Thousands of Indian cotton farmers kill themselves each year because of the clothes you wear!
India is an agrarian country with around 60% of its people depending directly or indirectly upon agriculture. (The science or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide) and farmer suicides in India have been making headlines since the mid 1990s. With £1 = 80.85 rupees and the farmers earning on average 100 rupees a day (£1.24 a day) you can see how they are struggling to make ends meet and to make things worse it costs 950 rupees (£11.79) for a kilogram bag of seed!
Some facts:
- More than 17,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2009, a seven percent rise on the previous year, according to new government figures.
- The Fairtrade Minimum Price for seed cotton from India is $0.46/kg for organic and $0.38/kg for conventional
- Now for the first time suicides by farmers, including those in 2011 and 2012, have been definitively linked to the declining performance of the GM cotton. - Read more.
- It is the low prices for cotton and high prices for chemicals have caused tens of thousands of farmers to go bankrupt.
- Thousands of Indian farmers sold their kidneys into the world organ market to pay their pesticide and fertilizer bill to Monsanto, Cargill or multinational banks.
