When a questionable story gets rolling and takes on a life of its own, you can usually count on journalists to check it out thoroughly. Not that debunking it necessarily puts an end to the matter, as we discovered with President Obama's birth certificate and the global warming hoax cooked up by thousands of scientists. Some stories, no matter how discredited, remain believable for certain audiences. A case in point is the story of India's shockingly high farmer suicide rates being blamed on agricultural multinationals and GE (genetically engineered) crop technology. The short version of this story is that hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have killed themselves after the GE cotton crops they switched to either failed or didn't produce a high enough yield to offset their costs, thus putting individual farmers (and their families) in massive debt. This assertion, which has been percolating for nearly a decade, rocketed far and wide in 2008 after the UK's Prince Charles hooked his personal anti-GMO campaign to a very real and tragic story in rural parts of India. That indebted Indian farmers have taken their own lives in horribly high numbers is true. But it's a complex story that surprisingly few in the media have attempted to unravel. This has allowed anti-GMO activists to build and propagate their farmer suicide/biotech narrative without much journalistic scrutiny. In a minute, we will see where this has led. So shortly after Prince Charles made his claim in 2008, the Daily Mail, a bastion of melodramatic and scurrilous journalism, parachuted one of its reporters into India for a first hand look-see. That resulted in a story headlined:
The GM Genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers committing suicide after using genetically modified crops
