Credit: Reuters/Ajay Verma
Monsanto, which has just paid out $2.4 million to US farmers, settling one of many lawsuits it’s been involved in worldwide, is also facing accusations that its seeds are to blame for a spike in suicides by India farmers.
The accusations have not transformed into legal action so far, but criticism of Monsanto has been mounting, blaming the giant company for contributing to over 290,000 suicides by Indian farmers over the last 20 years.
The author of a documentary on Indian farmers’ suicides, Alakananda Nag, who has interviewed dozens of the relatives of those who have taken their lives, links the rise in the suicide rate to the use of GMO seeds. She believes small farms are particularly vulnerable.
“The large farms certainly have the funds to support themselves and get on, but the smaller ones are really ones that suffer the most,” Nag told RT. “Monsanto definitely has a very big hand to play. A few years ago it was illegal to grow GMO crops in India. It’s not like the suicide did not exist back then. It did, but I […]
I can also see the other trend affecting the trend toward depression in poor small farmers by the “free trade” agreements which are neither free or agreeable to small farmers. When the USA made “free trade” agreements with Mexico it ended up having the affect of displacing small farmers who’s land was bought up by agribusiness giants, leaving these poor farmers with no place to grow their own food and into the cities where they could not survive. That is one of the reasons so many people like those small scale, old fashioned farmers decided to emmigrate to the USA. There is no wonder we have an immigration problem when we let corporations control agriculture. My grandfather, God rest his soul, used to say “those who live close to the soil, live close to God”. I can identify with the plight of those poor farmers who do not want to live in cities but want to live close to the earth, on their own land, raising their own food. It was their way of life, stripped away from them by people who only care about how many millions of dollars they can make, not how well they live by being close to the soil, and close to their God.