Development Report #15: A bitter harvest: Farmer suicide in India
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.
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)
Farming Shrimp, Harvesting Hunger: The Costs and Benefits of the Blue Revolution
Farming Shrimp, Harvesting Hunger: The Costs and Benefits of the Blue Revolution
by Susan C. Stonich, professor, University of California, Santa Barbara and Isabel De La Torre, International Coordinator, Industrial Shrimp Action Network
Protesting shrimp farms in Bangladesh.
Monsanto: Food, Health, Hope
When corporate agribusiness sets out to transform our farms and ranches, the traditional source of our food and fiber, into modern bioengineering workshops designed to suit their narrow corporate interests, farmers and various other producers of our food see themselves being sold into economic slavery. Meanwhile, large numbers of the world community are gradually discovering that the increasing quantitative and qualitative price for such self-serving corporate gimmickry continues to escalate.
Striving to take the leadership in such a corporate-dominated age of prescription agriculture and food, or "life sciences" is the Monsanto Company, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.
Hatian and California Farmers: Squeezed by the Same Company
I will make you a bet of
ten to one that, in a matter of months, relations are healed and the American
Ambassador returns. You forget-Papa Doc is a bulwark against Communism.
There will be no Cuba and no Bay of Pigs here. Of course there are other
reasons. Papa Doc's lobbyist in Washington is the lobbyist for certain
American-owned mills (they grind grey flour for the people out of imported