World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control
Published June 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:
"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."
The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:
BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.
The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.
If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...
As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.
Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.
The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.
I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.
In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.
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Comments (2)
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Natasha is an amateur eater with severe snarkolepsy and a c. 2002 blogging habit. She had a fabulous time studying ecological agriculture and policy at The Evergreen State College, and even did her homework while writing at various times for pacificviews.org, boomantribune.com, and mydd.com.
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We have been over this ground before. The suicides in India though tragic are not related to Bt crops. I have posted research papers that clearly demonstrate the alleged suicides in India are not risinng and not related to Bt crops as Ms Shiva continually claims. If people would like I would be happy to repost them here.
There are now more than 150 cultivars of Bt cotton available in India today. Many produced by state sponsored research, not Monsanto.
Since 2002 the acres of bt cotton have gone from very small to over 70% of the entire Indian crop. Now either the Bt cotton does what it claims and the farmers know it and want it or Monsanto is the worlds greatest saleman. Hmmm I think will trust the knowledge of the farmers to know what works and what does not.
Posted by Robert Wager on 06/27/2009 @ 10:08AM PT
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From the 2008 OFPRA report:
October 2008
Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India
Reviewing the Evidence
In this paper, we review the evidence on the alleged resurgence of farmer suicides in India and the potential relationship between the adoption of Bt cotton and suicides among Indian farmers. Using secondary data from multiple sources, we evaluate two sets of contradicting hypotheses on the phenomenon of farmer suicides and Bt cotton in India. The first supports the existence of a visible increase in farmer suicides concurrent with the adoption of Bt cotton and affirms that this technology contributed to the rise in farmer suicides. The second set rejects both the presence of a surge in farmer suicides in recent years and any direct or reciprocal role of Bt cotton introduction in farmer suicides, while noting that Bt cotton may have played a role in specific cases and seasons. These cases were mainly the result of institutional, climatic, and economic constraints, among many other factors. By compiling and synthesizing available data from official sources, research reports, and economic and policy analyses we are able to clearly reject the first set of hypotheses and support the second. We first show that despite the recent media hype around farmer suicides, fueled by civil society organizations and reaching the highest political spheres in India and elsewhere, there is no evidence in available data of a "resurgence" of farmer suicide in India in the last five years. Yes, farmer suicide is an important and tragic phenomenon, but it still only represents three-quarters of the total number of suicides due to pesticide ingestion in India and less than a fifth of total suicides in India. Moreover, even if there has been an increasing trend in total suicides, the reported share of farmer suicides has in fact been decreasing. Of course, all these conclusions are based on available estimates, which may be underestimated, but without better data, one cannot deny that claim.
IFPRI Discussion Paper 00808
and
Whose numbers count?: Probing discrepant evidence on transgenic cotton in the Warangal district of India
Ronald J Herring
Professor of Government; Director, Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, United States of America
PP: 145 - 159
The relationship between poverty and transgenic agricultural crops has created a global rift in development studies. Some, but not all, questions in this debate should be amenable to empirical treatment.
Field studies have generated divergent numbers on yields and other agronomic outcomes. Studies from India come to diametrically opposed findings about Bt cotton: either the technology is scale-neutral and profitable for farmers of all size classes, or produces rural catastrophe - reaching the characterization ‘genocidal' in one prominent critique.
This essay suggests a method learned from field investigation of data volatility across studies in the most controversial district in India. The method involves a multi-disciplinary team concentrating on plausible mechanisms for data distortion at the field level.
Interpolating among studies and field results, this essay concludes that widespread reports of ‘the failure of Bt cotton in India' - on agronomic, economic and environmental grounds - are not sustainable scientifically but do have plausible motivations connected to the contentious politics around ‘GMOs' globally.
http://mra.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/2/issue/2/article/2364/whose-numbers-count
I have quite a few other reports that also come to the same conclusion if people are interested. I leave readers with one thing to ponder. If Bt cotton is such a bad thing in India can anyone explain why the acreage of Bt varieties has gone from near zero in 2003 to nearly 80% of ALL cotton grown in India today. Either the products do work as advertised or the farmers in India do not understand farming. They see the results of real life experiences of those who plant Bt cotton and decide what to plant. Hmmm, what to think?
Posted by Robert Wager on 06/27/2009 @ 10:23AM PT
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