Hypnotic Trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the Looting of India’s Agriculture
August 4, 2015
Hypnotic Trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the Looting of India’s Agriculture
by Colin Todhunter
We are about to enter August. And that’s a special month in India. Each year, on the 15th, the country commemorates the anniversary of independence from Britain. To mark the occasion, official public celebrations take place in Delhi with flag waving and fly-pasts, and the corporate media is awash with patriotic sentiments. Behind the scenes, however, agriculture, the very heart and soul of the nation, will continue to be restructured for the benefit of foreign interests, raising the question: just where does the notion independence sit with such a policy?
In India, small farms account for 92 percent of all farms and occupy around 40 percent of all agricultural land. They form the bedrock of food production. Indeed, small farms produce most of the world’s food [see this]. Facilitated by an appropriate policy framework, smallholders could easily feed the global population.
Throughout the world, however, there is a concerted effort to remove farmers from the land. Smallholders are squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland, and the world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of big agribusiness, institutional investors and the powerful moneyed classes. If nothing is done to reverse this trend, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and economic liberalisation [see this]. Facilitated by the WTO and the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, there is a deliberate strategy to make agriculture financially non-viable for India’s small farms, to get most farmers out of farming and to impose a World Bank sanctioned model of agriculture. The aim is to displace the current model and replace it with a system of industrial (GM) agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/04/hypnotic-trance-in-delhi-monsanto-gmos-and-the-looting-of-indias-agriculture/
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016129390
