Vandana Shiva: Farmer Suicides in India Linked to Debt, Globalization
Indian government officials estimate that 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last 13 years.
“The combination is unpayable debt, and it’s the day the farmer is going to lose his land for chemicals and seeds, that is the day the farmer drinks pesticide,” Shiva said. “And it’s totally related to a negative economy, of an agriculture that costs more in production than the farmer can ever earn.”
A Professor of economics at Columbia University explained that globalization was not to blame.
“There are other states in India where cotton seeds have been absorbed and which are really prosperous. So you have to ask, why is it that these are breaking out?” he asked. “What’s happening is very much like the subprime mortgages in the United States, where a whole bunch of salesmen went out and sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.”
Is that so Professor? And where do you think those salesmen got the idea to take advantage of people in such a fashion? Is that an indigenous, cultural, practice in India? Monsanto’s virtual stranglehold of the entire seed market in a country other than the company’s home – that is not “globalization”?
I would posit that this is exactly what results from globalization. Business practices, technology, and products migrate to “lesser developed countries” (which is a term I don’t particularly like using – might as well call them backward) across the entire planet, sucked into new markets by the gravitational pull of “free market capitalism” when that economic regime takes hold – which is also a direct consequence of globalization.