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Old 15-08-2011, 08:55 AM posted to rec.gardens
Billy[_10_] Billy[_10_] is offline
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Default Can You Apply Lawn Fertilizer and Grub Control At The Same Time??

In article ,
Bert Hyman wrote:

In
Higgs Boson wrote:

This city actually pays half (I think) the cost of conversion,


Which of course means that you're paying for it plus the costs of
adminstering the program.


TROPIC OF CHAOS: Climate change and the New Geography of Violence
http://www.amazon.com/Tropic-Chaos-C...nce/dp/1568586
000/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1313390844&sr=1-1

142 TROPIC OF CHAOS

Neoliberalism and Death by Cotton

The farmers in Telangana all grow genetically modified Bacillus
thuringiensis (Bt) cotton, a product of the agricultural giant
Monsanto.The new cotton became available a few years back. Although
advertised as not needing pesticides, it does. At first it boosted
output and incomes, but after a few years, incomes fell and the new
cotton became a curse. Its roots penetrate deep into the soil, sucking
up all the nutrients. Before long the farmers need large amounts of
artificial fertilizer‹and that means taking loans. Scholars call this
the "vicious cycle of chemical agriculture."

"We know that after three or four years, the land will be dead," said
Linga Reddy Sama, whose family are Hindu migrants rather than of the
local tribal Gond people. The farmers in these villages know they are
mining the soil, extracting and exporting its nutrition in the form of
cheap cotton. While their crops decline, their debts increase. And in
the worst of cases, farmers are killing themselves. This is the
catastrophic convergence at the local scale, at the scale of specific
crops and actual families.




INDIA'S DROUGHT REBELS 143

Had anyone committed suicide in Jaamni? Yes, a man named Anjanna, who
was about forty-five years old and had killed himself the previous year
by drinking pesticide. "He killed himself to escape his debts," said one
of the farmers. "Now his wife and grown son are in Maharashtra State
working as farm laborers."

The problem, again, comes back to water. In recent years, irrigation has
suffered under a wave of neoliberal disinvestment. The state has removed
important subsidies from small farmers; as result, thousands of them
have killed themselves.

The process went like this; Starting in 1991 the Indian government
began a process of economic liberalization. Efficiency became the
watch-word; the state cut power subsidies to farmers. With that, running
pumps for wells and irrigation became more expensive. To cope, farmers
started taking loans from local banks or usurious moneylenders.29 The
neoliberal withdrawal of developmentalist policies meant that local
irrigation systems fell into dilapidation. With bad irrigation works
soon the norm, farmers turned to drilling privately-funded wells and
taking groundwater. This was typically done on an ad hoc and individual
or village-by-village basis, with little planning or proper water
management. As a result, the aquifers soon fell into decline. These
private coping strategies require private capital. To drill wells,
farmers had to borrow from local moneylenders‹often at exorbitant rates.
Now, when crops fail or wells run dry, which is becoming more common due
to climate change, farmers cannot repay their debts.

By the late 1990s, many farmers had run out of options‹they were too far
in arrears to borrow more, too broke to produce crops. For thousands,
the only escape from this debt trap came in the form of suicide‹often by
swallowing pesticides. According to data from the National Crime Records
Bureau, 150,000 Indian farmers killed themselves between 1997 and 2005.
But as Anuradha Mittal reports, "Farmers' organizations believe the
number of suicides to be even greater."30 In Andhra Pradesh, an
estimated 2,000 to 3,000 farmers killed themselves between 1998 and
2004. As one creditor told the New York Times, "Many moneylenders have
made a whole lot of money. . . . Farmers, many of them, are ruined."31



144 TROPIC OF CHAOS

When the links between drought, irrigation, debt, and suicide were
becoming clear a dozen years ago, the Political and Economic Weekly
investigated. "A study of 50 deceased farmers in Warangal District [near
Adilabad] shows that well [water] is the largest source of irrigation
forabout three-fourths of the farmers. Only about one-third of the wells
were dug under the subsidy schemes of the government. In the rest of the
cases farmers themselves have borne the expenses for digging of wells.
Besides this the depletion of groundwater in recent years has
necessitated deepening of wells and laying of in-well bores."

The cost of such a well in the late 1990s averaged between $1,400 and
$3,000.32 As a World Bank study on drought and climate change in Andhra
Pradesh found, that means debt. The Bank noted, "Household responses to
drought have been largely reactive and do little to build longterm
drought resilience. Credit remains the most common coping response to
drought." In fact, 68 percent of households in the study took loans due
to drought, with large landholders borrowing "from formal sources (such
as banks), while the landless and small farmers borrow from moneylenders
at inflated interest rates."33 Not only are the rates usurious, but
these more informal contracts rely on brutal and humiliating enforcement
mechanisms.
---

The point is that we are better off if we coordinate our efforts in
water use.

--
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYIC0eZYEtI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug