You can listen online to the BBC's 'Bitter Harvest' series recently broadcast as part of the BBC Asian Network's Vaisakhi season (marking an important Sikh festival which coincides with the harvesting season for farmers in the Punjab).

The 'Bitter Harvest' series looks at the plight of farmers in India through a series of 5 separate programmes of about 10 minutes each, covering issues such as seed-saving, patents, farmer suicides, depopulation of rural areas, subsidies, free trade and the debt trap.

The British Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, refused to take part in these programmes but there are interesting contributions from Vandana Shiva and Devinder Sharma, amongst others.

The corporate take-over of farming, the green revolution and biotechnology are an almost constant point of reference. There's also lots of interesting detail on how, for example, the entire public system in the Punjab is used to promote Monsanto's seeds, and how Monsanto makes use of religion in its advertising to farmers in order to project its seeds as miraculous - using the Ramayana in its advertisements for Hindu farmers in South India, while using Guru Nanak in its sales pitch to Sikh farmers in the Punjab.

You can listen to the series here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/asiannetwork/features/vaisakhi.shtml
Click on the daily 'Bitter Harvest' links in the top right 'Listen Again' panel. You will sometimes get a short burst of the 'Drive' programme before 'Bitter Harvest' begins.