from the labour contractors not to speak but the main reason is their poverty. They fear that if they report [the abuse], it will bring disrepute, they will get no more work and there will be no one to marry them.”

Whenever such an incident happens, parents view it as a disgrace to the family and choose to marry their daughter off at a very young age, said Gaikwad.

In many cases, teenage girls don’t complain about sexual harassment as they are scared that they will lose their chance of going to school and be forced to sit at home, she said.

The working and living conditions of women working in India’s sugar fields “violate basic human rights,” researchers say.

Choosing hysterectomy

Women working in the sugar industry endure daily pain, as they lift 20-40 kg sugarcane bundles on their heads, including while pregnant or suffering from menstrual cramps.

“When women work long (15-18) hours or they squat in agriculture fields or when they lift heavy weights, they can develop abdominal pain,” said Himani Negi, a Delhi-based gynaecologist who runs a women’s care clinic.

To escape this constant pain, many women choose to have their womb removed. The practice has been prevalent among sugar workers for years. Women in Maharashtra’s Beed district were twice as likely as the state average to have had a hysterectomy, according to analysis of official data by Climate Home News.

In many villages in Ambajogai, a division of Beed district, at least 50-60 hysterectomy cases have been recorded over the past two decades, according to Patil.

Ishmala Raghu Patwade, who is in her mid-40s and has several children, told Climate Home News that she had a hysterectomy three months ago.

“My stomach was hurting. I was going through a lot of pain. My uterus had developed knots because of working in the fields. It had to be removed,” she said. Other women recommended the surgery to relieve her pain.

But the operation didn’t help her. Since having it, she can no longer work or lift any heavy items. As a result, the sole earner of the family now has to sit at home. Her husband Raghu used to also work in the sugarcane fields but stopped five years ago after he got severely injured working in the field.

Misinformation and complications

In 2019, a report by the Maharashtra government found that over 13,800 women (about 16% of the 82,300 surveyed) involved in harvesting sugarcane from the Beed districts had their womb removed in the last 10 years. Most of these women were in the 35-40 age group.

According to a report by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management, one of the main reasons women choose to have surgery is to avoid losing wages when pain prevents them from working.

Dr Nitin Chate, associate professor at the Swami Ramanand Tirth Rural Government Medical College in Beed, who comes from a family of sugarcane labourers, blamed misinformation.

“Poverty and illiteracy are two devils,” said Chate. “Due to poor awareness, women choose hysterectomies. After this surgery, many women face a disease called osteoporosis, which is related to weak bones.”

Ishmala Raghu Patwade chose to have a hysterectomy after other women told her it would relieve her abdominal pain

Other common complications include vaginal prolapse, back pain, poor balance and urinary incontinence. “Women should be made aware that this surgery won’t address their pain,” said gynaecologist Negi.

Gaikwad told Climate Home it was her dream to go to university, but she has accepted her reality. “We cut sugarcane, no matter what. Whether there’s sweltering heat, frigid cold, or even if the sugarcane fields are flooded with rain, we have to work in the field to cut the sugarcane. There’s no other option,” she said.

“Do girls like me not deserve any justice?”

*Meera Gaikwad is not the subject’s real name, to protect her identity as a minor.

Reporting by Meenal Upreti, Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post India’s female cane cutters face child marriage and hysterectomy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Karan Gautam Wavhale, 20, wanted to join the Indian Army, but it was not to be. Instead, he became a labourer, travelling over 200km from his home in Koyal, in Maharashtra’s Beed district, to toil in the sugar fields of Karnataka.

He is one of millions who migrate with the sugar season each year. Heatwaves, drought and floods brought by climate change make the working conditions increasingly harsh. And when yields are low, many workers get trapped with debts they cannot repay.

“It is about survival,” Wavhale told Climate Home News. “Due to water shortages several months each year, there is just no work for us here… there is no option for us but to migrate.

“It is not just the story of our village. There are dozens of villages like ours.”

Climate Home News visited Koyal, about 450km from India’s financial capital Mumbai, in August. The villagers were preparing for the upcoming sugarcane harvest season in October. Here, climate change is worsening the already harsh conditions for workers.

Most of the village’s 2,500 people travel to neighbouring states Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh or western Maharashtra for seasonal work in sugarcane fields. There are no other jobs for them in Koyal and many residents hold government-issued Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards.

India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of sugar and the second-largest exporter. 50 million farmers are involved in India’s sugar industry, cultivating sugarcane in an area spanning almost five million hectares (50,000 sq km).

According to the Indian government, during last year’s sugar season more than 500 million metric tonnes of sugarcane were produced in the country. It is a record that the government is celebrating, but it comes at a high cost to vulnerable migrant labourers.

Almost half a million labourers migrate from Maharashtra’s Beed district each year to work in the sugarcane fields

Scorching heat

More and more, these migrants have to work in scorching heat – temperatures exceeded 46C in Maharashtra in April. This takes a severe toll on their physical and mental health, leading to extreme fatigue, anaemia and joint problems as well as depression and anxiety, according to a report by Oxfam India.

Workers prepare the fields, sow seeds, irrigate the crops, cut them with sickles and load the cane onto tractors for transport to the sugar mills in the region. The days last between 13 and 16 hours, over a 4-5 month season.

Sampat Lakshman, a 49-year-old migrant labourer, told Climate Home News that he and his colleagues work day and night during the sugarcane harvest season.

“If we cut the sugarcane during the day, we have to stay till late at night to load it in [the] trucks. There’s no timetable of any sort… there’s no time to get tired,” said Lakshman.

Sampat Lakshman, a sugarcane labourer from Beed district in Maharashtra, lives in a tiny hut with his wife and five children

Debilitating accidents

Labourers are frequently injured by a misplaced machete, heavy load or vehicle accident. Snake bites are common. In extreme cases, some suffer permanent disability, amputation or even death.

Wavhale’s younger brother Sachin was killed in a devastating vehicle collision in 2021.

“We were returning home in a vehicle which ferries workers. The driver tried to avoid an accident. [Because of this] several people fell off the vehicle… when the driver reversed the car, the vehicle crushed my brother’s head,” Wavhale told Climate Home. Sachin’s name was scribbled on the wall of his small, poorly lit home in Koyal.

“Several people suffered injuries in the accident, three people including my brother died on the spot,” he said. “One died a few months later due to injuries.”

Raghu Govind Patwade of Beed district suffered spinal injuries in 2016 when a tyre of a tractor trolley drove over him while he was resting in a sugarcane field in Karnataka. Although he survived, it has not been possible for him to work since then.

“I suffered multiple fractures including one on my hip. Since then, I have been bedridden. I can’t work now and I am stuck at home. I have a bag attached to pass urine,” he told Climate Home News.

“There are deep-rooted concerns in the way the [sugar industry] functions, regarding human rights violations, migrant labour and the living conditions [of labourers], child labour and child marriages, and women’s rights,” said Pooja Adhikari, Business Global Coordinator, Global Value Chains at Oxfam Germany, who has carried out extensive research into the industry.

Minimal facilities

The labourers in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh told Climate Home that when they work in the fields there are hardly any facilities for them, whether it is food, water, toilets, healthcare or electricity.

The sugar mill provides some materials for makeshift shelters from rainfall, extreme heat or cold, Lakshman said. Their earnings are “not enough to fill the stomach but only to ensure that we don’t starve”.

According to the report by Oxfam India, “the tents are small and inadequate to give complete shelter” and “do not have water, electricity supply or toilets.”

A sugarcane labourer plants sugarcane cuttings in Satara district of Maharashtra.

Missed schooling

In Maharashtra around 1.5 million people migrate each year with their children, according to Oxfam. Of those, nearly 500,000 migrate from Beed district, the hiring hub for cane cutters.

Migrant labourers are integral to sugarcane harvesting, Mantare Hanuman, a social activist in Maharashtra, told Climate Home News. “It is labour-intensive work… it requires labour at every step, whether it is sowing or harvesting,” he said. Machines are expensive and rarely used.

During the dry season in Beed district, from November to May, villages face severe seasonal unemployment. Wavhale, who left school when he was 15, said nobody wants to stay behind and work in the fields in Koyal, because they are paid close to nothing – a mere $1-2 per day.

Once the labourers migrate, their villages are left deserted. About 200,000 children younger than 14 accompany their parents during the cutting season and live with them in temporary huts, missing school.

“I know that their education suffers but I have no option but to take them with us,” said Lata Chandrasen Patole, a resident of Paargaon in Beed district. “There is no one else to take care of [them], [provide them with] food and [look out for their] safety.”

Hanuman said parents fear their daughters will face physical and sexual abuse if they are left behind. Many children drop out of school altogether at a young age and join their parents in the fields, he said.

The children of labourers miss school for months at a time when their parents migrate to work in the sugar fields

Debt trap

The migrant labourers and their families rely on credit to get through the year. They borrow money from labour contractors, known as mukadams, who play an integral role in India’s sugar industry. Mukadams act as the middlemen between labourers, farmers and sugar mills.

Mukadams help labourers find work on the fields and offer informal credit for displacement and living costs, under strict conditions. They hire labourers, usually as married couples, through informal contracts and pay them in instalments.

Labourers negotiate payment based on their personal situation: medical needs, whether they are married and how many children they have. An advance is then paid, usually to the men, based on the amount of crop to be harvested by the couple. If crops are destroyed by floods or heatwaves, their advance (and final payment) is lower.

“Once that happens they get trapped in a vicious cycle of debt, due to high interest rates, and their condition is akin to those of slaves. There is no one to listen to them,” said Yogesh Pande, an independent advocate for the welfare of sugar farmers.

The mukadams control who gets paid and when. After his accident, Patwade was supposed to receive compensation from the sugar mill to help pay for hospitals. “But I never got it. It was siphoned off by the mukadam,” he said.

The money Lakshman and his three relatives earn in the fields is not enough to feed their family of seven. “That is why we have to rely on [the] advance from contractors… We have to repay our debt,” he said. His debt stands at 100,000 rupees ($1,200).

The home of sugarcane labourer Karan Wavhale, in Beed district, Maharashtra

High interest rates

Mukadams typically provide loans to labourers at 50-60% interest rates, compared to the lower interest rates of 5-10% provided by banks, said Raju Shetti, a former member of India’s parliament and president of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, an advocacy group for farmers and labourers.  “They make money while everyone else loses,” Shetti said.  

The fall in harvest yields means many labourers are unable to repay their loans to the mukadams. To make up the shortfall, they have to return for the next season or bring more relatives to work. “If this becomes a regular feature, they will be stuck in a cycle of heavy interest and debt,” said Mahadev Chunche, associate professor at the Kumbhalkar College of Social Work in Maharashtra.

One mukadam, who spoke to Climate Home on the condition of anonymity, dismissed claims of exploitation. He said it is labourers who take excess money in advance, spend it on alcohol and then cry foul.

“In fact, mill owners give us very little in advance and ask contractors like me to bring labourers,” he said. “Now labourers want their money in advance to secure their season while I only get paid at the end of the season. To ensure a steady supply of labourers I have to take money with heavy interest. How can I be blamed?”

In the meantime, labourers like Wavahle continue to toil in the sugar fields in harsh conditions. “Extreme heat or harsh winter cold is a reality for me but I have to work to survive,” he said.

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

The post Migrant labourers suffer exploitation in India’s sugar fields appeared first on Climate Home News.

“I won’t ever recover what I invested,” said 67-year-old Kalua Mehmood, a sugarcane farmer in Shahabpur, a village in western Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. Due to scarce rainfall, his sugarcane farm will deliver a poor harvest this year.

The rainfall during the monsoon season, between June and September, was erratic this year, he told Climate Home News. 10 years ago, farmers could count on steady rainfall. “But this year I have already irrigated my crop 10 times with a tube well [diesel pump] and even now the sugarcane has no juice,” Mehmood said, showing its stunted growth and dry yellow leaves.

Mehmood is one of millions of Indian sugarcane farmers who is suffering the onslaught of climate change. More intense and longer droughts and floods, caused by climate change, are destroying sugarcane crops and plunging millions of farmers and their families into debt, while creating dangerous working conditions. In August and September, Climate Home travelled to Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, to hear their stories.

India’s most valuable crop

India is the largest consumer and producer of sugar in the world. Sugarcane is a critical crop for the economy; it accounts for about 10% of the country’s agricultural output and the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their dependents.

“It is no secret how important sugarcane is to India,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and agriculture expert. Further expansion of the sugar industry “needs to be discouraged,” said Sharma. “It is taking too much water.” The crop needs about 2,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of sugar.

“There is just no reason for us to continue pushing for sugarcane when we have options like corn syrup available,” said Sharma. “Rather than looking at adaptation measures, we need to prepare a package to take farmers away from the sugarcane cultivation.”

A tractor ploughs a sugarcane field in Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh. 

Climate impacts

The industry is feeling the impacts of climate change, Mahesh Palawat, vice president of Skymet Weather, a private weather forecaster in India, told Climate Home.

In 2022, India suffered an extreme heatwave and recorded the hottest March in the last 122 years. Maharashtra recorded temperatures of over 46C and in Banda district in Uttar Pradesh temperatures reached 49C. According to a Lancet report, heat-related deaths of people over 65 years increased by 55% in India from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021.

Following the heatwave, Maharashtra experienced heavy downpours [in July and October], which damaged many sugarcane crops, Palawat said. In Uttar Pradesh, there were drought-like conditions until mid-September and “then we suddenly had heavy rain.”

Maharashtra experienced a sixfold increase in floods between 1970 and 2019, according to a report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based think tank.

“Agriculture requires stable weather… these episodes of extreme weather events are harmful,” said Palawat. “What this can result in is that we may have a bumper crop in one region in a particular year but that can quickly change in the next year due to unpredictable weather.”

Intense heat or extreme cold deteriorates the quality of the sugarcane juice and the overall quality of the final sugar product, according to a government report. Temperatures exceeding 35C-40C stunt the growth of the sugarcane crop and reduce the overall yield, according to a 2016 study.

Despite these climate challenges, sugarcane is still considered a better bet than other crops. According to a government report, the net return on cultivating sugarcane is 200–250% higher than for cotton or wheat.

Not enough water

Between May and September 2022, very little rain fell on Uttar Pradesh.

When Climate Home visited Shahabpur in Uttar Pradesh in September, it had just rained for the first time in 40 days. Farm owner Firasut Ali said the area only saw three proper rain spells during the entire monsoon season.

250km away in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, Ammar Zaidi, a former banker, said that when he started farming in 2014, he was able to secure 40,000-42,500kg of crop per acre. But in the last two years, this has shrunk to about 30,000-36,000kg per acre due to heatwaves. “We are in the thick of the monsoon season but if you touch the ground all you can feel is dust.”

Sitting in his sugarcane field, Zaidi showed Climate Home his diseased sugarcane crop. According to Bharat Rachkar, from the Central Sugarcane Research Station in Maharashtra, when temperatures exceed 40C, “we see the problem of bugs and parasites in the stem”.  When temperatures drop below 25C, germination is also affected.

“I have calculated all my inputs and my overall costs. At the end of the day, I am not getting the return [on investment] I need to survive in this profession,” said Zaidi. “If I started making a balance sheet, I would be in the negative every year.”

“For every investment of 100,000 rupees ($1,230), a farmer is only able to secure 90,000 rupees ($1,100),” he said.

“Why am I still doing this? It is probably because like many others in my area my family has been connected to this land and farming for ages. I can’t just leave.”

Labourers prepare sugarcane fields in Sangli district, Maharashtra

Broken dreams

Diljinder Singh, who lives in the village Sheetlapur in Uttar Pradesh, told Climate Home News that he has many broken dreams. He used to work for Jet Airways and live in Gurugram, the swanky neighbouring city of Delhi.

In 2012, he left his job and returned to his village, where his family owns land, to run a sugarcane farm. His parents warned against it. Singh believed that with better sowing and irrigation methods, he could farm in a more productive way. But his harvests languished.

“The whole pattern is disturbed,” Singh said. “About 5-7 years ago, we used to get good rainfall and we didn’t require irrigation but today people are dependent on diesel-run generators to irrigate their fields.”

Too much water

Heat isn’t the only problem. In late September, heavy downpours hit Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, damaging 2.3 million hectares (23,000 sq km) of crops, including sugarcane. When heavy rains like this hits, it leads to waterlogged soil which impacts the germination process and stunts the root development, said Rachkar.

“I was born in 1989 and until 2006 I had never seen floods in my region. Since then I have seen [floods] three times,” said Ankush Churmule, a farmer whose family has been involved in sugarcane farming for 50 years.

“Areas of western Maharashtra, where the sugarcane is grown near the river, are facing a lot of impact due to successive floods. In those areas, the farmers are moving to bamboo,” said Rahul Ramesh Patil, president of the Weather Literacy Forum, a group that raises awareness about changing weather patterns.

A farmer removes weeds from floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India

The poor harvests caused by excess flooding also impact people with associated livelihoods such as rearing bulls or transporting goods. Kiran Shamrao, who rears bulls for sugarcane farming in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that flooding had severely reduced his profits.

“Our life runs on the bulls. Before, there was little rain, so we had some work for the bulls. But now, because of so much rain, the bulls don’t have work anymore, and we are at a loss,” he said.

Price guaranteed, timing not

If these regions are so prone to droughts and floods, then why do farmers continue to grow sugarcane? The simple answer is that sugarcane fetches them an assured price as it is regulated by the government, unlike other crops such as cotton and soy beans.

“From production to export, every part of the sugar industry is regulated in India. Farmers have an assured buyer and price and they know every last cane will be purchased,” said Sonjoy Mohanty, director of the Indian Sugar Mills Association.

That does not mean payment is swift. Sharma told Climate Home that payments are “often delayed for a year and sometimes even more, bringing hardship to farmers”.

Because of delayed payments, farmers are struggling to make ends meet and are falling into debt, Zaidi said. “Except for sowing, farmers have nothing in their control– neither production nor the final price.”

Representatives for sugarcane farmers told Niti Aayog, the government think tank, that climate threats, such as droughts and floods, “restrict their ability to switch to alternate crops”.

“These weather conditions lead to poor forecasting and the risk of crop failure is higher with other crops [such as cotton, wheat and soybean],” they said.

The Indian government has established a National Agriculture Disaster Management Plan to understand the impact of climate change on farming and focus on disaster risk reduction and possible adaptation measures for the sector.

But farmers told Climate Home they need more support.

No going back

In such a catch-22 situation, what is the solution?

“With climate change being a reality, the crop patterns need to be adjusted otherwise it will heavily impact the yield,” said 50-year-old Suresh Kabade, who has worked as a sugarcane farmer for the past 30 years. “We need to change with climate change.”

A 2019 study by a group of Indian scientists recommended the development of efficient irrigation practices, the adoption of a heat-tolerant cane variety and reducing the use of fossil fuel fertilisers in the near future to assist the sugar industry and help it adapt to the changing climate in northern India.

Other measures could include farmers adopting solar-powered pumps, getting crop insurance, and being taught to use weather forecasting tools, which are readily available but not widely used due to a lack of training.

Most of the farmers Climate Home spoke to were pessimistic about what lies ahead. Singh said there are times when he regrets leaving his corporate job but now there is no option but to continue. “We can’t go back.”

Asked if he will encourage his daughter to follow in his footsteps, Singh was direct. “My nine-year-old daughter enjoys farming and helps me in the fields. Considering my achievements, I would encourage her to take up farming… but if I consider present-day policies, I would never ask her to go into agriculture.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

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