
As crops rot, millions go hungry in India - tokenadult
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/01/uk-india-wheat-idUKBRE8600KB20120701
======
simplefish
So let's summarize: The Indian government spends billions of dollars (which
are desperately needed for other purposes in a poor country like India)
propping up the price of wheat. This causes many farmers to switch from
growing vegetables to wheat. The drives up the price of vegetables, and
_would_ drive down the price of wheat, except for political reasons the Indian
government would rather let the wheat rot than give it away cheaply. As a
result, many of the poor can't afford wheat, and the ones who can can't afford
anything _but_ wheat, leading to rampant malnutrition.

Or even shorter: India spends billions of dollars on a policy that does
nothing except ensure they have a rate of child malnutrition almost twice that
of sub-saharan Africa.

tl;dr: Socialism, lol.

(Oh, and as Spodek pointed out, famines are caused by a lack of money, not
food. It's been known for DECADES that if you want to stop people starving,
you need to give them cash, and cut barriers to trade.)

~~~
w1ntermute
I don't think it's yet even at the level where you can start debating
socialism vs. other systems. In India, there are endemic problems with
enforcing the law, especially with respect to the wealthy/privileged. Just
ensuring that no one can flout the law and get away unscathed would go a long
way in alleviating these sorts of issues.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Could you explain how would enforcing the law against the wealthy/privileged
affect this situation at all?

Please be specific about the mechanics.

~~~
solutionyogi
I am not the OP but let me try.

I agree with the OP in the sense that the biggest problem in India is that if
you are rich, you don't have to worry about the law. Let me give you couple of
examples:

1\. The murder of Jessica Lal.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lal> Even though the accused
is in jail right now, it was not because law enforcement worked. It was
because of Indian Media. Read the Wikipedia page to get more details.

2\. Almost all Indian politicians are corrupt.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_politicians_in_India_ch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_politicians_in_India_charged_with_corruption)
Now, it's one thing to get away with a crime but it's a whole another thing to
still be active in politics after your crimes are exposed. E.g. Lalu Yadav was
involved in a scam costing government ~190MM. He later became Railway Minister
and he is still active. Compare this to US. Eliot Spitzer, a generally honest
man, had to quit politics after his sex scandal came out.

3\. Salman Khan, a famous Indian actor, was drunk driving and killed a person.
He didn't do any jail time. [ <http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/sep/28khan.htm>
]

I grew up in India and I have personally seen how the rich people have used
money to circumvent the law.

This lack of enforcement against rich people leads to a situation where common
people have no respect for the law. And that is why corruption is so rampant
in India.

IMHO, A law enforcement similar to how it's in USA, will do wonders to India
and it's economy. Though I should add that before we adapt strict law
enforcement, we have to revamp our ridiculously outdated laws
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Penal_Code>]. E.g. It was only in 2009
when the law banning gay people was scrapped down.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Penal...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377_of_the_Indian_Penal_Code)

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm well aware of corruption and the antics of Salman Khan. I absolutely don't
dispute that India needs to fix this problem to make real progress.

However, this ignores the question: how would enforcing laws against the
wealthy and privileged affect the particular problem we are discussing in this
article (wheat rotting while children starve)?

~~~
solutionyogi
My bad. I kind of overlooked your statement where you mentioned 'how it would
affect this situation'. On that note, I agree with you, law enforcement won't
really help this particular situation.

------
jandrewrogers
Ignoring the crop subsidies for a moment, there was a similar issue in the US
for many years. In the little farming town where I grew up, there was a giant
mountain of grain dumped outside of town where excess grain was left to rot
(and like the article stated, it reeks).

People often wonder why excess grain is dumped instead of shipped off as aid
to people that can't afford it. The reason is simple but complex in its
implications: the grain is worth less than the cost to move it somewhere else.
In addition to the loss of underutilized grain, someone has to pay even more
money to move it that in the net is not a cost efficient way to get food to
the people that need it relative to not using dumped grain. So the grain is
dumped.

One way to improve the situation is to invest in infrastructure to reduce the
logistical cost, allowing the grain to compete across a wider range of market
prices. However, that investment in infrastructure has to be offset by return
on the grain production it effectively allows and has to account for the
unpredictability of a global market that the subsidies are crudely trying to
mitigate. There is a diminishing return.

One of the big issues in the global market is that grain trade tends to be
highly protectionist, in part for food security reasons. While some countries
(like the US) produce grain in vast quantities at low cost, most governments
do not want to be dependent on foreign countries for their food. At the same
time, these policies increase the price and restrict flow of food in these
countries in times when the global market is a much more efficient producer.
Subsidies and protectionism tend to be very blunt instruments.

~~~
btilly
The fundamental economic problem is that demand is very inelastic. When you
draw a supply-demand curve for food it looks very close to a vertical line,
people do not buy significantly more food when you make it cheaper, people do
not buy significantly less food until they run out of money.

The implication is that even slight excesses result in rock bottom prices, and
even slight shortages result in very high prices. This volatility is bad for
everyone. Therefore the government steps in with subsidies to even out how
much farmers get, and to guarantee a surplus to avoid ruinous food prices for
consumers.

But there is simply no good way to do this without perverse consequences
somewhere...

~~~
ars
> people do not buy significantly more food when you make it cheaper, people
> do not buy significantly less food until they run out of money.

That's not really accurate. Yes, the total amount of food may not change, but
the _type_ of food changes quite a bit. People will eat less desirable, but
cheaper food.

~~~
cgoddard
That's not so much an issue with grain prices. Rice and bread and such are the
most basic of staple foods, and pricing people out of that market results in
hunger and starvation.

~~~
Symmetry
But huge amounts of the staples the US produces are then fed to animals to
make meat. It takes something like ten pounds of grain to make a pound of
hamburger. If food gets more expensive people cut back on meat, which frees up
more grain.

~~~
krschultz
That is true in the US, but not as true in other countries. The US eats an
enormous amount of meat compared to most countries (and even more so compared
to history).

The article mentions that it would be better if some of the farmers started
growing vegetables rather than grain, but the subsidies don't pay for
vegetables.

------
spodek
That people starve while food rots isn't rare. We've known about the effect
for decades. If you aren't familiar with Amartya Sen, he won a Nobel Prize in
part for his research into famines, pointing out their causes not only in food
shortages but distribution. Quoting Wikipedia --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen> (sorry so long a quote but his work
is fascinating and I'm interested to read other thoughts from this community
)--

In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from
a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing
food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic
boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to
starve to death when their wages did not keep up.[17] However, this argument
has recently been undermined by evidence suggesting significant decline in
food availability in the Bengal Famine.[18] This implies the curious irony
that Sen had bought into precisely the excuse used by the War Cabinet to
refuse aid to Bengal -- that hoarding, not a lack of food, was the famine's
cause.

Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old
boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people
perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded.
He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time,
but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban
service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire
food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British military
acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price gouging, all connected to the
war in the region. In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of
famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example,
food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous
non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors,
such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-
distribution systems. These issues led to starvation among certain groups in
society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person's
actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom
approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-
interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy
food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not
positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of
nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.

~~~
steve8918
Didn't a similar thing happen during the Great Depression? I thought FDR
ordered livestock, etc, destroyed in order to keep their prices up. I'm sure
lots of Americans were going hungry at that time, so the outrage must have
been huge.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
It lasted less than 6 months before they created the Federal Surplus Relief
Corporation, which instead of creating artificial scarcity bought the stocks
and distributed it (some 600 Million pounds of grain, cotton, and meat) to
impoverished sectors across the US.

~~~
gcb
Doesn't giving something for free totally counters the effects of buying it at
higher price to begin with?

sounds more like "helping my friend producer with tax money" than "keeping
market stable"

~~~
jeremyswank
sounds to me like they were trying to feed the hungry. i suppose it all comes
down to your perspective.

~~~
yummyfajitas
They could also have fed the hungry merely by allowing prices to fall. But
doing that makes it harder to get the farming vote (a big deal in that era).

~~~
rprasad
FDR did not pay the farmers as a way to get their vote. _He already had their
vote._ Furthermore, allowing prices to fall would have done nothing for many
of the victims of the Great Recession, as many of them did not have jobs and
thus could not afford to pay for food _no matter what it cost_.

The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation was created for the sole purpose of
maintaining America's agricultural output, which then and now, was the primary
source of America's economic strength. Maintaining food production also meant
that many of the associated farming jobs would remain intact, preventing the
crisis for worsening.

The farming jobs supported many skilled industrial production jobs, especially
for heavy equipment such as tractors. This would prove invaluable a decade
later when the U.S. entered WWII and the factories began producing weapons and
tanks. The factories already had plenty of trained workers ready to work the
lines.

All of this is covered in most high school U.S. history courses.

~~~
Symmetry
That's partially correct. FDR wasn't just trying to buy farmers votes, he
really did believe that high prices were good for the economy. He correctly
realized that the deflation being experienced in the US was bad, but he
thought that artificially increasing prices would fix things, but in reality
people didn't have the money to pay the new, higher, prices and all of FDR's
efforts to raise the prices of things (the NRA especially) just ended up
making the depression worse.

Now, FDR did a lot of things and some of them worked pretty well. He'd touched
off the fastest industrial expansion in US history a few months before he
killed it with the NRA, for example. I'm not aware of any current economic
school of thought that would endorse the idea that price supports actually
helped with the depression. A Keynesian would say that you have to run a
deficit to increase the aggregate demand, a Monetarist would say you need more
money to increase aggregate demand, a Supply-Sider would say you can't help, a
Socialist would say the state needs to take over the means of production, etc.

Now, I do have friends from states that rely on agricultural subsidies, and
their high school history textbooks evidently did wax poetic about how awesome
agricultural subsidies were, but that isn't in most American's high school
educations.

------
kamaal
There is more than one reason for why India is in this problem today. And
taking simplistic view points can't explain this problem completely.

Firstly Farming in India is currently very unproductive. To understand why
this happens, you have to understand some history. India was even from its
very existence in history a huge sub continent ruled big and small kingdoms,
with Agriculture as its main source of work. And Farmers were always taxed in
return for many things. Add to this shortage of rainfall, droughts and other
occasional problems forced farmers to mortgage their lands for some money to
rich landlords. These problems went to an extent till farmers were almost
synonymous with slaves. The Naxal terrorism problems has deep roots in this
history.

I have many friends who come families of farmers. And you can still hear the
old stories. The lands get passed on from generation to generation through
inheritance. And every time the land is inherited it gets divided among sons.
So with every generation each person gets lesser and lesser land to harvest
on. With growing population you can now image with each generation, number of
farmers increase but the land available for farming decreases. This makes
farming a highly unproductive business in India.

This is coupled lack of modern logistics to distribute, modern machinery or
harvesting and farming. All these stories of rotting grains that your hear of
is because, the crops are often sold to local middlemen with farmers often
given an unfair deal. The middle men take real hefty cut, and both the farmers
and consumers suffer. Also middle men again sell to places called 'mandis'
which inturn are very inefficient ways of distribution.

The policies ran by Government of India utmost work as patch jobs. There is no
long term vision to improve the situation of farmers. Providing subsidized
pump sets, lower interest loans etc only give the farmer a longer rope to hang
himself. There are no incentives to bring in larger agricultural reforms, to
modernize distribution, to eliminate middle men(In fact in the recent FDI
debate, some MP's actually sided with the middlemen, can you believe that?),
to improve logistics, cut corruption, fight bureaucracy, bring in mass farming
techniques, infrastructure and equipment.

Agriculture policies are just one election to the next bait to get farmer
votes.

~~~
Tichy
How did India get to it's huge population, though? I would have thought that
if you don't have food, eventually the population stops growing?

~~~
pm90
that's a very good question. The fertility rate is very high amongst the poor,
although they seem to have the worst means to support many children. I guess
the main reason is that women were/are not empowered enough to decide how many
kids they should have. Another major factor is lack of availability/knowledge
of contraceptives. Also, I think children provide the only
"entertainment"(using this word very loosely) when you have no TV, no books
etc; there may also be a feeling that having many children gurantees that some
will survive to carry their "family" ahead (many might die due to lack of
access to healthcare). Lastly, child labour. Most of these are purely
speculative though. Its what I picked up when I asked my parents precisely the
same thing

~~~
kamaal
While ignorance on family planning matters and entertainment stuff(Again using
that word loosely) have been factors(Remember the idea mobile phone ad? Where
they cite power cuts contributing the other source of 'entertainment' which in
turn contributes to population. So use idea 3G and get entertained in the
other way).

The actual reasons really are 'reproduce until you get a boy' or 'have as many
boys as you can' so that you can have something depend on in old age.

~~~
pm90
I don't think its as simple as saying that there is "actual reason" for
anything that is so complex. For example: this obsession with males might be
widely prevalent in the northern part of India, but its not as strong in the
southern part.

~~~
realrocker
I would call BullShit, but you are right, Southern states are marginally
better. Especially Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Though they too are
degrading every year. Stats:
<http://www.satyamevjayate.in/issue01/learnmore/detail/4/>

~~~
kamaal
>>I would call BullShit

You would because, you are not 60 and you are not being forced to do small
time jobs for paltry income to just afford food, clothing, shelter and medical
care.

A person goes and works small time jobs, struggles to put food on his table.
He spends almost nothing. Struggles to pay rents, or buy clothes. All this
while his hand and legs have no strength. Yet his peer who has a son eats dal,
roti and kabab at home watching television.

Go and all the best trying to lecture that person, why not having a son was
OK.

Honestly if you were to ask me, merely the thought of being that person scares
me. I would save like hell now, have enough money to feed me until I die than
be in such a position when I am 60.

~~~
aangjie
>>Honestly if you were to ask me, merely the thought of being that person
scares me.

Honestly, the thought of becoming either(small time job vs comfortable living
with son oldman) of those old persons scare me. I would rather be an oldman,
more like Ron from "Into the wild"(think lifestyle business), than either of
these. Unfortunately, i can't rely on Federal Health care or pension for that.

------
Zenst
Reminds me of the early days of the EU nd butter mountain.

The indian goverment needs to build storage, build a transport system to
replace the old british one that is dated. So many things theyt could be doing
and should of been doing and yet all the warning signs get ignored.

Firstly they need to look at the price they pay as the sad fact they have paid
so much has allowed the GM crops to sneak in via various crop priomises and
alot of farmers jumped onto that bandwagon, found themselfs in debt they could
not pay and cmmiting suicide to maintain honour. So any drop in price would be
impacting and needs to be done slowly. You cant hook a farmer onto a subsidy
crack-pipe without weaning them off slowly, but there again people dont
apprecieate that money can also be a drug.

Sadly this pattern of growth/overstock etc is common in many area's of the
World over time and as I mentioned the whole butter mountain/dairy one the EU
had in its early days being a good enough example. Exports would be one area,
though they will take a loss, but better a small loss than losing it all.

------
robomartin
Further evidence that governments should be as limited as possible in their
access and control of our lives. Nearly everything they touch has ugly short
and long-term consequences spanning from financial to millions of people
dying.

I know that the issues in India are far more complex than this. I am over-
simplifying in a gross manner. That said, I can't help but feel that
"civilization" has degenerated into the lunatics running the asylum world-
over. I don't know what the solution might be, but it is almost unthinkable to
see millions of people dying rather than millions of people mounting a revolt
to take control of what is rightly theirs: Their country, their land, their
resources and their very lives.

Here's a case where the actions of a few in power are likely a huge part of
the reason for millions dying every year. What is wrong with humanity?

~~~
intended
Yes. It is a gross simplification.

For reference: soon after being formed, India was given 0 chance of survival,
with a common theme being that the country would soon break up into a million
different states.

That country with more languages, cultures and dialects than Babel is still
here.

Further, for the longest time India depended on foreign aid to feed its
people. Until they finally did something about it and ushered in the green
revolution which turned Punjab and many other states into bread baskets. India
has gone from a place where people died in famines to a place where they can
actually worry about improving nutrition standards.

And the subsidies being reviled today played an important part before to make
this discussion happen in the first place.

India built the IITs. Which went on to power companies across the globe.

They built their own space program, and they also built the Non Aligned
movement during the cold war, which was a pretty nifty achievement.

They currently supply some of the larger contingents to the UN. (And some of
those contingents are mired in corruption charges.)

India is a stupidly complicated country. I could go on for pages about its
ills, at the same time point out genuine accomplishments it has achieved.

Edit: removed a line which was argumentative.

~~~
robomartin
I would go farther and say that mine was a grotesque over-simplification.

One has to admit that there is something wrong with the way governments are
working world-wide (not just India or the US). Examples abound of everything
from flat-out government corruption to governments making decisions which
often-times have consequences that affect millions in very negative ways. It's
a weird time because we are so connected that it is easy to see these things
happening all across the world. Fifty years ago it was very hard for the
average citizen of any country to get a play-by-play account of what was going
on around the world.

Today you can get a good picture within an hour of sitting down at your
computer. One of the pictures I am getting is that we have all allowed
governments to do more than they should. And we are all paying for it in one
way or another. To be auto-critical, the disastrous economic downturn that we
have been navigating through was nearly 100% caused by the US government
deciding that it was politically important to put into place a framework that
allowed almost anyone to own a home. Yes, private enterprise and Wall Street
took it from there. It was government that enabled and promoted this and
provided the ecosystem within which the disaster was created. Other examples
of this are wars nobody wants, military bases all over the world and foreign
aid that often ends in the hands of dictators and questionable characters.

Being hopeful, I see a future where the Internet connects people to the point
where governments simply won't be able to cause so much damage at the local or
global level. I think that era is slowly coming to an end.

------
escherplex
"Tehran will not be falling over itself to buy because of concern that Indian
grain may be tainted by fungal disease"

That's what I was wondering. There is something making the rounds called Ug99,
a form of wheat rust capable of destroying 80 percent of all known wheat
varieties (PBS). The protocols may be inept but to what extent could the
government just be trying to contain a botanical pandemic?

------
anmol
Governance in India consists of terrible mismanagement and obscene corruption.
The country's growth has been driven by the private sector and privatization.

Its so entrenched in the billion person economy, there simply seems to be no
way for the educated classes to have an impact and change this. Any ideas on
how this can be changed?

~~~
Synaesthesia
Something similar in South Africa. At least India has decent mass education,
the only way I see out. You need everyone to be educated, connected and have a
true participatory democracy.

~~~
kamaal
The problem is everybody talks against corruption, but when they themselves
get a chance to be corrupt they go for it.

People feel what they do is right, and what others do is wrong. No matter what
the truth is.

~~~
jhatax
What is even more deplorable, depressing even, is that the educated Indians
are the worst of the lot. You would think education would bring about change
and an unwillingness to give in to the corruption. You would be absolutely
wrong.

The educated are the ones with money, and if you have money in India, you can
get away with almost anything unscathed. Notice how the wealthy/rich/educated
are almost never standing in lines in India. It is always poor folk in line;
the rich have paid someone to either stand in line, or the government agent to
cut ahead of the line.

As someone said, India's problems are too complex to propose simple solutions.
Educating the masses is just one prong of a multi-pronged approach to making
things "right".

~~~
pm90
It really depends on what you mean by "educated". I went to one of the best
engineering universities; yet I was shocked to see that a large chunk of the
students had no qualms with cheating, copying etc. Essentially, the
"education" they received was only as a means to land a job

------
skrish
One of the primary reasons is the inability to match the supply-demand cycle.
There are a few startups trying to solve this issue in their own way.

I heard one of the founders speak <http://www.efarm.in> (he runs another site
connecting farmers called <http://www.efarmdirect.com>). His views are quite
interesting and he is using IT as an enabler to solve some of the issues. They
are trying to use basic mobile phones to gather supply info, feed that
information above the chain.

------
iwwr
The problem appears to be:

"The ruling party has been the worst manager of the demand-supply of food
grains."

the very idea that a political entity can 'manage' supply and demand.

~~~
kamaal
'No matter what happens, I am not responsible' is the attitude of nearly all
of us.

When asked who actually is.. The answer is obvious.

'Its the government'.

------
vilhelm_s
I wonder if farmers could arbitrage the government by buying grain at the
market price and then selling at the fixed price...

------
nsns
The main problem is the PDS [1] in certain Indian states. In other states,
where the PDS works (e.g. Tamil Nadu), things are better.

The article is very simplistic and alarmist. Things are much more complex, and
it's high time Western readers stopped using the "developing" (read:
industrial) world to boost their perceived moral superiority.

Why are political articles about the US not allowed on HN, but Indian are?

[1] <http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1711/17110710.htm>

~~~
realrocker
It was not submitted as a political problem, but the discussions have devolved
into a political debate. Sad.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Politics is the art of allocating resources.

~~~
nsns
"politics is the fact that the weakest cat in the street can become the leader
of the pack" (paraphrasing Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe in their _Retreating the
Political_ )

------
known
India needs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika>

Former USSR republics are prospering well. <http://doingbusiness.org/rankings>
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita)

------
xfhai
This kind of old news. This has been a problem for many years. But this year
there has been no rain yet in Bangalore. I suppose the rains should have
started in beginning of June. Many farmers who planted the seeds expecting
rains, have lost crops. So, there could be use of excess stocks this year.

------
known
"Power will go to the hands of rogues and freebooters. All Indian leaders will
be of low caliber and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly
hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in
political squabbles" --Winston Churchill

------
ashray
This is SHAMEFUL!

I'm a web developer and I want to solve this distribution problem. I've been
trying to think of a business model to sustain it but have come up with
nothing.

Ideas ?

------
excuse-me
Indian has a space program, a nuclear weapons program and now owns British
Steel and LandRover - and we send them aid to feed themselves !

~~~
latch
The United States of American has a space program, a nuclear program, own a
lot and 1 in 5 children are living in poverty.

You can say the same about almost any country.

The state of poverty and despair in western countries is far more mind
boggling to me than in developing countries.

~~~
modoc
True but AFAIK no other countries are spending their tax money providing food
aid to the USA?

I agree our own poverty situation is awful, but honestly that's another reason
to not be spending tax money the US International Food Aid Program. What if we
spent that ~1.2 billion each year on feeding our hungry children, trying to
reduce the number of families in poverty etc..?

~~~
earl
I was going to sarcastically reply that my apartment building also wasn't
holding a fundraiser for the robber barons on wall street until I remembered
that we already did.

Also, you are aware that in 2011 the usa spent .86 _trillion_ dollars on the
military and wars? Maybe we should go after that for food aid before
complaining about a paltry billion donated from the richest country in the
world to our fellow human beings.

~~~
modoc
Agreed 100%, but arguing about military spending seems pretty tangential to
the main discussion here, whereas the food aid program is directly relevant.

------
eriksank
Difficult to reach two different goals at the same time with just one
instrument. So, supporting the farmers means keeping prices high. Supporting
the poor means keeping prices low. No matter how much anybody patches the
system, the contradiction will remain in place.

------
hastur
I just hope someone doesn't come up with the stupid idea that this story is
not tech related and kill it on HN.

As many "hackers" work on the next farting iPhone app or the next photo-
sharing service that will leverage your social graph to puss fake viagra ads,
stories like this need to be promoted to shame people chasing pathetic first-
world problems.

------
Ancient
I'm curious if this has anything to do as a result of India banning Monsanto
for bio-piracy.

