Farmers in India

Today 150, 000 farmers in India have committed suicide in areas where seed has been destroyed, where they have to buy the seed from Monsanto and buy it every year at very high cost, and that high cost seed is getting them into debt and that debt is pushing them to suicide. What we've done is create community seed banks in places where we collect and save seeds rescue them from disappearance, multiply them and then distribute them according to farmers' needs and about 40 community seed banks have been created across the length and breadth of India. Places where these have been created famers are not in distress, because the biggest cost today is seeds and chemicals. These seed banks have now been a new place where we can respond to the new crisis of globalization. On the one hand and climate change on the other globalization has led to farmer suicides. We are able to take seeds to these suicide zones and distribute so that farmers can break out of that dependency. .. draw food crops get out of debt we've been able to create community seed banks to deal with climate change whether it's extreme flooding, the new droughts, the cyclones, the hurricanes that lead to salinization, and today for us the work on seed has become the place from where we are responding to the worst tragedies and worst crises of that types.