FACTS can be stubborn - and irritating. It is satisfying—perhaps even gratifying—to accept the idea that genetically modified crops are causing thousands of Indian farmers to commit suicide (as this article claims). The notion seems plausible: farmers take out higher debts on the promise that GM seeds will be a bonanza and then lose everything when the harvest fails. There is genuine distress: farmers are indeed killing themselves. Their cause has been adopted by high-profile campaigners such as Britain’s Prince Charles and India’s Vandana Shiva, who blames the spate of deaths on Monsanto, an American biotech firm. There have been blockbuster films, such as “Summer 2007”; the rural-affairs editor of The Hindu, a newspaper, won an international press award for his writing on the subject. The farmers' deaths played a part in the recommendation by a panel of India's Supreme Court to impose a 10-year moratorium on field trials of GM crops in the country.There is only one trouble: there has been no spate of suicides. Ian Plewis, of the University of Manchester, in Britian, has looked at suicide rates in the cotton-growing areas of India, which are usually regarded as among the worst-hit. He finds that the suicide rate among male farmers in the nine main cotton-growing states was just under 30 per 100,000 in 2011. That is about the same as suicide rates among farmers in ...
