"Half of India’s population (about 700 million people) are directly engaged in agriculture, producing staples such as rice, wheat, lentils, peas, and vegetables. Eighty-six percent are smallholder farmers,” reports Indra Shekhar Singh.
“The farmers of Gandhi’s India are answering a call to arms to defend their motherland, their food system, and their dignity against a new wave of corporatization unleashed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.”
Three new law passed by the Indian Parliament in September are designed to forcibly expand industrial agriculture in India. Corporations such as Cargill India, Tyson Food, Adani, and Reliance have welcomed the "reforms."
Over 280,000 Indian farmer’s have committed suicide over the past two decades after having fallen deeply in debt and losing their farms because they made the tragic decision to convert their traditionally farmed fields over to industrial agriculture. Purchases of costly GMO seeds and requisite industrial inputs mired them inexorably in debt once they couldn’t profitably sell their crops.
Millions of farmers have been protesting for the past 90 days and their numbers are growing.
87 U.S.-based farm and food advocacy groups including Sierra Club, Farm Aid and Pesticide Action Network sent a letter “in support of the farmers in hopes of ‘connecting the dots between the forces of neoliberalism that stifle farmers, from India to the U.S..'”
American industrial ag commodity crop farmers would be similarly insolvent if our government didn’t pay out $26 billion yearly in crop insurance and other subsidies to keep them afloat.
It’s time for American industrial ag farmers to shift to a regenerative model. It’s time to insist that our government support this transition.
Read this article here.
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