Posts Tagged ‘India’
As in India, US Farmers Caught in Crushing Agribusiness Debt Trap Turn to Suicide in Spiking Numbers
With Bayer-Monsanto now the largest seed and agro-chemical company in the world, its near monopoly on prices and its disregard for farmers and environmental health mean that the despair that has consumed India’s farmers will soon be planted in the United States.
Over 12,000 farmers in India still committing suicide every year. US farmers developing a farmer-suicide epidemic
June 27, 2018
MINNEAPOLIS – Over a decade ago, a disturbing trend among farmers in India captured headlines, as suicides among Indian farmers began to spiral out of control.
Many of those farmers were indebted to giant agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, which – after gaining access to India’s seed sector in 1998 – enticed poor farmers to buy new “bio-engineered” seeds every planting season along with the associated agro-chemicals required to grow them, promising bigger yields that would offset the costs.
When such benefits failed to materialize, many farmers – confronted with an ever-growing debt snowball – were faced with losing their land, leading many to take their lives by drinking the very same agro-chemicals that had helped trap them in debt.
Though it has faded from the headlines, the crisis has continued unabated, with over 12,000 farmers in India still committing suicide every year.
While the crisis in India may seem a distant problem to many Americans, new reports have indicated that the U.S. is developing a farmer-suicide epidemic of its own.
A new report in CBS News notes that farmers in America now die at a rate higher than that of any other occupation and 5 times higher than that of the general population, even as the national suicide rate as a whole has jumped over the last few decades.
As CBS notes, the increase in suicides mirrors a similar phenomenon in the 1980s, when U.S. farmers faced economic hardship related to debt, and suicides spiked.
Jennifer Fahy, communications director with Farm Aid, told CBS at the time that “the farm crisis was so bad, there was a terrible outbreak of suicide and depression.” Fahy now warns that the current situation is “actually worse.”
The newly reported increase in U.S. farmer suicides — much like the crisis for India’s farmers – is related to debt, specifically to global seed and agribusiness corporations that continue to raise prices as farmers’ incomes fall.
Farm income has been dropping steadily since 2013, with the average this year set to be 35% less than it was five years ago.
Meanwhile, farmers have seen a 300 % price increase in recent years on products like seeds, fertilizer and agro-chemicals produced by giant agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Syngenta and others.
Many farmers in the U.S. are dependent on “bio-engineered” seeds and their requisite chemicals, molded by decades of U.S. policy that pushed for farm consolidation and favored the adoption of these products.
As a result, most American farmers have become dependent on these commodities and, because they must be purchased again every planting season, have been taking out loans just to be able to plant. (In order to get subsidies, farmers must cooperate with these agro multinationals?)
As Todd Eney, a fourth-generation farmer in central Montana, told Business Insider last month:
Our farm has been out here since 1935, and I’m 40 years old and I’ve watched a lot of small family farms in our area go under. They can’t compete because they can’t pay the price of input because of what these companies are wanting to charge for input now.”
The growing debt burden has been known for some time, with reports warning five years ago that U.S. farmers would be the next group to “be slammed by debt.”
Yet now — in addition to the massive debt accumulated by many farmers — President Trump’s trade and tariff war, as well as the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates, have compounded to put even more financial pressure on the nation’s farmers.
Bayer-Monsanto merger leaves American farmers fearing worst is yet to come
Activists protest the acquisition of the US agrochemical company Monsanto by the German Bayer in Bonn, Germany, May 25, 2018. Martin Meissner | AP
Unfortunately, the situation for American farmers is soon likely to get much worse, thanks to the merger of agribusiness giants Monsanto and Bayer, which concluded earlier this month.
The resulting mega-company now controls around a third of the U.S. seed and pesticide market and has inspired the other largest agribusinesses in the world to plan mergers, including Dow Chemical and DuPont.
After the merger was announced, many farmers voiced their concerns that it would allow Bayer-Monsanto to consolidate even more of the seed market and use its privileged position to further increase prices.
Beyond an imminent jump in prices for farmers, the merger affects farmers in yet another way, as their products, time and again, have been shown to cause mass die-offs of farmers’ most important pollinator: bees.
Many Bayer and Monsanto products have been found to harm bee populations, even in studies they themselves funded. As a result, over 340 native bee populations are facing extinction and over half of all bees in the U.S. are actively declining.
With the bee population facing unprecedented die-offs, any worsening of their precarious situation will have a major impact on U.S. farms and, by extension, farmers.
With Bayer-Monsanto now the largest seed and agrochemical company in the world, its near monopoly on prices and its disregard for farmers and environmental health mean that the despair that has consumed India’s farmers will soon be planted in the United States.
Top Photo | File – A 70-year-old former farmer at his farm north of Hope, N.D. Ann Arbor Miller | AP
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
Fact check: India wasn’t the first place Sanskrit was recorded – it was Syria
As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.
How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.
Shoaib Daniyal.After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit. The Indian government is enthusiastically participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok.
Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2.
Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs.
How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.
On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited.
Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.
Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren’t Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.
The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit
The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.
Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names include Purusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.
Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).
The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare.
A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word “marya”, meaning “young man”.
The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones).
They signed a treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which names Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis.
While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in the Rig Veda.
This is a striking fact.
As David Anthony points out in his book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, this means that not only did Rigvedic Sanskrit predate the compilation of the Rig Veda in northwestern India but even the “central religious pantheon and moral beliefs enshrined in the Rig Veda existed equally early”.
How did Sanskrit reach Syria before India?
What explains this amazing fact? Were PN Oak and his kooky Hindutva histories right? Was the whole world Hindu once upon a time? Was the Kaaba in Mecca once a Shivling?
Unfortunately, the history behind this is far more prosaic.
The founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European. Its daughter is a language called Proto-Indo-Iranian, so called because it is the origin of the languages of North India and Iran (linguists aren’t that good with catchy language names).
The encyclopedic, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, edited by JP Mallory and DQ Adams, writes of the earliest speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian emerging in the southern Urals and Kazakhstan. These steppe people, representing what is called the Andronovo culture, first appear just before 2000 BC.
From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.
David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east.
These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom. While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion.
However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on.
The group that went east and later on composed the Rig Veda, we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root. So much so that 3,500 years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.
Hindutvaising Sanskrit’s rich history
Unfortunately, while their language, religion and culture is celebrated, the history of the Indo-European people who brought Sanskrit into the subcontinent is sought to be erased at the altar of cultural nationalism.
Popular national myths in India urgently paint Sanskrit as completely indigenous to India. This is critical given how the dominant Hindutva ideology treats geographical indigenousness as a prerequisite for nationality. If Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism, has a history that predates its arrival in India, that really does pull the rug from out under the feet of Hindutva.
Ironically, twin country Pakistan’s national myths go in the exact opposite direction: their of-kilter Islamists attempt to make foreign Arabs into founding fathers and completely deny their subcontinental roots.
Both national myths, whether Arab or Sanskrit, attempt to imagine a pure, pristine origin culture uncontaminated by unsavoury influences. Unfortunately the real world is very often messier than myth.
Pakistanis are not Arabs and, as the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture rather bluntly puts it: “This theory [that Sanskrit and its ancestor Proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India], which resurrects some of the earliest speculations on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, has not a shred of supporting evidence, either linguistic or archeological”.
Assaad Zakka shared a link. ·
As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.
SCROLL.IN
Note: It is my conjecture that 12,000 years ago, most of the current land were under water and that countries with high plateau witnessed the first new human resurgence before it transferred to lower fertile lands.
Tags: adonis49, Andronovo culture, Hurrian, India, Mitanni, Narendra Modi, Rig Veda, Sanskrit, Shoaib Daniyal
Toda tribe in India southern Nilgiri plateau
On the secluded Nilgiri plateau in the hill country of Southern India, there is small pastoral tribal community known as the Toda.
They reside in small Toda Huts, also referred to as “Toda Hamlets.”
These structures, set at a distance of around 5.6 km from the mainland of Ooty, are an original representation of a Toda community still in existence.
Until the 18th Century, before the British colonization of India, the Toda peoples coexisted locally with other communities, including the Kuruba and the Kota, in a loose caste-like society, in which the Toda were on top.
The Toda population has drastically (dangerously?) hovered in the range between 700 and 9oo during the 20th Century.
Even though the tribal community is an irrelevant fraction of the massive population of India, since the late 18th Century ” they have attracted “a most disproportionate amount of attention because of their ethnological aberrancy” and “their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs.”
Buffalo is the sacred animal and an instrumental element of Toda Religion. Toda faced a lot of changes in their lifestyle and culture as a result of forced interaction with other peoples with technology.
Toda used to be pastoral people, while now are increasingly venturing into agriculture. Even though the vast majority of Toda tribe are meat eaters now, they used to be strict vegetarians.
The study of Toda culture by linguists and anthropologists proved very important in developing the fields of ethnomusicology and social anthropology.
By the end of the 20th century, some Toda pasture land was overtaken by outsiders who used it for agriculture.
This has endangered Toda society and their culture, as vast buffalo herds have been diminished.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, Toda culture has been the primary focus of an international effort at culturally sensitive environmental restoration.
Repeat gang rape: Do Indian Women Need a Political Party?
Another gang rape in India, much less in the medias: Customs taking over women rights, child slavery, untouchable lowest class…
Is India really essentially a village? And because it is a village it is a woman’s ancient foe? The most ardent fan of the Indian village was Mohandas K. Gandhi, who said, probably with joy, “The soul of India lives in its villages.”
A few Indians would venture to claim that even the country’s apparent cities are overwhelmed by deep and enduring infestations of rural tradition and the fellowships of the conservatives who hold women in low esteem.
The Parliament and legislative assemblies are largely confederations of village headmen.
Do Indian Women Need a Political Party and are Indians ready to welcome it? Kind of Village-style association?
“This is pretty much as badass as imaginable–“The Gulabi gang (from Hindi gulabi, “pink”, transln. “pink gang”) is a group of women vigilantes and activists originally from Banda in Bundelkhand district, Uttar Pradesh, India, but reported to be active across North India as of 2010. It is named after the pink saris worn by its members.The gang was founded in 2006 by Sampat Pal Devi, a mother of five and former government health worker (and a former child bride), as a response to widespread domestic abuse and other violence against women.
Gulabis visit abusive husbands and beat them up with laathis (bamboo sticks) unless they stop abusing their wives.
In 2008, they stormed an electricity office in Banda district and forced officials to turn back the power they had cut in order to extract bribes.
They have also stopped child marriages and protested dowry and female illiteracy.”
MANU JOSEPH Published in NYT on Jan. 2, 2013 under “City Setting, but Village Mentalities”
“The village in India is at the heart of most of India’s social problems. The most factual analysis of the Indian village was from a man who could not stand Gandhi, the writer, B.R. Ambedkar.
B.R. Ambedkar is the primary author of the Indian Constitution and arguably the nation’s most underrated writer, and he who wrote more than 60 years ago, “The love of the intellectual Indian for the village community is of course infinite, if not pathetic. … What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?”
His view holds even today.
The Indian village is the most formidable preserve of caste hierarchies, and at the very bottom of its many social rungs is the woman. The city, for its part, attempts to dissolve everything that the village holds dear, especially its hierarchies, its “narrow mindedness” and its close scrutiny of women. All of India’s struggles for modernity have been about this — the battle of the idea of the city against the idea of the village.
The latest uprising in India is a part of this tired war, even though at first glance it appears to be a society’s outrage at the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi.
On the night of Dec. 16, a 23-year-old student was raped and brutalized for nearly an hour in a moving bus in Delhi by six drunken men, and thrown out of the vehicle. She battled for her life for nearly two weeks before succumbing to complications arising from severe injuries. India reacted to the rape and eventually to her death in a profound way.
How it reacted became an accidental survey of the many psychological states of urban India, which included, inexorably, the city’s contempt for the village.
What happened to this young woman could have happened anywhere in the world, and such crimes have indeed occurred even in some of the most affluent nations. But nowhere else in the world did such an event set off an urban middle-class movement across several cities against the government. The protesters slammed the government for its failure to make Delhi and other Indian cities safe for women.
But, largely, the demonstrations were a lament of the city against a nation that has, going by the statements of politicians and policemen in the past, blamed attacks on women on the women’s own modernity.
The placards, which were mostly in English, of the women who marched in Delhi in protest, carried statements like these: “Just because I show my legs, it does not mean I will spread them for you,” “Don’t tell me how to dress, tell them not to rape,” and “My body, my right. My city, my right.”
In numerous television chat shows and articles, women accused the very core of India for their daily humiliations. The phrase “feudal structure” was used several times to describe a rural Indian society where men perceive rape as a way of showing a woman her place and how such men carry that perception with them when they migrate to the cities.
If the idea of a city, as evident in the world’s greatest cities, is the very opposite of the reality of an Indian village, if a city is supposed to be a liberal, broad-minded place that is a young woman’s best friend, then does India truly have even a single city?
Mumbai alone appears to come close, but it is today a decaying city run by rustics. Politicians and policemen whose morality seems chiefly to concern the sexual and drinking habits of unmarried women express their alarm now and then. In Mumbai’s bars, under an old law that until the past year was largely unenforced, you actually need a permit to consume alcohol.
And a portion of the city’s beautiful southern tip by the Arabian Sea has become an almost exclusive peninsula for fundamentalist vegetarians who have somehow ensured that it is hard for anyone to find meat or even eggs in their neighborhood.
Eight years ago, the hotelier Sanjay Narang told me that when he defied them and opened a nonvegetarian restaurant in the area, in the ground floor of a residential building, angry residents of the building stood in their balconies and spat on the patrons. He soon had to shut down.
As for the city’s reputation as being safe for women, according to several of its women, this is an exaggeration, or at best a relative virtue.
Why does India not have real cities? Because cities require a critical mass of liberal people, or at least its elite, to be somewhat independent — free of their cultural, familial and communal roots, whereas it is the nature of the average Indian to be dependent on a network of his own kind, to deepen his roots and marinate in too many value judgments about other people.
Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 3, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.
India systematic raping customs? The Final Straw?
What’s her name? I see a picture of her. Many demonstrations AND outraged condemnations, but no name. Why? A taboo?
Is this raped girl must die incognito in order to preserve whose dignity, whose safety?
She was 23
Her fault she boarded the wrong bus
And SHE WAS A GIRL
Six men raped her, indian file, and used an iron rod to tear her vagina-
Small intestine and large intestine came out
They left her to die on the road
Naked!
Wounded!
Exposed!
Devastated
What’s more is that no one even turned to look at her
No one even bothered to throw a shawl on the ill-clad
ill-fated girl
She can never live a normal married life again
She Went into coma five times since 16th December
She was unconscious
Critical and hasn’t been able to stop crying
But don’t worry
She wasn’t your sister
She wasn’t your daughter
But she could be.
The brutality has to stop right here guys
These people deserve serious punishment for their cruel,
Perverted act
She died yesterday Saturday 29th
December 2012
Rest in Peace♥
Raping doesn’t only happen in India..
But in every country around the world..
Is this how we treat our women?
It Makes me ashamed to even live on this planet today
If her death Touches u and you are against RAPE
“Write RIP”
If u Support RAPE
“IGNORE”
Emma Ruby-Sachs – of Avaaz.org wrote:
 A Join massive protests in India, and call on the government to strengthen laws and launch a major public education campaign to challenge and shame the grotesque attitudes that led to this violence:
 |
She was a physical therapy student who boarded a bus in Delhi last month. Six men locked the door, and savagely raped her for hours, including with a metal rod.
The ringleader of the woman’s rapists coldly says she deserved itbecause she dared to stand up to him.
They dumped her naked in the street, and after bravely fighting for her life, she died last weekend.
Across India, people are responding in massive protests to say enough is enough.
In India a woman is raped every 22 minutes, and few see justice.
Globally, a staggering 7 in 10 women will be physically or sexually abused in their lifetime.
This horror in Delhi is the last straw — it’s 2013, and the brutal, venal, global war on women must stop. We can start by drawing the line in India.
The government is accepting public comments for the next 24 hours.
We urgently need both stronger law enforcement and a massive public education program to change the grotesque but common male attitudes that permit violence against women.
If 1 million of us join the call for action, we can help make this young woman’s horror the last straw, and the beginning of a new hope:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/end_indias_war_on_women/?bFAfecb&v=20715
Blaming the victim and other outrageous attitudes are found across society, including in the police system who continually fail to investigate rape.
Such views repress women and corrupt men everywhere.
Massively funded public education campaigns have radically shifted social behaviour on drunk driving and smoking, and can impact the treatment of women.
Tackling the root causes of India’s rape epidemic is vital, alongside better laws and faster legal processes.
Advertising in India is relatively cheap, so a significant funding commitment could blanket airwaves in multiple media markets for a sustained period of time.
The ads should target male subcultures where conservative misogyny thrives, directly challenging and shaming those attitudes, ideally using messengers like popular sports figures that carry authority with the audience.
We have just 1 day to influence the official Commission set up to find ways to crack down on India’s wave of sexual violence. If we can show real success in shifting attitudes in India, the model can be applied to other countries.
The money spent will more than pay for itself by reducing poverty and promoting development, since treatment and empowerment of women has been identified as one of the greatest single drivers of social and economic progress. Click to send a message directly to the Indian government:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/end_indias_war_on_women/?bFAfecb&v=20715
From opposing the stoning of women in Iran, to supporting the reproductive rights of women in Morocco, Uzbekistan and Honduras, to lobbying for real action to counter the growing ‘rape trade’ in trafficked women and girls, our community has been on the front lines of the fight to end the war on women. This new year begins with new resolve in India.
With hope and determination,
Emma, Ricken, Luis, Meredith, Iain, Ian, Marie, Michelle, Alaphia, Allison and the rest of the Avaaz team
Read MORE
India gang-rape: Five suspects charged in Delhi (BBC)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20896031
Verma committee flooded with suggestions on rape (News One India)
http://news.oneindia.in/2012/12/26/verma-committee-flooded-with-suggestions-on-rape-1120658.html
India’s ‘rape culture’ can be changed: women authors (Hindustan Times)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Books/Chunk-HT-UI-BooksSectionPage-LiteraryBuzz/India-s-rape-culture-can-be-changed-Women-authors/Article1-984318.aspx
Activists woe low conviction rate, long trials (Times of India)
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Activists-woe-low-conviction-rate-long-trials/articleshow/17657522.cms
Delhi Gang-Rape Underscores Rising Sexual Violence Against Indian Women (IB Times)
http://www.ibtimes.com/delhi-gang-rape-underscores-rising-sexual-violence-against-indian-women-944030
Rise in rapes across India (ZeeNews)
http://zeenews.india.com/news/nation/rapes-in-india-rise-by-873-percent-from-1953_817894.html
70% of women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime (UN report)
http://www.un.org/en/women/endviolence/pdf/apromiseisapromise.pdf
Adonis Diaries 
