Development Report #15: A bitter harvest: Farmer suicide in India

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January 2007

Bryan Newman, BA
Asian Studies
University of North Carolina

Alongside India’s tremendous middle class growth and the much-celebrated boom of its IT sector, a quiet emergency of debt-driven suicide has taken hold in the countryside. It is estimated that between 1993 and 2003, as many as 100,000 indebted Indian farmers took their own lives. Many of these farmers died consuming the very same pesticides they had bought to use on their fields.

Postcards from the Heartland - Part 3

A Local Revolution

by Ingrid Evjen-Elias


In the third installment of the Postcards from the Heartland series, Food First intern Ingrid Evjen-Elias chronicles what she learned during her 500-mile bike trip through the American Midwest about the troubles facing small farmers and their innovation.

Read Part I and Part II of the series.




Postcards from the Heartland


Click here to view a detailed map of the route.




By Ingrid Evjen-Elias*

Segment 1 -

Ten reasons why biotechnology will not ensure food security, protect the environment and reduce poverty in the developing world

Miguel A. Altieri, University of California, Berkeley and
Peter Rosset, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, California

October 1999

This article appeared in: Sierra Magazine

(Also available en español)