Invisible Hands: Voices from the Global Economy (Voice of Witness)
Language: English
Pages: 364
ISBN: 1938073908
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
farmers.1 Numerous surveys and reports link farmer suicides to debt and the pressures of repaying loans with steep interest rates. Increasingly, cotton farmers will borrow money in order to buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, and the cost of these investments has risen dramatically, even as the market has kept the price at which farmers can sell their cotton relatively flat. We meet Pournima Akolkar at a banquet in honor of over two hundred widows of cotton farmers in Vidarbha, a region with
asset we couldn’t get a loan of more than 10,000 rupees.20 then, from 2007 through 2010, the rains betrayed us. for two years it didn’t rain, and the other two years it rained so much the seeds were washed away. because bank loans were small, my husband started to take out loans from other farmers or private moneylenders, and he wouldn’t tell me exactly what the interest rate for these were. he would just say, “Why are you worried about the interest rate? i’m taking a loan, that’s it. you don’t
would agree to send her? she is the only daughter we have. but we can’t do anything about it. if we don’t send our daughter to the fields, the school cannot punish her officially, but we’ve heard that those who didn’t go to the fields were expelled from school. the school districts can fire school directors if their schools don’t meet harvesting requirements. uzbeks have a saying: “the government official who is threatened from above in turn threatens the school director below. the director
women of Ijatz produce and sell as part of a catering business that supports the work of the cooperative. Francisca struggles through memories of her earliest years, and the deaths of her parents still weigh heavily on her. But when she speaks of her current work and her future, she seems cheerful and confident. i had to be the resPonsible one my name is francisca ajcibinac cocón. i was born on the tenth of october, 1968, in a finca called san bernardino. it’s near Pochuta in the province of
lok editor: dave eggers managing editor: luke gerwe education Program director: cliff mayotte education Program associate: claire Kiefer Publicity & communications consultant: alyson sinclair founding editors dave eggers Co-founder, Voice of Witness; co-founder of 826 National; founder of McSweeney’s Publishing LLC, and award-winning author lola vollen Co-founder, Voice of Witness; founder & Executive Director, The Life After Exoneration Program voice of Witness board of directors mimi loK