Life

Are Farmer Suicides in India Your Fault?

Deconstructing Dinner presents Palagummi Sainath, author of 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought.'

By Jon Steinman, 27 Feb 2009, TheTyee.ca

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[Editor's note: This is the last Deconstructing Dinner to run on The Tyee, but you don't have to go hungry! You can find, and bookmark, Jon Steinman's wonderful weekly podcast here.]

In February 2009, Deconstructing Dinner descended upon Edmonton for a week of local and global food education. Every year, the University of Alberta hosts International Week, the largest annual extracurricular educational event on campus. International Week "fosters global citizenship through engagement with today's most pressing issues." In its 24th year, the theme was "Hungry for Change: Transcending Feast, Famine and Frenzy."

As outlined by the event's organizers, "We live in an unprecedented, contradictory era. Hunger soars amid record harvests. At the same time, community-based democratic movements on every continent are showing the way toward a world without hunger. They are proving that it is possible to reconnect farming with ecological wisdom by enhancing soils and yields while empowering citizens to meet universal human needs for both food and dignity. In such a dark and disorienting time, solutions are still evident. The only real problem we have to worry about is despair arising from feelings of powerlessness. As we dig to the roots of the global crisis, we protect against despair and find our own power. Only then can we perceive how our individual and group actions can dissolve the forces that brought us here and plant the seeds of lasting solutions."

Deconstructing Dinner recorded one of the event's featured speakers, Palagummi Sainath.

Voices

Palagummi Sainath, rural affairs editor, The Hindu (Mumbai, India) -- Once described by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as "one of the world's foremost experts on poverty and hunger," Palagummi Sainath is a dedicated development reporter and photojournalist. He spends the majority of his year with the village people of India's rural interior on which he reports. As the current rural affairs editor of The Hindu and author of the highly acclaimed Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts, his writing on the impacts of globalization on India's rural poor, and particularly farmer suicides, has raised public awareness and influenced both policy in India and the development debate in general. His unflinching coverage of the negative impacts of neo-liberal policy on India's poorest populations has earned him more than 30 awards, including Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism Prize and the Raymond Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication. [Tyee]

Jon Steinman is producer and host of Kootenay Co-op Radio's program Deconstructing Dinner. All Deconstructing Dinner podcasts can be found here.

5 Comments:

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  • anarcho

    3 years ago

    Over 200, 000 Indian farmers

    Over 200, 000 Indian farmers have committed suicide thanks to neo-liberal policies. Funny, this never made a headline in the North American press, just like the one million Iraqi deaths thanks to the Bush-Chaney Gang were ignored.

  • Chris Bouris

    3 years ago

    Shrimp Farms, Fresh water, Local Drought

    Communities in India face drought due to the redirecting of fresh water to supply shrimp farms. The agricultural sector takes the hit as a by-product.

    This is a very serious issue both in India, and South America. Local community fresh water supplies take a beating, plus have to deal with contamination from the shrimp farms themselves (does the contamination part sound familiar with regard to "farmed" open water salmon pens?).

    Shrimp farm companies come in for awhile (a few years), the local ecosystem around the area eventually collapses via fresh water diversion, and along go local agricultural famers livelihoods. The companies leave and move on to the next area; Thanks for the memories.

    ..A remarkably succinct book by Vendana Shiva "Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global food Supply", speaks to a number of issues including the shrimp farms in India.

    Vendana Shiva also speaks in a video about impacts to India and its local farmers (and local fishers). In the first 10 minutes of the presentation, Shiva expresses ideas that evoke an undeniable sense, and yet she does so without condemnation.

    Perhaps upon a time you or a friend are (fortunate enough to be) looking at a restaurant menu, considering seafood, or perhaps at a market, you might consider asking the staff person "where does your shrimp come from?"
    The general restaurant answer options are: ("I don’t know, I'll ask"), India, the Philippines, or South America.
    And sometimes (the minority at restaurants) it's locally caught.

    ..And if you’re thinking of having a vegetarian dish instead...is that a locally grown option ( 100 mile :-) or that soy..GMO..oui ou non?

  • James Burns

    3 years ago

    Yeah, it's interesting the

    Yeah, it's interesting the things that don't make it into the press. To take a local example, the abysmal coverage of Basi-Virk and the legislature raids by our so-called media.

    Corruption is so endemic where money rules rather than it operate as just a means of proxy exchange.

    Our chickens maybe be pumped full of steroids and antibiotics, fatter than a butterball... but it looks like even they are coming home to roost.

  • Countrytype

    3 years ago

    Once upon a time, shrimp

    Once upon a time, shrimp were only local. More people lived on basic foods even as late as the 1970s. A few people have tried this cheaper and simpler way of eating again to fundraise for the Edmonton Food Bank at http://theworkingpoordiet.blogspot.com/ .

    While their efforts are clumsy and many vegetarians and vegans may take issue with the meal choices at workingpoordiet's blog, (I personally think I could have eaten better and more cheaply), our North American consumer choices of shrimp, processed or GM foods, and quick-fix biofuels go a long way towards creating the examples and markets that cause agricultural social problems in India.

    We North Americans should also think about the loss that ruined soil and abandoned diverse crops and traditional techniques linked to agricultural modernization as we are observing in India can bring us when we vote on our own leaders.

    To remove some of the impetus to modernize these places for livestock-related grain cropping, more people around our part of the world need to try to eat an in-season, 'small planet' meal at least once a week, if not several times weekly (Thank you Frances Moore Lappe for writing and updating your well-researched books!). Restaurants should start to offer these meals - if better restaurants did, it might just catch on more widely. Show me the barley risotto, roasted turnip fries, lentil-walnut-roasted fennel terrines, and tofu scrambles and tortes, you talented chefs you! Talk about the health benefits please, but most of all the delicious flavours and traditions!

    Livestock raisers, don't fret... start using more traditional means and hike your prices, as we only need to eat about 1/4 of the meat we do, and it's much better tasting and healthier when pastured and heritage raised. Your future manure management bills will be much lower, and your water much cleaner. Why not form a coop to make quality sausage with other livestock farmers - you can do nothing but improve on the poor quality we are mostly served out here in the west, and the profit margin is quite large.

  • Countrytype

    3 years ago

    And about cheap meat for the working poor...

    Before anyone attacks me about rising meat prices due to the exodus of neoliberal grain policies in India and the impending kwashiorkor and malnutrition of working North American and third world poor from a bubbly meat market, realize that meat isn't neccessary every day even though many of us (myself included) enjoy that - we are not culturally required to eat that way.

    Even the Irish (anyone descended?) did with less and managed not to go extinct. My own grandparents made the weekly roast last on a single reasonably meagre income and two kids. Rice and pea or bean is actually tasty and sustaining.

    Many of the recipes should be taught or written in the papers now, if people find the idea of cooking without preprocessed foods intimidating.

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