Monopoly on Suicide

Via Ian Welsh, Vandana Shiva explains the connection between global seed monopolies and farmer suicides, which Shiva says have exceeded 200,000 in the previous decade:

... [Vandana Shiva] The first suicide that we studied took place in Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh in 1997. This region is a rain-fed dry region and used to grow dry land crops such as millets, pigeon pea etc. In 1997, the seed corporations converted the region from biodiverse agriculture to monocultures of cotton hybrid. The farmers were not told they would need irrigation. They were not told that they would need fertilizers and pesticides. They were not told they could not save the seeds. The cotton seeds were sold as “White Gold,” with a false promise that farmers would become millionaires. Instead, the farmers landed in severe unpayable debt. This is how the suicides began.

... India is a land of varied climates, from rainforests to deserts. Seventy percent of Indian farming is rain-fed (dependent on rain not irrigation). Introducing inappropriate crops and cropping patterns has aggravated the water crisis and precipitated more frequent crop failure. Ecological agriculture needs 10 times less water than chemical farming. Green Revolution varieties, hybrids and GM crops are all bred for irrigation. On the one hand, this puts pressure on farmers in low-rainfall zones to drill tube wells, which fail — on the other hand, it leads to more frequent crop failure. ...

[Ian Welsh] To summarize: first world subsidies on agriculture lead to first world prices that are artificially low, which leads to dumping, which reduces the price of the crops. Something Shiva doesn’t mention is that each time a third world country moves to cash crops, that too depresses the prices as there just aren’t that many cash crops. Having to buy seeds every year, having to buy pesticides and fertilizers and having to irrigate all increase the cost of farming significantly, and also cause drawdown of aquifers. Once those aquifers are gone (and they are being drawn down faster than the water is being replaced) the areas in question won’t be able to grow any meaningful crops at all. ...

Welsh also touches on the pollen drift from patented seeds, which contaminate nearby crops with copyrighted traits and simply aren't as easy to breed out as the seed mongers would have us believe.

Genetically engineered crops are easier to patent and protect as intellectual property than regular hybrid seeds, which are more or less protected by the fact that their yield quality sharply declines in future generations. With GMO traits that aren't naturally found in the crop plant genome, genetic testing can readily reveal laboratory origins.

Not that there was ever a serious public debate about whether lifeforms should be patentable, particularly under the present international patent regime which can extend protections near indefinitely.

People forget that patents were originally intended to give the original owner a few years time to recover the costs of their inventive processes, after which point the presumption was that their ideas become available for the common good. And when patents were the province of individual humans, instead of immortal corporations, there was a harder natural limit on how long they could last.

But owning life? Owning spontaneously replicating organisms that can spread of their own accord? It's a problem, particularly when companies continually try to claim patents on existing crop plants and wild organisms known to local communities to be medicinally useful - genomes which, as Welsh points out, the companies invested no effort in developing.

All of which is to say that there isn't just one objection to patented, genetically modified crop organisms, there are many and they are deeply interwoven with the other structural flaws of industrial agriculture.

The Green Revolution had its moment, its successes. Now, we're living with its design flaws writ large all over the world.

Our water and soil nutrients are running out. The seed-based (grains are seeds, as Michael Pollan would remind us all) diet we've switched to isn't as nutritious or healthful as any of the traditional diets based around whole foods. The small-scale farm economy has been decimated, and with it, the human resources needed to implement all that we've learned in recent decades about more sustainable, lower-input methods of agriculture.

There are other, better ways of doing things. We should make use of them.

(Photo credit: James Tan Chin Choy on Flickr.)