Vandana Shiva: Our Corporate Farming System Is to Blame for …

AlterNet – San Francisco, CA

Last month, the world got a glimpse of an epidemic that has hit India in the last decade when news reports alerted readers to the suicides of 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh.

But this has been only a fraction of the suicides committed by farmers since 1997, says Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., a physicist, environmentalist, feminist, science policy advocate and director ofNavdanya and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.

While initial news reports blamed the recent suicides on falling water levels, Shiva explains that the suicide epidemic in India is a lot more complicated and far-reaching.

“Rapid increase in indebtedness is at the root of farmers’ taking their lives,” she wrote recently. “Debt is a reflection of a negative economy. Two factors have transformed agriculture from a positive economy into a negative economy for peasants: the rising of costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization.”

At the heart of this is a circle of indebtedness that has resulted from the so-called Green Revolution, which exported industrial agricultural practices to places like India and in doing so, made seeds, a once-renewable resource for farmers, into something that had be bought from corporations.

“In 1998, the World Bank’s structural-adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta,” Shiva wrote. “The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm-saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved. … The shift from saved seed to corporate monopoly of the seed supply also represents a shift from biodiversity to monoculture in agriculture.”

In an interview with AlterNet, Shiva explained how Monsanto’s Bt cotton has exemplified what can go wrong with industrial agriculture; what happens to farming communities when traditional farming methods are replaced by corporate sponsored mono-cropping; and how to stem the tide of farmer suicides.