Monsanto according to Monsanto, the official blog of that monolithic U.S. bio-tech multinational corporation, has decided to tackle those posts out in the blogosphere which draw a correlation between an increase in suicides amongst Indian farmers and the introduction of GMO cotton seed into that country in 2002.
In its post Indian Farmer Suicide - The Bottom Line Monsanto has decided that these suicides are due to a number of factors including the weather, but finally plumps for personal debt as the chief cause; A variety of third-party studies have proven that personal debt is the historical reason behind an Indian farmer's decision to commit suicide, not biotech seed.
The company blog points to an article in The Financial Express, which it implies exonerates biotech crops (such as cotton) from culpability.
However, this article points out that; "Increased liberalisation and globalisation have in fact led to a shift in the cropping pattern from staple crop to cash crops like oilseeds and cotton, requiring high investment in modern inputs and wage labour. This increases credit needs. But when the prices declined farmers have no means to supplement their incomes,".
Not quite the clean report card for biotech multinationals as Monsanto according to Monsanto would have us believe.
Modern inputs for an Indian farmer with a GM cotton crop in the field can include recurring annual seed costs and Monsanto's technology fee as part of seed price.
Nor does a 2008 study cited by Monsanto undertaken by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPR) give unqualified support for Monsanto's assertion that the introduction of GMO cotton was benign; in specific regions and years, where Bt cotton may have indirectly contributed to farmer indebtedness, leading to suicides, its failure was mainly the result of the context or environment in which it was planted. We close the paper by proposing a conceptual framework for empirical applications linking the different agricultural and institutional factors that could have contributed to farmer suicides in recent years in certain districts of Central and Southern India.
The Monsanto blog goes on to mention the Virdabah district as being an area where GM cotton was a great success, but neglects to mention that according to that same IFPR paper ; The largest number of reported cases [of suicide] was concentrated in districts of northeast Maharashtra (Vidharba District).
According to a March 2008 3D paper on intellectual property rights asserted by biotech companies in India;
Owners of IPRs can prevent others from producing or selling the seeds or plant varieties over which he or she owns the rights, which makes farmers dependent on the owner of the intellectual property to supply the seeds. The IPR owners (usually private corporations) are free to set high prices or royalties on the seeds, and they retain a degree of control over how seeds are used or reused. With increasing corporate concentration in the agricultural sector, the seed owners have the power – which they already use – to raise prices of seeds and other agricultural inputs. In India the introduction of genetically-modified cotton has already had devastating effects. In addition to increasing the cost of food, jeopardizing the ability of farmers to derive a livelihood from farming when seed prices increase, and slowing down public-interest-oriented agricultural research, the ownership of IPRs on seeds goes counter to traditional practices of exchanging and saving seeds, thus undermining community and cultural rights.
The Indian Journal of Psychiatry in 2007 confirmed a rise in official suicides rates over the last twenty years, that the 'real' rate is probably somewhere in the vicinity of six to nine times the official rate and, that there has been a recent spate of farmer suicides.
Monsanto according to Monsanto is right when it points to the complexities surrounding suicide, but that doesn't mean that it can ignore the fact that the economics of growing GM cotton may place an onerous burden on poor, marginal farmers in India.
Neither can it chose to ignore the fact that in India in 2006 Monsanto through its joint venture Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (MMB) went to court in an effort to force an increase in GM cotton seed prices or the fact that Monsanto is also accused of profiting from bonded child labour on that continent.
Australian consumers need to decide whether buying products containing GM ingredients is supporting biotech companies truly committed to environmentally sustainable and socially responsible agriculture production or is just supporting companies who put such sentiments on their websites and forget these principles thereafter.
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