{"id":504,"date":"2010-01-30T07:06:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-30T12:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/indian-cost-of-pesticides-and-fertilizers.html"},"modified":"2010-01-30T07:06:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-30T12:06:00","slug":"indian-cost-of-pesticides-and-fertilizers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/indian-cost-of-pesticides-and-fertilizers.html","title":{"rendered":"Indian Cost of Pesticides and Fertilizers"},"content":{"rendered":"Akash Kapur <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/29\/world\/asia\/29iht-letter.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">\nwrites in the New York Times<\/a> about\nsomething rotten in the state of India:\n<blockquote>\nBy the late \u201980s, the chemicals had started taking a toll. Mr. Govindan\u2019s land dried up. Yields declined. Mr. Govindan said the quality of his crops did, too. In the old days, he told me, if you cooked too much rice for dinner you could keep it overnight and eat it the next day for breakfast. Now, rice from the fields around Molasur turned rotten overnight.\n<p>\nOther things had changed: labor was more expensive, the price of fertilizers and seeds had increased, and the overall cost of living had outstripped the rise in crop prices.\n<\/blockquote>\nHow bad is it?\n<blockquote>\nThe scientist M.S. Swaminathan, often referred to as the father of India\u2019s green revolution, has spoken of a \u201cdisaster\u201d in Indian agriculture. The sociologist Dipankar Gupta has written of \u201chollowed\u201d villages.\n<p>\nAccording to a recent report in The Hindu newspaper, almost 200,000 farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2009 \u2014 a national tragedy (although it is rarely treated as such) brought on by rising debt and the resulting economic and existential despair.\n<\/blockquote>\nSo is the Indian government being realistic about the problem?\n<blockquote>\nMr. Govindan wondered about something else, too. Farming had always seemed a special profession to him, with a vital, even noble, role in feeding the nation. He wondered why the country didn\u2019t see it that way anymore. Just the previous night, he had watched Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on television, assuring the nation that it wouldn\u2019t face food shortages. Mr. Govindan felt something didn\u2019t add up. He pointed to the barren fields; he said you couldn\u2019t even grow peanuts on them anymore. \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d he said, \u201cWhere is all the food supposed to come from?\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nWell, if India follows the U.S. model, the food will come from a tiny number of agrobusinesses that will end up owning most of the land.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Akash Kapur writes in the New York Times about something rotten in the state of India: By the late \u201980s, the chemicals had started taking a toll. Mr. Govindan\u2019s land dried up. Yields declined. Mr. Govindan said the quality of his crops did, too. In the old days, he told me, if you cooked too [&hellip;]","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":[8,40,42,44,12],"tags":[1679,2762,1678,1677,544,835,1680,15,620],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agrochemicals","category-economy","category-food-and-drink","category-health","category-politics","tag-a-p-govindan","tag-agrochemicals","tag-akash-kapur","tag-archer-daniels-midland","tag-fertilizer","tag-india","tag-manmohan-singh","tag-monsanto","tag-pesticides"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-88","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","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=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}