|
|
 | ||
 | ||
 | ||
 | ||
 |
| Voice of the Environment's mission is to educate the public regarding the transfer of public trust assets into private, mostly corporate, hands. | ||
|
Ukiah office: 1330 Boonville Rd Ukiah, CA 95482 707-467-0329 |
||
|
Marin office: 270 Beach Rd Belvedere, CA 94920 415-435-2007 |
||
| For two decades, Voice of the Environment has stood up for the people and our communities against the avarice of corporations and the misguided policies of the corporate-dominated state. |
|
Print This Article Sunday, April 5th, 2009 There's a New Blogger in Town: Monsanto Jill Richardson/Daily Kos Monsanto's got a blog! They have decided to set the record straight on all of the bad Monsanto stories that everyone's heard. Here's the thing of it though. Some of my "bad Monsanto stories" aren't from newspapers or blogs - they are stories that have happened to MY FRIENDS. I know two people who've had Monsanto's lawyer come after them. They were both sustainable food activists, and neither was doing anything that dealt directly with Monsanto. They were acting legally. They weren't protesters. Nothing like that at all. It makes me kinda think that I'll be getting a call from Monsanto's lawyer too if my book gets any sort of attention once it is published. So - you want to play, Monsanto? Let's play. Because there's a reason you're so hated. If there were this many bad stories about dirty tricks from Bayer or Syngenta or ADM, I'd write about those companies instead. Yesterday on my blog, I wrote about one particular post on Monsanto's blog, about Indian farmer suicides. If you haven't heard about this story, it's a big one. Indian farmers have been committing suicide on a mass scale for about a decade now. Between 1997 and 2007, 182,936 Indian farmers killed themselves. Monsanto's side of the story seems to be roughly something like: "People commit suicide all over the world! Who can say why anyone commits suicide? Our seeds are HELPING Indian farmers." Yet if you look in their comments, you'll see one by "Vandana" (Vandana Shiva, I assume) that says: In India, the promise of genetically engineered cotton was that it would yield 1,500 kilos per acre. In four states, the average yield was 200 kilos. Farmer incomes were projected to increase by 10,000 rupees an acre, but ran losses of 6,000 rupees per acre. The performance of these crops has been completely unreliable. The hybrid maize seeds that Monsanto sold to the peasants in the poorest states of India, like Bihar, left them with total crop failure and losses totaling 4 billion rupees. In the case of the failure of Bt cotton in Andhra Pradash, it was a billion rupees. A peasant switching to hybrid or genetically modified seed finds him or herself, in a year’s time, two to three thousand rupees in debt. In the link above from my blog, I wrote up Amy Goodman's interview with Vandana Shiva. To Monsanto's credit, it sounds like the Indian farmer suicides aren't 100% their fault. It's only about HALF their fault. Part of the problem is increased costs to the farmers (buying seeds every year, plus in some cases buying the chemicals that those seeds were designed to be used with). The second part is that the seeds came with a promise of high yields but did not deliver. The third part is the lack of affordable credit for the farmers who need it, so they turn to moneylenders and go into a debt they can't escape. The last part of the problem is the low prices due to U.S. dumping cheap products on the market and the free trade deals that prohibit India from putting tariffs on cheap foreign cotton. From a report called Seeds of Suicide (mentioned in the Vandana Shiva interview): High yield varieties (HYVs), or green revolution seeds are misnamed because the term implies that the seeds are high yielding in and of themselves. The distinguishing feature of these seeds, however, is that they are highly responsive to certain key inputs such as fertiliser and irrigation. In other words, Americans go to other countries and offer them seeds that can give them high yields. But the seeds give high yields ONLY if they have the right inputs added - ammonia fertilizer and irrigation. The older Indian varieties of seeds are adapted to their own climate and soil conditions. So with the new seeds come new costs - fertilizer and irrigation - or else you don't get the high yields as promised. And even before GMO seeds came along, the farmers couldn't save these hybrid seeds because the next generation of seeds would not be as high yielding. This is relevant now because the U.S. is on the brink of making this same mistake in Africa & S. Asia with Sen. Lugar's bill S.384. In 1998, Monsanto brought India its first GM seeds - Bt cotton. When they did this, they started with (illegal) field trials by contacting individual farmers who were known for producing high yields over the years and asking them to grow the Bt cotton seeds. Monsanto's partnering seed company in India, Mahyco, paid for all of the expenses these farmers incurred to grow the Bt cotton. Once the farmers achieved high yields, other farmers were invited to their fields to see how wonderful the GE seeds were. However, they were not told how much the seeds cost. From the report: The farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab and other states of India (see chapter 3) as well as the ecological disasters like the continuous failure of cotton in last few years in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab are used by industry to sell new "miracles" and new vulnerabilities. The excessive use of pesticides in Andhra Pradesh and Punjab was related to the vulnerability of the hybrid seeds. However, the genetically engineered seeds which have pesticides built into them are now being offered by the multinational seed industry as the only alternative to the use of pesticides. Bt-cotton is one of the products of genetic engineering being offered by Monsanto, the leading US based Agricultural Biotechnology Company as a ‘miracle’ to end the use of hazardous pesticides, to save the cotton crop from American bollworm and to increase the yield. In other words, farmers were sold the hybrid seeds beginning in the 1990's (with slow adoption rates at first). The 1990's marked the first farmer suicides. When the farmers began killing themselves due to the high costs of the seeds plus the chemicals they had to buy along with the seeds, Monsanto came in offering its Bt cotton as the "fix." Yes, the seeds were MUCH more expensive than the hybrid seeds - but now you don't need to buy fertilizer! And it'll give you amazing yields! The report continues with some details about Bt cotton itself. It has a pesticide engineered into it so farmers are told they no longer need to spray pesticides on their crops. However, in practice this didn't always work out - sometimes (in the U.S.) the bugs that were supposed to die from the Bt survived and wrecked the cotton anyway. This brings up a fear of creating "superbugs" that are resistant to Bt - a major problem because Bt is often used as an organic pesticide. In India, the problems are more complex because Bt cotton is designed to resist the cotton bollworm, but India has other pests that destroy cotton too and Bt doesn't work for them. The Farmer Suicides Several states in India are plagued by this decade-long epidemic of suicides now. The Seeds of Suicide report describe a region of India called Warangal (in a state that had 16,000 farmer suicides in 1995-1997 and many more since). The area used to grow food crops but when India changed its trade policies, the farmers swapped their food for cotton. Back then they were getting a good return on it so it seemed to make sense. In 1997-1998, things changed for the worst. Bad weather was followed by a pest attack. The farmers, who already faced decreased yields due to weather, bought pesticides and sprayed several times to kill the pests without much success. Warangal was the canary in the coal mine - because they traditionally did not grow cotton, they planted hybrid seeds instead of traditional varieties from saved seeds. That's how the suicides started. These farmers bought expensive seeds, then bought pesticides, and the poor cotton yields could not make up for the costs. They had to go into debt in order to plant the next year's crop. Many who couldn't break the cycle of debt committed suicide. Here's the story of a woman named Ramanamma: She and her husband cultivated 20 acres of leased land. Taken in by the marketing hype of seed companies, they replaced paddy with cotton. This proved beneficial at the beginning, but demanded intensive irrigation, for which they took a loan of Rs. 50,000. The subsequent crops failed. Burdened with loans and accumulating interests Ramanamma’s husband consumed pesticide and committed suicide. Ramanamma and her son are today working as construction workers in order to survive. And who made the hybrid seeds? In Warangal the seeds and chemicals come from Shaw Wallace, ICI, Rallis India, Monsanto, Saral India, Novratis, Nocil, and Bayer. Earlier the cotton farmers used to get 10-12 quintals of yield in one acre spread over four to five picking. But 1997-98 they could hardly get 4-5 quintals. Some of the farmers could not get even that. The temptation of heavy returns on cotton had attracted the small farmers who had even leased land for growing cotton. Bandi Kalavathi, w/o. Somaiah of the Venkatapur village, had no land of her own but she had taken 5 acres of land on lease and in 4 acres she had planted only cotton. She had taken Rs. 35,000 as debt from private parties. Bandi Kalavathi is one of the farmers who committed suicide due to the crop failure. In the cotton cropping season in 1997-98 not a day passed since mid-December 1997 without at least one farmer ending his life as a consequence of the failure of the cotton, chilli, red gram and other crops in Warangal, Karimnager, Medak, Rangareddi and Mahabubnagar districts in the Telangana region and Kurnoor in the Rayalaseema region. This trend started in the 1990's but it has continued and it has not yet ended. Another trend is farmers selling their kidneys to pay off their debts. The end of the report is heartbreaking. It is list after list, chart after chart of names and details about farmers who committed suicide. One chart has a key to it "B=burns; H=hanging; P=pesticide; T=under a train; D=drowning." Monsanto's blog says: Think about it this way: if Bt cotton were the root cause of suicidal tendencies, then why is it that Indian farmers represent the fastest-growing users of biotech crops in the world? Between 2005 and 2006, India’s adoption of Bt cotton nearly tripled to 9.5 million acres! Today, Bt cotton is currently used in nine states in India on 14.4 million or 63 percent of India’s total cotton acres. This echoes the report I cited above. When farmers were facing debts from high costs for seeds and pesticides, a promise of high yields and freedom from buying more pesticides must be nice. It seems to me that Bt cotton didn't START the farmer suicides, but it's adding fuel to the fire. And Monsanto's hands are not clean even still... Monsanto was one of the original companies selling chemicals and seeds way back when BEFORE Bt cotton came to India. Action You Can Take Now To Prevent Future Suicides All kidding aside (even though I do like to poke fun at Monsanto for being so goddamn evil and then pretending they arent... here's a top 10 list of evil Monsanto deeds I put together) we do need to do something about the Casey-Lugar bill in the Senate right now, S.384. I watched the hearing and wrote it up here. They had several speakers but they got ONE point of view - those who are FOR the hybrid seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, etc, that had such an awful consequence in India. That's not the only point of view out there. In fact, 400 scientists and 30 governments came to another conclusion. And this was ignored, entirely. The Casey-Lugar bill mandates GMO research in developing countries we help, among other things. I'd like to see that part taken out of the bill, but I'm still not going to be happy with it even then. Because the Senate had such a one-sided, wrong, and STUPID hearing on the whole thing. I don't want to be hearing about African farmer suicides in 20 years. There are some people here who are pro-GMOs and even some people who think that fertilizer and pesticides are necessary in some cases. Well, we disagree, obviously. But I think this is larger than that. Farmers in the U.S. can afford those things, and farmers in the U.S. benefit from all kinds of things like roads, clean water, and electricity that the government provides. Poor farmers in the developing world do not have the resources we have, so exporting our resource-intensive agriculture to them is foolish for that reason no matter what you think of GMOs and pesticides. To take action, write or call your Senators about this in the next 2 weeks.or receiving certain types of file attachments. Check your e-mail security settings to determine how attachments are handled. SOURCE Print This Article |
|
|
|
|
|
Voice of the Environment is a 501 (c-3) not-for-profit Montana-based corporation formed in 1991.
|