Every day for more than a year, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have protested three new laws claiming to “modernize” Indian agriculture — laws that were a thinly veiled push to forcibly expand industrial agriculture throughout India.
Over 700 people died in the protests yet the resolve and determination of those involved never wavered.
On November 29th, the Indian parliament, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lead, repealed each one of these new laws.
When industrial agriculture was pushed on Indian farmers just two decades ago, hundreds of thousands of farmers embraced it. Prices for their crops plummeted causing a large number of them to lose their farms. Over the 15-year span beginning when industrial agriculture was introduced in India, author Vandana Shiva notes that, “284,000 farmers have committed suicide because of the non-sustainability of capital- and chemical-intensive farming based on nonrenewable seeds.”
These recent laws are testament to the abject disregard for the loss of 284,000 farmer’s lives as a direct consequence of embracing the false promise of industrial agriculture, as well as the ruthless insidiousness of the ‘profit at all cost’ mindset of industrial agriculture corporations and their proponents including Bill Gates.
This is a huge victory for 2 million Indian farmers, for regenerative agriculture, and a seminal step in addressing our accelerating climate crisis.
On November 19th, bowing to political pressure with key elections approaching, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that these new agriculture laws would be repealed in parliament. Wary farmers vowed to continue their protests until the day the Indian Parliament passed the repeal. That day has now come.
Rear the Independent article here.
And a New York Times article here.
Photo credit: Randeep Maddoke Wikipedia Commons