Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides and other troubling issues

Lots of things entered my brain while we were in India, and got lost somewhere in the mass of new data. Farmer suicides was such an item. This was mentioned in the conference - there was some debate whether it was really higher than in the past or whether it was just getting more attention; whether the media attention was spurring more suicides - but I didn't really understand the issue. It was also mentioned in the press. (India has a lot of English language newspapers aimed at Indians, not foreigners.) This morning I heard Vandana Shiva on Democracy Now, talking about Farmer Suicides, which she linked to farmers going into debt buying expensive, genetically modified seeds from Monsanto and others. These seeds are non-renewable, they must be bought each year. US subsidies for US cotton farmers also plays a role here by keeping the price of cotton, a major Indian crop, low. And farmers can't pay their debts, can't buy (before they could have harvested) new seeds. It is easy for us in the US to be blind to the impacts of our multi-national corporations, of the various world trade agreements. We don't see the impacts, they aren't covered in the mainstream media. So I invite readers to check out this particular interview on
Democracy Now and to listen to other interviews on Democracy Now and other alternative media.

There are no easy answers, but at least we need to know the questions, and I think most Americans, me included, are woefully unaware of how our country impacts the rest of the world. Yes, we're starting to get a clue about Iraq. Linking war to dead bodies is fairly easy, but understanding the links between trade agreements, copyrights and patents, and poverty and farmer suicides is far more difficult.



Who is Vandana Shiva? From the Democracy Now website: Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. She is also a physicist and ecologist and the Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is the founder of Navdanya -"nine seeds", a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds. Dr. Shiva was the 1993 recipient of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize -the Right Livelihood Award. And she is the author of many books, her latest is "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace.",

Note on the pictures: Obviously, the interview has a different impact on me since I was just in India and drove through some of the states mentioned in the interview, and have images to connect to what she is saying. To give you a little sense of this I've added two pictures. The first is from the car driving through rural Maharashtra State. (Mumbai (Bombay) is the capital of Maharashtra). I'm not 100% certain, but I think this is cotton being taken to the market. The ox carts carry the bags to the road, to be loaded onto trucks. We saw this also with sugar cane. The picture at the bottom is from the plane, landing in Mumbai. It's of one of the many shanty towns as rural people, some because they've lost their land, move into the cities. If you click on the pictures, you can see them a little larger. Hit 'skip this ad' in the upper right corner to get to the article faster.