ABSTRACT
In July 2003, before a meeting in Palakkad district, south India, to memorialise the peasant leader Keraleeyan, agrarian activists told me and each other of threats from ‘the terminator’. I explained to colleagues that the ‘Monsanto/terminator/suicide-seed’ narrative about Bt cotton tests was a product of a Canadian web site, NGOs and instrumental political dramaturgy, not reality. Politely, no one corrected me. At the meeting, a prominent public intellectual – P. A. Vasudevan – said that the current stage of historic agrarian struggles for which Kerala is justifiably well-known is only for ‘the mud’; world agriculture will be controlled by Monsanto and Cargill, through biotechnology. Popular forces had learned how to struggle against and defeat the landlords, their goondas and police, but they did not know how to fight globalisation. 1 The emergence of a new farmer organisation in a district already intensively organised reflects his analysis: the Deshiya Karshaka Samrakshana Samithi (National Agriculturalist Protection Committee, DKKS) was formed to protect farmers from globalisation, one prominent manifestation of which was Monsanto and its terminator technology (DKSS, 2003: 2).
