India’s cotton farmers faced the same debt-driven corporate dependency as Iraq’s wheat farmers.

Evidence

A similar experiment took place in India in the 1990s. Tens of thousands of farmers were lured into using genetically modified cotton seed by village-to-village agribusiness representatives promising bigger crops with export potential, something especially important at a time when neoliberal reforms were eliminating government price supports and subsidies for cotton production. Farmers were abetted in the transition by the availability of large bank loans to purchase seed and the needed pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Like the Iraqis, Indian cotton farmers were not only adopting new agricultural technologies, but becoming fully integrated into world markets and debt finance. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Chinese/Indian farmer debt suicides and Vandana Shiva’s analyses are natural extensions; also connects to the reader’s interest in how austerity eliminates state supports, forcing market dependence.