Higgs Boson wrote:
On Aug 14, 11:55 pm, Billy wrote:
In article ,
Bert Hyman wrote:


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


Billy has nailed it, as he often does.

The exploitation of indigenous peoples by international corporations
has been going on for nearly a century.

This game has been played for many centuries and was a key part of European
colonisation of the other continents. In the early days of colonialism
they were more direct, the corporation would steal the land and/or enslave
the locals, as overt slavery became less popular the approach was to get the
indigenes to work the land and to become consumers of the products of
European factories.

The local chiefs, rajahs and feudal lords got their cut for allowing this
and in some cases participated directly by supplying forced labour. For a
good example of the massive scale that this was done long before the phrase
multinational corporation was coined see the East India Company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Company

In the colonial era European governments openly supported the exploiters
with royal and parliamentary authority and would supply muscle and guns if
the Company troops needed help subduing any local potentate who didn't want
to play. Nearly everybody considered this A Good Thing and the proper role
for whites who were after all superior. The modern version is slightly more
subtle.

David