The ongoing farmers’ movement in India has taken the world’s largest democracy by storm. Hundreds of thousands from all over the country have laid siege to New Delhi for more than two months. As both the protestors and the government dig their heels in, the chances of confrontation and violence are increasing by the day.

Local and international reporting traces the origin of the movement to three laws passed by Narendra Modi’s government in September 2020. These laws aim to radically change the country’s agricultural system ‘from a supply-push production system to a demand-led one.’ In essence, the three laws aim at loosening regulations in the agriculture sector and cracking open the door for contract farming. The farmers fear these laws will put them at the mercy of large corporations and effectively kill various government support programs through which the state has historically subsidized agricultural production and protected farmers, as well as the general public, from the vicissitudes of the free market, both local and global.

Privatizing the agriculture sector is a risky move even for countries in the developed world, let alone India where agriculture provides livelihood for over 50 percent of the country’s workforce. So, the real question is not why the farmers are protesting, but why Modi’s government chose to expend its political capital on a politically risky policy reform in the first place.

The answer is simple: agriculture has become uncompetitive, and therefore unsustainable for the government to continue to subsidize. There is no single reason behind this diminishing competitiveness. However, amid a panoply of challenges—such as mismanagement of natural resources, inefficient and outdated cropping patterns, and wasteful agricultural practices—one unmistakable factor that has catapulted India’s agriculture sector into chaos in recent decades is the change in rainfall and temperature patterns across the country.

In India, extreme climate events, particularly extreme precipitation events, have tripled in number between 1950 and 2015. According to the International Disasters Database (EM-DAT), the resulting economic loss in the country increased from $20 billion for the period 1988-1997 to $45 billion for 2008-2017. The number climbed to $10 billion for the year 2020 alone.

Paradoxically, despite an increase in extreme rainfall events, the total amount of precipitation has been declining consistently. According to the Economic Survey of India (2017-2018), annual average rainfall in the country has decreased by 86 millimeters between 1970 and 2015—a nearly 8 percent decrease from the long-term average of 1056.83 millimeters. This is alarming, since more than 52 percent of India’s farmland is unirrigated and relies on predictable and timely rainfall. Additionally, average temperatures for Kharif (monsoon) and Rabi (winter) cultivation seasons have increased by 0.45°C and 0.63°C respectively for the same time period. These sub-annual changes in rainfall and temperature trends are not uniform temporally or spatially, and have led to shifting of meteorological calendars across the country. Last year, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) revised the dates for the onset and end of the monsoon season for the first time in 80 years.

This ‘press and pulse of climate change’—long-term change in temperature and precipitation patterns interspersed with unpredictable extreme weather events—has perplexed both the farmers and the state. Farmers responded by intensifying the use of agricultural inputs (irrigation water, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc.) to shore up plummeting yields. Nevertheless, as the cost of production has grown, profit margins have vanished in recent years. Successive governments have tried to placate the growing unrest among farmers through various programs such as free electricity for pumping water from tube-wells, fertilizer subsidy and waiving of huge sums of farm-loans. However, no amount of support has been enough to keep up with the losses.

The devastation of the changed climate trends goes beyond the direct impacts. The biggest threat to agriculture’s sustainability in India has come in the form of disruption of the crop patterns around which the country’s political economy is built. In the face of the inordinate uncertainty imposed by climatic changes, farmers are switching from growing the previously profitable crops to less risky, less profitable ones. However, since there aren’t too many options to choose from, switching en masse to the same crop results in overproduction and, finally, price-crash. In the last few years, at some point, the price of almost every major and minor crop in India has collapsed. Crushed under debt, a disturbing trend of farmers committing suicides has ensued.

The flip side of the phenomenon is that when a climate event decimates crop production in another country, it jacks up the crop price almost overnight in the global market. Farmers quickly try to take advantage of the price rise by planting new crops, thereby disrupting cultivation patterns worldwide. Caught between overproduction and crop failures, India’s agricultural growth has become highly unstable in recent years.

The phenomenon of agricultural disruption traceable to climate change is not exclusive to India. In neighboring Pakistan, it is the fluctuation in the Indus stream-flows, in addition to intra-annual shift in temperature and precipitation patterns, which has sent agricultural production in a tailspin. The shrinkage of the Indus waters, traceable to the climatic changes in the Upper Indus Basin, has triggered all sorts of distributional conflicts—irrigation vs. power generation, upstream populations vs. downstream populations, rural vs. urban, etc.

Like in India, haphazard coping responses by vulnerable Pakistani farmers to minimize immediate risk imposed by climate change is generating system effects, destabilizing commodity markets and bankrupting farmers. The unrest has led Pakistan’s farmers to organize at a grassroots level. In the past five years alone, farmers of Punjab and Sindh—two predominantly agricultural provinces of the country—have carried out over 700 protests, sit-ins, rallies, and marches across the country.

Climate change is imposing extraordinarily severe burdens of adaptation. As the preexisting vulnerability of populations, their coping abilities, reactions of their governments and the climate insult that produced the consequences in the first place interact, complex stresses are produced that are not visible in aggregate datasets commonly used to explain the potential of climate change to cause social stresses. These need to be understood in local detail in order to counter the assault of climate change on human societies.

Do the farmers’ protests in India have the potential to escalate into political instability? Scholarship suggests that large-scale social and political phenomena such as mass migrations, social movements, rebellions, and civil conflicts do not erupt overnight or because of a single cause. Organized and sustained episodes of social and political contention and violent conflict become possible only when individual grievances and uncoordinated expressions of unrest coalesce to form cross-class coalitions against a common ‘other.’ India being an internally fragile society, the farmers’ movement seems to have come close to striking such a coalition of the aggrieved.