Indian Farmers Face Suicide Crisis- Debt and GM Crops
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Hundreds of farmers unable to repay crop loans killed themselves in India's richest state in the past year, despite a multi-million dollar cash plan to improve their lot, activists said on Friday.
The spate of suicides in Maharashtra since last July touched 1,132, they said, highlighting the failure of highly publicised efforts by New Delhi to ease the financial burden of cotton farmers.
Debt-ridden farmers have been committing suicide in four Indian states and government statistics have recorded more than 4,500 deaths in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala in the past six years.
When Monsanto's President and CEO, Hugh Grant, flies in to meet India's political leaders next week, he should be arrested for crimes against humanity and slung into jail alongside the CEOs of all the other seed houses that have taken a leaf out of Monsanto's Bt book.
Aggressively pushing this faulty but expensive technology onto poor farmers amounts to nothing less than such a crime. And Monsanto knew what it was doing from the start.
Its failure in Indonesia - the first country in Asia to accept Bt cotton - had been unambiguous. Despite all Monsanto's corruption of officials, Bt cotton was so unsuccessful Monsanto had to pull its GM cotton out of the country, leaving only a trail of broken promises and illegality. http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=58&page=1
Farmers in Andhra Pradesh are grappling with crippling debt and desperation and choosing to end their lives after their cotton crop failed.
Most farmers say, Bt cotton that was introduced to put an end to their problems, have now become one of the biggest causes of farmer suicides.
Failed crop
Twenty-year-old Vijayalakshmi is a widow and she blames the genetically modified Bt cotton for it.
Less than two months ago, her husband Raju drank pesticide because the Bt cotton he grew on four acres left him with a debt of over Rs 1 lakh.
With no buyers even for the land he owned, the humiliation of not being able to even ensure his wife and two little children don't go hungry was too much for the 25-year-old.
"We grew Raasi hybrid seeds with great hope but it has ruined us. Never before, had we invested Rs 75,000 in one crop. Now he is dead and I have debts and two children. What should I do?" said Vijaylakshmi.
Rising debts
There were other widows and farmers with similar tales at the public hearing on Bt cotton in Hyderabad.
All of them echo the sentiment that what was seen as the seeds of hope are turning out to be seeds of debt and death.
"Bt Cotton is hardly useful. They had said that it would yield 10-12 or even 15 quintals but I got only 3 quintals," said Devaiah, a cotton farmer.
"It has not significantly reduced pesticide use, it has not reduced cultivation cost. It has in fact increased cultivation cost.
"There's no high yield, farmers have suffered negative returns. That is why the first Bt cotton suicides have started being reported," said P V Satheesh, Convenor, South Against Genetic Engineering...
2. They are horrific... farmers gave up legacy cotton bred for generations
to fit the local climate for Corporate Monsanto seed which CANNOT be saved and must be repurchased every year... On top of that, the Bt Cotton requires CONSTANT irrigation. This has led to disaster for these poor people.
One poor lady in a documentary/report I saw this last week had her husband walk home looking very ill. She smelled his breath... he had drank pesticides and died a few hours later.
There's no mention in it of the seed company's role.
Here's an interesting stat from a Frontline 2005 story:
Since 1997, more than 25,000 farmers have committed suicide, many drinking the chemical that was supposed to make their crops more, not less, productive.
A few years ago, I got into it on a different message board with a GM/GE proponent, a bio-chem major who slipped up and said outright: "the small, independent farmer needs to be eliminated." I don't think even he meant it literally.
Not only the body but the spirit. Now you see why I use the term "legalized murder". Corps have no morality and no loyalty of anyone one or things just stockholders. Mammon, how many times were we warned about worshipping mammon? Guess who runs the country, it sure ain't Christians.
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