The Military of the Future
The GMO-Suicide Myth
Opponents of genetically modified cotton in India claim that the technology has resulted in the suicides of hundreds of thousands of farmers. They appear to be wrong, and the real reasons why Indian farmers take their own lives remain largely unaddressed.
In October 2013, rallies against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) drew thousands of protesters in dozens of countries around the world. The synchronized events were called the March against Monsanto, a reference to the agribusiness company based in St. Louis, Missouri, that has pioneered the crop biotechnology industry. Many I GMO opponents view Monsanto as an evil Goliath that is messing with nature, crushing small farmers, and poisoning the world with “frankenfoods.”
But of all the dirty deeds Monsanto is routinely accused of (which include using patented seeds and monopolistic behavior to destroy farmer’s livelihoods), one awful indictment stands out, and is often repeated in social media and news outlets as received truth. An Al Jazeera online story that reported on the anti-Monsanto protests cited it matter-of-factly halfway through its piece, when it mentioned Monsanto’s “link to hundreds of thousands of Indian farmer suicides.” The article went on to say: “More than 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India after Monsanto’s Bt cotton seeds largely failed. Many farmers decided to drink Monsanto pesticide, ending their lives.”
Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacterium in soil that has insecticide properties. Over a decade ago, Monsanto (in partnership with Indian seed companies) produced genetically engineered cotton seeds with the Bt protein, which helps the crop ward off insects, particularly the bollworm. Since then, there have been widespread charges that the seed technology has failed, resulting in lower crop yields.
The sole attribution for the suicide claim in the Al Jazeera story is a hyperlink for “250,00 farmers,” which takes readers to a 2012 opinion column by writer Belen Fernandez (who actually reports the number of suicides as “nearly 300,000”), which she supports by linking to a 2009 op-ed by Vandana Shiva in the Huffington Post. Shiva is a prominent Indian-born environmentalist who, for the past decade, has said repeatedly that Monsanto’s “suicide seeds” have triggered a “genocide” in rural areas of India.
The Monsanto-Indian famer suicide connection is a recurring motif for Shiva. She raises it when she references Monsanto or GMOs in her many writings, media interviews, and public talks. I heard her expound on it during a recent talk on sustainability that she gave at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in New York City.
Shiva’s words are treated with earnest respect in liberal and environmental circles, where she is held in great esteem. If she insists that Monsanto and its GMO seeds have driven hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers to suicide—and she has said this frequently—then there must be something to it.
After all, a much-acclaimed 2011 documentary called Bitter Seeds chronicled this heartrending phenomenon and Monsanto’s culpability. As the popular environmental news site Grist put it, Bitter Seeds revealed the “tragic toll of GMOs in India.” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the bestselling Omnivore’s Dilemma and other food-related books, told his 300,000 followers on Twitter that Bitter Seeds was not to be missed, and lauded it as “a powerful documentary on farmer suicides and biotech seeds in India.”
By now, the “failure of Bt cotton” and Monsanto’s “suicide seeds” are memes firmly embedded in the media ecosystem. Countless blog posts, tweets, and news stories state it as established fact. Monsanto employees get asked about it by their friends and families. The company has a page on its website that discusses the topic. During the 2013 March against Monsanto rallies, protesters held aloft signs that read “Indian farmer suicides.”
If you had heard of this issue only from fleeting headlines or from friends on Facebook, or from Bill Moyers on PBS, who was told about it when he interviewed Shiva in 2013, you would be inclined to believe that Monsanto is guilty as charged, that the company was indeed responsible for the deaths of a quarter-million Indian farmers.
But there is one problem with this story. Bt cotton has been all the rage in India since it was officially approved in 2002. The technology has been adopted by over 90% of Indian cotton farmers. Multiple studies point to significant reduction in pesticide spraying and subsequent cost savings for cotton farmers. (Similar findings attest to the same in China, where Bt cotton accounts for 80% of its crop.) India’s agricultural minister said in 2012 that the country “has harvested an average of 5.1 million tons of cotton per year, which is well above the highest production of 3 million tons before the introduction of Bt cotton.” India is the world’s second-biggest cotton producer, behind China.
Apparently, Indian farmers have come to overwhelmingly embrace genetically modified cotton. Yet there is an enduring belief that Bt cotton has failed in India, with tragic consequences.
This failure, the story goes, has resulted in burdensome debt and caused more than a quarter-million Indian farmers to take their own lives. Ronald Herring, a political scientist at Cornell University, has studied the seeming paradox and written on it extensively. As he observed in one paper, “It is hard to imagine farmers spreading a technology that is literally killing them.”
Of suicides, seeds, and society
Agriculture, according to the Indian government, “is unquestionably the largest livelihood provider in India, more so in the vast rural areas.” Seventy percent of India’s 1.2 billion people live in the countryside. Many eke out a living on marginal lands.
Still, India is a top agricultural producer. The government crows on a state-sponsored website that “India is the largest producer of pulses [a high protein grain], milk, tea, cashew and jute; and the second largest producer of wheat, rice, fruits and vegetables, sugarcane, cotton and oilseeds.”
The larger picture is not so rosy. India’s agricultural sector, which contributes only 21% of the country’s gross domestic product, is highly inefficient, wasteful, and hobbled by inconsistent government policies that, as The Economist pointed out several years ago, “still fixes prices and subsidizes inputs, when public money would be far better spent on infrastructure and research.” Lack of mechanization and irrigation, for example, are two key shortcomings. Many Indian farmers depend on erratic monsoonal rains.
As in much of the developing world, small-holder Indian farmers (those with less than two hectares of land) are most vulnerable to the vagaries of weather and climate change. They also have little access to institutional credit. As the World Bank has noted: “While India has a wide network of rural finance institutions, many of the rural poor remain excluded, due to inefficiencies in the formal finance institutions, the weak regulatory framework, high transaction costs, and risks associated with lending to agriculture.” Consequently, when purchasing seed, fertilizer, and other crop-related items, poor farmers often turn to private money lenders who charge high loan rates.
This financial burden is commonly cited for the wave of farmer suicides that the media—particularly in India—have been reporting the past decade. However, researchers studying the phenomenon also note that it has struck unevenly in cotton-growing regions of central and southern India, where the social and economic stressors vary. For example, a 2012 paper in The Lancet that surveyed India’s suicide mortality rate noted: “Studies from south India have shown that the most common contributors to suicide are a combination of social problems, such as interpersonal and family problems and financial difficulties, and pre-existing mental illness.”
Still, this much is known: More than 270,000 Indian farmers have taken their own lives since the mid-1990s, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. And that number is believed to be higher, although firm data is hard to come by. These deaths are real and they are tragic for the surviving families.
In April of 2013, I attended a conference at Cornell (which Herring helped to organize) on Indian agricultural issues. Several of the panels examined the phenomenon of Indian farmer suicides, and one of them specifically addressed the question, “What do we know about the incidence, distribution, and causes of the personal tragedies?”
What we know is that many of the farmer suicides have been concentrated in five of India’s 28 states. (Anti-GMO activists call this the “suicide belt.”) At the conference, Anoop Sadanadan, a political economist at Syracuse University, identified the role of Indian banking policies, rather than the alleged GMO crop failure, in contributing to the suicides. In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Developing Areas, he argues that “the increase in suicides among Indian farmers is an unanticipated consequence of the bank reforms the country undertook since the early-1990s. In particular, the entry of foreign and new generation private banks has made banking in India competitive and led to fewer loans to agriculture and farmers. With increased competition, banks saw lending to the farm sector as unprofitable and unreliable.”
Banking practices vary across India. Sadanadan found that states with the highest incidence of farmer suicides were those that offered the least institutional credit to farmers. This forced small farmers into the hands of private lenders who charge exorbitant interest rates (as high as 45%). In those states where farmers had better access to institutional credit and farm insurance, there were markedly fewer suicides. Indian banks also offer credit to farmers with irrigated land, as this makes farming more viable. “Irrigation does drive bank lending,” Sadanadan said at the panel. “In states where there is greater irrigation, they [banks] lend money to the farmer.”
In his upcoming paper, Sadanadan writes that he also found “no evidence to suggest that the cultivation of a particular crop was related to suicides in India.” Some states with high agrarian suicide rates do not include cotton farmers. “Further, cotton was cultivated in some 10 other states that did not witness high incidence of farmer suicides,” he writes.
I asked Sadanadan if there are sociocultural factors that might also explain why Indian farmers have taken their own lives? “So farmers have a choice,” he responded. “In America, a farmer could just default on a loan and say, ‘come after me.’ But in India, they commit suicide. Why? There has to be something cultural there. Is it shame?” But the proximate cause of many suicides, he reiterated, is the “debt burden” associated with the loan sharks, especially in states where farmer credit is tight.
There is also a larger context to the tragedy of these farmer suicides. Nearly 1 million people are reported to take their own lives each year worldwide. China and India account for almost half that total. According to Chinese government statistics, 80% of the 280,000 annual suicides in China occur in rural areas. Some of the main causes include social isolation, lack of economic opportunity, and inadequate access to mental health services.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that approximately 170,000 deaths by suicide occur annually in India. Another Lancet study also published in 2012 found that young women in rural areas of India and China “are at especially high risk of dying by suicide.” The authors of this paper were surprised to find “that suicide was higher in India’s richer states and that divorce, separation, and widowhood in women were protective [that is, mitigating] factors for suicide.” Why would that be? One of the paper’s coauthors said in a press interview that “interpersonal violence” (such as “marital violence”) and “economic difficulties” in India are the “main social determinants for suicide in women.” A common method of suicide is ingesting pesticides.
Moreover, as horrific as India’s farmer suicide numbers may be, only about 10% of the total annual number of suicides in India are those of farmers. To further put these numbers in perspective, every year in India more than 200,000 children under the age of 5 die from diarrhea, a toll that could easily be reduced by improving the infrastructure for drinking water and sanitation.
Surely this larger cultural and economic context is not news to those who have been closely monitoring human rights and social justice concerns in India. Yet since the mid-2000s, advocacy organizations, international media, and even some academic groups have latched onto to the plight of small-holder Indian farmers.
As highlighted in a 2011 report by the New York University School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, one Indian farmer commits suicide every 30 minutes— a number based on Indian government data that listed 17,638 farmers as having killed themselves in 2009. The report’s title, Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights and the Agrarian Crisis in India, was picked up (in shortened form) as a tagline for the Bitter Seeds documentary. “Every Thirty Minutes” has since become a useful rhetorical device for activists who have melded it into their screeds against Monsanto and GMOs. One organic foods advocacy website writes: “Every 30 minutes an Indian farmer commits suicide as a result of Monsanto’s GM crops. In the last decade more than 250,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves because of Monsanto’s costly seeds and pesticides.”
That website links to and posts an excerpt of a 2008 story in the Daily Mail (a newspaper published in the United Kingdom) headlined, “The GM Genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide after using genetically modified crops.” The Daily Mail is a notorious tabloid, but it is also the world’s largest English language newspaper site. That particular article is omnipresent on the Internet, referenced (and linked to) by many articles on Monsanto, especially those at alternative health websites that promote “natural” cures and organic foods.
Joseph Mercola, a controversial alternative medicine vendor who has been featured on The Dr. Oz Show, a popular TV talk show, runs one such high-traffic site. He advises his readers to avoid foods “laced with genetically modified ingredients.” In 2011, Mercola penned a long article about a two-week trip he took to India, where he “experienced the Indian farmers’ plight firsthand.” Mercola’s web chronicle has gotten over 180,000 online views and has been emailed 1 million times. At the article’s outset are embedded videos of Vandana Shiva discussing the Monsanto-GMO link and a trailer for Bitter Seeds. Mercola goes on to say that “a farmer commits suicide by pesticide every 30 minutes in India,” and explains that genetically modified seeds are the fundamental reason for the “GM genocide.” Monsanto, he writes, “has blood on its hands.”
So the Monsanto-farmer suicide story has been accepted, repeated, and amplified by a widening range of people and organizations, including many major environmental groups, such as Greenpeace; mainstream media figures, such as the respected Bill Moyers; and academic groups, such as the human rights center at New York University. It has even found its way into the scientific community. In October of 2013, when the subject of food security arose during a panel at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in Australia, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University, author of the 1968 classic The Population Bomb, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, stated that Monsanto had “killed those farmers in India.”
Anatomy of a myth
No one has done more to promote the narrative of Monsanto’s “seeds of suicide” than Vandana Shiva. A leader of the antiglobalism movement in the 1990s, Shiva often depicts the peasant agrarian lifestyle as a sacred stewardship of the land, and she views the patenting of agricultural seeds as part of a plot by multinational corporations to dominate the world’s food supply and enslave small farmers. She is the author of numerous books, including Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, published in 1997. Her idyllic view of traditional farming and the nefarious threat to it created by GMOs is itself a popular item on the antiglobalism agenda, and is shared among many people in the environmental community.
Shiva’s fixation on the suicides of Indian farmers grew after the Indian government in 2002 officially approved Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton crop. By the mid-2000s, Shiva and her allies in the anti-GMO movement were advancing a storyline that coincided with increasing media coverage of Indian farmer suicides. In a 2006 report published by her organization, Navdanya, Shiva asserted that the higher seed cost and purported failure of “Monsanto’s Bt. cotton has already pushed thousands of Indian farmers into debt, despair and death.” This “failure” was asserted for Bt crops that were ruined by pests or drought, causing the farmer to pile up debts. The report states: “Genetic engineering is killing Indian farmers.”
Other influential voices would soon echo this claim. “I blame GM crops for farmers’ suicides,” said Prince Charles in 2008. That year, at an event in India sponsored by Shiva, the Prince of Wales gave a widely publicized speech that reinforced the Indian farmer suicide-GMO connection.
The Daily Mail piled on with its 2008 “GM Genocide” article, and since then, a steady drumbeat of similarly embellished claims (most of which continue to live on the Internet) has sustained and promulgated the Monsanto Bt-cotton-kills-Indian farmers narrative. The story garnered even greater cultural cache and wider audiences with the 2011 release of Bitter Seeds, which was screened at film festivals around the world and won many accolades.
The movie’s director, Michal X. Peled, had previously made two documentaries with a social justice/globalization theme and was searching for a third idea to round out a planned trilogy when he met Vandana Shiva in the late 2000s at a film festival in Greece. As he recounts in an interview with Filmmaker magazine: “She said, ‘you should come to India for your third one.’ And I told her, ‘Well actually that’s kind of what I had in mind. But what do you got?’ And she said, ‘The farmer suicide crisis. Every 30 minutes a farmer kills himself.’ And I thought she must be exaggerating, because I had never heard of it. So I started investigating it, and I asked her, ‘What’s the globalization angle?’ And she told me, ‘It’s because of the seeds that Monsanto sells.’ And three months later I went to India, and she made the arrangements for me to meet people and start traveling around.”
Bitter Seeds is an affecting film that captures the marginal existence of poor farmers in India and the sociocultural circumstances that defines their lives. But like every moral fable, it needed a villain, in this case Monsanto’s GM cotton seeds. The film is set in a rural Indian village “at the center of a suicide epidemic.” In its review, Grist wrote: “As Grist and others have reported, 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.”
Cornell’s Herring, who has done extensive fieldwork in India, has closely tracked the Indian farmer suicide issue since the late 1990s. In a 2006 paper, well before Bitter Seeds came to movie screens, he noted that Shiva had shaped the public narrative and that she “provided the main frames for the connection between globalization and transgenics.”
Yet Herring at the time was also puzzled by a disconnect between what was literally happening on—and in—the ground in India, and what was being claimed by Shiva. For it was already clear by the mid-2000s that Indian farmers had enthusiastically embraced Bt cotton over conventional cotton seeds. Indeed, there was such a demand for the transgenic cotton by the early- and mid-2000s that counterfeit Bt seeds were being sold by unscrupulous parties; these spurious seeds were cheaper, but they did not contain the advertised Bt pest-resistant gene, which led some farmers to “honestly but mistakenly believe that their Bt crop has failed,” Herring says.
Meanwhile, Shiva and others ignored such nuances and kept insisting that Bt cotton had failed—that it did not produce higher yields and increase farmers’ incomes. In his paper, Herring pondered the contradiction: “Rather than asking why there is such a sharp adoption curve of both small and large farmers, and commercial seed firms, across all cotton areas of India, activists continue to declare ‘the failure of Bt cotton.’”
“Why then do farmers not only buy the seeds, but sometimes save and replant them, and cross them into new Bt hybrids?” he asked. “Why do capitalist firms buy expensive licenses to produce a failed technology?”
Shiva and her anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto allies were unfazed by these contradictions. Indeed, their rhetoric would become more charged in the coming years and the number of suicides attributed to Monsanto and Bt cotton would increase ten- and twentyfold. “Every [Indian cotton farmer] suicide can be linked to Monsanto,” she told The Independent, a British newspaper, in 2011. Why was she doubling down in the face of contrary evidence? As Herring explained, “If overwhelming farmer adoption has in effect settled the agro-economic questions around Bt cotton in India, new claims are needed to justify continuing the struggle.”
This would be the struggle against the globalized, neoliberal system of free trade, which Shiva and like-minded critics oppose. To them, such a system benefits only large corporations such as Monsanto, which use their political influence and patented GMO technology to corner the seed market. So when India approved Bt cotton (thus far the only GMO crop permitted in the country), it quickly became a surrogate cause in the larger ideological battle.
In this battle, the Bt cotton-Indian farmer suicide narrative that Shiva helped to craft proved to be powerfully seductive and immune to contradiction or correction. Not only does there seem to be no evidence that farmers using Bt cotton seed are more likely to commit suicide than others, but farmers that do use the seeds appear on the whole to be benefiting from them. A 2008 meta-review of data between 2002 and 2006 “suggests that Bt cotton has been quite successful in most states and years in India, contributing to an impressive leap in average cotton yields, as well as a decrease in pesticide use and increase in farmer revenue.” The authors of this paper, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, say that their analysis “is sufficiently well documented to discredit the possibility of a naïve direct causal or reciprocal relationship between Bt cotton and farmer suicides.”
These conclusions have since been corroborated by additional studies that found that Indian farmers using Bt crops spend less money on pesticides and earn more money from higher yields. In fact, a 2013 study in PLOS ONE found that in India “the adoption of GM cotton has significantly improved calorie consumption and dietary quality, resulting from increased family incomes.”
In 2013, after attending Shiva’s talk at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I asked her about the mounting evidence that contradicted her “suicide seed” claims. She dismissed them breezily and said, “Those are the Monsanto studies.” But neither Monsanto nor the biotechnology industry funded any of the aforementioned studies.
Never mind; that same week, she went on a news program in the United States and said: “Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market. That’s more than a quarter-million. It’s a genocide.”
The unresolved plight of Indian farmers
Humans have been altering agricultural plants for thousands of years. Relatively recent advances in recombinant DNA technology has brought a new precision to the process, enabling plants to be more resistant to pests and diseases.
In 2014, transgenic crops account for roughly 10-15% of the world’s agriculture. Much of the corn, soybean, cotton, and canola produced today are genetically modified. These crops are mostly used for animal feed, biofuels, and fiber. Biotechnology is expected to play a larger role in food production in the coming years and decades. Its advocates also say that crops genetically engineered to withstand harsh environmental conditions will help the world adapt to extreme weather and higher temperatures resulting from global warming, and feed a global population that is projected to reach 9 billion people in 2050.
But ever since the introduction of biotechnology into agriculture more than two decades ago, activists in the environmental, social justice, and food movements have passionately opposed it. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth played a major role in successfully demonizing biotechnology in Europe in the 1990s and have imported their anti-GMO campaigns to Asia and Africa. These campaigns have rested, in part, on claims about adverse human health affects that are groundless. The other main pillar of anti-GMO campaigns is built on anticorporate and anti-big business philosophy.
Much of the criticism of Monsanto, for example, revolves around its patenting of genetically modified crops. This “bio-piracy” (as Shiva calls it) has enabled the company to monopolize the seed market with its products, critics charge. Corporate domination of agriculture (which, the argument goes, perpetuates an industrial-sized, profit-incentivizing system) makes many people uneasy, particularly those who care deeply about what is in their food, how it is produced, and who makes the money from producing it.
When concerns about GMO foods combine with this deep distrust of a globalized, corporatist agricultural system, the result is what Herring identifies as the two main strands of GMO resistance. The proliferation of these GMO fears is made possible, he says, by “knowledge claims” circulated by transnational advocacy groups and activists (such as Greenpeace and Shiva). These claims are, in turn, funneled through the media and high-profile sources (such as the Daily Mail and Prince Charles and Bill Moyers). The socially conscious director of Bitter Seeds made a documentary premised on Shiva’s claims and relied on her advocacy network to provide the farmers featured in his film. It is a self-validating closed loop.
Monsanto, for its part, has recently decided to engage its critics more directly in public forums. One such event took place in Montreal in November 2013 when Trish Jordan, Monsanto’s Canada’s director of public and industry affairs, faced off against Eric Darier, Greenpeace International’s senior campaigner on agriculture. During the debate, Darier railed against the “huge concentration around food” and, hitting a familiar theme of GMO opponents, said that “those who control the food supply, whatever part of it, will control the rest of society.”
In its coverage of the event, Canada’s National Post reported: “The evening that started with anti-GMO pamphleteers outside ended for Ms. Jordan with students from the audience questioning her about why Monsanto is driving Indian farmers to suicide.”
And so the narrative persists, firmly embedded in popular knowledge, against all evidence to the contrary. “I seldom give a presentation on agricultural biotechnology anywhere in the world in which someone does not bring up the farmer suicides in India,” Herring says in one paper. The sensationalist stories of Bt disaster, he believes, play into broader anxieties about GMOs stoked by activists and “may assist in delaying diffusion of biotechnology” to farmers around the world.
One consequence in India appears to be the decade-long delay of Bt brinjal (a variety of eggplant), a staple food crop. A number of nongovernmental organizations in India have fiercely campaigned against Bt brinjal, using the stories of supposed Bt cotton “failure” as ammunition. While a moratorium on Bt brinjal remains in effect in India, neighboring Bangladesh has just approved the crop.
Meanwhile, farmers in India continue to take their own lives. The Indian media covers such suicides on a near daily basis. A story in the Hindustan Times on November 22, 2013, reports that seven farmers killed themselves after “unseasonably heavy rains destroyed their crops.” This article, attempting to put the recent spate of suicides in a larger national context of the past decade, paraphrased a finding from a 2012 Indian government report on rural development: “Indebtedness and lenders confiscating land have been attributed as the main causes of the farmers deaths.”
The need for Indian policy reforms that provide rural farmers with much better financial and social service resources seems clear enough. And when drought or floods victimize these farmers, the lack of a state-level safety net appears to drive some of them to suicide. Blaming farmer suicides on Bt cotton thus seems not only to be incorrect but also a distraction from the real causes of a tragic problem. One is left wondering what problem Vandana Shiva and other like-minded activists are actually interested in solving, since it does not seem to be the livelihoods of Indian farmers.
Keith Kloor ([email protected]) is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Dear Ms. Kloor,
I am a simple man, retired with my wife from the high-pressure corporate world of New Jersey to WNC ten years ago. I am a conservative by nature with my father having served on Okinawa in WWII and one of my sons in Afghanistan for one short tour.
Because I was raised when America was at its peak in the 1950’s, I know what real freedom looks like before the new age of the socialist activists developed from a young generation of Americans looking for free stuff.
I was brought up when there were mortgage burning parties and the only thing a family might get a loan for outside the home was a family car. Everything else was basically paid for in cash, Americans proud to be on their own wanting little or no assistance from the feds. My father didn’t belong to any church nor was required to. I became a Christian in the late 30’s, discouraged today with the politics of the church but not in its founder.
I started a tiny hobby Web site eight years ago that I still receive no income from, which has grown to a conservative Web portal where busy folks can check the news from close to 70 posted Web sites. My site started by helping people find jobs with my having been downsized. The URL, however, quickly morphed to the domain name of Freedom is knowledge when I watched what was happening in the pre election days of 2007.
I have been sending out a weekend e-mail for about three years on the summary of the week’s news to a short e-mail list of retired military and professionals. To that end I received an e-mail from one of those on my list today, a retired Army officer with 22 years of service, his talking about if I knew about Indians committing suicide over genetically modified crops.
I did a quick search and came across the name of Vandana Shiva with a 2014 article printed in the New Yorker Magazine. Then I come across your excellent calming post mentioning the names of Bill Moyer, Greenpeace, and the Huffington Post, which I am banned from leaving comments on. So I don’t need much more to figure out what’s going on, remembering the Obama administration’s mission statement to never allow a good crisis go to waste.
I saw your post noted two comments were left and felt you needed to know your words fell on fertile ground today. I will also be sending your article to my Army friend. And I will also post it in one of my e-mails going out to continue to support my warnings of the dangerous politically correct world we live in today. It is where Obama’s activists can go from holding their hands up saying don’t shoot to a nationwide movement that quickly morphs back to Obama’s Marxist OWS supported by the ideology of radicals such as Cloward and Piven. Pelosi at the time said God had blessed the OWS.
My chores for the day of cleaning the bathrooms and cooking a special dinner for friends tomorrow is calling, so I need to go. Like I said, I am a simple man. By the way we had a former neighbor, a priest, who lived next to us for a few years from Brooklyn, discovering that green grass took more time to care for than hosing down cement.
Best regards,
Webmaster
WNC
Nice article. Did Monsanto write it for you? If that isn’t the biggest POS blaming the victim article and everything BUT Monsanto’s aggressive royalty fees and pushing banks to NOT extend credit. As well as going after farmers as they do in America if one of their precious seeds drifts over to another farmer’s fields for stealing their product and even taking the family land.
The highest acreage of Bt cotton is in Maharashtra and this is also where the highest farmer suicides are. Suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced — Monsanto’s royalty extraction, and the high costs of seed and chemicals have created a debt trap. According to Government of India data, nearly 75 per cent rural debt is due to purchase inputs. As Monsanto’s profits grow, farmers’ debt grows. It is in this systemic sense that Monsanto’s seeds are seeds of suicide.
So your article smacks of legal teams making it up and having it printed here as though it is the last word on the subject.
IT IS NOT.
Keith, what do you say to the fact that cotton yield per hectare in India has essentially remained unchanged from 2004-05(470 kg) to 2011-12(481 kg), even as the acreage under Bt cotton increased from 6% to 90%?
It seems the suicide story has been given a rewrite, this time blaming it on (the evil) Monsanto daring to charge a fee for their seeds:
http://action.sumofus.org/a/monsanto-royalties/?rd=1&sub=fwd&t=1&referring_akid=12130.1443466.W-DRm4
Just FYI,
Ron S.
Why a farmer commits suicide
• A farmer never pays any tax
• Most of the farmers are given free electricity & water.
• Many of their loans exempted once new government comes.
• They have given low interest loan on their purchases of farming equipment.
Still why a farmer commits suicide??
Before we find the answers we should find reason influencing it
• Working / Business men pays tax ( so many taxes )
• Working / Business men has to pay all his loans with high interest & penalty ( no mercy )
• For Working / Business men everything is charged road, electricity, water etc. nothing is free
The most influencing answer is here
• Working / business men left out with less money after all their taxes to purchase what local farmer supplies to market; he goes for cheaper food alternatives.
• The farmer is weakened because of drop in his profit even though he has no taxes he can’t find a prospective buyer
• The farmer cannot bear the overheads of family and commits suicide motivated by the compensation offered by government for his death to save his family
Final out come
• Working / Business men continue paying more and more taxes to fund the government to give compensation to a dead farmer and money spent by our pro farmer ministers for their boosting rallies and vote banking favouring farmers with their generous contributions ( with tax payers money)
• Again the real buyer left out with few money and look for cheaper food stuff and one more farmer dies.
The truth is Working / Business men pays for the welfare of farmers not the one who are giving big speeches ……….Dear back bone of India (farmers ) please understand it , don’t waste time on listening to unethical politicians who are not even aware without a prospective buyer the producer never survives
ರೈತ
Monsanto has been known in both its previous incarnation with agent orange, and its current manifestation to have been not fully honest with the public. rBST(rBGH) is still used without its consumers knowing by using political loopholes, and was caught by The USDA who is forcing it to be removed. This economic machine has far to many moving parts in the chain of command to be understood by anyone who does not at least work for the company. Consider this; Food inc used information directly from american farmers that GMO soy “drifted” into their fields and then were sued by Monsanto for using their patented soy gene. But how did a hybrid crop that produces a yield of crop which cant be pollinated, spread to an organic farm? I leave that inference to you.
Another problem is that Indian farmers have claimed on camera, regardless of how truthful they were being, that Monsanto is oppressing them. Monsanto may not be the main source of the problem, but Monsanto is connected enough to make a farmer say they are an issue. And if he/she is lying, then why would they be? They would have to had something against monsanto in general. If that is true, then you may just be brushing the surface of what the real issue those farmers are having.
(personally I do belive Monsanto has good intentions in most, if not all of its actions as a company, but occasionally reaps negative results)
Works Cited
“USDA ERS – Corn: Background.” USDA ERS – Corn: Background. USDA, 11 Feb. 2016. Web. 29 June 2016. .
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Apologies: this is the edited version.
While you spend a great deal of time emphasizing that there is no connection between Bt cotton and the suicides of Indian farmers, there’s very little here exploring what is at the root of those suicides, so your article’s intent seems less to truly investigate that phenomemom than it is to defend Montsanto and discredit Vandana Shiva. There is a more complex relationship between industrial agriculture and the debts incurred by these failed farmers. One need not go much further than to look at Montsanto’s not-so-private history of bankrupting farmers on American soil to see the economic politics involved in their policies and tactics. The suicides are real, and they are by marginal farmers who have no money to buy Montsanto products; neither are they simply cotton farmers. The presence of large-scale agribusiness has damaging effects environmentally and socially. To call attention to that is not to jump on a bandwagon, as you suggest here.
This article left out one very important problem cotton has. The more you grow it the more it depletes your soil. So if BT is successful at one end it kills your soil at the other.
—“A historic example of nutrient depletion is the depletion of soils in the southeastern United States by the growing of cotton. As late as 1950, “King Cotton” was the most valuable farm commodity produced in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.”
Reference:
Plant Life: Soil Degradation,
lifeofplant.blogspot.com/2011/01/soil-degradation.htm
I find your comments about cotton depleting the soil to be very interesting, I would be interested in hearing if you have proposals that solve the problem. I have my own issues with GM crops period, but I try to maintain an open mind, and let the passage of time reveal what is true and not.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html
this article is EVIL and heartless propaganda with REAL blood being spilled. In essence, you’re false information is killing real people.
Dear Mr. Kloor
I found your article refreshing. I do believe that Dr. Vandana has ulterior motives for propagating the myth relating Monsanto and indian farmer suicides. Her assumption is rather naive. One wonders who finances her global trips and her office. As they say follow the money trail and her motives will be uncovered.
regards
Dr. Shiva is a trained scientist. If her logic was faulty and naiive would the whole world believe in it?
FYI – everyone on this planet has some “ulterior” motives and so do you…
When did you become her money manager?
As Mr. Blake alludes to here, the more important issue is not GM crops per se but the aggregate affect of ignoring soil health. Natural system based agricultural techniques such as Agroforestry and agroecology, which fundamentally focus on building healthy soil, are the answer to sustainable food production. Corporate controlled, industrial agriculture, which is mentioned repeatedly but not problematized, is what drives soil degradation whether or not GM crops are the culprit. Effective policies would look at the Indian suicides systemically, offering programs, services, and market incentives that encourage stewardship of the soil. In this situation, Monsanto’s primary concern is not to feed the world, but to maximize profits. This is why the seeds are patented, and this is why, beyond Monsanto, the ecosystem for financing agriculture is designed for extracting money from rural Indian farmers, as opposed to allowing them to take the necessary time for nurturing soil health. Addressing this issue over the long term will require providing viable pathways to land and soil stewardship and, ultimately, empowerment of the rural Indian farmer. This is what Vandana Shiva and other like-minded activists are actually interested in solving but which the government and scientific community at large is incapable of acknowledging. Healthy soil = healthy food = healthy societies = healthy economies.
You point out that cotton is hard on soil. The fact that a farmer uses or does not use bt cotton does not affect that. The farmers there should do what the farmers here do. Most of the cotton farmers on the Rolling Plains of Texas will rotate wheat or sesame into the rotation to help the soil. Regardless of the type of cotton used the farmers should find a rotation crop.
Shiva cares nothing for the farmer or the soil. She cares to promote her name and her religion of natural farming. That notion will starve the population because her natural farming methods are not effective. Dr Norman Borloug warned against letting people like her have the ability to this important tool away from the farmers. These people who want to remove GM from the tool box of farmers are the people who will have to answer for the deaths of billions who will starve because we cannot keep up with the growth of the population.
Well spoken Webmaster. GMO crops might make certain seeds, plants, areas more productive, insect resistant and fecund in the short term but the long-term effects are not known, the unplanned factors are not known. It is dangerous science funded by those who have the most financially to gain.
You very cleverly say something without actually saying anything at all. You dance around the topic with quotes and references, but it never really goes anywhere. GMO’s are linked to failed crops, which in turn leads to higher debt for farmers, which ultimately leads to suicide.
You are just ignoring the issue.
The RT documentary proves beyond doubt the link between the hoodwinking of Indian farmers, and the monopoly on seed that Monsanto has engineered. The inflated price of the seed and the unsuitability of the seed for the conditions for most farmers (the need for irrigation that they cannot provide) leaves them producing inferior quality cotton that sells for a fraction of the production costs. Monsanto – what a great business model!
Unfortunately, for anyone who has never studied the environmental justice movement and [innumerable] cases of environmental racism, it is hard to swallow that YES there is purposeful destabilization of agricultural/ecological systems in other countries. This causes two new economic avenues for the US, providing arms deals to countries who then go to war over resource depletion, and, for the pharmaceutical industry to sell the drugs needed when populations obtain diseases related to diet and nutrition changes and ecological destruction. The thing that honestly pisses me off in this whole debate is how those who favor Monsanto end up spinning it into being over whether GMO’s are good or bad. This is all an ethics issue. These are farmers who have had a history of subsistence farming, relationship with the land and it’s ecology, husbandry which includes relating to the animal before ending its life-the green revolution forced industrial agriculture on certain countries and changed their entire way of life to model that of the US, which some uphold as the standard of the globe (furthering the colonialist mindset/agenda). You say look at the yield, I say look at the happiness of the people, their wellbeing. You have become completely brainwashed to accept figures and measures as a reflection of good standing. Capitalism is a disease of the mind.
those who favor Monsanto end up spinning it into being over whether GMO’s are good or bad. This is all an ethics issue. These are farmers who have had a history of subsistence farming, relationship with the land and it’s ecology, husbandry which includes relating to the animal before ending its life-the green revolution forced industrial agriculture on certain countries and changed their entire way of life to model that of the US, which some uphold as the standard of the globe (furthering the colonialist mindset/agenda). You say look at the yield, I say look at the happiness of the people, their wellbeing. You have become completely brainwashed to accept figures and measures as a reflection of good standing. Capitalism is a disease of the mind.
Human dignity and human life matter. And we MUST be willing to do something to help people in distress who feel the need to take their own lives. But removing GM crops from India is not going to solve this problem. Take a look at this comprehensive 2012 study which analyzes suicides in India. Although those in rural areas have a higher suicide rate than in urban areas, farmers are three times less likely to commit suicide than non-workers or other laborers. Most deaths are however caused from ingesting pesticides. So there are many ways to intervene: limiting access to pesticides, focusing on crop diversity and efficient agricultural practices, bank lending and debt reduction policies are just a few (to address farmer suicide). If people want to oppose GMO companies, that’s fine – they certain have their faults. But if people actually want to prevent farmer suicides (or suicides in general in India) then there are more effective avenues to pursue.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4247159/#R1