In what has been called the single largest wave of recorded suicides in human history, Indian farmers are now killing themselves in record numbers. It has been extensively reported, even in mainstream news, but nothing has been done about the issue. The cause? Monsanto’s cost-inflated and ineffective seeds have been driving farmers to suicide, and is considered to be one of the largest — if not the largest — cause of the quarter of a million farmer suicides over the past 16 years.
According to the most recent figures (provided by the New York University School of Law), 17,638 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009 — about one death every 30 minutes. In 2008, the Daily Mail labeled the continual and disturbing suicide spree as ‘The GM (genetically modified) Genocide’. Due to failing harvests and inflated prices that bankrupt the poor farmers, struggling Indian farmers began to kill themselves. Oftentimes, they would commit the act by drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto supplied them with — a gruesome testament to the extent in which Monsanto has wrecked the lives of independent and traditional farmers.
To further add backing to the tragedy, the rate of Indian farmer suicides massively increased since the introduction of Monsanto’s Bt cotton in 2002. It is no wonder that a large percentage of farmers who take their own lives are cotton farmers, the demographic that is thought to be among the most impacted. Dr. Mercola, an osteopathic doctor that has been educating the world about natural health for many years, recently saw the destruction of traditional Indian farmers first hand. Dr. Mercola found out about the notorious ‘suicide belt’ of India, where 4,238 farmer suicides took place in 2007 alone.
Many families are now ruined thanks to the mass suicides, and are left to economic ruin and must struggle to fight off starvation:
‘We are ruined now,’ said one dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’
In India, around 60 percent of the population (currently standing at 1.1 billion) are directly or indirectly reliant on agriculture. Monsanto’s intrusion into India’s traditional and sustainable farming community is not only concerning for health and wellness reasons, but it is now clear that the issue is much more serious.
This article, please article #5 and article #6 are pretty amazing, Kojisan.
When you have time, please try to check them out.
Love you,
Susan
Subsistence agriculture is still the backbone of global food production, and the attack on this demographic is proving marvellously successful….almost as if it was planned to happen, and not just a sick tribute to mankinds greed…
Kick Monsanato out, ban the use of GMO's and hebicides, distibute free open pollinated seed and teash the people seed saving…..and then let the famers get on with it, rather than committing suicide by drinking pesticide…
1) the farmers in question drank rat poison, not the pesticides…
2) subsistence farming is the backbone of global food production and you don't see a problem in that???? Why the hell would we want something that is bare minimum for something that we all need? Especially with the impact of global warming being felt, do you really want to start relying on the weather to be good all the time?
"Monsanto’s cost-inflated and ineffective seeds have been driving farmers to suicide…"
Horrendous. Is Monsanto aware of this and what are they doing about it?
The article does not explain how and why the seeds are cost-inflated and ineffective or why farmers continue to buy and plant them. Can they not find, purchase, and use other seeds, for cotton and for other crops?
Something does not ring true here. Farmers everywhere throughout history have survived failed crops without resorting to mass, serial suicide. Mr Gucciardi, or any other knowledgable person, can you explain this to me?
Monsanto seeds cost more because they are designed to work or grow through the pesticides that will kill the weeds that would otherwise grow around the crops. The problem is two fold: 1. The seeds will not produce seeds so there is cost related to constant repurchasing of seed rather than seed saving, and 2. The pesticides are part of the contract of buying the seeds. The more ugly part of the suicides is that the seeds don't give the higher yields that cover the cost of the seeds and so the farmers are pressed to pay more and more for the new seeds every year. Finally the seeds actually rarely produce enough for the farmers to eat so they are in debt and unable to feed themselves dispite all their hard work. Every day many farmers a comitting suicide with the remaining fertilizer that has made their land unable to grow anything. The worst of all horrors of this situation is that Monsanto is funded by our Governement and is pushed on the poor farmers of other lands as part of diplomatic contracts with the USA. Personally I'd be willing to guess that our government funds Monsanto through other chemical products and stock holders. Why are they so important that the USA has to make them part of diplomatic contracts? Other than the jobs they provide in small towns who so despiritely need jobs they wouldn't be able to notice if they were the biggest chemical killers on the planet…or one might say they are just another dynamic in the banality of evil that breeds on selfish persuit at the expense of the vilified others. If the story doesn't rigng true….look deeper don't just call the whole thing off. Real intellect can see beyond the side of the bread that has butter for them. Are you such a one? Your power is in your honesty rather in your power to lie to yourself and everyone else.
It is also important to note that if you own a farm that does not use Monsanto GMO seeds, but your neighbor’s farm does…and a crow or an insect poops on your farm and a little GMO crop starts to spring up on your farm via wind dispersion or animal waste, guess what?! Monsanto sends a lawyer to your farm and you end up signing over your farm to Monsanto or going to court with them and losing your life savings battling Satans food bank. Farmers have no protections under the law from unwanted seed dispersal. Amazing isn’t it?
Signup for jury duty. Protect your Farmers from big Corp,and high priced lawyers and stick it to Monsanto with something that no judge or lawyer will tell you.
jury nullification
– U.S. v Moylan 417 F.2d 1002 at 1006 (1969)
"If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence. This power of the jury is not always contrary to the interests of justice."
LINK http://www.stormy.org/jurynull.htm
I can see where big awards for Damages can be added here too!
um, that won't happen anymore? You realize what a hybrid crop is right? IT is something that doesn't reproduce, ergo, it dies within one generation. This is what bananas, casava and sweet potatoes are. The only way to continue the generations, is to cut clippings from the hybrids creating clones. Monsanto fixed this problem and then you complain that they did. PLease actually read a little more about farming… people think it is just as simple as planting a seed in the ground, there is actual science behind it, and it is dependent on the weather, insect and pathogens, weeds, water prices, oil prices, temperatures, you name it!
Laura you are spot on in your statement about the nefarious dealings of Monsanto. The key is in the lack of seed production in the GM plants. As this practice proliferates globally a point will be reached where only those with approved access to GM plant seeds will survive, all others will perish. I urge everyone to horde all the "heirloom" seeds you can as you will eventually need them to keep from starving to death.
Monsanto is doing something about it, they bought "XE"(aka "Black Water")so don't anybody worry!
Largest mercenary force in the world goes a long way to help silence opposition right…
Monsanto is quite aware and does not care. There are several problems with the whole picture regarding Monsanto. They own the seeds and have contracts with the farmers. They cannot use other seed while contracted and the seeds produced from crops are then owned by Monsanto and the farmers are not legally able to keep any. Some farmers have tried and been sued and lost their farms. What's worse is Monsanto has just won a legal battle after lobbying certain legislators and now have a congressional act protecting them from future law suits and can no longer be legally held accountable for their actions. (Just enacted this last week.)
maybe the product itself is causing changes in the brain, leading to suicidal behavior
Nothing will change until the individual changes what they do.
Don't buy India products.
Don't buy Japanese products.
Don't buy Chinese products.
Only BUY REAL AMERICA PRODUCTS. Produced here!
It's so fuc*ing simple!
Buy less, live longer!
do you know that monsanto is also in the US?
I don't think he has a clue. In fact, the former Monsanto CEO was appointed head of the FDA if I recall correctly. Between these low life scumbags, our corrupt government, and raids on organic growers and raw foods we have a fight on our hands and we need every red blooded American to stand up and tell Monsanto to go to hell. Knock one of us down and another stands up!
Wow, how uneducated are you? Monsanto does most of its business in the United States… many, many farmers have been sued and put out of business in the Great Country of the United States because of this American Company..
lmfao, name one thing that America produces itself ? Thats a fuc*ing joke. Nothing is ever produced here
YOU ARE RETARDED. Global trade is a fact of life. Some nations have resources others don't. China produces most of the rare earth metals because they have large reserves. Pretty much anything electrical requires this, so stop buying from china, no more ipods, catalytic converters, computers, you name it.
Buy real american products… or, you know, do something amazing and stop using the "d'they tuk ur jubs" shit. They work harder for less money, it isn't their fault.
Don't buy products from china, Japan and India, so all of Europe's stuff is okay? So if you stop buying in asia you will get cheap labour somewhere else… That is not how you fix the system.
But GM foods are prevalent in the USA!! So, buy organic only!!
Is this all part of the plan to reduce the worlds population?
It surely isn't an accident.
yes it is and that's not all they are doing with GMO 's search GMO fed pigs fail to reproduce. that's just a part of it look up bovine growth hormone and cancer
http://deathbyvaccination.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvsXrVkjyz4
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/november292011…
http://www.infowars.com/paralysis-cases-spike-in-…
http://therefusers.com/refusers-newsroom/schools-…
Wow.. Just wow, a vaccination link on a gmo article. I will provide 20 articles, for everyone one you give me, showing no correlation between vaccines and autism. The wakefield paper was BS and everyone should know that.
GMO fed pigs failed to reproduce… ahuh… You do realize each gmo is different, and that we have been feeding most livestock gmo`s for 20+ years right? Wow, just wow. Considering if it caused sterility we wouldn't have pigs anymore, I sure see a lot of pigs…
So where are the articles then? One was provided, provide 20..
Oh yeah, this is certainly about population control. The only long term effect that this company cares about concerning the human race is that only the "strong" will survive the poison of their products and the "weak" will die off. And in the process, they will turn a global profit.
What they don't realize (or too drunk in their own power to care about) is there are moral consequences to "knowingly" inflicting pain and destruction on others in the guise of productivity and progress. No bad deed goes unpunished. If they don't pay now, they will later in some form or fashion.
What is an Indian farmer?
A farmer that lives in India.
What is a brain?
Something you wish you had
What are people wasting time arguing while they could stand up against government crimes?
because talk is cheap and typically has no actual repercussions.
right….it's time to act.
I like pie.
The suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is a sad trend, but pinning it on Monsanto is cheap and disingenuous. The trend in high farmer suicides in India predates the introduction of GM crops to India by almost a decade and has not changed appreciably since their introduction.
The best evidence for the high rate of farmer suicide are strong socio-economic changes and the extreme difficulty in making an agricultural living in some of the marginal and inhospitable land into which farmers have been forced.
The latter, by the way, is something that can actually be HELPED by biotechnology as in, e.g., Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution.
Additionally, farmers in India are experiencing horrible health effects from insecticides, the use of which can be reduced through the use of pest-resistant GM crops.
How about just plain death in India predates Monsanto. And what is "disingenuous" here? Your comment qualifies big time as disingenuous. For example you are pointing out their problems as: "making an agricultural living in some of the marginal and inhospitable land into which farmers have been forced".
Inhospitable land and monsanto sells them seed to grow anyway? Stupid business decision or just property acquisition. Somehow I don't see Monsanto being stupid. Farmers being forced to bad lands? What does that even mean? Monsanto only deals with welfare case farmers? Sure! Why not they are into charity now.
Indian farmers suffer from the bad effects of pesticides so Monsanto comes to the rescue. If I am correct Monsanto also sells round up resistant seeds. Basically, a farmer gets to chemically kill everything on his land. Oh yeah weeds mostly and in the process manage to deform human babies, cause cancer and a variety of deformities in less important sub human and ungodly species. And then the farmer plants his round up resistant seeds. Wunderbar. See no chemicals. Ok I agree it is less chemicals then Bhopal had.
And then there is the GMO food their seeds produce. The whole world very litteraly is a giant guinea pig farm for GMO foods. We have no clue what long term effects it has or even have a plan to control it if it decides to grow in places we never thought about. Oops and you died eating it. We are so sorry.
Unfortunatelly, dead people will not take Monsanto to court. So for them it is just a win win.
At least you are open minded at monsanto
It's disingenuous because a link is being postulated where no link exists. There's a saying, correlation does not equal causation but in this case we don't even have a correlations.
See http://twitpic.com/3p4bau and http://twitpic.com/4zoep4
It's a totally fabricated link and before GMO's came into the picture, the well known proponent of this nonsense, Vandana Shiva, was blaming something else for farmer suicides (globalization or some such thing).
Your further speculation is baseless.
Human disasters caused by corrupt politicians, corrupt judges and preditory corporations = genocide
the one indian farmer commits suicide every 30 min angle has been bandied about by anti GMO activists. Assuming thats true, it has no relationship to the safety of GMO products because 1. it is only connected to one company – monsanto therefore you cannot generalize and 2. the cause of suicide is not toxicity of the GMO plant but economic hardship caused by either crop failures or the too aggressive "copyright protection" by monsanto.
thats like saying "always online DRM by ubisoft is bad therefore we should ban ALL video games"
You have very poor reading comprehension skills. No where in this article is it making the claim that the suicides are tied to the safety of GMO products. The entire premise of the article is that the economic hardship is causing the suicides. It also only listed Monsanto and no other companies, so I don't see where you get claim #1.
Seems he has a better grasp of the burked up story then you do. Just looking at the headlines and then showing a barn on a farm gives the impression at first glance that we are talking of people in the Midwest America and in Canada. It is only after you start reading this that you find that it is suppose to be in India. Now isnt it very suspicious, that while the "New York University of Law" supposedly gave these figures, the actual New Delhi India newspaper 'The Times of India' timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ has absolutely NO mention in any of their papers or archives of anything like this happening? Now that means that either 1. The author is lying because they got their arse handed to them by a defeat of over 2 to 1 for this prop 37 BS, or 2. the University is lying. Personally I think the author is the one that is lying. And lets get something straight right now..NOT ONE THING that you eat has not already been modified by plant husbandry or by nature. Therefor EVERYTHING you eat no matter who grew it or how, is a modified food substance. So your whole premis is based on faulty logic and no scientific proof whatsoever! Get over it and get a real life.
A quick search of the Times of India website shows many stories about farmer suicides, so I'm not sure why you say there is "absolutely NO mention" of these types of things happening. I only looked briefly and didn't find specific mention of GMO or Monsanto, but there are many books and web articles that discuss the unsustainability of GMO farming and Monsanto business practices as being largely responsible for the well documented (try googling articles by Vandana Shiva or many other indian and non-indian sources on the subject if you actually want to understand what's going on) increasing number of farmer suicides in India. Yes, it's true that plant husbandry and natural selection (nature) are a form of genetic modification, but "GMO" is generally accepted as referring to unnatural processes which occur on a much faster timescale than the above two processes. The general scientific argument is that GMO agricultural practices lead to crops that change too quickly and drastically for the surrounding environment (subject to the slower moving genetic modifications of natural selection) to keep up, which means unsustainability.
You said that not one thing you eat has not been changed by plant husbandry or by nature. You are right but this involves string of genes of the same varieties of crops and not by altering genes by introducing genes of species that have no relationship whatsoever with the species being altered. Seriously, in nature tomatoes do not get fish genes introduced, or soy that get a pesticide protein inserted. Or a strawberry that receives an anti-freeze gene from an artic fish.
And the great myth is that gene insertion is an exact science or an exact procedure because it is not. There is a lot of transgenetic pollution outside the targeted gene or string of genes. Not to mention the contamination to species in the wild. I suggest you find the report "GMO myths and facts", read it and follow the references there to scientific studies that paint a different picture of GMO than what biotech tells you.
That is of course, you are a biotech troll here.
Do some research idiot
Ok, so I shouldn’t call anyone an idiot because that’s mean, therefore I take that part back. Which was directed at Dan, the smarter ones’ post. I just found what he said to be disrespectful and uneducated.
yes i will fight for farmers……………………………i will do my best……. This is called "THE FARMER" the farmer's time starts Now……………………………………………
I guess people in the USA need to be shocked into learning the truth about Monsanto and GMO; so any investigating you do to discover what will accomplish this will be significantly worthwhile. Think of all the milk and corn we are feeding our children!!
Yes but anytime you have a population of 1 Billion….. one person every 30 seconds would be unfortunate, but hey.
Monsanto is a monster company, but I challenge the statement:
"A farmer suicide every 30 minutes".
That is just such an obvious lie, and it does no favours to those of us wishing and working for the downfall of Monsanto.
Simona, do the math. If there are 529,600 minutes in a year, divided by 17,638 suicides comes out to 1 death every 30.02 minutes in 2009. It’s obviously NOT a lie, its statistics and it opens eyes. It helps.
You would have thought that these Farmers could have all gotten together to destroy Monsanto in India, by going to their offices and burning them down, killing the Employees of Monsanto and Burning any seeds in any Warehouses. The round-up just has to be messed with so it will kill the Monsanto Crap-Crop! Then all these Farmers march on down to their government offices and get the government to sign a total ban of all GMOs or Monsanto Poisons!
If they were going to finish themselves off because of Monsanto, they should have fought to the death to remove Monsanto from India!
Hola! I’ve been following your weblog for a long time now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Kingwood Texas! Just wanted to say keep up the fantastic work!
yeah uh, mating two horses to get a better horse, or combining afgani with trainwreck is a little less dramatic than splicing flounder genes into a tomato, dip shit
.
This guy linked to mercola. nuff said.
17,638 deaths / year. 1 year = 8,760 hours. 17,638 divided by 8,760 = ~ 2 deaths per hour. DO YOU EVEN KNOW MATH BRO???
thats math..you should try it sometime simona
This is all MYTH folks, its come out as a BS story…do some research with actual facts
Only, when you actually learn the “truth” as opposed to myths, you don’t come away with the conclusion that modern agricultural technology is dangerous.
Not really. Once you buy into a world-wide conspiracy to “poison” the people/planet, you’ll see evidence for it in all kinds of places: anti-GMO, anti-Vaxx, even “chemtrails” activism. It really is all the same thing.
But Vandana Shiva isn’t a credible source. She has built her reputation on the backs of unsupported claims. Just because a world-view hangs together logically and is appealing to people who want to believe that there is a giant conspiracy against them doesn’t mean that there is *actually* a giant conspiracy.