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  • From: Thomas Allen <thallen@nwlink.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] help with data needed
  • Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:48:53 -0700

Below is an excerpt of Vandana Shiva speaking at the closing plenary session of the UK Soils Association in late 2007. This doesn't directly answer the question of data but perhaps Shiva could supply the source of her comments. I don't know haw to contact her but perhaps someone on the list does.

The transcript and podcast can be found at:


http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/(UNID)/ 6BB05A7D57DAF6A28025727200416A64?OpenDocument

"One of the things that's taken us totally by surprise is a new epidemic of farmers' suicides. Indian peasants have been so resilient. You know, I've been in villages after disasters of floods and droughts and hurricanes. You know, you have one season of a loss of agriculture, you have one season of having to struggle, and you are right back again - you rebuild your hut and you're back on the field and you borrowed some seeds from somewhere and you're farming again.

But the new industrialised globalised agriculture is doing something different, because it's not like a natural disaster which you know will not be there in a permanent way. The first step in the globalised agriculture is dependency on what I call non-renewable seed. We've even made seed the very embodiment of life and its renewability behave like non-renewable fossil fuel - once and no more.

When non-renewable seeds have to be bought each year, that's a higher cost. Then they are sold as a monopoly with intellectual property royalties linked to it. The genetically engineered Bt cotton, for example, costs about 2-300 rupees for a kilogram to produce. But when Monsanto sells it for 4,000 rupees a kilogram the rest is all royalty payment.

The seeds aren't tested, they aren't adapted, the same seeds are sold across different climate zones, they obviously don't perform well. Instead of 1,500 kilograms per acre, farmers get 200, 300, sometimes total failure and add to this the fact that even if they have 300 kilograms of a bad cotton variety because its fibre is of a very inferior quality.

And new studies that we have done are showing that there's huge allergies linked to it because what is Bt cotton, but toxic? 1,800 sheep died last year feeding on the plants. Anyone working in a [...] mill where this Bt cotton is being used is getting allergies. Farmers who are collecting the cotton ball are getting allergies.

But, linked to the fact that this is inferior cotton, the fact that in the United States there are $4 billion of subsidies linked to cotton and now with these so called open markets the price has started to come down. In India, they've dropped to half. So your costs of production have gone up two, three, four times, sometimes 10 times, sometimes 100 times depending on what you were farming and meantime what you are earning at the end of it has fallen to a third.

It's a negative economy. Farmers get into debt, it's unpayable debt. The people giving them the credit are the same as the salesmen and the agents at the local level. I don't know how many of you read the Economist – it has a special article on the farmers' suicides in India. We have been doing reports since the first farm suicide happened in '97. The first report was a 10 pager because only one farmer has killed himself, now there's 150,000 farmers.

So the fossil fuel economy, the globalised economy, is not just ruining our atmosphere, before it ruins the atmosphere, it's killing millions. And for us the alternative is necessary just so farmers can have a safe, secure livelihood. In addition to that we have just had new surveys again from the government - the health standards of the Indian people are falling as the economy gets globalised and food is no more food, agriculture is about exports."


On Apr 9, 2009, at 5:33 PM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

Danijela Babic wrote:
dear all,
can you help me with links to (independent) studies related to the crop
yield comparisons for gmo and no-gmo food, pricing etc.?
does anybody have any data contrasting the ifpr study that says that
suicides of farmers in andhra pradesh in india are not connected to the
failure of bt crops...
many thanks
danijela babic
zamirnet

I forwarded your message into the sanet-mg list and got this reply:

[Fwd: Re: [SANET-MG] [permaculture] help with data needed]
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [SANET-MG] [permaculture] help with data needed
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 02:46:54 -0500
From: Frank A. Schultz, III <wb5ayy@aircanopy.net>
Reply-To: Frank A. Schultz, III <wb5ayy@aircanopy.net>
Organization: Industrial System

Lawrence -

Posted some links on India farmer suicides some time ago - can't remember
who published the reports - most likely the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the
Times, or the Times of India - http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ . As I
recall, massive crop failures due to drought coupled with the purchase of GM
seeds at about 10 times the price of local native seeds precipitated mass
suicides, which by some estimates numbered into the 100's of thousands.
They likely could have survived the drought with native seeds and they could
have survived 10 X normal cost GM seeds with good rain - but they couldn't
survive high-priced seeds and no rain. They indebted themselves to buy the
GM seeds way beyond any sense, at all.

They tried to buy into American economics using Indian economics - might
marginally work under ideal conditions. Don't know if the GM seed was
touted to have higher yields - which has never been demonstrated in any
significant measure, by the way. Further, as I recall, GM shows lower
nutrient levels than native. The only way GM makes sense is the reduction
of labor thru the use of your favorite juice, glyphosate. But the labor
angle is irrelevant in India, so it has never been clear to me why the
Indians would go for GM... I certainly wouldn't eat the GM stuff I grow...
Forward this on, if you want.

F-
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