Karnataka: a Brief Study on Globalization, Farming, and Genetically Modified Crops
Karnataka: A Brief Study on Globalization, Farming, and Genetically Modified Crops
ABC
Spring 2011
Introduction: A Historical Lens for Viewing Politics Politics is often studied as a collection of individual events and moments, never truly connected but still influencing the lives of every individual. Many historians, especially those dealing with farmer suicides in India, note that politics cannot be seen as a series of events but as a process or continuum of interconnected moments that truly influence each other. As Palagummi Sainath has noted in his multiple articles regarding rural communities in the Times of India, instead of seeing farmer suicides as a singular event, they must be seen through the lens of a process, mainly “the process of commercialization of the countryside and its consequences.”[1] The problem in not seeing the suicides as a continuum of past policies is that until the media and government realize that, there will continue to be problems in finding the underlying causes of the suicides and in addressing the tensions that have led to the conflict in the first place. Until then, there will be few effective solutions that the communities or the government can put into action. This is especially important to the situation of farmer suicides in Karnataka from 1998 to 2006. The political climate of the time shows that the government saw the entire period as an isolated event that was completely blamed on the farmers and not on any external sources such as the processes of commercialization and globalization. When one considers the entire continuum of these processes since the 1980s, a completely different understanding comes to light. A fuller study shows that due to the introduction of genetically modified crops into the Karnataka economy, there have been negative socio-cultural, political, and economic impacts on the region, even though the Karnataka government could have organized multiple methods of action to alleviate the
ABC
Spring 2011
Introduction: A Historical Lens for Viewing Politics Politics is often studied as a collection of individual events and moments, never truly connected but still influencing the lives of every individual. Many historians, especially those dealing with farmer suicides in India, note that politics cannot be seen as a series of events but as a process or continuum of interconnected moments that truly influence each other. As Palagummi Sainath has noted in his multiple articles regarding rural communities in the Times of India, instead of seeing farmer suicides as a singular event, they must be seen through the lens of a process, mainly “the process of commercialization of the countryside and its consequences.”[1] The problem in not seeing the suicides as a continuum of past policies is that until the media and government realize that, there will continue to be problems in finding the underlying causes of the suicides and in addressing the tensions that have led to the conflict in the first place. Until then, there will be few effective solutions that the communities or the government can put into action. This is especially important to the situation of farmer suicides in Karnataka from 1998 to 2006. The political climate of the time shows that the government saw the entire period as an isolated event that was completely blamed on the farmers and not on any external sources such as the processes of commercialization and globalization. When one considers the entire continuum of these processes since the 1980s, a completely different understanding comes to light. A fuller study shows that due to the introduction of genetically modified crops into the Karnataka economy, there have been negative socio-cultural, political, and economic impacts on the region, even though the Karnataka government could have organized multiple methods of action to alleviate the