The following is an edited excerpt.
Last Friday, Vandana Shiva, Indian feminist, activist, and thinker and “author of many books” said:
In India…the collection of royalties from seed has led to Monsanto controlling 95 percent of the cottonseed supply, 95 percent through a monopoly, not through the choice of the farmers, as it’s often made out to be. Farmers are getting indebted because the price of seed jumped 8,000 percent, and there’s no option…
Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market. That’s more than a quarter-million. It’s a genocide.
The idea is that indebtedness to Monsanto is driving farmers to suicide–a scandal if true, and one with a claim to be called genocide.
But it isn’t true.
View the original article here: Demolishing the myth that Monsanto’s engineered crops drove 270,000 Indian farmers to suicide.
