Thankyou so much for your intelligent posts Bronwyn, and for exposing once again Agronomist's deception on Indian farmer suicide rates.

Agronomist has said twice now re the L tryptophan disaster, the GM food supplement that killed 100 people and caused the disability of 5,000-10,000 more .(I mistakenly under stated the number of victims in an earlier post), that
it was not because of the genetic modifications, but the filtering . However the filter change Agronomist blames occurred in January 1989, years after the EMS epidemic started. It was only due to a series of coincidences that doctors realized that this new disease was contracted only by those who had taken Showa Denko brand GM LTryptophan. The suspect toxins were present at less than 0.1% of the final product.
The GM debate is built on deception, as we have seen all through this thread.Its all on record.

Yes Bronwyn, I actually agree with those Indian farmers.

GM crops should be much cheaper and more freely available to poorer farmers.

It is heartbreaking to think of those poor Indian children, because workers in BT cotton fields are suffering from itchyness and allergies, upper respitory tract problems etc. In the Phillipines BT Corn is grown right alongside villages. The people have to leave their homes to get away from the field at tasselling time. The Pollen smells like pesticide and people are getting sick. They move away for a week, recover and return, only to fall ill again.

Rob, Please spare us the jingles from Monsantos captivating marketing speils..."IMAGINE" "imAGgine"....What a wonderful world playing in the background.Imagine a poor farmer in Africa getting twice the yield with no rain blah blah blha. Imagine if our children suffer autism ( under developed brains) and infertility like the rats do...

I will leave this forum with this.

http://www.agbios.com/main.php?action=ShowNewsItem&id=10336

Cheers Folks

Bronwyn, so you have taken a monthly estimate for farmer suicides across India, multiplied it by 12 and applied it just to the state of Maharashtra? Glad to see that cleared up. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture does not in fact collect statistics on farmer suicides, that is done by the National Crime Records Bureau. They haven’t provided figures for 2008, because 2008 has just finished. I linked to their 2007 figures (published in December 2008) and these showed farmer suicides declining slightly.

It was not my suggestion that the link of farmer suicides to BT cotton is a hoax. That suggestion was made to me by people working in agriculture in India. Vandana Shiva is not an agriculturalist and has no expertise in agriculture. She is a professional activist.

Governments not infrequently make comments about costs of various products as a way of gaining popularity. I understand that your Government has created campaigns against gas suppliers and supermarkets in recent years. Farmers everywhere would like to reduce the costs of inputs. If farmers think BT cotton seed is too expensive, they can decide not to buy it and grow non-GM instead.

Farmer suicides in India is indeed a tragic situation, but the root cause is indebtedness, not GM crops http://pulitzercenter.org/openitem.cfm?id=834 . The only major economic failure of GM crops was in the drought of 2003/4 in Andhra Pradesh. Both GM and non-GM suffered, but the higher cost of GM seed meant farmers were further out of pocket. In all other years and situations, BT cotton has performed as well or much better economically than has non-GM. The average cotton farmer profit has more than doubled across India from growing BT cotton. http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c.php?leftnm=10&autono=290672

Merri bee, Read the CDC and FDA reports on L-tryptophan http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/ds-tryp1.html, http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/tp5htp.html, http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/NEW00064.html, http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/ds-ltr3.html . Showa Denko’s GM L-tryptophan was first marketed in the US in late 1988 http://www.psrast.org/jftrypt.htm , so if there was an EMS epidemic years before this, GM L-tryptophan could not be to blame.

Agronomist

I see the critics of GM crop technology have now gone full circle back to the original alleged evil GM fear story (L-tryptophan story). Though the smelly tassles is one for the quotes book to be sure. If that were true then there must be mass exidus from all organic fields that use Bt bacteria. The allergies myth continues, Big business is evil, etc, etc, etc.

ciao for now

Rob