Villages for Sale

Entire villages like Malwa in India’s cotton belt or Butal Khor in Punjab were put up for sale do to the inability of all the villagers collectively to pay escalating debts taken out to cover the rising cost of living and farming. Rising  input costs  on pesticides and seeds for example, coincide with cutbacks in subsidies for the Indian farmer

meanwhile subsidized competition from the U.S. drives down the price for their crops at the market. These agricultural refugees are then forced to leave their ancestral land for menial jobs in India’s overpopulated and polluted cities to live on less than $2.00 a day, or die of malnutrition. The overall process of forcibly transforming agrarian peoples into a cheap impoverished labor that is available for urban projects such as road building, dam building, condo and hospital construction etc, has been termed urbanization.

Government policies that shift favor to corporate farming , the  biotech industry, and western style chemical agriculture, displace farmers, tribals and others who rely on forest produce and natural equity, thus increasing poverty through a slow divesting of these peoples of their only economic security – their meager land holdings and/or access. Entire villages going up for sale is a collective symptom of a paradigm of domination where everything is sourced for the lower cost, and sold at the highest.

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