The double standards are clear. In 2012, the US provided $100 billion for domestic food aid, up from the $95 billion it spent on feeding its 67 million undernourished population in 2010 including spending on food coupons and other supplementary nutrition programmes. In India, the Food Bill is expected to cost $20 billion and will feed an estimated 850 million people. Against an average supply of 358kg/person of subsidised food aid (including cereals) in the US every year, India promises to make available 60 kg/person in food entitlement. And yet, while the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is quiet on the subsidy being doled out in America for feeding its poor, the US has launched an attack on India for “creating a massive new loophole for potentially unlimited trade-distorting subsidies.”
Ref http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/Columns/The-WTO-is-destroying-Indian-farming/Article1-1137811.aspx
“WTO Kills Farmers”: India Free Market Reforms Trigger Farmers’ Suicides
Many of us remember the crucial failure of the WTO’s Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. It was on this day that Lee Kyung Hae, leader of the Korean Federation of Advanced Farmers, discovered that his loudest voice was in death.
Wearing a sandwich board that read, “The WTO kills farmers!”- Lee took a knife and stabbed himself in the chest. His death was ignored by the WTO and the mainstream media. Given the lack of attention, many argue that his violent end was in vain. Sadly, his dishonored death is one of thousands being ignored by corporate mainstream media.
In 2003, 17,107 farmers committed suicide. In the last few years, the number of documented suicides in India’s rural areas has skyrocketed. These suicides have become so commonplace that they are mystifying a nation and polarizing the debate over biotechnology.
On the surface, the massive numbers of farmer suicides lack the social unity and revolutionary opposition other revolutions employ. In fact, the local Indian government refuses to address the correlation between agrarian suicides and economic exploitation, making it difficult for the international public to apply real social forces to these farmers’ actions.
However, research shows the massive numbers of farmer suicides are linked not only with economic disparity, but with corporate exploitation by multinational agribusinesses.
The Republic of India is one of the top twelve nations in the world in terms of biodiversity. Featuring nearly 8% of all recorded species on Earth, this subcontinent is home to 47,000 plant species and 81,000 animal species. Simultaneously, India is home to the largest network of indigenous farmers in the world. Yet biotechnology has led to extreme environmental degradation in the region, threatening to replace its diverse ecology with corporate hybrid monoculture. The original Green Revolution was supposed to save 58 million Indian hectares. Today, 120 million of the 142 million cultivable hectares is degraded- over twice the magnitude that the Green Revolution attempted to save! In the Indian state of Punjab, 84 of the 138 developmental blocks are recorded as having 98% ground water exploitation. The critical limit is 80%. The result has had devastating impacts on the agricultural community, leaving exploited farmers with little choice of action. In the past six years, more than three thousand farmers have committed suicide in Andrha Pradesh, that is six to ten farmers everyday! When did this start? Why is this occurring?
And why have such little media attention been given to this crisis?
There are three potential causes for the onset of these self-inflicted massacres:
1) exploitation by multinational agribusinesses
2) severe economic disparity and
3) a means of resistance by exposing the abuse of the agrarian sphere.
In 1998, around the inception of mass farmer suicides, the World Bank imposed regulations that opened up India’s seed market to corporate multinationals like Monsanto. Non-renewable GM crops now replaced a self-sustainable farming system that had been perfected over thousands of years.
While corporate agribusinesses impose their hybrid monoculture on peasant farmers, they refuse to consider the biodiversity that is desired to maintain traditional practices.
For example, 75% of cultivable Indian land exists in dry zones. Non GM rice utilizes 3,000 liters of water in order to produce one kilo, while non-renewable hybrid rice requires 5,000 liters per kilo! Cotton, largely considered the “pesticide treadmill,” makes India the third largest cotton grower in the world, accounting for 1/3 of its export earnings.
Kisan Sabha (AIKS), or peasants front of the Communist Party in India view this agrarian crisis as a direct result of proletarian exploitation. S. Ramachandran Pillai, AIKS president, “called for a united movement of the peasantry to fight the neo-liberal imperialist offensive looming large all over the country.” AIKS has formed allies with other social groups like the Agricultural Workers Union, Adivasi Kshema Samithi, Center for Indian Trade Unions and the Democratic Youth Federation of India to combat neoliberalism and to voice demands for proletariat justice.
Ref http://www.globalresearch.ca/wto-kills-farmers-india-free-market-reforms-trigger-farmers-suicides
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/farm-suicide-trends-in-2012-remain-dismal/article4860980.ece
Farm suicide trends in 2012 remain dismal
Farm suicides rose sharply by almost 450 in Maharashtra in 2012 to touch 3,786, the latest National Crime Records Bureau data show. (The State saw 3,337 suicides in 2011). That is the worst annual increase in seven years. It also brings Maharashtra’s total tally since the NCRB began recording farm data in 1995 to a staggering 57,604 farmers’ suicides.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/farm-suicide-trends-in-2012-remain-dismal/article4860980.ece
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