Science & Public Interest Halt the Push for GM Crops in India: Approval by Contamination?
Colin Todhunter
Between 1991 and 2016, the population of Delhi and its suburbs increased from 9.4 million to 25 million. In 2023, the World Population Review website estimates Delhi’s population to be 32.9 million.
In the December 2016 paper Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems.
Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. The paper states that this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.
Africa and Asia will together bear 80% of the projected cropland loss due to rising urbanisation. The disappearance of this productive land will impact staple crops such as maize, rice, soya beans and wheat, which are cornerstones of global food security.
In South Asia, farmland can’t simply spread elsewhere because fertile land is already running out.
One of the paper’s authors, Felix Creutzig (currently, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the Technical University of Berlin), said at the time that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers will be displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.
However, what Creutzig says is not inevitable. Far from it. Urbanisation is being encouraged and facilitated by design.
According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the early 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture: India was to embark on a massive rural depopulation/urbanisation project.
In addition, in return for up to more than $120 billion (accounting for inflation, this would be $269 billion in 2023) in loans, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions, facilitate the entry of global players and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE). In effect, it constitutes a massive urbanisation project and the opening of India’s agriculture sector to foreign agribusiness corporations.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Felix Creutzig predicted the following:
As peri-urban land is converted, smallholders will lose their land. The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.”
The RUPE says that the opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses has been a longstanding project of the imperialist countries.
Industrial-scale agriculture is key to the plan. And integral to this model of farming is genetically engineered food crops – whether first generation genetically modified (GM) crops based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or newer techniques involving the likes of gene editing.
Glyphosate/GM crop approval
According to a recent report in the Chennai-based New Indian Express (NIE), the Indian government is likely to allow the cultivation of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops. These crops have not been legalised but have been growing in India for some years.
The government is creating a pool of more than 4,000 ‘progressive farmers’ and ‘rural educated youths’ who can help farmers spray glyphosate on GM crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. These pest control officers are to spray glyphosate on behalf of farmers.
Glyphosate is carcinogenic and, in India, its use is officially restricted to tea crops and non-cropping areas like barren land and roadsides. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.
The NIE quotes a source who implies that the drive to spray glyphosate on agricultural land seems like a precursor of legalising HT GM cotton (I would add – and HT GM food crops eventually).
At this time, only one GM crop – Bt (insecticidal) cotton – is legalised in India.
The legalisation of HT GM cotton would be a key step towards opening a multi-billion-dollar market for global agritech-agrochemicals firms which have a range of HT GM food crops waiting in the pipeline.
Much has been written on the devastating effects that glyphosate has on health and the environment. Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH)s formulas affect the gut microbiome and are associated with a global metabolic health crisis. They also cause epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.
These toxic chemicals have entered the food chain and human bodies at harmful levels and are even in a range of popular children’s cereals.
An April 2023 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA and a cancer biomarker.
The study findings appeared after the US Centers for Disease Control reported in 2022 that more than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults contained glyphosate. Similar figures are found in the EU. GBHs are the world’s most widely used agricultural weedkiller.
There are dozens of academic studies that indicate the deleterious and disturbing effects of GBHs on human health. Rather than presenting them here, for the sake of brevity, many are listed in the online article Bathed In Pesticides: The Narrative Of Deception (2022).
Attorney (and current presidential candidate) Robert F Kennedy Jr has been involved with some of the ongoing court cases in the US that have been brought against Bayer regarding the human health damage of Monsanto’s Roundup GBH (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018).
Kennedy concludes that there is cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.
He adds that strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.
Researchers peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children. It is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body and disrupts the microbiome, destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects.
So, why do GBHs remain on the market? It’s because of the power of the agritech/agrochemical sector and the don’t look, don’t see approach of compromised regulatory bodies: see Glyphosate: EU assessment report excludes most of the scientific literature from its analysis (2021) by GMWatch and Glyphosate in the EU: product promoters masquerading as regulators in a ‘cesspool of corruption’? (2016) in The Ecologist.
Consider what veteran journalist Carey Gillam says:
US Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Internal Monsanto documents dating back decades show that the company was aware of scientific research linking its weed killer to cancer but instead of warning consumers, the company worked to suppress the information and manipulate scientific literature.”
Over the years, Monsanto mounted a deceitful defence of its health- and environment-damaging Roundup and its GM crops and orchestrated toxic smear campaigns against anyone – scientist or campaigner – who threatened its interests.
In 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote an open letter to European Chemicals Agency Executive Director Geert Dancet. It can be accessed on the academia.edu site.
In it, she sets out how current EU legislation was originally set up to protect the pesticides industry and how Monsanto and other agrochemical corporations helped the EU design the regulatory systems for their own products.
There is much at stake for the industry. According to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports, herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value. Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil and Argentina.
GBHs are a multi-billion-dollar money-spinning venture for the manufacturers. But this latest development in India is as much about the legalisation of a wide range of proprietary HT GM seeds and crops as it is about glyphosate because both are joined at the hip.
Regulatory delinquency
In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the Jairam Ramesh Report (2010); the Sopory Committee Report (2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report (2012); the Technical Expert Committee Final Report (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017).
Given the health and environmental issues surrounding GM crops, as well as the now well-documented failure of Bt cotton in the country, it comes as little surprise that these reports advise against their adoption.
This high-level advice also derives, in part, from GM ‘regulation’ in India being dogged by blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight.
The ‘Technical Expert Committee Final Report’ was scathing about India’s prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist.
The drive to get GM crops commercialised has been relentless, not least GM mustard. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the country’s apex regulatory body for GMOs, has pushed ahead by giving this crop the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains stuck in the Supreme Court due to a public interest litigation lodged by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues.
Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no testing) and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency.
This crop is also HT, which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application on nearby fields.
However, despite the ban on GM crops, in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant “special seed” of all sorts of vegetables.
In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in India against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. In 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh.
In 2017, the illegal cultivation of an HT GM soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating the HT crop.
As mentioned above, HT cotton is illegally growing in India.
In the 2017 paper – The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture – Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the tactic of encouraging farmers to abandon traditional on-farm practices, which coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply of HT GM cotton seeds.
This is a cynical attempt to place farmers on corporate seed and chemical (glyphosate) treadmills.
The authors write:
Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow… double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton.”
Stone and Flachs note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Indeed, enormous expansion if HT GM crops become legal.
Friends in high places
Global agritech firms are salivating at the prospect of India being prised open for the introduction of GM crops. The industry has always had high-level supporters in India and abroad. And this leads back to what was stated earlier in the article – the plan to industrialise Indian agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and foreign agribusiness and the manoeuvring into position of compliant officials.
PM Modi proclaimed in 2014 that GM represents a good business-investment opportunity. Renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva has highlighted the arm twisting that has gone on in an attempt to force through GMOs into India, with various politicians having been pushed aside until the dotted line for GMO open field-testing approval was signed on.
Back in late 2015, I co-authored a piece with then editor of The Ecologist Oliver Tickell – Rice, wheat, mustard… India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy.
Seventeen or more secret applications had been made to India’s GMO regulators for trials and release of GM crops, including rice, wheat, chickpeas, brinjal and mustard. In a violation of the law, regulators had released no information about the applications, raising fears that India’s first GMOs will be released with no health, safety or environmental testing.
It is not surprising then that calls have been made for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other way as illegal GM crop cultivation has taken place.
India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally. Campaigner Kavitha Kuruganti said the GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large-scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt for this GM crop were still underway.
In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability has been fixed for the illegal spread. We could well be witnessing a rerun of this scenario for HT cotton and HT food crops.
The tactic of contaminate first then legalise has benefited industry players before. Aside from Bt cotton in India, in 2016, the US Department of Agriculture granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy.
The writing could be on the wall for India.
Does India need GM?
A common claim is that GMOs are essential to agriculture if we are to feed an ever-growing global population. Supporters of GM crops argue that by increasing productivity and yields, this technology will also help boost farmers’ incomes and lift many out of poverty.
In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, eminent scientists P C Kesavan and M S Swaminathan (regarded as the ‘father of the Green Revolution’ in India) questioned the efficacy of and the need for GMOs in agriculture.
The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in Kesavan and Swaminathan’s piece and by many others, there is sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of HT crops and their shocking, devastating impact in places like Argentina.
Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. Too often, however, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM are sidelined in a rush by powerful interests to facilitate the introduction of GM crops.
Although India fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables and fruit.
People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country continues to export food while millions remain hungry. It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance.
Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says that GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts. Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace most of them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations.
But pro-GMO supporters, both outside of India and within, along with the neoliberal think tanks many of them are associated with, have wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of their promotional strategy.
The knowledge and many of the traditional practices of India’s small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, sustainable agriculture. It is no surprise therefore that a 2019 FAO high-level report has called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. It argues that scaling up agroecology offers potential solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems, whether, for instance, climate resilience, carbon storage, soil degradation, water shortages, unemployment or food security.
Available evidence suggests that (non-GMO) smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in total output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable.
It is for good reason that the FAO high-level report referred to earlier along with the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Professor Hilal Elver and numerous other papers and reports advocate agroecology call for investment in this type of agriculture.
Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world.
In the introduction to a recent article, I wrote that the prevailing globalised agrifood model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.
Do Indian citizens want a GM/glyphosate-drenched, industrial food system that brings with it all of the above?
I also wrote that the model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency.
The solution lies in a paradigm shift that abandons the notion that urbanisation equates with ‘progress’. A shift that prioritises rural communities, small independent retail enterprises (instead of global giants like Walmart-Flipkart and Amazon) and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty.
A shift that rejects the ecomodernist techno-dystopia of hyper-urbanisation, genetically engineered crops, biosynthetic food and farmerless farms and a ‘food transition’ all under the control of a big data-agritech cartel that wraps all of the above in a veneer of fake green.
There are alternative visions, potential outcomes and resistance that can challenge the ecomodernist agenda.
Instead of their eradication, creating land markets to amalgamate their land for industrial-scale mono-cropping or using vital cropland to build on, smallholder farmers and rural communities should be placed at the centre of development policies.
Moreover, inspiration can be taken from the worldviews of indigenous peoples and, as anthropology professor Arturo Escobar says, the concept of Buen Viver: promoting ways of living that stress the collective wellbeing of humans and nature and recognising the inseparability and interdependence of both.
For instance, India’s indigenous peoples’ low-energy, low-consumption tribal cultures are the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation, and their knowledge and value systems promote genuine sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature.
This entails a fundamental transformation in values, priorities and outlooks and a shift away from predation, imperialism, domination, anthropocentrism and plunder.
That’s what a genuine ‘food transition’ and Buen Viver would really mean.
Many of the issues mentioned in the article above are discussed in the author’s free-to-read e-book.
Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his “mini e-book”, Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
My goodness, fantastic article indeed….
What the hell do agro-business, corporations know about anything?
They know nothing of India and it’s unimaginable ability to grow food for all who live within it’s boundaries.
The availability of quality food is beyond what we in the west think we know of what India is..??? and that the most beautiful small growers are the one’s that do it.
In Rajastan several years ago, at an annual Fair in Nawalghar, I witnessed one farmer in particular, living as 3 joint families on 20 acres, with several cows, a tractor and hard work, who with out exception was the healthiest human I have ever met. The food we were presented with was exquisit and simple beyond anything i’d eaten before.
The town is, successfully being used as a centre for ecological growing proceedures, schooling and promotion of sustainable crops (truely “sustainable”, as compared to the current use of the word…) and ideas, that were trickling through the entire area and influencing more attempts at getting away from agro-parasites. All of this, was being promoted by a local businessman, Mr Kamal Marahka, sadly now passed on.
Poor India, is another cash cow, a very BIG cash cow that still gives it’s energy and blood to the Bankers, no doubt, in The City of London as was the older scam from the Colonial period. But, India is NOT poor. Mis-managed, squeezed by all, including Indians and every creepy parasite on the planet. It is the most amazing country and I love it dearly.
What we see around us at this amazing period in History is beyond comprehension and lies at the feet of Usary, processed as the modernist Slave system. Will this completely false Ponzi system disappear..??? The World is sucking it’s own brains out and going more and more insane.
Surely time is on the side of people, everywhere, who one day return to the Land and carry on with the real traditions of growing food, for real people and not just lost battery human-hens crushed into synthetic, concrete breeding pens.
Food, Dispossession and Dependency.
Resisting the New World Order
by
Colin Todhunter
https://www.globalresearch.ca/food-dispossession-dependency-resisting-new-world-order/5770468
Interesting word in the title of Colin’s free ebook: DISPOSSESSION
” Of course, the billionaire interests behind this try to portray what they are doing as “saving the planet” with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. In the cold light of day, however, what they are really doing is Greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.”
Reminds me of the old Christian Left, as represented by GKChesterton and Hilaire Belloc, whose Communism stressed the importance of POSSESSION; possession of Common Land and of Common Wealth.
“Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.” — Acts V, New Testament.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Ananias and his wife were executed for misappropriation of common property. In modern times, they would have been celebrated as Philanthropists like the Rothschilds and the Pritzkers, for not privatizing everything but giving back a part of what had been intended as Commons Land.
Todhunter puts his finger on a most important feature of the modern capitalist strategy of “Attack the Left from the Left”: Socialism for the Rich. The bigger the corporation and the more it owns, the more it gets from public funds in the way of tax breaks and subsidies from public funds.
You could clear, in Vietnam for instance, UXO from contaminated lands and return it to agricultural use. There is a wikipedia page with Vietnam War Casualties where that’s mentioned. .
I wonder where that tea goes… surely not to Britannia!
YOU’RE EATING GMO CORN
Most corns produced in America are genetically modified. Corn can be found is almost every processed foods in forms of high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, corn starch, corn oil and corn meal. Many food products such as many breakfast cereals, infant formula, salad dressing, bread, cereal, hamburgers, mayonnaise, veggie burgers, meat substitutes, soy cheese, tomato sauce, crackers, cookies, chocolate, candy, fried food, protein powder, baking powder, alcohol, vanilla, powdered sugar, peanut butter, ice cream, frozen yogurt, tofu, tamari, soy sauce, enriched flour and pasta have high levels of GMO corn.GMO corns have been related to infertility, tumors, and increase in food allergies.
TOMATOES
GMO tomatoes are banned in Europe but many tomatoes have been genetically modified in US. Tomatoes are genetically modified to last longer and not get rotten quickly. GMO tomatoes have been related to premature death in lab rats.
Go back to school.
GM food toxins found in the blood of 93% of unborn babies
Studies suggest that Bt toxin found in the blood of pregnant women and fetuses were the result of animal products (meat or dairy) and the animal was fed by Monsanto’s Bt corn. Thanks to biotech companies Roundup ready is now in 60% of air and water samples. It’s in the urine of children and blood of pregnant women and their fetuses.
The debate over labeling genetically modified organisms still continues in US while 27 different countries have banned GMOs and 50 countries across the globe have required GMO labeling.
—
Biotech companies also directly invest in our universities so not too many scientists and researchers could perform independent research and studies about negative effects of GMOs.
—
All US sugar beets are GMOnow. To avoid contamination, avoid backyrd seed from Oregon for beets or Chard.. Also majority of bananas in the US are genetically modified. Many additives, preservatives and food flavoring are genetically modified. Aspartame in diet drinks is sure one of the products of genetic engineering.
[Aspartame causes weight GAIN, as well as cancer and heart disease]
All you need to know is that the GMO crap is designed to totally control the supply of seeds through patents, which means the GMO crowd can control what is allowed to be planted, every farmer who jumps on the agrochem/GMO train should realize that he voluntarily boarded the train to Auschwitz.
Hello Colin Todhunter: Excellent article! I’ve followed GMO disasters and corporate-bank administrations of India for more years than I’d like to admit. The Modi regime serves about the same functional values as those of Pol Pot and Idi Amin…
No one seems to boil the “situation” down to this: International trade agreement (graft) “gifts” international sized disasters to local scale economies. It ain’t rocket science..
We’ve been stealing one another’s apples for thousands of years, yet there’s still not enough food to eat…
For centuries famine has been caused by politics, not weather.
DEMOCIDE
“the deleterious and disturbing effects of Glyohosate B-based herbicides on human health”.
they talk about a loneliness pandemic.
lonely people have a lot of illnesses to accompany them through the loneliness journey, trips to GPs and specialists help keeping a busy schedule. they have opportunities to enjoy the latest scanning technologies for brains, heart and liver. there are times to spend in hospitals for hip and knee replacements for those who collapsed under the extra weight gifted by metabolism disruptions.
not a dull moment with modern Glyphosaty diet. your schedule will fill up pretty quickly.
thanks to the preponderance of added lovely poisonous chemicals into the food chain.
It’s turning the frogs gay!
And that silly statement turns out to be true.
India has been under many famines where millions died under the British rule and Empire, and India are more than willing to do that again to please City of London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule
Good link, actually during the Second World War the year to ending 1943 is a pivotal point in our present day understanding, further the internal farmlands of the British Isles. 1979 was a Global beginning transitioning into limiting Public Water natual availability again another reason I never voted. Cheers.
The Center of London being owned by Rothschild, the owners of the Bank of England (BOE).
I think the fact that Monsanto has virtually taken over farming in India is the main cause of overpopulation in urban India. Small-lot farmers have gone out of business and hanged themselves while their families are increasingly seeking some sort of employment in the cities.
With the average household size in India being only 4.44 in 2021, after having declined for decades, (https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/average-household-size-in-india-2096125/), surely fertility rate can’t be the cause.
Globally we should abolish genetically engineered crops and encourage wholistic, organic farming. Good for the environment and for society at large.
Organic being an investing opportunity that led us into this mess since 1920. 1950 economic deprivation period,.. rise of the organic immortals. Tags come with a price reasurrance homestead tax. Here we go again…with the supplement Industrial spinning, the affluent over Creativity.
Water is organic chemistry what else are people missing in their own wide open public convenience Olympia.
I prefer my plant foods grown without Roundup dousing and not genetically engineered.
What urban areas of the world aren’t over populated?
As outlined in my earlier post, when and why did humans begin to crowd into cities? That’s the question.
The situation is engineered, like pretty much every other problem we face.
There can be no food security , whatever the author may believe that to be , as long as global population continues to rise by more than 80 million per year . The article starts with some salient facts then quickly dissolves into bureaucratic mush which it seems to me are the main ingredients of cognitive dissonance these days ?
And where do you obtain the population stats that frighten you so much?
Jim
There is a whole literature that shows that overconsumption, and not overpopulation, is the driving force of …well, everything. It is also parasitic and imperial, but nobody wants to admit to personalised lifestyle imperialism — so we blame ‘them’ — be it the ‘corporations’, the ‘government’ and so on; as if they are not just the daily activities of the people, in the very ways the people agreed to organise.
Overpopulation is just another imperial ego-myth in order to escape from reality. We could consume less and distribute production further, and more equitably, feeding everybody with the same (or possibly even less) land; without chemicals; without ‘Big Agro’ Frankinseeds, GMO, biotech; replenishing water tables; increasing biodiversity and so on… but ‘we’ don’t want to.
So ‘we’ have to offload the blame onto imaginary entities to stay sane as insatiable; whichever is a particularly vicious and violent species samsara…. which we could end at any point by not offloading and projecting egocentric phantasies ….but we don’t want to.
Instead of coming to terms with First World imperialism and at least proposing viable solutions to our inherited problems; we seem to prefer cognitive dissonance blaming the egocentric phantasies in our head rather than deal with the problem. We can feed the needs of the world, but never our owned collectivised greeds.
People are not to blame for the woes of the environment. The average person is not in control of millions of gallons of toxic materials and fluids on trains that wreck into water ways. The average this not capable of starting wars that expend tons of toxic materials into the environment.
This “average person” thing, apart from being reductive and inherently individualistic is also entirely misleading. It takes more than the average person to build civilisation: it took the concerted effort of everybody across the centuries. That concerted coordinated order is and was mostly cooperative: and when it wasn’t — who fought the wars?
The average person is indeed implicated in human civilisation which is irreducible to the individual, no matter how much they remonstrate. Civilisation is average humanism in action by definition: wars, toxic spills, toxic pollution and all are average aggregations of individual action.
Blame and moralisation are also toxic: but we’ve got to correctly identify the state of the world in terms of human impact… and change it for the better.
For a fraction of the energy we expend: we could live better for less toxicity and pollution as Buen Viver or ecological degrowth. A human-first economy is a clean economy that is health-producing by definition. No more derailed trainfulls of ecotoxicity and radioactive materials in the watercourses; no more oil-dependency materialistic wars; no more structural militarism, racism and greed. We make what we need as close as possible to where we need it without mercantile or profit-seeking rentiers; and chillax. It won’t be utopia, but it’ll be a damn site better than this shitshow.
If you truly believe that the world is over populated then you should immediately get castrated, then jump into a plastic bag to save us all from your viruses and drive a giant battery bomb.
Good article. There is a pushback though and this is something that needs to be mentioned more.
There has always been push back and that is when controlled opposition takes over.
Majority of push back starts as grass roots and then is co-opted into controlled opposition to pacify the masses.
Nothing is actually going to change until TPTB start to have sudden fatal accidents.
“Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH)s formulas affect the gut microbiome and are associated with a global metabolic health crisis.”
Wow .. Glyphosates are working extremely well, just like our Democracies, our laws , and oureducation
Irony alert.
Tru$t th£ $¢i€n¢€…
Brawndo — The Thirst Mutilator. It’s what plants crave!
Soylent Green is people!
Box:
“Fish, and plankton, and sea greens, and protein from the sea. It’s all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming. And they came instead. So I store them here. I’m ready. And you’re ready. It’s my job. To freeze you.”
Klaus Schwab:
“You will own nothing and be happy”
The Great Reset is in full effect…
“So you best protect ya neck!” — Wu Tang Clan
#donteatthebugs
“Brawndo — The Thirst Mutilator. It’s what plants crave!” And it’s got Electrolytes!!!
Idiocracy (the movie) was pure prophecy…
Terrific article by Mr. Todhunter.
TWO ADDITIONAL POINTS
–Non-ruminant food animals raised on grain yield meat with a highly undesirable fat-profile — linoleic acid (omega 6), rather than alpha -linolenic acid (omega 3) fat.
— The “less desirable” grasslands are a far healthier food source for raising pigs and chickens. Their feed can be supplemented w non-grain, fermented greenery like fermented agave, mesquite, sprouted non-gmo beans.
–Grasslands can be extended at will by tapping into Primary Water. This water is made by the earth, has never been a part of the hydrologic cycle and is several times larger in extent than the oceans.
I have a file on Primary Water and have visited a well. The water is readily available by those who know where to drill, often quite near the surface.
http://www.primarywaterinstitute.org/evidence.html
Saturated fats are of course better for you than the ruinous vegetable oil PUFAs, but the content of the fat of non-ruminants depends on their food.
We can do lots to rewild and regenerate the land if only we weren’t impeded by red tape and BigBiz. Here a snapshot of a famous Indian man who rewilded a degraded part of India:
Jadav Payeng is better known as the Forest Man of India. He earned this name by spending 30 years of his life planting trees, creating a real man-made forest of 550 hectares. Thanks to this reforestation, wildlife has returned to the area. Incredibly, he did it all by himself.
Molai Kathoni forest: A one-man-made forest
The Mulai Reserve is a forest on the Majuli Island in the Brahmaputrar river near Kokilamukh in the Jorhat district in Assam, India. It has a total area of about 1,000 hectares and is under continuous threat due to the extensive soil erosion on its banks.
Majuli has shrunk over the past 70 years by more than half. There are concerns that it could be submerged within the next 20 years. To fight this, in 1980, the Assam Forestry Division of Golaghat district began a plan to reforest 200 hectares of the forest in one of the sandbars of the Brahmaputra river.
Beautiful, Veri Tas. Thanks for sharing it.
In Scotland and elsewhere millions of acres of trees are being cut down for stupid, bird-killing windfarms.
For my own part, I’m much more interested in improving the quality of our food. Also the quality of life of our food animals. I’m fond of pigs and especially of chickens; since they live so briefly at least they should have a natural, good quality of life.
Agreed, the destruction on plane(t) earth is being done, not by overpopulation but, rather, by industry. Think Amazon cut down for GM soy beans to be fed to animals most humans use for meat; fires deliberately set to clear the path for fast rail, wind farms, etc. Not to mention one of the biggest destroyers of life and land: the military.
I have read of such efforts in Africa and even Israel. The big new word agro-ecology is a rehash of small-scale farming that utilises traditional knowledge and, by its nature, destroys far les than industrial farming.
China is beating back its northern deserts as a national project, on a truly stupendous scale. That mitigates some of the forest destruction elsewhere in Asia.
USA has all different rules We on Food Drink Alcohol & Tobacco is pointless without The US Federal Reserve and The World Central Bank.
Good Heavens…we are Realalist Generations the vast amount of US do not even know what you are talking about. East Shore to West Shore…other than We Help You in International Trade deals in BRUSSELS…European Union. Are you even Here, in America..?
Unsure about animal fats, but cooking degrades palm oil and coconut oil less than the lighter veg oils. Moreover, extracting the lighter oils may utilise solvents, one being hexane. In all cases heating fats (at production or during cooking) is not good.
Mgeo,
The vegetable oils (seed oils) are different on the molecular level, and alter our human fat in unhealthful ways. They increase heart disease and cancer. The cholesterol theory was hoax pushed thru by Rockefeller interests, using point-man Ancel Keyes.
Mgeo, you’re so knowledgeable in other areas; do, please, educate yourself in this for your health’s sake. Here’s a video & she has a book (there are many others).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY
Heart disease was almost unknown before seed oils. I remember hearing Prez Eisenhower’s doctor say he had never SEEN a heart attack. We began using these oils in commercial foods, heart attacks began &TPTB spewed propaganda that this was caused by the saturated fats we’d always eaten.
Thanks, but I only read info on links. Videos take up time and are mostly waffle (hand-waving). Also keep in mind:
-Seed and veg. oils have existed for ages.
-There are many other harmful components in food, all tacitly blessed by our caring authorities, including additives and processing.
-Propaganda (advertising) has infantalised most people beyond help; look at the way they waddle around eating, drinking or watching videos.
mgeo, No sir, vegetable oils ARE seed oils & we didn’t have the technology to extract oil from them till post-WW II. There WAS no dietary use of seed oils till just before the heart attacks began.
A country like India has a large surplus population of under and unemployed people which means that Western type solutions focused on productivity and labor saving aren’t appropriate. Its common practice to just look at small areas of the big picture, typically to answer the question “How can we make more money?”, while neglecting the whole because that’s “someone else’s problem”. Its not. Failure to manage a large population results in endemic poverty and so social disruption and exporting the population surplus isn’t a way of managing it, its just dumping the problem on someone else.
India’s population is shrinking. Look it up. The problem now is urbanisation due to loss of small farms, taken over by BigBiz.
“A country like India has a large surplus population”
I see what you are getting at, but deplore the phrase “surplus population”.
Abel was “surplus population” in Cain’s eyes when there were hardly a score of people in the entire planet.
Which is why Rabbi Yeshuah of Nazareth railed against the rich, and founded a movement that punished members who withheld property from the common store.
On the other hand, China’s one-child policy may have given the nation a chance to adjust agricultural production to the size of its population; while India and Africa were held back by an ever-increasing “surplus population”.
I do not think there is a definitive decision between these two views on the reality of “surplus population”.
The phrase rang a bell that resonates with your response:
“‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'”
This is one of the most important articles OffG has ever published. Unfortunately, while satisfying a few of the Alt-Right forum’s standards, it does tend to go against others.
For instance, there’s the tricky matter of overpopulation, as carried out in over-urbanization. Urbanization is grabbing up croplands, making it more difficult to feed the population – which kind of puts a damper on the strange notion that size alone determines how many people the Earth can sustain.
Then there’s also the notion that while government is the problem, it’s also the solution in that government alone would be powerful enough to take on the agri-giants. Stop regulatory capture and put the government to work looking after the nation’s real interests.
Lots of thorns here.
Urbanisation or “development”, including the enforced variety, swallows up farmland. Over-population is hardly an issue anywhere now. Consider who or what is displacing all those rural peoples, turning them into refugees headed for towns.
Heh… Stop regulatory capture – for sure… Then place all governmental bodies in isolated rubber rooms with no cell signals nor ability to communicate with the outside world… Teach them leather work and basket weaving… Dress them in orange pajamas…
That can only happen if judges, prosecutors and police become terrified first.
Bit of fun.
Consider that GCHQ’s JTRIG is influencing the up and downvoting. Then imagine if the telly normalised it.
“Is David Schwimmer’s ‘Intelligence’ Propaganda for GCHQ?” – Tom Secker https://youtu.be/YoeQBFSQdhs
Discloure: My father worked in the Central Office of Information, for the Foreign Office, with but not for MI5 and with but not for GCHQ.
How many ‘Just Stop Oil’ protestors – have a garden, a terrace or use it?
They are mostly urban but that should not limit them.
I live next to the central station in Tbilisi, Georgia, and I have 30+ tomato plants, 15 cucumber,and five pumpkin, pumping away. Result, as Dickens would say, three-to-five cucumbers and tomatoes per day.
No need to walk to the supermarket except for the dry goods. I have no car.
In my yard the tortoises just laid 14 eggs – which they won’t do unless they feel comfortable. Fortunately there is a damp piece of forest nearby where they will live. I keep the visiting cats and dogs free of fleas and ticks.
Yet the Green agenda is to stop individual growing, to restrict the availability of seeds, to sanction the use of water even from the sky, and perhaps to ban the human “domination” of pets. That’s ignoring the anti-energy policy.
Look it up – I am not your mummy. And then conclude what this mindset is.
in 2004 in Spain my then partner went vegan, and grumbling our 6 year old and I followed suit a month later. I thought that one of the prevailing vegan habits of trying to imitate meat or foods containing meat was more than a bit silly, what about the natural plants that grow by themselves even in relatively dry Southern Spain? I learned from observation that they have 2 flushes/growth spurts, the second in September regardless of whether it rained little or even not.
One great thing about the Alpujarras was the amount and variety of edible wild plants, between 30-40 on a regular basis. Whole hillsides are covered with Rocket, for example.
So I began eating weeds/wild plant salad, but not only. Into it goes thin sliced red onion, grated carrot, chopped and diced radish and beetroot.
I couldn’t hack full-time veganism, my body didn’t like it. So I widened it in 2006,
I’m still eating wild plants in season here, although the selection is pretty limited in comparison with Spain. It’s a bit more time consuming here for a lot less variety, but an hour and a half wandering about with a plastic bag and a pair of scissors will still produce 5 days worth of greenery guaranteed to be as organic as it gets these days, although it’s obviously a moot point. The plants are growing by themselves, in harmony with the landscape. Even the dreaded Himalayan Balsam seeds are edible.
The sugar problem, if you have one, stops DEAD. And it saves money, too, but eating in harmony with yer actual Nature is a buzz of it’s own, and keeps you in touch with what the Earth is doing, so you can see any changes expressed through Her efflorescence.
The food transition that is ongoing is the elimination of farmers in parallel with their consumers.
This does not fit into the Guardianista paradigm and thus it is ignored in a mutual code of silence.
Once upon a time I tried to get a job with the United Nations, before I grew up and realised it is largely invitation only, like the World Economic Forum.
But I still try to view the Green agenda from their side:
= How many Dutch farms have successfully been shuttered?
= What are the metrics for the sustainability of Sri Lankan agriculture?
= Heroic examples of countries that have transitioned to renewable energy.
Google has no answer. There are no Stakhanovites of the modern era. Just a new breed of bureaucrats and journalists speaking in an ever-more excited, or drug-fueled, tone about progress, before moving on swiftly.
Green Agenda is a euphemism for People Control. PERIOD.
The main threat to us and our biosphere is not “fossil” fuels or greenhouse gases. It is frenetic growth and tyranny due to the greed and sadism of the insane.
Does not The Great Reset propose to end growth? The point being that wealth resides not in growth but resources.
Hence the self-induced collapse of productive economies – and the pursuit of resource wars.
And why the prestigious Macleans Magazine article, “The R…….ds’ Fabulous Stake in Canada” has been memory holed – and the controlled media is terrified at the mention.
Economics is a trust game of cyclical ups and downs that are manipulated into being for the purpose of controlling economic power and determining who gets economic power.
It’s the Enclosures by a different name. And with a twist.
They seek a new society, with new social orders, and it will be based on a very different way of allocating energy, food and resources.
Stuff will no longer just “be there” to feed and clothe billions of people, like plucking and apple from a tree.
The tree will be felled; the apple produced in a lab, from a self-destructing seed, or seedless, so there will be nothing to plant.
This encapsulates the business rationale behind the owner-investors craze for seizing patents, ruling whole areas of research off-limits, modelling and patenting DNA of flora and fauna, paw and plant, including humans — it is the monetisation of life.
https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/crisis-update-follow-the-consensus
Put differently: a genuine ‘food transition’ and Buen Viver would really mean massive industrialised economic Degrowth or agroecologic “altglobalisation” – “Soil, not oil.” Thereafter, there can be no argument about what a transition would look like; a descaling and downgrading of oil-dependent urbanisation and turn toward simpler, more localised ways of being in some sort of balance with the earth. For ethics: that also means equality of distribution, food and wellbeing security and justice and so on. So what is the argumentation about?
Thereafter: there is only one solutions-based form of thinking – Buen Viver or Degrowth amount to the same thing…. The end of industrialised, urbanised, moralised, and rationalised growth at all costs; with the whole earth as sacrificial to the urbanised human ego-collectivisation we call economic civilisation…. Homo kakoeconomicus.
That makes for an interesting juxtaposition with recent content posted here, particularly yesterdays Iain Davis piece. We either resist ‘climate lockdowns’ and carry on with industrialised imperialism, upholding the status quo; or we completely deconstruct industrialised urbanisation and return, partially at least, to the Land; establishing a peri-agroecologic successionary civilisation, retaining as much of the beneficial uses of technology as possible but focusing on human wellbeing rather than corporate profit. Thereafter: there is only one sane and rational outcome – Buen Viver as Degrowth.
So why is there any need to alternate from this, the only possible solution? Infinite economics as urbanised, or finite (agro-) ecologics as de-urbanised, deglobalised, and returned to human-scale with limited, but effective intermediate technology? If anybody cares to think about it: industrialised civilisation is well into the throes of inescapable, irreversible catastrophic collapse…. So, there is no alternative. So why pretend there is?
Buen Viver as Degrowth is, or could be “transfinite”; that is not finite and not infinite, but indeterminably indefinite – providing there is soil, breathable air, drinkable water, biodiversity, and so on – life-affirmation is indefinite as steady-state homoeostasis. Ever increasing demand jeopardises that intimately balancing regulation of body and earth as self-regulating. That egocentric, economised libidinal demand is finite life-negation, and reduced demand and proportionate redistribution is “more than finite” life-affirmation as indefinite Buen Viver.
We could just agree and get on with it? The only viable solution is the only thing worth anything right now. “Buen Viver or urban barbarism” will be my new slogan from now on.
Four people seem to disagree that de-industrialization and de-urbanization is the only way forward. Presumably the expression “How’s that working out so far?” remains alien to them.
That which has already proven itself time and again to be not only insufficient to long term human sustainability but incompatible with life in general can no longer be justified on any basis whatever.
In the short term, this highly industrialized mode of social organization appeared to work better than anything else humans have tried; but it didn’t take long for its negative aspects to come to dominate the entire paradigm.
Naturally, those few who benefit from it wish to retain it; but it’s time for everyone else to begin the process of scraping it before it’s too late to get rid of it. Of course it will implode – it’s already begun imploding; soon it may too late to keep its implosion from destroying almost everything.
What do people prefer?
Do you want hard outside in windy cold/hot/wet conditions get sweaty and dirt on your hands, or do you want to sit comfortable in office making a financial logarithm that makes money.
Most youngsters I know of want an office job, a title, feeling VIP.
Erik
Personally, I prefer to be outside, but I get where you are coming from.
Modern education is based on a core curriculum or STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, Mechanics) which are the core skills to run the next generation of the ‘green’ economic civilisation that is not going to happen.
Yep, most of my fiends kids are in service industrial jobs or at uni, training for impossibility and implausibility rather than ecologic reality. I prefer my options to at least be plausible and in some sort of alignment with the surrounding world. Unfortunately, that is a minority consideration. ‘Most’ people prefer comfort and fantasy ‘bullshit’ jobs that make the financial logarithm seem ‘real’ ….for now.
Metta.
Howard
All animals exert precisely “one body power” [“1 BP”] to reproduce themselves and do what they need to do. Humans exert 1 BP per day leveraged by 100 million barrels of oil; as previously shown — that is around 800 million years extra labour per day. Why?
Mostly to transact “1s and Os” — that’s binary code — in a digital simulacrum of life-affirmation. The majority of transactions are not even ‘productive’ (as in “producing a tangible product”); the supermajority are ‘derivative’ ….But why?
As previously shown (and as per above): ‘green’ agriculture accounts for ~1% of global GDP whilst smallholders produce more food, and of better quality (mostly organic) with less land (Vandana Shiva); which means that >90% of human activity is superfluous of orders of magnitude beyond physiologic necessity.
But it will never be enough for psychologic ‘necessity’: that is imaginary libidinal desire we invent and are not born with. We could live better and easily feed our physiologic appetites, which are controllable, but we will never feed the greed: whichever grows as insatiable and exponentialand uncontrollable as it is imagined and invented. The economic driving force is the hyperindividual human psyche whichever is blind to its owned destructive appetivities.
You, me and a couple of others seem to be the only ones who can see were this is going. Respect.
“People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, inequality and poverty. The country continues to export food while millions remain hungry.”
This “scarcity amidst abundance” was documented in 1977:
“Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity”, by Frances Moore Lappe “
Like everything that Colin Writes it is first class both in diagnosis of the illness and in prescription for its cure. But despite the encouraging title (below), I feel a hiatus between scientists writing the prescription and government applying the medicine. Is public opinion really moving to stop the GMO juggernaut? It would be wonderful if this were true:
“Science & Public Interest Halt the Push for GM Crops in India”
Glyphosate-based herbicides.
GBH.
Grievous Bodily Harm.
“To this day, no liability has been fixed for the illegal spread.”
As EU MP Clare Daly said about criminals like Bush & B.Liar walking free in the EU$A, “it’s absolutely scandalous”.
India is a democracy, and the trouble with democracy — as Plato said long ago — is that we don’t hang really big criminals.
A pity the pesticides are ineffective against sex pests.
Would be helpful to eradicate the visitors to Epstein Island, especially the Anti Christ Bill Gates.
Antonym coming in…
As you are asking for it:
India is doing fine agriculturally the last few decades without foreign MNCs mixing in or any GMOs. Instead of hunger there can be food exports sometimes.
If only Colin would open any of his continues streams of anti GMO/ MNC articles acknowledging that India is about the LAST big nation not yet gone for that.
Any naive reader now gets the distinct impression that India is GMO world central, which is not the case. NEVER a reference to Canada with its Canola, the US, Brazil, Argentina. India is there only due to BT Cotton.
These articles make the Modi government look bad; they could be written positively that Indians give the most resistance to the WEF agenda. Would work better to achieve Colin’s biological goals — at the cost of losing political browny points on the Left?
Please do something to increase your reading skills. All though the article, mention is made of nations other than India – specifically, these nations’ acceptance of GM and GMO things.
India is being focused on because India really is the last frontier, where the agri-giants haven’t yet completely taken over farming. There’s a chance to save India from that fate; but that chance is slipping away by the day.
So why on Earth wouldn’t Colin Toddhunter keep beating the drum labeled “India?” It’s the only drum still working.
The clue for Colin is there: write positively about India’s agriculture, as one of the last bastions of non WEF territory. That is the way New Delhi might listen more to him.
If he wants to rant about a country let him go for the US or Brazil and show the mess of MNC-for profit-GMOs there. Show everyone he is not a one tune band.
India rice export ban puts market on edge for copycat curbs
I think you mean $$$$$$$cience Colin.
What’s the big joke is that it’s the pesticides that seem to come hand in hand with GMO crops, but wait… Aren’t they supposed to be better against pests?
Who knows if the health effects of GMO is actually from the pesticides?
BTW GMO is a big scam to use genetics to claim patent power.
How exactly are farms without GMO getting GMO cross into their land if the plants aren’t supposed to reproduce? Lol
Rob, gmo plants DO reproduce. Health effects of gmos– apart from the pesticides they are genetically altered to tolerate– have been extensively studied: multi, LARGE tumors in rats. GMO companies refuse to allow purchasers to provide samples to research scientists, but they’ve acquired them anyway.