I recently came across this very gruesome and graphic article, after following a link in a post Robbyn made.
What was originally estimated to be a few thousand farmers, now recognized as 125,000, have killed themselves after getting into financial trouble growing GM crops. According to Monsanto, regardless of the problems of individual farmers, cotton yields have doubled in the last seven years and suicide is a part of life in rural India. So what’s the problem here?
The problem is Monsanto and other seed giants are promoting their products in a misleading way, leading farmers to expect larger yields and higher profits than are realistically possible. Farmers are also promised, or the suggestion is made in promotion of the products, that pesticides will not be needed, which couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact the GM crops grown by farmers often promote insecticide resistant pests, meaning farmers have to buy even more expensive insecticides than would otherwise be necessary. This leads to financial ruin of the farmers, who escape their debts by killing themselves.
Prince Charles of the UK, mentioned in the article, really deserves a lot of credit for drawing attention to the problem as well as setting up a trust fund to help impoverished farmers in India. Of particular interest to readers of this blog may be that Prince Charles is also an avid gardener and seed saver, who has also drawn attention to the loss of heritage crop varieties.
I hate to rain on your parade, but did you happen also to see this paper? Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India: Reviewing the Evidence
Of course the Mail on Sunday and IFPRI both have their own biases, but I know whose data I would trust.
That’s not to exonerate Monsanto. But why stoop to using Monsanto’s own methods?
Hi Jeremy, thanks for your comment and the link pointing me to the research paper.
I literally caught your comment as it came in a few minutes ago, and have spent a little while glancing at some parts of the 64 page report and I do have a couple of comments. Please understand however these comments don’t come from any sort of intensive review.
I don’t particularly stand behind The Mail on Sunday. I also don’t particularly see the IFPRI as much of an independent news source either. I have some respect for both of them however. A publication may need to attract attention with sensational headlines and article content. A research institute has to stand behind the companies that provide it’s financial base, and an industry faced with accusations of genocide has to defend itself.
Then of course there are the political activists themselves, who have to come up with a slogan for everyone to focus on ‘GM Genocide’.
I think all these people understand the situation is a lot more complicated than it’s being presented. You’re dealing with a region of the world, that has it’s own cultures and traditions. You also have 125,000 dead farmers (a disputed number if you like), who all had their own personal tragedies. You can blame it partly on global warming and climate change or other environmental degradation, or just an occasional bad year. Everyone knows there are a huge number of variables in the equation. Everyone also understands what a horribly distressing situation this is too!
I want to take one quote out of the abstract of the paper and address it in particular:
“…we find that Bt cotton technology has been very effective overall in India…”
These days we are faced with so many similar ‘scientific’ conclusions. I accept that they do go on to support this statement in their paper, but this is just such a famously, widely, disputed hypothesis. Until a few years ago tobacco companies could claim their products were not addicting and didn’t cause cancer, because no one had proven they did. We all knew they were lying.
When the IFPRI paper includes a statement like that, not a single person can stand up and say they are lying, because we can’t prove it. However, most of us with our heads about us, and who are in tune with this kind of thing, know this is almost certainly not true. At the very least it’s from a perspective that’s not our own.
In my opinion, the entire IFPRI paper reads this way. I don’t have the credentials or background to stand up and dispute the findings of rest of this paper, but it looks very much full of unproven or disputed statements that probably aren’t true, and smaller studies that were specially formulated to make a point that may not even be relevant the the issue at hand. It’s not a study I would want to point to and say I thought it had useful information in it.
The whole premise of the paper is disputing the connection between GM technology and the death of Indian farmers, but everyone knows it’s much more complicated than that. Does it make any sense to dispute this particular small connection, if it’s obvious a large part of the economic model Indian farming is based on, in particular IPR, is what the problem is? All this paper is really doing is addressing the slogan ‘GM Genocide’.
So what do we, as ordinary people, do?
I would say this paper is not very useful to ordinary people.
I would say the slogan ‘GM Genocide’ is only of little use to the ordinary person, as is the sensationalistic article describing people drinking pesticides.
What’s clear is an awful lot of people have died unnecessarily, under horrible circumstances! If it’s 2000 or 125,000 is not a serious discussion point for me, it’s simply too many. I need to pick a number, I have to be able to talk about it with other people, I do my best to pick one that seems right and generally agreed on. After all, when someone talks about the Holocaust, what’s the more politically correct thing to do, pick the generally agreed on number of people who died, or the smallest available number in order to avoid the possibility someone accuses you of picking a number too large?
I personally don’t think it would be honest to deny GM technology has anything to do with Indian farmer suicides. As a layperson reading the study, it doesn’t seem to prove anything, only offer a point of view and a number of facts that are widely disputed or apparently irrelevant to the average dead Indian farmer.
Do I really believe GMOs are the sole reason behind Indian farmer suicides? Of course not. You could argue this is missing from this post, and I’d have to agree with you. Put it down to carelessness on my part, and a lack of not thinking it all through before publishing it. It certainly wasn’t my intention to deceive anyone.
Was the title of the post a little sensationalistic and misleading? Perhaps. I also have readers who I have to consider what they would like to see and read here, and I picked a title I thought would appeal to them. The subject matter also seemed one that could use the extra attention that might be gained in this way.
Ordinary people do also sometimes need slogans or one liners to focus their attention, and sometimes these are gross oversimplifications of reality. Just as research institutes like the IFPRI need to make claims like the one quoted above, or campaigners need ones like GM Genocide. This is just the way we all communicate sometimes.
Above all, I am just doing my honest best in order to get information out in the world in the most complete and useful way I know how to do it, accessible to the average person in a way they enjoy reading it. Did you read my recent ‘Seed Snobs’ post? I address this subject there too.
I know, it’s this attitude of mine that sets me at odds with every professional journalist and scientist on the Internet, and probably many others as well. I still stand by it, and believe it’s part of what makes a blog a blog, and one of the reasons this blog is popular. I still believe I am offering a useful service to the Internetting public.
I like to read the Times of India, occasionally. It is a newspaper with a broad global view and concern for the environment. One of the post painful articles I read was about a rash of farmer suicides, by ingestion of pesticide, while legislation was being passed for give farmers financial aid.
Oh, and, just the other day I read an article in the Mother Earth News about farm and capital. It basically said the dairy and cattle farmers require over 200,000 of equipment, plus they are mortgaged up to their eyes, which really makes the farmer a low-paid manager on a farm owned by the bank. Certainly, the unquestionable fact is, a farmer is better off when he keep more money in his pocket and gives less money to Monsanto.
New Scientist had a big article on this – it was debunking the claim that suicide rates have increased. However it did note that the early GM cotton crop was absolutely useless for the climate.
The sad thing is that we don’t need much cotton at all, let alone sprayed or GM.
Hemp, however, is a crop with a much bigger potential & it’s free from diseases & pests – as far as I know. If you want to know why we don’t grow hemp (any more), check out http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=60.
Hi Lieven,
Thanks for the link. I watched it last night and it is indeed an interesting video. I wish the world used more hemp instead of all the cotton we use now!
I also forgot to thank you for pointing out the Monsanto video I mentioned in my latest post.
Some more alternatives are stinging nettles:
http://www.swicofil.com/products/016nettle.html
and there’s also boehmeria, a member of the nettle family, but needs a very warm summer over here in Western Europe. Cotton has another draw-back as well: grown in semi-hot drier areas it absorbs tons of water, sometimes brought in from far away, remember the story of the Russian Aral Sea ….
I just had a look at the Wikipedia page on the Aral Sea. I never knew that before, that it was drained largely as a result of growing cotton.
I read about a Dutch man a few years ago who was going to try to grow stinging nettles commercially for making textiles. I never heard anymore about him, so I assume his business never did well.
The world is really going to be a lot better off if we find alternatives for cotton sooner, rather than later!
It doesn’t just ‘offer a point of view,’ it provides data and evaluates hypotheses in light of that data. What I find interesting is that you admit that you are not qualified to address it, yet, you already reject what it says:
I’d like to note that one very interesting thing pointed out in the paper is that most farmers that committed suicide were in debt because they had to pay for their daughters weddings and such. But no one is talking about the Dowry Genocide at all…. no it is easier to blame a perceived (and debunked) external threat than an internal one.
Karl,
Thanks for visiting. Thanks too for your comment.
With reference to Dowry related suicides, I would ask you to consider that most of the deaths attributed to GM crops are in one Indian state, Andhra Pradesh. Also, most of these suicides are farmers who drink their own pesticides. While I don’t in any way want to underestimate the importance of Dowry related deaths (suicide or otherwise), I think it’s stretching it a bit by trying to draw a significant connection between the two.
Like I said before, behind every suicide is a unique tragedy, and I have no doubt a dowry has played a role in some of them.
I find it particularly troubling just how easy it is to rewrite history by simply introducing uncertainty into a situation like this. A company like Monsanto or perhaps the industry as a whole, is accused of being behind the deaths of 125,000 people. They come along and offer alternative explanations together with introducing some doubts, and everyone is supposed to sit up, take notice and forget about those 125,000 deaths. We’re suppose to ask ourselves if maybe it was fewer people, or maybe it wasn’t Monsanto’s fault. After all, this is a peer reviewed scientific paper, right?
Germany had to pass a series of laws prohibiting expressing doubt over the Holocaust because otherwise it was just going to be brushed aside and forgotten in the midst of squabbling over if it existed or not. I don’t think the IFPRI publishing a paper in this way is a particularly legitimate act of science. I would have been much more impressed if they had taken concrete steps in some way that lead to an improvement in Indian farmers’ lives.
When I started this blog 3 years ago, I made a very concious decision to write to ordinary people. I don’t believe the issues I write about are only for some elite group of people, or that I have to follow special rules on the way I present it. This blog is not peer reviewed, nor is it a commercial publication with an editorial policy. While I would never knowingly publish anything incorrect, it’s nothing more than what I want to write about, and an expression of my opinions and ideas.
I believe in freedom of speech as much as anyone, and I appreciate it when people take the time to leave comments, you included. While I occasionally have to ask someone who is being disruptive or going way off topic to continue their discussion elsewhere on the Internet, I don’t ever delete legitimate comments and I encourage all constructive discussion.
As much as I believe in freedom of speech, this is not a free speech forum per se. Rather it’s a place for me to write what I want, in the way I want, and for people to leave related comments. People come here and read this blog because they find me and what I write about interesting.
I hope reading this comment doesn’t scare you off, and I hope you come back and leave more comments. You’re very welcome here.
At the same time I wonder why if you disagree with me so strongly you don’t make a post with your point of view on your own blog? This blog does support trackbacks, so it’s possible to leave an automated link back to whatever you want to say. In this way, people who want to read your point of view can stop by and read your blog. I would probably visit as well.