Export-oriented monocrop farming traps debt-burdened farmers in spirals ending in suicide

Evidence

The problem is that farming in general is uniquely vulnerable to fluctuations in nature, such as draughts and floods, and farming for export is also vulnerable to fluctuations in world markets. One bad year with either can leave debt-burdened farmers without the means to repay loans, which means bad credit, which means the inability to borrow more (or borrowing at scandalous rates), which means the inability to plant and thus recoup losses. This is what happened in India a decade ago, pushing cotton farmers into an ever-deepening hole of debt. The result? An epidemic of farmer suicides (at least twenty thousand at this point), often committed by drinking a bottle of RoundUp®, the Monsanto-produced herbicide that kills everything except Monsanto’s genetically modified seed. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 285

Categorization

• FICTION: The micro-mechanism of a debt spiral — each default compounding the next — is a ready engine for a literary portrait of rural despair.
• XREF: connects to: Global supply-chain efficiency transfers ecological costs onto the world’s most vulnerable people — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 306; Sharecropping law trapped Black farmers between debt servitude and accusations of shiftlessness. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 678; Early MPS development economists prescribed agricultural export specialization over industrialization for poor countries — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1280 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sharecropping law trapped Black farmers between debt servitude and accusations of shiftlessness. #corroborates (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 678
• Early MPS development economists prescribed agricultural export specialization over industrialization for poor countries #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1280
• Global supply-chain efficiency transfers ecological costs onto the world’s most vulnerable people #qualifies (0.70) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 306
• Expanding the market weakens the producer’s ethical investment in labor #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 698