Friday, February 28, 2014

The vicious cycle of farmer suicide, human trafficking, and Monsanto...

Yesterday, members of the Uttar Pradesh General Assembly walked out of a meeting, frustrated by the state government’s denial of farmer suicide being a current and pressing issue affecting the Indian population. Cabinet Minister Shivpal Yadav addressed the House when asked about farmers committing suicide in a particular region because of debts, saying that the government did not have information about the suicides. Yadav also asserted that suicide was a crime.

Essentially, Yadav was ignoring India’s current phenomenon of increased suicide rates among the farmer demographic since the 1990s. In fact, since 2001, one farmer in India has committed suicide every 30 minutes.

In 2010, 190,000 people committed suicide in India. 10 percent of those suicides were farmer suicides but farmers make up only 20 percent of India’s population. The population of India is rising, but the number of farmers across the country is declining.

The most alarming aspect of this phenomenon is that farmer suicides have yet to be addressed properly by the Indian government and they are largely left to be dealt with by authority figures in isolated villages and, of course, the families of the deceased who inherit the farmers’ debts. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Monsanto's monopoly on seeds in India are the root cause...
  2. Farmer suicides in India...
  3. Indian farmers trapped and desperate...
  4. Monsanto's patent appeal rejected by Indian govt, saving farmers, food...
  5. Monsanto and the bio-rape of India...
  6. One French farmer commits suicide every two days...

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