Loss of both food sovereignty and subsistence security

RIGHTS AIPP AIPP Regional Capacity Building Program - Training Manual on the UNDRIP 118 cious traditional lands to their creditors and become mere tenants or agricultural workers. In the Philippines, thousands of them have had to leave agriculture altogether and either resort to small-scale mining or take up contractual jobs in private construction and public works projects in urban areas. In India, some 60,000 peasants, most of them indigenous people, have commit- ted suicide by ingesting pesticides because they had no alternative to agriculture, and no hope of ever extricating themselves from indebtedness and securing a future for their families.

c. Degradation of land and other natural resources, disruption of ecosystem balance

There are some cases in which indigenous peasants have been able to cope with market glo- balization by taking out bigger loans, intensifying their production and expanding this towards areas that their communities traditionally conserved as forests. But in overcultivating the land and clearing watersheds, the peasants have been jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of their production. Environmental degradation is, how- ever, an old story in the development of market-integrated agriculture. Pressed to make good in the market – because otherwise, their families would starve – farmers have long been striving for high- er and higher yields by means unfriendly to nature. Farmers have been using fertilizers synthesized from petrochemicals, and these fertilizers have made the soil acid- ic, less hospitable to the micro-organ- isms which have helped to maintain its friability and, thus, less cultivable. As said, farmers have also been monocropping, and this has contributed to nutrient imbalance in the soil as well as allowed pests to spread more easily and more quickly. To address pest problems, the farmers have been using poisons, also synthesized from petrochemicals. These are indiscriminate killers, and in most cases, the pests have developed a resistance to the poisons, while the organisms that used to prey upon them have been decimated. Stronger and stronger poisons have thus been developed by input-producing monopolies. And in recent years, the trend among these monopolies has been towards the development of pest-resistant crops by means of genetic engineering. Genetically engineered crops like Bt corn, which carries the DNA of the bacteria Bacillus thuringensis, can kill pests as well as beneficial insects. Meanwhile, their bacteria DNA can trans- fer to weeds whose extermination would then require the use of powerful herbicides, offsetting the benefit of not having to use insecticides. Monocropping, the use of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the cultivation of ge- netically engineered crops all threaten the sustainability of farming because they disrupt the balance in the ecosystem of the farm itself and its environs. Module-6