By
Andrew Malone
When
Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves
after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling
dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.
The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting
back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared
their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked,
barren fields near their home.
As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana,
14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and
daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face
working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will
be the lowest of the low.
Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had
taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due
to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.
Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he
was in despair. He could see no way out.
There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in
agony. Other villagers looked on – they knew from experience that any
intervention was pointless – as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in
pain and vomiting.
Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home
100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any
noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara
Mandaukar came to an end.
As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home,
Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her
husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.
‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too
much. We have lost everything.’
Shankara’s crop had failed – twice. Of course, famine and
pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.
But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on
something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.
Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been
promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming
with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.
Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money
in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with
spiralling debts – and no income.
So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to
take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing
ground for genetically modified crops.
The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was
highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become
a ‘global moral question’ – and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.
Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian
capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by
condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in
India, stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’.
Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and
prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have
transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.
The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the
future’ and follow suit.
So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the
‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.
What I found was deeply disturbing – and has profound
implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the
planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.
For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture
do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers
kill themselves here each month.
Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths.
Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not
need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.
It seems that many are massively in debt to local
money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.
Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism,
drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll.
But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the
epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.
In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed
suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over
farms from their dead husbands – only to kill themselves as well.
Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed –
two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.
She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of
relatives. ‘He cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt,
sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.
Village after village, families told how they had fallen
into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton
seeds.
The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM
seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.
But GM salesmen and government officials had promised
farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ – with better crops that would be free
from parasites and insects.
Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds,
traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.
The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new
biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the
post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech
giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed
creations.
In return for allowing western
companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more
than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in
the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.
But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the
farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages.
Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in
two years – up to 17 million acres – many famers have found there is a terrible
price to be paid.
Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of
cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.
Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double
the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.
With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops
have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no
means of paying them off.
When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save
seeds and replant them the following year.
But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM
seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been
genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of
their own.
As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the
same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and
death.
Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was
cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.
As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted
outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no
doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy
BT Cotton, a genetically modified plant created by Monsanto.
‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife.
‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become
depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed
insecticide.’
Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital
along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he
was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay
their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’
Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from
other ‘social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified
gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers exclaimed.
‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.
‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the
seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to
buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please
tell the world what is happening here.’
Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this
tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven
years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis,
such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always
been part of rural Indian life.
Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of
Indian farmers want GM seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by
aggressive marketing tactics.
During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I
encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information
about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more
expensive – and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.
(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only
double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed – but admitted that the difference
can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants,
who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.)
With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the
wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of
assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want
help to stop any more of us dying.’
Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide
farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help
those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.
India’s farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as
taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state
government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of
GM seeds.
This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000
rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. ‘I told him that we
can survive,’ his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell.
‘I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.’
But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can
find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children’s
schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their
thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.
Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM
Genocide’ - the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life
of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’.
Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the
genetically modified future is murderously high.
