Indian Farmers Commit Suicide Due To Devastation Caused By GM Crops

reply to post by EarthCitizen07

Yeah the guy seems to be highely connected on a global scale but he is still a puppet...

Basically people who made in big in the industrial revolution of europe and then america. OLD MONEY...

Great misery is ahead and perhaps a revolution

Yes Maurice Strong is just a high placed puppet, though a very competent one.

I often wonder if the Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan.... Families are actually second or third tier.

If you look at the World Wild Life Fund you find Prince Bernhard and Prince Phillip. If you follow the UN Agenda 21 back it comes from Ged Davis's Scenario B1 "Sustainability. Davis worked for Shell Oil as well as being involved with the United Nations. Prince Bernhard and his family have big ties to "Royal Dutch Shell"

Climategate e-mail on Global Governance & Sustainable Development (B1) (Ged Davis)


Here is more on the (B1) scenario IPCC Emissions Scenarios


Here is who Ged Davis is (Shell Oil executive with IPCC connection)

GED DAVIS is now Co-President of Global Energy Assessment. he holds Postgraduate degrees in Economics and Engineering from London School of Economics (see below) and Stanford University.


A knotty little intrigue I have been working on also traces back to the Dutch and British Royal Families.

Cecil Rhodes left his fortune as a trust administered by Nathan Rothschild to further the "British Empire" The Rhodes Scholarship was to be used to indoctrinate promising young graduates for the purpose (Bill Clinton for example) Rhodes was a member of the Fabian Society which set up the London School of Economics - Oxford. Again if you look at todays bankers many are trained at the Fabian run London School of Economics.

The whole mess is nothing but an interconnecting web! And I fear you are correct that great misery is ahead. Who every these people are they hold normal humans in utter contempt and think nothing of deliberately starving children if it fills their pockets with gold. Six million children die of hunger every year.

Gramm, head of the CFTC, helped firms such as Goldman Sachs gain influence over the commodity markets. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly. Wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In 2008 we had world wide food riots.

“Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.” Through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations [controlling agricultural futures contracts] were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born. The speculators drove the price through the roof.” www.independent.co.uk...

...Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge control the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls three-fifths of seed production. Unsurprisingly, in the last quarter of 2007, even as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s profits jumped 20%, Monsanto 45%, and Cargill 60%. Recent speculation with food commodities has created another dangerous “boom.” After buying up grains and grain futures, traders are hoarding, withholding stocks and further inflating prices.... www.globalissues.org...

The following quotes show the grain traders greed and the level of concern for other humans.

“In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends...very attractive.” Food shortfalls predicted: 2008 www.financialsense.com...

“Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept..Stock reserves have a documented depressing effect on prices... and resulted in less aggressive market bidding for the grains.” July 22, 2008 letter to President Bush www.naega.org...

Unfortunately Americans and Europeans remain oblivious to the approaching misery of having the world food supply completely controlled by these unfeeling monsters!

I didn't read through the post so I don't know if this has been listed but this was a pretty good doc about one old man from NZ trying to help them get their fields back to normal. If you have time you should check it
out.

ONE MAN, ONE COW, ONE PLANET

I just started following the posts on gmo's and monsanto. Is there a way to tell which products are produced in this way?? Thanks very much for any info.

Originally posted by Arcot

i have seen Agent responding No to GM food Guiding the Farmers towards organic
60 % percent of farmers are aware of this Invasion of GM food

LINK for the call center

agritech.tnau.ac.in...

With combined support of Indian Students we are Fighting Big Corp Like GM

Thank you very much for your post! How very encouraging to see you fight back!

You have many people on your side, we are rooting for you!

Originally posted by Xcathdra
reply to post by burntheships

 

Funny... Dwarf Wheat worked back in the day....

Yes, it did! Why mess with a good thing?

reply to post by doobydoll


Are we stuck with them for life?

Well I dont know but I have a vision that all of the GMO crops will be an epic fail, and then they might raid
the seed vault, and have to start over. We can always dream....

There is an irony to this. The huge crop yields per acre possible now were needed to feed the masses in overpopulated countries like India. As I recall India was up to an average of 8 per family and breeding themselves to death while the Western World reduced to around two kids per family.

Stories like this always have side stories. How do you get people to stop having more kids than they can feed exactly? Got to feed them and that opened the door to all of this. You go to nothing but Organic, tens if not hundreds of millions starve. So what is the answer?

Originally posted by Maxmars
reply to post by burntheships

 

Monsanto has also infiltrated the UN and the international trade regulators tables as well.

Indeed they have, and Max, thanks for highlighting this apsect of the saga!

For those looking for a grasp on just how this injustice advances...take a gander here:

www.corporatewatch.org...

And in case anyone wants to explore the connections of Monsanto and Big Pharma...

www.corporatewatch.org...

reply to post by jude11

Now that Monsanto have admitted he did not illegal use their seed surely the way is now open to sue them for contamination of his crop. The proof in the genetic markers are there!!!! Then any and all other farmers can get their crops tested and sue for the same reason.

reply to post by Blaine91555

There is an irony to this. The huge crop yields per acre possible now were needed to feed the masses in overpopulated countries like India. As I recall India was up to an average of 8 per family and breeding themselves to death while the Western World reduced to around two kids per family....

As usual this is the typical corporate propaganda.

Professor El-Tayeb sums it up very nicely"

Interesting then that a contributor to the FAO's Forum, Professor El-Tayeb, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Industrial Biotechnology at Cairo University commented that: "..currently available (GMO's) mostly contribute negatively to poverty alleviation and food security - and positively to the stock market." www.warmwell.com...

GMO's and monoculture farming are not about "Feeding the world's poor" but about filling the pockets of the elite.


We hear lots of rhetoric about the starving children in third world countries and about saving the "environment" from the SAME people who are getting rich off GMO's and monoculture farming. The same people who are introducing restrictive legislation and regs on small farmers. So what is the reality?

By driving farm families off the land you provide a large pool of desperate people willing to work at slave wages in factories. THAT is the real reason for GMO and factory farms.

A classic example of the difference between Big AG Monoculture farming and diverse small farming is what I did. I planted blue berries and between bushes I planted wild and cultivated strawberries. My cats who hid under the strawberry leaves were the finishing touch. I never weeded or netted and had plenty of fruit.

The farm I have now is typical of the devastation caused by Monoculture Farming. When the 1940 soil survey was done there was over two feet of "the best soil in the county" according to the extension service agent. When I bought it the soil was 99% CLAY (soil test results) It was sold because it would no longer produce a crop. Using only limestone I have managed to build up about four inches of top soil and my land is now productive again. Actually it is now so productive that I have to mow my pastures to keep the grass to a decent height even though I doubled my herd size.

Yes I use limestone, pesticides, herbicides and the first year commercial fertilizer to establish my pastures. However I spot apply with a hand applicator. By rotational grazing with different species, I profit from "weeds" (If the goats won't eat it THEN the weed gets sprayed)


I was going to quote from a very lengthy PEW REPORT but this synopsis of Policy Brief number 4, The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture in the Context of Global Trade Negotiations does a very nice job of hitting all the points I wanted to make.

For more than a century, pundits have confidently predicted the demise of the small farm, labeling it as backward, unproductive, and inefficient -- an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of economic development....

How many times have we heard that large farms are more productive than small farms, and that we need to consolidate land holdings to take advantage of that greater productivity and efficiency? The actual data shows the opposite --

small farms produce far more per acre or hectare than large farms.

.....Large farmers tend to plant monocultures because they are the simplest to manage with heavy machinery. Small farmers, especially in the Third World, are much more likely to plant crop mixtures -- intercropping -- where the empty space between the rows is occupied by other crops. They usually combine or rotate crops and livestock, with manure serving to replenish soil fertility.

Such integrated farming systems produce far more per unit area than do monocultures. Though the yield per unit area of one crop -- corn, for example -- may be lower on a small farm than on a large monoculture farm, the total production per unit area, often composed of more than a dozen crops and various animal products, can be far higher.....

Small Farms in Economic Development

In farming communities dominated by large corporate farms, nearby towns died
off....

Where family farms predominated, there were more local businesses,
paved streets and sidewalks, schools, parks, churches, clubs, and newspapers,
better services, higher employment, and more civic participation. Recent studies
confirm that Goldschmidt’s findings remain true.

If we turn toward the Third World we find similar local benefits to be derived from a small farm economy...

The Landless Workers Movement (MST) is a grassroots organization in Brazil that helps landless laborers to organize occupations of idle land belonging to wealthy landlords. When the movement began in the mid-1980s, the mostly conservative mayors of rural towns were violently opposed to MST land occupations in surrounding areas. In recent times, their attitude has changed....

Not surprisingly those towns with nearby MST settlements are better off economically than other similar towns, and many mayors now actually petition the MST to carry out occupations near their towns....

We can examine the outcome of every land reform program carried out in the Third World since World War II, being careful to distinguish between genuine land reforms -— when quality land was really distributed to the poor....

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, and China are all good examples. In contrast,
countries with reforms that gave only poor quality land to beneficiaries, and/or failed to alter the rural power structures that work against the poor, failed to make a major dent in rural poverty. Mexico and the Philippines are typical cases of the latter.

More recently IBASE, a research center in Brazil, studied the impact on government coffers of legalizing MST-style land occupations cum settlements versus the services used by equal numbers of people migrating to urban areas. When the landless poor occupy land and force the government to legalize their holdings, it implies costs: compensation of the former landowner, legal expenses, credit for the new farmers, and others. Nevertheless the total cost to the state to maintain the same number of people in an urban shanty town -- including the services and infrastructure they use -- exceeds in just one month, the yearly cost of legalizing land occupations.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of the cost of creating a new job. Estimates of the cost of creating a job in the commercial sector of Brazil range from two to twenty times more than the cost of establishing an unem-ployed head of household on farm land, through agrarian reform. Land reform beneficiaries in Brazil have an annual income equivalent to 3.7 minimum wages, while still landless laborers average only 0.7 of the minimum. Infant mortality among families of beneficiaries has dropped to only half of the national average.

This provides a powerful argument that using land reform to create a small farm
economy is not only good for local economic development, but is also more effective social policy than allowing business-as-usual to keep driving the poor out of rural areas and into burgeoning cities.

National Economic Development and "Bubble-Up" Economics

...The post-war experiences of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan demonstrate how equitable land distribution fuels economic development. At the end of the war, circumstances including devastation and foreign occupation, conspired to create the conditions for "radical" land reforms in each country, breaking the eco-nomic stranglehold of the landholding class over rural economies. Combined with trade protection to keep farm prices high, and targeted investment in rural areas, small farmers rapidly achieved a high level of purchasing power, which guaranteed domestic markets for fledging industries.

The post-war economic "miracles" of these three countries were each fueled at the
start by these internal markets centered in rural areas, long before the much heralded "export orientation" policies which much later on pushed those industries to compete in the global economy. This was real triumph for "bubble-up" economics, in which re-distribution of productive assets to the poorest strata of society created the economic basis for rapid development. It stands in stark contrast to the failure of "trickle down" economics to achieve much of anything in the same time period in areas of U.S. dominance, such as much of Latin America...

Good Stewards of Natural Resources

The benefits of small farms extend into the ecological sphere. Where large,
industrial-style farms impose a scorched-earth mentality on resource management
-- no trees, no wildlife, endless monocultures -- small farmers can be very effective stewards of natural resources and the soil. To begin with, small farmers utilize a broad array of resources and have a vested interest in their sustainability. Their farming systems are diverse, incorporating and preserving significant functional biodiversity within the farm. By preserving biodiversity,
open space, and trees, and by reducing land degradation, small farms provide valuable ecosystem services to the larger society....

Compared to the ecological wasteland of a modern export plantation, the small farm landscape contains a myriad array of biodiversity....

www.foodfirst.org...

reply to post by Blaine91555

The huge crop yields per acre possible now were needed to feed the masses in overpopulated countries like India. As I recall India was up to an average of 8 per family and breeding themselves to death while the Western World reduced to around two kids per family.

SIDE NOTE: This is another article about farming and size: How Big Should A Small Farm Be?

Now to discuss the DISINFORMATION on overpopulation and high breeding rates.

The maintenance level for the population is a birth rate of 2.1
(This is a few years old so the numbers may have changed)

The USA has a birth rate of 1.3 Central Intelligence Agency LINK

France 1.3
UK - 1.1
Canada - 1.0
Germany - 0.8
Switzerland - 0.9
Greece - 0.9
Georgia - 1.0
China - 1.4
Paraguay - 2.8
Niger - 5.2
Cambodia - 2.5
Hong Kong - 0.7

57% or 129 of the 224 countries are below the 2.1 benchmark. LINK


For a comparison to today (as usual the presentation of the numbers has changed to confuse us)
Niger was 5.2 and is now 50.54 births per 1000 people or 5.05
Cambodia was 2.5 and is now 25.40births per 1000 people or 2.5

The USA was 1.4 and is now 13.83 births per 1000 people or a birth rate of 1.38

INDIA is now 20.97 births per 1000 people or a birth rate 2.097 WHICH IS BELOW MAINTANANCE!

So That argument is ALSO an EPIC FAIL

Those above 2.1 are mostly in Africa where disease wipes out a lot of children before the age of 5.
The infant mortality rate for European Americans was 5.7 per 1000 births. In Sub-Saharan Africa " 1 in every 6 children dies before age five.” [UNICEF report]

Nearly 10 million children under five died worldwide in 2006... 4 million die within the first month of life, half of these within the first 24 hours....
The five countries with the highest rates of infant mortality were Sierra Leone, with 270 deaths per 1,000 live births; Angola with 260; Afghanistan with 257; Niger with 253; and Liberia with 235. In contrast, Sweden and Iceland were among the countries with the lowest mortality rates—3 deaths per 1,000 live births.

The report notes, “For every newborn baby who dies, another 20 suffer birth injury, complications arising from preterm birth or other neonatal conditions.... www.wsws.org...

So Niger has 50.54 births per 1000 people but an infant mortality of 273 per 1000 live births or 27.3 % of the babies die. This reduces to 36.74 "viable births" per 1000 people or a rate of 3.67 I am sure if you looked at the number of people reaching "breeding age" it would be even less. Especially since for every 1 who dies as an infant there is "another 20 suffer[ing] birth injury, complications arising from preterm birth or other neonatal conditions"


I really hate how the elite twist numbers to scare us and the MSM propaganda machine eats it right up and regurgitates it with no checking.

I say we go Fight Club on Monsanto. Was I the only guy rooting for Tyler and his cause? What was the harm in blowing up buildings with no one in them

reply to post by seekingtruths


Unfortunately as far as I know, no there isn't a way. I wish it was listed and labeled as such, that way I can avoid it like I avoid transfats and other harmful food products/additives. It's pure insanity, how would we be able to track GMO's affect on human beings without knowing which foods are which? That's not even talking about the problems with GMO's crossing farmers land and mixing with natural crops.

Originally posted by seekingtruths
I just started following the posts on gmo's and monsanto. Is there a way to tell which products are produced in this way?? Thanks very much for any info.

Yes, there is a guide that can be found here:
truefoodnow.org...

You can download it and print it too.

This reminds me of my Uncles and their running of the small family farm right here in Washington State. They were among the few small family farms that didn't go under due to rising costs of seeds and such. Why? Simple, they saved their seeds, maintained and repaired equipment rather then buy new and frankly worked hard. While the farm is owned by them they quit working it at the ripe age of 82 for the oldest one; the other Uncle was a youngster at 67 but had lost part of his leg due to cancer. I wonder if they were still farming now how long it would be before Monsanto came after them? They NEVER purchased modified seed; felt it was wasteful as it couldn't be saved and used again further they would never pay a "fee" per acre to use the seed they paid for.

These giant corporations are slowly chocking us to death; not only with what I believe to be unhealthy foods but forcing their ways on us. I wonder what would happen if the organic farmers who, in this area have had their organic certification imperiled because of wind blown modified seeds were to work together to sue Monsanto.

Those poor farmers in India are being killed by Monsanto or more accurately by modified seeds because the purchase of such seeds isn't a one-time or as needed purchase.....no it's every year and I would be willing to bet every year the price goes up creating in effect a sucking whirlpool of debt the farmer despairs of ever escaping.

reply to post by Neopan100


Thanks for the connects and the documentary.

Nice one, and I would reccomend every one watch it.

reply to post by alfa1

Well said, alfa1. People really should at least read the linked article before leaping aboard their hobbyhorses and thundering off into the sunset, or wherever it is they think they’re going.

I’m South Asian, and I know a little bit about this. Suicide is very popular among Indian farmers, and always has been. They live lives of subsistence with almost no provision for or protection against the unexpected. It isn’t their fault; since time immemorial they’ve been stuck fast in a trap made of debt (they live from harvest to harvest, owing their all to local traders and landlords), caste (which denies them social mobility) and tradition (which stigmatizes anyone who dares to be different). Very often, when trouble strikes, the only option is suicide.

If somebody can point to one single example of ‘devastation’ caused by genetically modified crops in India, or for that matter anywhere else, I should be very pleased to hear of it.

The evil corporate American monster at work again. The White House is good at telling how bad various regimes are in the Middle East, but indirectly (through lobbying for Monsanto), they are responsible for the killings and bankruptcies of many people across the world.

reply to post by Astyanax

If somebody can point to one single example of ‘devastation’ caused by genetically modified crops in India, or for that matter anywhere else, I should be very pleased to hear of it.

That question should be aimed at Vandana Shiva and Professor Nagaraj both from India whose reports I quoted HERE

They are the scientist who have been investigating the suicides.

reply to post by crimvelvet

Originally posted by Astyanax
If somebody can point to one single example of ‘devastation’ caused by genetically modified crops in India, or for that matter anywhere else, I should be very pleased to hear of it.

That question should be aimed at Vandana Shiva and Professor Nagaraj both from India whose reports I quoted HERE

Thanks for the references. I read all three linked articles. In none of them did I find any mention of environmental degradation or crop failures leading to food shortages (that would be ‘devastation’) caused by genetically modified crops. What I did find is the following:

VANDANA SHIVA: Indian farmers have never committed suicide on a large scale. It’s something totally new. It’s linked to the last decade of globalization, trade liberalization under a corporate-driven economy. Democracy Now

"They began keeping farm data only from 1995," says Professor Nagaraj. "But significant states did not start reporting their data till about two years later. So the study begins with the year 1997. And 2005 is the last year for which such data were available nationally." AlterInter

In other words, it’s not so much about ‘the last decade of globalization’ as it is about the fact that they only started keeping records in 1995.

*

Something needs to be explained here. The cause of all these suicides isn’t Monsanto, or GM crops, or globalization, though all have been cited as accessories before the fact. The real cause of the rise in Indian farmer suicides is Socialism.

Why are these poor farmers killing themselves? Because they cannot see a way to pay their debts and feed their families. The crops they raise aren’t covering the cost of growing them, let alone making a profit.

These farmers are sowing crops that need expensive inputs of fertilizer, weedicides and so on – high-yield, hybrid crops, sometimes genetically engineered – the same crops, in fact, that American farmers are sowing. Indian farmers sow these crops too, then discover that they can’t afford to raise them. Come harvest time, they’re in hock to the local loan shark for seed, fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals, tractor fuel, etc., and once the crop is sold and the debt is paid there’s not enough money to feed the kids over the coming year.

We need to ask why these farmers can’t make a living from their crops. The main reason, curiously enough, is that there are too many farmers.

*

Historically, India has been plagued by food shortages and famines, most recently in Bengal in 1943 under British rule. Independent India was determined to avoid the horror and stigma of famine, so successive Indian governments massively subsidized agriculture, which was and still is the occupation of the overwhelming majority of Indians. There were seed subsidies, irrigation subsidies, fertilizer subsidies, fuel subsidies – you name it. And it wasn’t just about subsidy, either; government, both state and federal, was involved in agricultural extension up to the eyeballs, providing everything from grain milling to veterinary services.

Government was also an important actor in the food market: buying harvested crops directly from farmers in some cases, subsidizing purchase prices in others and becoming actively involved in food storage and distribution. It created tariffs and other barriers to make some imported food products more expensive than the (highly-subsidized, inefficiently-produced, often inferior-quality) local substitutes and ban others altogether (that’s why, for decades, India was one of the few places on the planet where you couldn’t buy a Coke). States in India also created tariff barriers that hindered the movement of crops and food across internal borders, making matters worse. All this is a matter of public record, as any quick internet search will demonstrate.

As long as it was backed with subsidies and protections, farming in India was a worthwhile occupation. The system may have been uneconomical, but it was the government, not the farmers, that bore the losses. Thus featherbedded (though trapped and exploited in numerous other ways), rural Indians stuck to farming, and the number of farmers actually grew – more mouths for the State to feed.

*

This massive rattletrap of subsidy and state patronage, replete with all the economic distortions and perverse incentives you might expect, started to collapse when India began opening up its economy in 1995. Over the years since then, the government has been moving to dismantle the system so as to make their country more competitive in the global marketplace. In particular, it has been removing tariff barriers to allow imported seed, agricultural chemicals and food products into the Indian market, to the benefit of ordinary Indians who have suffered for generations from shortages and artificially inflated food prices resulting from the government’s price-distorting involvement in the market.

The result has been a shock for Indian farmers. On the one hand, they no longer have their captive markets. People won’t buy expensively-produced mustard oil from Rajasthan when cheaper, imported soybean or palm oil is readily available down at the corner shop. On the other hand, the government can no longer afford (and as a matter of policy is not keen) to subsidize agricultural inputs and provide agricultural extension services as it used to in the heyday of Indian Socialism.

However (and partly due to the protests of Ms. Shiva and others who led privileged lives under the old Socialist regime), the process of freeing up Indian markets and dethroning Socialism is only half-complete. There is a strong liberalizing impulse at the centre, but state and local governments still cling to the old ways, partly because of special interests lobbying to retain them but mostly because the good old ‘licence Raj’ remains a great way for corrupt bureaucrats to make money.

Even at the centre, the government is chary of withdrawing farm subsidies and angering the seventy percent of the electorate that lives in rural areas, mostly by farming. So many of the old, perverse Socialist ways still linger. The annual subsidy on fertilizer continues to grow year on year, even though the Indian government promised radical reforms in 2008 and enacted weak and useless ones in 2010. The cost of seed, too, is subsidized: in Haryana, the breadbasket of India, the state government met 70 percent of farmers’ seed costs in 2008. And where do the farmers go to buy their subsidized seed? That’s right, you guessed it: the government.

This is the background to the Indian farm-suicide epidemic: a system of typically perverse Socialistic policies and incentives whose partial breakdown has left them in the lurch. But such a system was always doomed; at some point the Indian government was going to run out of money for all these subsidies. Besides, Socialist protectionism was strangling the Indian economy, a fact that is amply demonstrated by the massive strides India has made with even the limited freeing-up of its markets that has taken place since 1995.

*

The truth is simply that India has too many farmers. What is happening there now has already happened in more developed parts of the world, which have long since adjusted to modern, large-scale industrial farming. It is simply the market at work, and if Monsanto and the other big boys sometimes play rough in the interests of profit, well, that isn’t nice, but it is allowed in places where people love freedom at least as much as they love money.

In India, dirt-poor peasants still till an acre or two of impoverished soil to scratch a living for their families. They never could compete against big agribusiness without massive subsidies, and anyway those subsidies are unfair since they impoverish others, create perverse incentives and distort the economy so that no-one pays a fair price for anything. Only people still infatuated with Socialism could love a setup like that.

The solution is, of course, fewer farmers. And it seems that the invisible hand of the market is achieving this, though not in a way we can possibly approve of. It would be better if the country’s supernumary agricultural workforce could be re-trained and helped to find employment in other sectors of the Indian economy. Tragically, the deadweight of tradition and caste, together with the bureaucratic lethargy and corruption for which India is notorious, make this very difficult. The result is what we see: surplus Indian agricultural workers are removing themselves, not just from the industry, but from the world.

Monsanto and its kind aren’t helping the situation, but they aren’t to blame for it either. The real culprit is Indian Socialism and the society that bred it.