good point by alex. maybe those indian farmers brought the financial ruin upon themselves by being too greedy? if you're greedy, you might encounter snake oil salesmen at some point. takes 2 to tango?

Interesting topic to be sure, but I missed the Yunnan/Kunming connection.

Minor one, since Yunnan is a big agricultural province, but the OP didn't started this about Yunnan. More as anti-GMO health and safety thread. But I'm ok with non Yunnan threads, some are interesting and civil.

@Magnifico. Uttar Pradesh is a poster child for down and out farmers drinking pesticide once over they're in over their head in debt. Snake oil sellers taking advantage of uneducated farmers for sure. Greed by the farmers possibly; many times its desperation and poverty. Not sure two to tango is a fair comparison. The snake oil seller is just a scammer the end of the day. The farmer gullible, but not the bad guy. There's also a third party. Mother Nature. Sometimes she sees fit to give Indian farmers three years of drought.

i don't know much about farming, but your comments are probably not that far from the truth.

without farmers, we'd all be dead, right? the rich would eat their money. yet rock stars get all the glory. we really need to look after the farmers out there who are breaking their backs to keep us alive. maybe we need a system that supports farmers in case of droughts so they're never in a position of desperation.

well, ideally govts should be doing it, but govts are in bed with big businesses.

it seems like in Bhutan, the govt is behind the individual farmers.

there was Farm Aid many years ago raising money in the US. there's an NGO called Cows for Cambodia that I came across. they get financing to buy cows to help farmers. but again, with NGOs you never know if they have ulterior motives.

and maybe people should start investing in farms with the intention not only of making profits but actually helping the farmers. rather than putting money in stupid mutual funds where you barely know what companies you're supporting.

@Alex

I suggest you actually do some research on how Monsanto strong armed Indian farmers with Bt cotton before making those claims. Having seen it on the front lines, you would be surprised just how determined they can be. A whole area of Maharashtra became known as the "suicide belt" due to the pressures directly applied by Monsanto. It was truly shocking, yet strangely not surprising. I was working with people who would try to help Indian farmers with training and development, often they would come to work in tears hearing another one of their farmer friends had committed suicide due to huge debt. The cause was almost always linked to Monsanto induced debt.

What do you do if you have land, need to plant crops and when attempting to procure seeds are told the only seeds available are Monsanto's. But don't worry, they are higher yield (lies), require less water (lies) and repel pests (only if you put twice as much Round up on them as you would normally... Oh that Round up is made by Monsanto too). And all this for the special bargain of only twice what you paid for last years seed! And if you are somehow able to get hold of other seed, you can't sell it here as our cotton mill is sponsored by... Monsanto. And we don't accept non Monsanto cotton sorry.

@blobbles. point taken, you were there. Like I said, I'm all for Monsanto bashing. But Dazzer had a point, hating Monsanto should not equate to hating GMO. But I did read your posts, so you're still open to debate on that.

www.truth-out.org/[...]

Twelve Ways to Rid the Planet of GMOs and Monsanto's Roundup

It is now blatantly obvious that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are nothing more than patented Pesticide Delivery Systems (PDS) designed to increase sales of poisonous agrochemicals such as Roundup...

To claim that GMOs are perfectly safe is equivalent to saying that pesticides, herbicides and fungicides—systemically laced at ever-higher levels into GMO-tainted human food and animal feed—are perfectly safe.

In other words, just about every non-organic item in your supermarket, or every item on your restaurant menu (bread, potatoes, meat, milk) is now tainted with Roundup.

www.theautomaticearth.com/[...]
Hungary Throws Out Monsanto

21stcenturywire.com/[...]
indiginous mayans refer to monsanto GMO soy beans as suicide beans.

I'm not necessarily buying everything about Orban, but kudos to him for taking on Monsanto and its powerful partner, the US government.
Scroll down on the site Magnifico has provided and you can read about an Occupy Monsanto' event - best wishes for that one.

@Magnifico
Great post. I think that they are trying to hide the truth. Mask it so that we don't know what's going on until it's too late to do anything about it. It's in the soil, water and air.