An estimated 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide in the past 13 years, or, roughly one every thirty minutes. These farmers, immersed in crippling debt, are taking their own lives, leaving their families grief-stricken and with even less resources.
“Vidarbha, known as the cotton belt of India, is more recently known as the 'suicide belt'.” Lata Sharma, director of Navdanya Mumbai, an NGO promoting organic farming and farmers rights told MediaGlobal. “The epidemic of farmers' suicides is the real measurement of the stress under which Indian agriculture and Indian farmers have been put by policies of neglect and indifference.”
While India's urban regions have grown at a remarkable rate over the past decade, millions of its farmers, who make up more than half of the population, have been left to live in deplorable conditions with poverty rates equal to those of sub-Saharan Africa. This leaves little room for farmers to make mistakes when growing their crops.
Since 2002, a large number of farmers in India have invested in genetically modified seeds. Companies including Monsanto, Cargill, and Syngenta, often advertise their seeds with Bollywood stars and charge up to ten times the cost of traditional seeds. The seeds claim to bring unprecedented harvest sizes and considerably higher income. Many farmers take out high risk loans from banks or money lenders, often being charged excessively high interest rates to purchase the seeds.
It was later determined that these genetically modified seeds use up to 13 times as much pesticide as conventional seeds and require fertilizer and irrigation systems, meaning farmers are no longer able to rely solely on rainfall. In most cases the farmers are unaware of these extra expenses until after they have paid for the seeds and are suddenly forced into buying extra fertilizers and pesticides, dragging themselves deeper into debt.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment