This is the story of Anan, a peasant farmer in southern India, growing cotton, who is being poisoned by the pesticides he uses, and slowly crushed by a spiralling mountain of debt.
It seems to me to be an immediate, tragic example of the way our entire civilization is destroying itself. Hat tip to GreenTalk for bringing this video to my attention.
One mantra that I gained from the GreenMBA program was that when thinking about a system the structure leads to behaviors which lead to effects. So where you see effects then look back to the structure of the system itself to see how to make deep, holistic improvements to change the outcome.
So looking at the set of behaviors that lead to such tragedy, then our attention turns to our economic system. It is structured to reward behavior that places money above people. Part of it’s DNA is a belief that financial transactions are the only thing of importance in the field of human interaction. Everything else is squishy.
How can we change this?
From a system that puts money before people, to one that puts people before money?
Why is Anan liable for his debts if his crop fails? Should not that risk be shared throughout the entire system rather than falling on the poorest of society? How is it possible for chemicals that we know are toxic to be allowed to enter into the ecosystem to harm not just these individuals, but the larger communities of which they are part? What crops can we grow instead of cotton to meet our needs? Hemp is, I think, one of the answers.
- Cotton uses more than twenty-five percent of all the insecticides in the world and 12% of all the pesticides. Cotton growers use 25% of all the pesticides used in the US. Yet cotton is farmed on only 3% of the world¹s farmland.
- The California EPA reported that only 15 chemicals accounted for 77% of the pesticides used on cotton from 1989 to 1998 and that these were some of the most toxic chemicals in the world. Cal EPA and US EPA analyses illustrate that seven of these fifteen most used cotton chemicals were probable cancer-causing pesticides, eight caused tumors and five caused mutations. Twelve of the top fifteen cotton pesticides in California caused birth defects, ten caused multiple birth defects, and thirteen were toxic or very toxic to fish or birds or both.
- More than 11 million of bales (480lbs. per bale) of US cotton per year were dumped on the world market from 1995 to 2003 at rock bottom prices. The price of cotton dropped to 48 cents in 1997 and bottomed out at 28 cents in 2000. Until 2003 the price continued to sell in the 48 cent range. At 48 cents a pound, cotton was being sold at about 30 cents less than the average cost to grow it and 40 cents less than the average of what US farmers received for it at the cotton gin.
- In India, low prices for cotton and high prices for chemicals have caused tens of thousands of farmers to go bankrupt. As a result, there have been more than 20,000 cotton farmer suicides since 1995. Additional thousands of Indian farmers sold their kidneys into the world organ market to pay their pesticide and fertilizer bill to Monsanto, Cargill or multinational banks.
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