Date:01/10/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/10/01/stories/2007100155430700.htm

Andhra Pradesh

Meet at Georgia Tech on October 2 on Indian farmers’ suicides

A. Saye Sekhar

HYDERABAD: Farmers’ suicides in India are evoking a worldwide reaction. Association for India’s Development (AID), Atlanta chapter, is screening ‘The Dying Fields’, a documentary on cotton farmers dying in Maharastra, followed by discussion and a candle light vigil on Gandhi Jayanthi (October 2).

Linn Cohen-Cole, an American writer, who is coordinating the programme, posted her e-mail invitation to listed members of the South Asian Journalists Association urging them to participate and also bring friends along to join the event. It would be held in the Georgia Tech University campus, Atlanta. Ms. Cohen-Cole said in her email that 100,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in the last decade. Giving a background of the agrarian crisis, she said Gandhiji had proposed sufficiency at a small-scale level, thus promoting sustainable means of livelihood and sustainable farming. “But successive Indian Governments chose not to follow his wise footsteps but instead, in the 1990s, to sign onto IMF agreements favouring multinational corporations, which brought ‘industrial farming’ at the large-scale level to India …,” she lamented.