I have no interest in watching sport but I love it because sports means drug cheats and drug cheats means better synthetic chemistry and that means better analytical chemistry to spot the cheats and that means better synthetic chemistry to avoid the new analytical techniques and so on forever. At some point some muscle-bound nobody wins a gold medal but the real winner at the end of the day is chemistry (yay chemistry!).

Arms races - military, agricultural, chemical, whatever - may or may not be good for the particular parties involved but they are ALWAYS good for science and improvements in the enabling sciences are ALWAYS good for the masses.

>>Tell me how can these peasant farmers afford to pay through the nose for new seeds each season?<<

I doubt they can. A clever man will find alternate means to get what he needs even if they aren't strictly legal.

>>Tell me what happens when farming is converted to monoculture and peasants go into debt for buy all the paraphernalia (fertiliser, pesticides and seed) needed to farm this way?<<

They owe somebody a debt. They can either repay it or default. Either choice has consequences; it's just a matter of which consequences they wish to experience.

>>Tell me how it is that over 200,000 peasant farmers have committed suicide in India because of debt racked up this way to Western corporations.<<

TBC

Tell me the context: what sort of sample space are we examining? 200,000 peasant farmers dead out of how many peasant farmers over all? How easy is it to assign causation in the case of suicide? How many of those peasant farmers were undiagnosed/improperly diagnosed schizophrenics? Schizophrenics kill themselves at a tragic and staggering rate. Other mental health victims such as those with major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder are also over-represented in suicide statistics. How many of your peasant farmers were fully compos mentis when they topped themselves and acting in a reasonable response to unreasonable mental pressures, and how many were just mentally ill and not picked up by India's non-existent mental health programs for peasant farmers?

>>Their favoured method is to drink the pesticides which have poisoned their soil and groundwater.<<

Americans prefer to shoot themselves. For some reason Australians prefer strangulation. When I was in my scary place I thought exsanguination would be the way to go... people who want to kill themselves are generally more concerned with the result than the method and will choose what seems expedient and accessible. If you're American it is often a gun. I understand the circulatory system and had access to sharp knives, while most people understand the respiratory system and have access to ceiling fans. Suicides aren't trying to make a political statement: they just want to kill themselves and organochlorine (or whatever) poisoning will achieve that quite efficiently.

>>Tell me what happens when much ancient knowledge of local bio-diversity is loss to a monoculture system and to the peasants themselves?<<

'Ancient knowledge' (read: superstition, half-baked beliefs and old wives tales) is replaced with verifiable scientific knowledge. Not sure why this is a bad thing. If there is any grain of truth in the ancient knowledge it will be picked up by the scientific method, and the superstitions and false beliefs will fall by the wayside. Where's the problem?

Cheers,

Tony

Tony Lavis,

You've spent quite a bit of time above shrugging your shoulders at the problems now facing peasant farmers and their land.

Yes, I'm sure those suicides must have come from every other cause except being drawn into a situation where the farmer has to go into debt to buy water pumps, machinery, fertilizer, pesticide and seed - all an ongoing expense which traditional farming practices didn't require.

Ancient knowledge was knowledge of local plant species and knowledge of the cycle of life which brings forth the harvest. Apparently, the way you put it, thousands of years of Indian agriculture was all due to superstition and old wives tales.....if it's not done on industrial scale, then it's not worth anything, eh?

My point being that these are "peasant" farmers in a developing country who over the years have been encouraged by the powers that be to pay through the nose for Western products to farm their land.

There is now a big movement to save and revive traditional knowledge and seed sharing - to share them - to farm organically as they did for thousands of years, because the land can't take too much more.

Tony Lavis, you obviously have little idea of the problems facing India's peasant farmers , or the state of the land and groundwater reserves - and nor are you interested, except for taking a shallow swipe which doesn't do much more than show how ignorant you are on the subject in general.

America has just suspended trade privileges until Bangladeshi working conditions improve: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23086366

While the US is not a shining light on worker conditions, this move might encourage others to follow to stamp out the exploitation of workers in the Third World.

It is too easy and unfair just to blame those countries where exploitation takes place, it is the primarily Western and Chinese businesses that place undue pressure on these industries to furnish them with cheap products. Cheap to the buyer not to the consumer necessarily, especially now with some 'designer' labels now using these factories.

The trouble with the open slather Free Trade Agreements is failure to address issues around treatment of workers. Even private agreements between various business groups that include stipulations are usually ignored. When audits take place the foreigners are presented with a sanitised version and do not get to see the 'shadow factories' in the hinterland as was revealed in the case of China a couple of years ago