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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India

The suicide rate among Indian farmers is 1.4 to 1.8 per 100,000. That is about 5-6 times lower than the overall rate in India or the United States. Most people pushing the story are relying on the fact that there are a lot of farmers in India, so even a low suicide rate is a lot of people dying.

We should, of course, be concerned whenever people are choosing to commit suicide, but it is nonsensical to point to a population with one of the lowest suicide rates (less than 1/10th the overall Japanese rate!) and call it an epidemic.

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The suicide rate among Indian farmers is 1.4 to 1.8 per 100,000

Since you're into stats, what do you think of this graph?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bt_Cotton_Hectares_and_Fa...

Point being, the story people "pushing" isn't about the overall rate of farmer suicides in the world's second most populous country - but about the rates in specific regions, and how those rates have changed in recent years, in response to specific events.

Just out of curious, what do you think that graph shows?

What the description says it shows, most likely.

It's showing a small bump in 2004 after Bt cotton was first introduced, and a precipitous drop in suicides in 2006, when Bt cotton had more wide-spread adoption.

It's a rather small time-frame to draw conclusions from (especially since we should have 10 more years of data), but the obvious one you would draw from this graph is that Bt cotton is associated with fewer suicides, and the bump in 2004 was likely unrelated to the introduction of Bt cotton.

Is that, uh, what you thought it showed?

It's showing a small bump in 2004 after Bt cotton was first introduced, and a precipitous drop in suicides in 2006, when Bt cotton had more wide-spread adoption.

Thanks, Alexa. I actually didn't look much at the graph, one way or another. My point was simply that in a country as large as India (or even not nearly as large), one should be looking at at local rates (and local factors of potential causality) not simply national averages, if ones wants to make heads or tails of a complex set of claims like these.

Your conclusion ("was likely unrelated") differs with what the authors of that study put forth in their abstract, BTW.

Hey man, you asked me what I would make of that graph; I told you.

It's been awhile since I've read in depth on this subject, but I believe when the authors say in the abstract "Nevertheless, in specific districts and years, Bt cotton may have indirectly contributed to farmer indebtedness, leading to suicides, but its failure was mainly the result of the context or environment in which it was planted.", they're referring to analysis showing that the suicides mainly correlated with regions where the banking infrastructure was under-developed (and good loans were not available to the farmers, to help them through rough times) that were subsequently hit with a bad year; within those regions, farmers who had planted Bt cotton were slightly worse off than farmers who hadn't, but it was a weaker correlation than the rest.

(But again, it's been years since I read in depth on this, and I could be confusing this paper with another.)

Thanks. My response to you was a bit off (hence obscuring the point I was trying to make). I do apologize.

tHats not the point though:

The point is, that if you watch the documentary (and if you actually believe it ((jury is out))) that the farmers were committing more suicide after the intro of Monsanto products REDUCED their yields and they fell into even more poverty as they couldn't pay the Monsanto tax - and thus fell into despair and killed themselves.

IIRC.

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