” “Over the last decade, more than 150,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because they had run into too many debts because their crops had gone bad or had been underpaid, despite their hard work and efforts. A large part of these causes are due to the questionable policies of the multinational corporations that are selling expensive seeds, which require more water, fertilisers and pesticides, produced by the same multinational corporations, especially in the states of Maharastra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. In the region of Vidharba alone (diocese of Amaravathi), in the State of Maharastra, approximately 3,000 farmers have taken their lives in the last six years. To solve the problem, "political determination and a huge availability of funds are required", said a few days ago mgr. Daniel Lourdes, bishop of Amaravathi, to the Catholic agency Ucanews, not least because the Indian Government took notice of the phenomenon and tackled it with proclamations and the allocation of funds that so far have been poorly effective. Ucanews highlights, in a late-2007 survey of Catholics in India, that, "since India has opened its markets to globalisation in 1991, the poor have become even poorer". The Catholic Church, although a minority in the country, decided to support the Indian farmers’ fights. (continued) ” “
