India's hidden climate change catastrophe

[cory777]

Source: Independent

Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we can sell the salt from our table."

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"Poverty has assaulted rural India," he said. "Farmers who used to be able to send their children to college now can't send them to school. For all that India has more dollar billionaires than the UK, we have 600 million poor. The wealth has not trickled down." Almost all the bereaved families report that debts and land loss because of unsuccessful crops were among their biggest problems.

The causes of that poverty are complex. Mr Sainath points to the long-term collapse of markets for farmers' produce. About half of all the suicides occur in the four states of India's cotton belt; the price of cotton in real terms, he says, is a twelfth of what it was 30 years ago. Vandana Shiva, a scientist-turned-campaigner, also links failures of cotton farming with the farmer suicides: she says the phenomenon was born in 1997 when the Indian government removed subsidies from cotton farming. This was also when genetically modified seed was widely introduced.

"Every suicide can be linked to Monsanto," says Ms Shiva, claiming that the biotech firm's modified Bt Cotton caused crop failure and poverty because it needed to be used with pesticide and fertilisers. The Prince of Wales has made the same accusation. Monsanto denies that its activities are to blame, saying that Indian rural poverty has many causes.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/indias-hidden-climate-change-catastrophe-2173995.html

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[The Backlash Cometh]

1. This is interesting.

I wonder how India will handle this glaring glitch in the capitalist model. Trickle down does not trickle down.

[Haole Girl]

2. Very sad

:-(

[glinda]

3. Monsanto needs to go on trial, be found guilty and imprison their top people.

[loudsue]

5. ALL...ALL global warming will never do the permanent harm that Monsanto has done.

They are a completely criminal enterprise, and their management should have been beheaded in the town square decades ago.

[Lorien]

9. Well, that's not true. Climate change has the potential to destroy most life on earth

but Monsanto could very easily destroy most of the crop species we depend on with their perpetual genetic tinkering. Unfortunately their former lobbyists and executives populate our FDA and EPA, so they do what they do with impunity.

[XemaSab]

4. This has little, if anything, to do with climate change

n/t

[DeSwiss]

6. K&R

[timo]

7. not new

not new, not really, indians were eating the pills we use to fumigate sorghum and corn with to commit suicide years ago, I mean like twenty years ago , here is a more recent link from 2008 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html upon a little googling phostoxin pills seem to be the method of choice for suicide across the middle east and india!!

[Quantess]

8. Sad.

[Uncle Joe]

10. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, cory.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

11. Monsanto -- the purveyor of death.

These corrupt, monopolizing a-holes need a visit to the guillotines.