The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops
- From: Muhammad Javed Iqbal <kaleemjavediqbal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:05:54 -0700 (PDT)
When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing
themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In
fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it's even WORSE than he
feared.
The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back
tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours
prepared their father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built
on the cracked, barren fields near their home.
As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a
grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter
would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now face
working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless,
they will be the lowest of the low.
Human tragedy: A farmer and child in India's 'suicide belt'
Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his
own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due
to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide. Unable to pay back
the equivalent of two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see
no way out.
There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony.
Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any
intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground,
crying out in pain and vomiting.Moaning, he crawled on to a bench
outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An
hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At
5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.
As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala
Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her
husband dead. 'He was a loving and caring man,' she said, weeping
quietly.'But he couldn't take any more. The mental anguish was too
much. We have lost everything.'
Shankara's crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence
are part of India's ancient story.But the death of this respected
farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister:
genetically modified crops.Shankara, like millions of other Indian
farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income
if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM
seeds instead.
Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order
to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with
spiralling debts - and no income.So Shankara became one of an
estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the
ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically
modified crops.
The crisis, branded the 'GM Genocide' by campaigners, was highlighted
recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a
'global moral question' - and the time had come to end its unstoppable
march.Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital,
Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by
condemning 'the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer
suicides in India, stemming... from the failure of many GM crop
varieties'.
Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent
politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have
transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever
before.The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace 'the future'
and follow suit.
So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the 'suicide
belt' in Maharashtra state.What I found was deeply disturbing - and
has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating
whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to
circumvent the laws of nature.
For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed
confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers
kill themselves here each month.Simple, rural people, they are dying
slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance
they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into
growing expensive GM crops. It seems that many are massively in debt
to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.
Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and
'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll.But,
as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the
disaster, that is not the full story.
Death seeds: A Greenpeace protester sprays milk-based paint on a
Monsanto research soybean field near Atlantic, Iowa. In one small
village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked
into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their
dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.
Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years
after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.She
left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries
when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting
listlessly in shade near the fields.
Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt
after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton
seeds.The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM
seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional
seeds.
But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that
these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from
parasites and insects. Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM
seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed
banks.
The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new
biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-
independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-
tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their
new seed creations.
In return for allowing western companies access to the second most
populated country in the world, with more than one billion people,
India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties
and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution. But while
cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have
slid back into the dark ages.
Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years
- up to 17 million acres - many famers have found there is a terrible
price to be paid. Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds'
of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.
Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount
of water. This has proved a matter of life and death. With rains
failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and
died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying
them off.
Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate
rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their
land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on
faced a fresh crisis. When crops failed in the past, farmers could
still save seeds and replant them the following year.
But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That's because GM seeds contain
so- called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been
genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable
seeds of their own. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each
year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference
between life and death.
Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this
week, leaving a wife and two children. As night fell after the
ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were
brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their
troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT
Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.
'We are ruined now,' said the 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.'
Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along
rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and
he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her
home to pay their respects. 'He was dead by the time they got to
hospital.'
Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social
problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified
gathering erupted in anger. 'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers
exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and
paid his taxes.
'He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying
they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy
the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us.
Please tell the world what is happening here.'
Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this
tragedy'. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the
past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for
the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out
that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.Officials
also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM
seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.
During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three
'independent' surveyors scouring villages for information about
suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more
expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.
(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is 'only double' the
price of 'official' non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can
be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by 'unscrupulous'
merchants, who often also sell 'fake' GM seeds which are prone to
disease.)
With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of
deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of
assistance. 'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said. 'We
just want help to stop any more of us dying.' Prince Charles is so
distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up
a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and
promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.
India's farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM
seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state
government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant
costs of GM seeds.
This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees
(about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. 'I told him that we
can survive,' his widow said, her children still by her side as
darkness fell. 'I told him we could find a way out. He just said it
was better to die.'
But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way
of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children's
schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging
in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic
country.
Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide'
- the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship
and misery by these 'magic seeds'. Here in the suicide belt of India,
the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.
http://www.globalre search.ca/ index.php? context=va&aid=10829
by Andrew Malone
.
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