{"id":428,"date":"2010-06-18T14:14:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T18:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/suicide-in-india-and-how-to-stop-it.html"},"modified":"2010-06-18T14:14:56","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T18:14:56","slug":"suicide-in-india-and-how-to-stop-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/suicide-in-india-and-how-to-stop-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Suicide in India and How to Stop It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/a>\nVandana Shiva writes in Huffington Post about India:\n
\n200,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1997.\n<\/blockquote>\nIn just one Indian state:\n
\n1593 farmers committed suicide in Chattisgarh in 2007. Before 2000 no farmers suicides are reported in the state.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhy?\n
\nIn 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved.\n

\nCorporations prevent seed savings through patents and by engineering seeds with non-renewable traits. As a result, poor peasants have to buy new seeds for every planting season and what was traditionally a free resource, available by putting aside a small portion of the crop, becomes a commodity. This new expense increases poverty and leads to indebtness.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd that’s not all:\n\n\n

\nThe shift from saved seed to corporate monopoly of the seed supply also represents a shift from biodiversity to monoculture in agriculture. The district of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millets, and oilseeds. Now the imposition of cotton monocultures has led to the loss of the wealth of farmer’s breeding and nature’s evolution.\n

\nMonocultures and uniformity increase the risk of crop failure, as diverse seeds adapted to diverse to eco-systems are replaced by the rushed introduction of uniform and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in 2002, the farmers lost 1 billion rupees due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 kilos per acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kilos per acre. Instead of incomes of 10,000 rupees an acre, farmers ran into losses of 6,400 rupees an acre. In the state of Bihar, when farm-saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto’s hybrid corn, the entire crop failed, creating 4 billion rupees in losses and increased poverty for desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies. The crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd that’s not even all. See the article<\/a> for the rest.\n

\nBut what can be done?\n

\nThe suicide economy is not an inevitability. Navdanya has started a Seeds of Hope campaign to stop farmers suicides. The transition from seeds of suicide to seeds of hope includes :\n
    \n
  • a shift from GMO and non renewable seeds to organic, open pollinated seed varieties which farmers can save and share.\n
  • a shift from chemical farming to organic farming.\n
  • a shift from unfair trade based on false prices to fair trade based on real and just prices.\n<\/ul>\nThe farmers who have made this shift are earning 10 times more than the farmers growing Monsanto’s Bt-cotton.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnd that’s the bottom line.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vandana Shiva writes in Huffington Post about India: 200,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1997. In just one Indian state: 1593 farmers committed suicide in Chattisgarh in 2007. Before 2000 no farmers suicides are reported in the state. Why? In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,8,68,40,44,10],"tags":[1391,1390,1389,515,1396,2774,1398,902,835,1392,1149,15,1393,173,1394,100,1397,648,1395,977,951],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-agrochemicals","category-development","category-economy","category-health","category-history","tag-andhra-pradesh","tag-cargill","tag-chattisgarh","tag-cotton","tag-crop-failure","tag-economy","tag-fair-trade","tag-gmo","tag-india","tag-legumes-millets","tag-monoculture","tag-monsanto","tag-oilseeds","tag-organic","tag-rice","tag-seed","tag-suicidd","tag-syngenta","tag-uniformity","tag-vandana-shiva","tag-world-bank"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-6U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}