Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

a quarter million farmers have committed suicide in India in the last fifteen 
years.

 Due to the source of this article I need to preface it with this comment. 
While the crisis is real, and their analysis of the system is something I can 
agree with, their solution is not. In India's situation (only India), I'd 
advocate violent revolution at any cost and not replacing their government 
with any kind of system, no "ism" of any kind, least of all socialism or 
capitalism - just let 500 million grow in traditional ways to feed themselves 
and tell the market and Monsanto to put it where the sun don't shine.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
______________________

The Imperialist Suicide Epidemic In India
By Larry Everest 15 June, 2011
http://www.countercurrents.org/everest150611.htm
http://revcom.us/a/236/imperialist_suicide_epidemic-en.html


"The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, 
they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbors prepared their 
father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren 
fields near their home. As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and 
Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son 
and daughter would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now 
face working as slave labor for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, 
they will be the lowest of the low.

"Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own 
life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he 
drank a cupful of chemical insecticide. Unable to pay back the equivalent of 
two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out."1

Shankara's story is not unique—or even unusual. Between 1995 and 2009, 
241,679 farmers in India committed suicide, and by the end of 2010 the number 
had probably risen to 250,000—a quarter of a million people. In 2009 alone, 
17,638 farmers committed suicide—an average of one every 30 minutes.

And it's even worse. These shocking figures "considerably underestimate the 
actual number of farmer suicides taking place," according to a new study by 
the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law 
School, "Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights and the Agrarian 
Crisis in India."2 For instance, women are often excluded from suicide 
statistics because they don't have title to their land and therefore are not 
counted as "farmers."

The Roots of India's Farmer Suicide Epidemic

This suicide epidemic is not a product of "human nature," or India's culture. 
Mass farmer suicides were unknown in India before the 1990s. Nor are they 
random and unexplainable: they follow a pattern. 86.5 percent of the farmers 
who commit suicide are in debt. Like Shankara, 40 percent had suffered a crop 
failure, the majority are small farmers (with less than five acres of land), 
and are growing cash crops for export. Cotton is one of India's main cash 
crops, and one of the highest concentrations of suicides is among cotton 
farmers like Shankara. Roughly half of all farmer suicides occur in the 
Vidarbha region of central India, where there are 3.2 million cotton farmers.3

What is the connection between crushing debt, failed harvests, small plots, 
and cash crops? Why have hundreds of thousands felt they had no way out but 
to take their own lives? What does this epidemic show about India, a country 
the U.S. lauds as "the world's largest democracy" and celebrates as a model 
for economic development? And what does it show about U.S. 
capitalism-imperialism and how it impacts millions upon millions around the 
world?

Step Back... and Survey the Globe

To answer these questions, we can't just look at India's cotton industry, or 
Indian agriculture overall, or even just India. You have to step back and 
look at what kind of system we live in, how it dominates and shapes the whole 
globe—especially oppressed countries like India.

We live in a capitalist system. That means that all production, including of 
basic necessities, is driven and shaped by the maximizing of profit. Today 
the tentacles of that capitalist system envelop the whole world—capitalism 
has become imperialism. A small handful of rich, capitalist-imperialist 
countries dominate the rest of the planet, with the United States at the top 
of this global system. These imperialist powers dominate the oppressed 
nations—where over 80 percent of the world's people live—economically, 
politically, and militarily. The imperialists set the terms for what will be 
produced in these countries—not to meet the needs of their peoples, but to 
further the interests of the imperialists, in particular their profitable 
accumulation of capital.

Imperialist investment is not—as we're told by the capitalist media—a "boon" 
or a "handout" for people in oppressed countries. As Raymond Lotta has 
written, "the economic structure of the oppressed nations (like India) is 
shaped mainly by forces external to them: what is produced, exported and 
imported, financed, etc., reflects first and foremost their subordination, 
and not principally the internal requirements and interrelations of different 
sectors. They answer to another's 'heartbeat.'"4

Globalization, including Third World countries becoming further integrated 
into and subordinated to imperialism, has intensified since the end of World 
War 2. Imperialism's need to further integrate and subordinate Third World 
countries like India took a leap following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet 
Union—which by the mid-1950s was an imperialist, not a socialist, country. 
Suddenly, the global political, economic, and military landscape was 
radically changed. The U.S. and Western imperialist powers had triumphed in 
the Cold War. The U.S. saw the need and the opportunity to accelerate 
capitalist "globalization": to break down barriers to global investment, 
exploitation, and trade, including opening up countries formerly allied with 
the Soviet Union or formerly closed to the West.

Poor countries around the world, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have 
been subjected to Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the International 
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These programs require that Third 
World governments meet strict conditions to get new loans or to obtain lower 
interest rates on existing loans. Both the IMF and World Bank are controlled 
by the imperialist powers, especially the United States. And this 
restructuring creates more favorable conditions for imperialist trade and 
investment.5

Imperialist restructuring has led to enormous changes in agricultural 
production in the oppressed countries. They have been more deeply integrated 
into the workings of an imperialist-dominated global food system. Agriculture 
has been further "industrialized" and reshaped to better serve the 
imperialists. Traditional subsistence farming (based on producing staples 
like corn, beans, etc.) has more and more been overrun and swallowed up by 
imperialist-controlled agribusiness.

India, the world's second most populous country, was one of the U.S.'s prime 
targets and has been ground zero for this agricultural restructuring. India 
was a longtime ally of the Soviet Union, and most of its economy was 
controlled and directed by the Indian state, which represented the interests 
of Indian capitalism and landed property, including semi-feudal landlordism.

Capitalist Globalization's Devastating Impact on India's Agriculture

India remains a predominantly agrarian society, with over 800 million people 
(of the 1.2 billion total population)—nearly 70 percent of the 
population—living in rural areas. Over half of India's workforce of nearly 
500 million works in agriculture.6

The world's capitalist powers say that poor countries being integrated into 
the world imperialist system will lead to rapid economic growth and 
development and rising standards of living for all. When President Obama 
addressed India's Parliament in November 2010, he praised India for not 
"resisting the global economy," instead becoming "one of its engines." He 
claimed this had unleashed "an economic marvel that has lifted tens of 
millions from poverty and created one of the world's largest middle classes," 
and that advanced technology was now "empowering farmers and women" in India.7

But what globalization has actually meant for the masses of people in India 
is intensified exploitation, sweatshops, and growing disparity between the 
rich and poor. After 25 years of market reform, the average calorie intake in 
India has declined! And globalization has meant the ruin of many farmers, 
driving them into desperation. Let's look, for example, at how imperialist 
globalization has affected cotton farmers in India, who are a lot of the 
farmers committing suicide.

Compete on the Global Market... Or Go Under

Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S., the World Bank, and the IMF pressured India 
to privatize many of its state-owned enterprises, slash regulations on 
business, cut spending on social services and subsidies to small farmers, 
tear down barriers to foreign investment and trade, and integrate its 
economy, including agriculture, more closely into the imperialist-dominated 
global capitalist order.

Under this "neo-liberal" program, the Indian government reduced subsidies and 
access to credit for farmers, who had mainly been raising food crops for 
domestic consumption. It pushed farmers to switch from foodstuffs to cash 
crops for sale on the global market. And as part of this, the Indian state 
has promoted the expansion of cotton growing. Today there are 4 million 
cotton farmers in India, which is now the world's second largest cotton 
producer.8

However, to sell their cotton, Indian farmers now faced the volatile ups and 
downs of the global market, and competition with giant multi-national 
corporations based in the imperialist countries, which had enormous 
advantages in technology, marketing, and financial resources.

The report, "Every 30 Minutes" says, "In order to compete on the global 
market, then, Indian cotton farmers desperately turned to using new, 
higher-priced inputs," and "the cotton market has become increasingly 
commercialized, and is dominated by a small group of multinational 
corporations that exert increasing control over the cost, quality, and 
availability of agricultural inputs."

In India, giant imperialist monopolies exerted this control and extracted 
huge profits through the sale of genetically modified cottonseed, especially 
Bollgard Bt cottonseed, made by the U.S. chemical giant Monsanto, the world's 
largest seed producer.

When Bt cottonseed was approved by the Indian state in 2002, Monsanto 
launched an aggressive sales program in India with salesmen going from 
village to village promising these seeds would yield higher outputs—and 
income—including because they're resistant to some pests, so less can be 
spent on pesticides. By 2009, a majority of India's cotton farmers invested 
in the seed, and 85 percent of cotton produced in India was Bt cotton.9

"They Consume the Very Pesticide That They Purchased, in Order to Kill 
Themselves"

Farmer Shende shouldered at least four debts at the time of his death: one 
from a bank, two procured on his behalf by his sisters and one from a local 
moneylender. The night before his suicide, he borrowed one last time. From a 
fellow villager, he took the equivalent of $9, roughly the cost of a 
one-liter bottle of pesticide, which he used to take his life.10

Bt cottonseeds cost from two to 10 times as much as regular cottonseed, and 
can end up accounting for 50 percent of farming costs. Making matters worse, 
farmers are often prevented from reusing these genetically modified Bt seeds 
without paying a fee each year to Monsanto—which owns the "intellectual 
property rights" to the seed.11

Of the 89.35 million farmer households in India, small and marginal farmers 
make up 84 percent of all agricultural land holdings. These small farmers on 
average earn less than $2 per day, according to a 2003 study.12

And the workings of imperialism have increasingly forced these kinds of 
farmers into debt, squeezing them from two sides. On the one hand, these 
farmers have to pay more for seed, fertilizers, etc., so their costs have 
gone up. On the other hand, in the name of neo-liberal reform, the government 
has cut back in providing low-cost credit to small farmers while credit is 
channeled towards the largest, most profitable agricultural enterprises. This 
has meant that farmers have had to seek out sources of credit from local, 
predatory money lenders. And they end up going ever deeper into debt and 
desperation.

While growing Bt cotton for the global capitalist market can produce high 
returns, it is also highly precarious and unpredictable. Prices can swing 
sharply on the world market. Today the price of cotton in real terms is 
one-twelfth what it was 30 years ago. Also, Bt cotton requires a larger and 
steadier flow of water than traditional seed, yet 65 percent of cotton 
farmers have no access to irrigation and depend on monsoon rains. (Only 37 
percent of rural households in India have electricity, and 80,000 villages 
are not even connected to the grid.13) Less than an average rainfall can wipe 
out their crop, and India's rainfall and weather patterns have become 
increasingly irregular, with annual monsoons failing three times in the last 
10 years and drought impacting some provinces. These changes may be connected 
to global warming.14

Meanwhile, competition from cotton imported from the U.S. and other major 
capitalist countries—where farmers and agricultural corporations have much 
greater access to capital and advanced technology—is driving down cotton 
prices and ruining tens of thousands of Indian farmers.

Between 1997 and 2004, India imported some eight million bales of American 
cotton. This cotton was being sold at a price 50 to 65 percent lower than the 
cost of production because it was being subsidized by the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture, which spent $245.2 billion to subsidize U.S. cotton farmers from 
1995 to 2009, as part of promoting the interests of U.S. capital around the 
world.15

Smita Narula, co-author of "Every Thirty Minutes," sums up the impact of all 
this on tens of thousands of India's farmers: "So they've gone into 
insurmountable debt to purchase the inputs. They don't have the yields. They 
repeat this cycle for a couple of seasons. And by the end of it, they're 
simply trapped in a cycle that they can't get out of, and they consume the 
very pesticide that they purchased, in order to kill themselves."16

India's Agrarian Crisis

The plight of Indian cotton farmers is part of a broader crisis in Indian 
agriculture, and most farmers facing ruin have no place to turn. India's 
much-talked about information technology and business processing 
industries—the so-called new economy—employ only 1.3 million out of India's 
working population of nearly 500 million.17

Oppressive traditional feudal and patriarchal relations also weigh heavily on 
Indian farmers. Those with daughters have to pay dowries to a prospective 
husband's family in order for them to be married:

"Farmers who pay these dowries fall further into debt—or face the social 
stigma of being unable to pay—and may commit suicide as a result. Even more 
startlingly, in Andhra Pradesh, unmarried daughters, wracked with guilt over 
their fathers' deaths, have committed suicide themselves. Finally, when 
husbands commit suicide, they not only leave their wives with their debt but 
also with the responsibility to marry off their daughters. As farmer-activist 
Sunanda Jayaram has noted, ‘There are debts hanging on [women's] heads which 
they did not incur. There are daughters whose marriages are pending. The 
pressure is unending.'"18

Indian farmers can no longer count on their own food production to stave off 
hunger and are increasingly subject to the global food crisis created by 
imperialism. The Revolution article, "The Global Food Crisis...and the 
Ravenous System of Capitalism" points out:

"Third World countries have been forced to shift much of their food 
production away from subsistence crops to high value exports. They have been 
pressured to open up their markets to cheap food imports. As a