Monsanto playing god with farmers
By Colin Todhunter –
India’s farmers are the
targets of structural violence aimed at uprooting indigenous agriculture
and replacing it with an intensive corporate model based on GMOs and
agrochemicals. But as Monsanto’s GM cotton succumbs to insect
infestations despite repeated pesticide applications, agroecological
farming is an increasingly attractive option for cultivators.
The mantra of global agribusiness is that it cares about farmers. It
also really cares about humanity and wants to help feed a growing world
population by using its patented genetically modified (GM) seeds.
It says it wants to assist poor farmers by helping them grow enough
to earn a decent income. Seems like it’s a win-win situation for
everyone!
If you listen to the PR, you could be forgiven for believing that
transnational agribusiness companies are driven by altruistic tendencies
and humanitarian goals rather than by massive profit margins and
delivering on shareholder dividends.
To promote itself and its products, the US multinational company
Union Carbide came out with a series of brochures in the 1950s and 60s
with powerful images depicting a large ‘hand of god’ in the sky, which
hovered over a series of landscapes and scenarios in need of ‘fixing’ by
the brave new world of science and the type of agricultural technology
to be found in a pesticide canister.
One such image is of a giant hand pouring chemicals from a lab flask
upon Indian soil, with a pesticide manufacturing factory in the distance
and Mumbai’s Gateway of India opposite.
It was a scene where science met tradition, where the helping hand of
God, in this case Union Carbide, assisted the ignorant, backward Indian
farmer who is shown toiling in the fields. The people at Union Carbide
didn’t do subtlety back then.
We can now look back and see where Union Carbide’s hubris got the
people of Bhopal and the deaths caused by that pesticide factory
depicted in the image. And we can also see the utter contempt its top
people in the US displayed by dodging justice and failing the victims of
Bhopal. There’s humanitarianism for you: playing god with people’s
lives and avoiding accountability for the death and havoc created.
The supposed humanitarian motives of global agribusiness are little more than a sham.
If these companies, their supporters, media shills and PR mouthpieces
really want to feed the world and assist poor farmers in low income
countries, as they say they do, they would do better by addressing the
political, economic and structural issues which fuel inequality, poverty and hunger.
And that includes the role of agribusiness itself in determining unfair world trade rules and trade agreements, such as the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP),
which help grant it access to agriculture across the globe and recast
it for its own ends (US agribusiness and the transformation of
food-sufficient countries into food-deficit ones has long been bound up
with the projection of Washington’s global power.)
Laughing all the way to the bank at the farmer’s expense
Many of the people these companies supply their inputs to and make a
profit from are smallholder farmers who live on a financial knife edge
in low income countries. Monsanto has appropriated around $900 million
from India’s farmers over the last decade or so – illegally according to Vandana Shiva. By way of contrast, Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant brought in $13.4 million in 2014 alone, according to Bloomberg.
Writing in India’s Statesman newspaper,
Bharat Dogra illustrates the knife-edge existence of the people that
rich agribusiness profits from by discussing the case of Babu Lal and
his wife Mirdi Bai who have been traditionally cultivating wheat, maize,
and bajra (millet) on their farmland in Rajasthan. Their crops provided
food for several months a year to the 10-member family as well as
fodder for farm and dairy animals which are integral to the mixed
farming system employed.
Dogra notes that company (unspecified – but Monsanto and its
subsidiaries dominate the GM cotton industry in India) agents approached
the family with the promise of a lump-sum payment to plant and produce
Bt (GM) cotton seeds in two of their fields. Babu Lal purchased
pesticides to help grow the seeds in the hope of receiving the payment,
which never materialised because the company agent said the seeds
produced had “failed” in tests.
The family faced economic ruin, not least because the food harvest
was much lower than normal as the best fields and most labour and
resources had been devoted to Bt cotton. There was hardly any fodder
too. It all resulted in Babu Lal borrowing from private moneylenders at a
high interest rate to meet the needs of food and fodder.
Things were to get much worse though as the company’s agent allegedly
started harassing Babu Lal for a payment of about 10,000 rupees in lieu
of the fertilisers and pesticides provided to him. Several other tribal
farmers in the area also fell into this trap, and reports say that the
soil of fields in which Bt cotton was grown has been badly damaged.
The promise of a lump-sum cash payment can be very enticing to poor
farmers, and when companies use influential villagers to get new farmers
to agree to plant GM cotton, tribal farmers are reluctant to decline
the offer. When production is declared as having failed, solely at the
company’s discretion it seems, a family becomes indebted.
According to Dogra’s piece, there is growing evidence that the trend
in tribal areas to experiment with Bt cotton has disrupted food security
and has introduced various health hazards and ecological threats due to
the use of poisonous chemical inputs.
What seed companies are doing is experimenting with farmers’
livelihoods and lives. ‘Success’, regardless of the impact on the
farmer, is measured in terms of company profits. However, failure for
the farmer is a matter of life and death. Look no further than the spike
in suicides across the cotton belt since 1997. Even ‘success’ for the
farmer may not amount to much when the costs of the seeds and associated
chemical inputs are factored into any possible increase in yield or
income.
Despite constant denials by Monsanto and its supporters in the media
that Bt cotton in India has nothing or little to do with farmer suicides
in India, a new study directly
links the crisis of suicides among Indian farmers to Bt cotton adoption
in rain-fed areas, where most of India’s cotton is grown.
As outlined in the case of Babu Lal above, many fall into a cycle of
debt from the purchase of expensive, commercialised GM seeds and
chemical inputs that then often fail to yield enough to sustain farmers’
livelihoods.
