India’s hidden climate change catastrophe: ‘wave upon wave’ of farmer suicides

[Barrett808]

Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we can sell the salt from our table."

Ms Nagamma, 41, showed us a picture of her husband – good-looking with an Elvis-style hairdo – on the day they married a quarter of a century ago. "He'd been unhappy for a month, but that day he was in a heavy depression. I tried to take the tin away from him but I couldn't. He died in front of us. The head of the family died in front of his wife and children – can you imagine?"

The death of Mr Naik, a smallholder in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in July 2009, is just another mark on an astonishingly long roll. Nearly 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the past decade. Like Mr Naik, a third of them choose pesticide to do it: an agonising, drawn-out death with vomiting and convulsions. ...

India’s hidden climate change catastrophe: ‘wave upon wave’ of farmer suicides

[freshwest]

1. Pesticide? Monsanto had more to do with this than the weather.

[Peace Patriot]

2. It was my understanding that Indian farmer suicides are connected to "free trade for the rich,"

that is, small farmers have been ruined by agricultural dumping of foreign produce on their markets, so they are driven out of business. These are small businesses with not much safety margin. They produce just enough to feed their families and local communities, using traditional organic farming methods, and have been doing so for hundreds if not thousands of years. There is a worldwide small farmer movement against the Big Ag/corporate producers who not only deliberately destroy small local farms but also introduce pesticides, GMO seeds and so on, destroying organic farms and making traditional knowledge useless. I know that a South Korean farmer committed suicide at the anti-WTO protests in Cancun a few years ago, for these reasons. Climate change may well exacerbate their problems but I'm suspicious of the assertion that climate change is THE problem.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Correct.

and part of the plan of destroying small farmers comes from the IMF, countries that agree to IMF loans
have to sign agreements which result in destruction to independent farming and businesses.

India is a victim of IMF conditions, called "structural adjustment programs"
( appropriately called "SAP".)

The series of policy measures launched by the Indian government are part of structural adjustment program in India. Government has taken up following measures to implement SAP :

* Devaluation of rupee by 23%.
* New Industrial Policy allowing more foreign investments.
* Opening up more areas for private domestic and foreign investment.
* Part disinvestment of government equity in profitable public sector enterprises.
* Sick public sector units to be closed down.
* Reforms of the financial sector by allowing in private banks.
* Liberal import and export policy.
* Cuts in social sector spending to reduce fiscal deficit.
* Amendments to the existing laws and regulations to support reforms.
* Market-friendly approach and less government intervention.
* Liberalization of the banking system.
* Tax reforms leading to greater share of indirect taxes.

http://www.ieo.org/world-c10-p1.html

[jwirr]

4. Not just climate - my guess is that GMO might have something to do

with it also. Maybe also imports that compete with local farmers. We are doing a lot of things that do not make much sense.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. Replacing someone's culture with capitalistic values comes with a price.