Living Farms Newsletter
Living Farms Newsletter: Help From Outside
Do Indian farmers need help from outside?
Both Bill and Melinda Gates had recently toured India and as a part of their philanthropic gesture given a small sum to certain agriculture institutions to carry out research on rice. As Dr Debal Deb comments, “Essentially the assumption behind such initiative is that Indian farmers need some sort of help which is impossible to come by from within.” The Green Revolution has not only hurt our fields and produce, it has deskilled the farmer. What technology is trying to do the Indian farmers had accomplished in the centuries when they were in control.
The second part of the interview with an eminent breeder scientist Dr. Debal Deb.
Farmers are forced to take their own lives
In the last three months 39 farmers have committed suicide in different districts of Orissa . They are pushed into an highly external input dependent chemical intensive agriculture. This has made their net agriculture income negative and forced them to seek loan from formal and non formal sectors. The pressure generated out of not being able to repay the loan took the lives of the people who feed rest of us–the farmers. But the government insists that they died because of family problems.Suicide has nothing to do with the crop failure. How many more farmers need to commit suicide before the government wakes up? In Orissa on an average 328 farmers commit suicide every year.
Click here to download the information in PDF on farmer suicide in last three months.
How many disasters do we need to wake up?
The Bhopal gas tragedy has never been accorded the seriousness it deserves. Let alone help the survivors the Government of India made an out of Court deal with Union Carbide and settled for a compensation amount of 473 million dollars in place of $3.3 billion it had demanded earlier. Survivors continued to die even as the government looked away. Today Bhopal has 25,000 deaths in total and one lakh still seriously ill. Now the next generation is being born deformed. The government urges the citizen to "move on".
It is that kind of apathy that is visible everywhere. Farmers are committing suicides and the government just shuts its eyes and ears. GM crops are being introduced without a public debate. If Bhopal and Vidarbha has failed to move the government, then what else can? How many disasters before the Govt wakes up?
