DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER

Want a pesticide factory in your intestines or increase abortions? Eat GMOs or animals that eat them. 

DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER from NO GMO on Vimeo.

IT'S TIME FOR A FOOD FIGHT from NO GMO on Vimeo.

Dr Huber's Warning

(From Food Democracy Now)

On January 17, internationally recognized plant pathologist Dr. Don Huber, wrote a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack warning of the discovery of a new pathogen and a possible link between Roundup Ready® (GMO) corn and soybeans and severe reproductive problems in livestock as well as widespread crop failure.

Less than 3 weeks later, the Obama administration approved 2 new Roundup Ready® GMO crops, set to be planted this spring... Read on about Dr. Huber's discovery. If it gives you pause, sign the petition to ask Sec. Vilsack to stop these seeds from being planted until further research is done.

In 2010, more than 365 million acres were planted worldwide with genetically engineered (GMO) seeds.

The U.S. leads the world with more than 165 million acres of GMO crops, mostly Roundup Ready® crops.

Monsanto owns patents on the genes of more than 93% of soybeans, 80% of corn, and 95% of sugar beets planted in the U.S. -- all genetically modified to be resistant to the weed killer Roundup.

In 2007, more than 185,000,000 lbs. of Roundup were applied to U.S. crops, the year the Bush administration halted reporting of the herbicide's application rates.

In 1992, U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle announced that GMO foods would not be "hampered by unnecessary regulation", freeing Monsanto of the burden of independent testing or labeling of GMO foods for the American public.

Are you eating GMOs?

Tell the Obama administration to stop the planting of GMO alfalfa & sugar beets

Dr. Huber Explains Science Behind New Organism and Threat from Monsanto's Roundup, GMOs to Disease and Infertility from Food Democracy Now! on Vimeo.

CAFO's Can Kill You - No Joke.

Flies and cockroaches carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria from factory farms, study finds

BY Tom Philpott

25 FEB 2011 3:24 PM

What sort of antibiotic-resistant pathogens are growing on factory farms, along with all the cheap pork chops and chicken wings? And what level of threat do they pose to our health?

Well, we know that in total, factory-farm animals consume a jaw-dropping four times as many antibiotics as do people in the United States, thanks to diligent reporting by Maryn McKenna andRalph Loglisci and work by Rep. Louise Slaughter(D-N.Y.).

And we know that a kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA now kills more people than AIDS -- and infects people who never set foot in a hospital, which is the site where MRSA is thought to have originated. We also know, due to the stellar work of Iowa State University researcher Tara Smith, that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains (her paper can be found here).

We also know that, by the FDA's own reckoning, meat on grocery store shelves is routinely infected by pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics (again, McKenna's work brought the FDA's perhaps intentionally obscure report to light).

And now we know of yet another means by which antibiotic-resistant nasties can make their way from meat factories into the broader community: through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the titanic amounts of manure produced on factory farms. For a paper published last month in the journal Microbiology, researchers from North Carolina State and Kansas State universities took one for the team -- i.e., the public. They did something few of us would want to do: rounded up common flies and roaches hanging around factory hog farms, and tested them to see what kinds of bacteria they were harboring.

Their finding? More than 90 percent of the insects sampled carried forms of the bacteria Enterococci that are resistant to at least one common antibiotic, and often more than one.

Read the rest here.

Boycott Land O'Lakes - GMO Pushers

Hay Now — It’s Boycott Time: Land O’Lakes, This Means You!

By Citizens for Safe Food and Feed

Farm Wars

By now you’ve heard how President Obama and his Monsanto Administration have plowed through approvals of three more genetically engineered products, including GE alfalfa.  Well, here’s something else you should know:

To produce its Round-Up Ready Alfalfa seeds, Monsanto partnered with a company called Forage Genetics International, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Land O’Lakes dairy co-op. That’s right, Land O’Lakes stands to make a fortune from polluting our food supply with untested and unlabeled GMOs.

To protest, you could sign one of the many petitions going around that will likely just be ignored.  But there’s another way to show your disapproval of genetically engineered Round-Up Ready Alfalfa:  Boycott all Land O’Lakes products — its butter, cheese, eggs, speads, margarine, seasonings, creams, cocoa and cappuccino mixes, sour cream and milk.  All of them.

You have the power to economically punish Land O’Lakes — the owner of Forage Genetics, Monsanto’s partner in crime — for its role in polluting the food chain with untested and unlabeled GMOs, increasing the use of toxic glyphosate herbicide, and potentially destroying the organic beef and dairy feed market by loudly refusing to support Land O’Lakes with your dollars.

Tell all your friends to go to all the supermarkets in their area and let the check-out clerks know that they’re boycotting Land O’Lakes products until they are out of the GMO business, loud enough for other shoppers to hear.  And next, stop by the store manager’s desk and tell him about the boycott.

Send Land O’Lakes and other companies a clear message:  HAY you — We’re FED UP with GMOs in our food supply!

And to make sure Land O’Lakes knows why its sales are down, contact its president and CEO Chris Policinski and let him know you won’t be buying Land O’Lakes products anymore because you don’t want genetically engineered food or animal feed:

Chris Policinski
President and CEO
Land O’Lakes
4001 Lexington Avenue
Arden Hills, MN 55126-2998
651/481-2222

Spread the word…

The Smoking Gun That Could Bring Down Monsanto

Glyphosate (Roundup) or Roundup Ready Crops May Cause Animal Miscarriages by: Jill Richardson (by way of La Vida Locavore) Fri Feb 18, 2011 at 14:54:30 PM PST

A bombshell has been quietly dropped on the website of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. I should disclose, upfront, that the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA) is founded and run by my close friend Judith McGeary. Said bombshell is an open letter written by Dr. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, to Tom Vilsack, presenting a finding of a correlation between either glyphosate or Roundup Ready crops and a new, previously unknown organism that may be the cause of animal miscarriages and infertility.As the letter, printed below, notes, this research is still preliminary. However, Huber, who has 40 years experience working as a scientist for "professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks," believes this should be treated as an emergency until more research can confirm or disprove these initial findings. Needless to say, the recent deregulation of GE alfalfa is something to think about, because that will dramatically increase the use of Roundup on animal feed and the feeding of Roundup Ready crops to our livestock. There is more to be said on this, but I want to tread carefully and stick to facts that I can confirm, so stay tuned.

Dear Secretary Vilsack:A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn-suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup.  This organism appears NEW to science! This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen's source, prevalence, implications, and remedies. We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does. For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency. A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario: Unique Physical Properties This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare. Pathogen Location and Concentration It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas. Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income-sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss' wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines). Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting. The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%. For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate. Recommendations In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA's participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health. It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data. I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure. Sincerely, COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber Emeritus Professor, Purdue University APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS)

  

GMOs for Consumer Lab Rats

Killer Trees Poison Forest Ecology, Drinking Water and Us

The Growing Threat of Genetically Engineered Trees -
Award winning documentary film explores the growing global threat of genetically engineered trees to our environment and to human health. The film features renowned geneticist and host of PBS' The Nature of Things David Suzuki, who explores the unknown and possibly disastrous consequences of improperly tested GE methods.

Lies and Bad Science - GMOs

Here are some excerpts from a recent interview, in Acres, USA, with Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette.



...we've identified 65 different risks, including thousands of sick, sterile and dead "livestock", thousands of toxic and allergic reactions in humans, and damage to virtually every organ and every system studied in laboratory animals. We have now what I say is irrefutable, overwhelming evidence that the current generation of genetically modified foods are unsafe, should never have been approved, and should be withdrawn....They have no justification for keeping their "foods" on the market given the overwhelming evidence to date. GMOs may constitute one of the greatest health and environmental catastrophes we face, since they are deployed in the entire food supply.

Evidence on health dangers has prompted the American Academy of Environmental Medicine to say that according to animal feeding studies, GMOs are causally linked to immune system problems, organ damage, reproductive damage, accelerated aging, insulin disregulation, gastrointestinal problems and higher death rates. A study...by the Union of Concerned Scientists confirm(ed)...that genetically modified crops on average reduce yield.

A USDA report from 2006 showed that farmers don't actually increase income from GMOs, but many actually lose income. And for the past several years the US has been forced to spend $3-5 billion per year to prop up the prices of GM crops no one wants. They are not reliable. They are expensive. The take money away from more effective strategies - sustainable and organic methods have been shown to increase yields in some cases by 73 - 300%.

...the strategy we have adopted for eliminating GMOs from the food supply...is not to try and get the government to do it for us but to create a tipping point of consumer rejection against GMOs. We think that could happen with as little as 5 % of US shoppers (15 million people) avoiding GM brands. That will make GM ingredients a marketing liability...and force them out of the market. There are already 28 million people who buy organic food on a regular basis, 54 million who buy it occasionally. Most Americans say they would avoid GMOs if they were labeled.

To create this tipping point quickly, please share with your friends, family, colleagues, customers and suppliers the Non-GMO shopping guide
http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com
See, especially, the page WHY SHOULD I AVOID GMOs?
and, at Jeffrey Smith's site, The 65 Health Risks of GM Foods.

In India, they introduced Bt cotton [cotton engineered to contain bacillus thuringiensis, a pesticide that kills many insects and boll weevils] and it turns out that thousands of farm workers are reporting allergic reactions, rashes and itching after working in the fields - the same symptoms described by farmers in the US and Canada who were exposed to aerial spraying of Bt for gypsy moths. We know that Bt causes allergy and flu-like symptoms in humans but it gets worse. Indian farmers let animals graze the cotton after harvest only to have thousands of sheep, goats, cattle, and buffalo die. Out of shame and desperation many of the farmers then committed suicide. The UK Daily Mail estimated that 125,000 Indian farmers killed themselves because of Bt cotton.

The process of genetic engineering is so disruptive that by the time you've inserted the gene and grown the cell into a plant using cloning, you have hundreds or thousands of mutations up and down the DNA structure. We know that the GMO soy on the market has a soy allergen that's as much as 7 times higher than non-GMO and has an anti-nutrient that's about double.

Do yourself and your family a HUGE favor and learn all you can about this grand and foolish experiment that turns every American into an unmonitored lab rat. Stop buying into it.

Monsanto Claus

CAFOs Are Killing US (NAIS Sucks)

A Consumer Speaks at NAIS Listening Session
By Kimberly Hartke

Susan Blasko is a cancer survivor twice over. She now incorporates local farm fresh foods into her diet in her on-going quest for health. Susan is a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Northern Virginia Whole Foods Nutrition meetup group. She was selected at random to speak at the USDA Listening Session on NAIS (National Animal Idenification System) that took place in Harrisburg, PA this month. Here is the complete text of her remarks.

Good Morning, Secretary Vilsack and USDA/APHIS Hosts. I’m Susan Blasko. I live and work in Falls Church, Virginia. I took a day off to come to Pennsylvania today to attend one of your listening sessions. I consider it a rare opportunity since there are so few of them.

I am a consumer, and I speak for myself. The fact that I am here at all should be an indication to you that the truth is dawning at last on the general population. It has been a gradual awakening, to be sure. For many years your department has been trying to force NAIS on us. What part of “NO” don’t you understand? Yes, the eyes of the public are being pried open by the undeniable, inescapable truth:

• that the aim of the National Animal Identification Scam is to put small farmers out of business so that big-ag can be the sole provider of the world’s food;
• that the food your department approves is making us sick and sterile (For the first time in our history, children are being born with cancer and diabetes. They probably won’t outlive their parents. It is within your power to facilitate the reversal of this trend through regulations that sincerely address the problem. By pushing for NAIS, you contribute further to this condition. I find this unconscionable.);
• that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), food processing plants, and milk pasteurization facilities are the origins of foodborne illness, not the crops of small farmers, grass-fed meats, and raw dairy;
• that the USDA has no legal authority to implement NAIS, and doing so violates the Constitution;
• that several “food safety” bills have NAIS written into them, often without the knowledge of even the legislators (very sneaky!);
• that the USDA is fully prepared to use force to implement NAIS, despite your claim that the program is voluntary (flap jackets have been issued);
• that genetically modified (GMO) foods are ubiquitous, in fully 80% of the foods in the grocery store that carry your stamp of approval, even though they facilitate the formation of tumors, heightened immune responses, and aggressive behavior in laboratory animals. Feed lot animals are fed GMO grains, candy, byproducts of citrus food processing with all the chemicals on the peel of the fruit, and who knows what else, which makes the animals – and us – sick.

I know these truths, and so do my friends, my co-workers, my cancer support group, my church, my family, and every stranger I get a chance to tell in the theatre restroom waiting line. I am the tip of an enormous iceberg that you are beginning to discover as more and more of us turn to locally produced foods, raw milk, and grass-fed meats, because they are safer than the food your department approves. We don’t need a trace-back mechanism. We know where our food comes from.

You should be helping us to access this safe food supply instead of trying to eliminate it. Why won’t you help us by outlawing CAFOs instead of protecting them? You’re supposed to protect us. Implement regulations that will put big-ag out of business if their practices are making us sick. Don’t target small farmers whose food is healing us. You asked for my suggestions for a solution to the growing food safety problem. I hope that you are honestly open to them. Here they are:

• Provide capital incentives to farmers to use the land – which is theirs, by the way! – to grow real crops without pesticides and chemical fertilizers instead of GMO’s, raise animals on pasture instead of in crowded buildings, and produce clean, real milk that doesn’t require the assault of pasteurization. Meat, milk and produce that result from such practices contain essential nutrients that we have a basic right to expect are present in our food.
• Test our foods for nutrient content before allowing them on the market, the same way the European Union does, and ban any foods from the grocery shelves that don’t measure up.
• Require school cafeterias, hospitals, hotels, and every other institution or business that cooks for us to serve nutrient-dense foods.
• Stop rewarding big food companies that over-feed and under-nourish us with their GMOs, artificial flavors and colors, chemical preservatives, over-processing, and pasteurization of everything (I recently learned that almonds are now being pasteurized. What next? This is ludicrous!)

I am deeply troubled by what I’ve learned about NAIS. Not only is it expensive, intrusive, discriminatory, and deliberately hostile to small farmers; it is downright unconstitutional. Go back to the drawing board. Stand up to big-ag and industrial food processors. Just imagine what would happen if you do. You could solve the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, and the economic crisis in one fell swoop. For example:

• Heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, autism, allergies, behavioral and neurological disorders, cancer, and a host of other health problems would again become rare occurrences as we reclaim the health our society enjoyed before the birth of food processing, feed lots and GMOs.
• Ruminants of all sorts would graze on acres – no, miles – of pasture while they renew our soil so that it once again sequesters carbon as it did in our country’s infancy. This is already happening at Polyface Farm, and Joel Salatin is teaching other farmers how to do it. I imagine you’ve heard about it. Why not focus more efforts on his proven methods? And what about the marvelous results that many of our Amish brothers and sisters have achieved without artificial means? Why not explore the wisdom of their traditions? CAFOs, GMOs and food processing are destroying this planet, and you are helping them. Don’t let them get away with it.

Trying to convince the American people that CAFO meats, GMO crops, and pasteurized dairy are safe and nutritious when you know the opposite to be true is immoral, to say the least, Mr. Secretary. And foisting NAIS on us as consumers and on our farmers is corruption at its worst.

I am appalled. And you should be ashamed.

Farming in the Suicide Belt

The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops

By Andrew Malone
Last updated at 12:48 AM on 03rd November 2008

When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it's even WORSE than he feared.

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.

Human tragedy: A farmer and child in India's 'suicide belt'

Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.

Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.

Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.

As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. 'He was a loving and caring man,' she said, weeping quietly.

'But he couldn't take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.'

Shankara's crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India's ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Distressed: Prince Charles has set up charity Bhumi Vardaan Foundation to address the plight of suicide farmers

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

The crisis, branded the 'GM Genocide' by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a 'global moral question' - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning 'the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming... from the failure of many GM crop varieties'.

Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.

The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace 'the future' and follow suit.

So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the 'suicide belt' in Maharashtra state.

What I found was deeply disturbing - and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.

Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and 'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll.

But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.

Death seeds: A Greenpeace protester sprays milk-based paint on a Monsanto research soybean field near Atlantic, Iowa

In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.

She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.

Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.

The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.

But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.

The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.

But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.

Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds' of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.

Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That's because GM seeds contain so- called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.

As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.

'We are ruined now,' said the dead man's 38-year-old wife. 'We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.'

Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her home to pay their respects. 'He was dead by the time they got to hospital.'

Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. 'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.

'He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.'

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this tragedy'. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.

Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.

During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three 'independent' surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more expensive - and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.

(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is 'only double' the price of 'official' non-GM seed - but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by 'unscrupulous' merchants, who often also sell 'fake' GM seeds which are prone to disease.)

With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. 'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said. 'We just want help to stop any more of us dying.'

Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.

India's farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds.

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. 'I told him that we can survive,' his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. 'I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.'

But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children's schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.

Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide' - the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these 'magic seeds'.

Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.