Please read this everyone - the price we all pay for rapacious ‘progress.’

betweenthewoodsandthewater:

thisisnotsustainable:

An estimated 125,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide as a result of overwhelming debts owed to GMO seed/fertilizer/pesticide companies such as Monsanto.

I know this is a little outside the norm for this blog and I hate the reference the Daily Fail but..

“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.”

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.