India Farmers

Corporate Greed Driving India Farmers to Suicide by the Thousands
By Ed Howes

The promise is the same everywhere. Buy our patented seeds at twice the price of others, buy our chemical fertilizers and pesticides and you will prosper like the government subsidized American farmers. These corporate parasites know how to sell in any language. The cost of the promised prosperity which seldom occurs without government subsidy and requires annual borrowing, as with American farming, is more than a poor farmer can afford. But corporate greed convinces him to gamble his future and his life on false corporate hope.

Working hand in glove with the corporate scum are the local money lenders, sometimes taking 5% interest per month and sometimes the entire harvest if drought or floods do not beat Mr. Moneybags to the harvest. India could not have chosen a worse model to modernize its agriculture than American corporate farming, which has already destroyed more value than it has produced, excluding corporate profits of course, because corporate balance sheets are all that matter in this world. Raped lands and environments be damned.

People and the people in government especially, easily lose sight of the fundamental importance of agriculture to the total national economy. A nation which does not feed its people is forever dependent upon the good will of people who cannot be trusted. Even the rich nations have boarded this leaky boat and they will pay dearly for so doing and are already paying dearly, in terms of food quality, environmental damage and disease.

If a nation is to have healthy people, requiring a minimum of medical attention, it must have health producing food, not the plastic the corporations peddle in the name of high yields and damage resistance. To have health building food, grow in rich organic soil 100% chemical free. In the story I read, a 31 year old farmer borrowed $9 for a bottle of pesticide which he drank to kill himelf. So the manufacturer made five dollars to create a widow and two small fatherless children. Congratulations on your keen business acumen, corporate parasite. Win - lose marketing at its finest.