Biotech has tried to dismiss the accounts of farmer suicides in India due to the introduction of genetically modified crops, but the problem is pervasive. Once the farmer is gone, the debt falls on the remaining family members. Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and other suicide seed sellers have essentially created a generational slave economy based on their toxic chemical and seed monopolies.
While there are other contributing factors to farmer suicides in India, debt is the largest concern, and non-viable crops are part of what creates that debt. Biotech sells seeds that don’t grow or that create superbugs, urging farmers to purchase RoundUp and other herbicidal chemicals which the farmers can ill afford. Thus, the mind-numbing cycle begins.
Now, you can hear straight from the farmers themselves about this ongoing problem in India surrounding GM crops.
Commissioned by the 2014 Food Safety and Sustainable Agriculture Forum, YIELD offers heart-breaking testimonies from cotton farmers in Vidarbha, Maharashtra that tell the true story. These people are nothing less than victims of corporate imperialism.
One voice of dissent, Vijay Jawandhia, from a farmers union, comments:
“I believe that the loot of the land for monetary gain has been going on since the advent of industrialized agriculture. Ever since we were colonized by the British, they have systematically exploited the cotton farmer.”
Read: GMO Corn Farmers Losing Land, Swimming in Debt
Farmers who had worked their fields for multiple generations were used to having respectable yields some years and less-than stellar yields in others depending on weather, but the devastation to modern family farms in India from utilizing GM technologies is unsurpassed.
Some farmers dug wells or learned to use other sustainable farming practices to increase yields over rain-poor years. Some farmers had to pay banks for loans in order to dig deep enough to find water. This also contributed to farmer debt, as the interest rates on the loans made it difficult for farmers to pay them back. Banks used this financial vulnerability of farmers to seize their land.
Families who had large plots or many acres would then be sold back only a few acres, limiting their ability to grow enough food for themselves, or to sell at market. This led to a dependence on biotech by farmers, looking for some ‘magic bullet’ to grow crops on their small plots of land.
The documentary, Bitter Seeds, details how Monsanto and other biotech companies then swooped into India, promising farmers higher yields if only they planted GM seed and used RoundUp chemicals.
“. . . the motivations for these suicides follow a familiar pattern: Farmers become trapped in a cycle of debt trying to make a living growing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton. They always live close to the edge, but one season’s ruined crop can dash hopes of ever paying back their loans, much less enabling their families to get ahead. Manjusha’s father, like many other suicide victims, killed himself by drinking the pesticide he spreads on his crops.”
Even worse, money lenders (instead of banks) now familiar with the unworkable business of planting a GM cotton field and unwilling to loan to farmers, charge exorbitant interest rates to families who need to purchase seed, pesticides, and industrial fertilizers. The age-old practice of farming organically and sustainably is turned on its head since the farmers are doomed before they even get started.
While biotech has promised to ‘feed the world,’ they have done nothing more than create a biosphere of noxious chemicals, ruined indigenous seeds, and devastated farming communities.
shame shame these NorthAmerican companies (Monsanto and the others) and Europe that go to other countries without understanding their culture, traditions and their ways doing things. Shame and they are guilty of destruction and lack of human sensitivity in the name of power and money. we do this in India, Irak, Afganistan etc etc.. thinking we because we are protected by God we can go to someone’s land and trying to change them to our ways, we are so arrogant that we think our ways are the good and better, ignoring thousands of years of traditions, and ways to think and doing things. I remember years ago, when India had a famine we try to have them eat potatoes, when they eat rice and other things, always imposing our ways to them. Instead of sending them rice and other foods. It took us several years to learn this lesson. And now we do the same again??!! SHAME ON YOU MONSANTO AND CO.
Shame on Monsanto? They are just another “big guy” seeking to exercise control over the population by enslaving food production to their corporate entity. Control over the means of food is a classic means of controlling the population at large. This is why small private growing of crops is coming under assault from all levels of government. How long before food rationing takes place? And will ration allotments be based on ones political correctness or denied because of opposition to government edicts?
…and bees and good insects dying by thousands the last 15 years since Monsanto started the GMO’ lies and manipulations.
Dear Friends
We have no right to blame to North American companies (Monsanto and the others) and Europe, its our Indian Government, which are allowing and promoting these companies. Our leader and politicians are taking huge money from these companies and working as agent for these companies to promote their products forcefully, aggressively in India. The high level corrupt politicians, policy makers and leadership is basically responsible for the vulnerable condition of farmers and farmers suicide and no one.
We have ancient agriculture culture (Rushi Kheti) in place of promoting that by ignoring it we are running towards Western countries agriculture solutions to just degrade our land health, to ruin our indigenous seeds, to ruin our own health and to demolish our old agriculture practices which is in real seance you can say Sustainable agriculture practices.
Regards.
Sharad Pant