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Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts – and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a ‘global moral question’ – and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’.

Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.

The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the future’ and follow suit.

So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.

What I found was deeply disturbing – and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.

Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll.

In an e-mail to local election supervisors, obtained by the McMinnville, Oregon News Register, Evergreen president Tom Wiggins said he “recognized the potential conflict” that could occur on November 4th. “Never has there been a more heated battle in the race for president.”

The company, he said, ‘proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4th to assure that disputes amongst citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed, but capable of stopping any violence that may occur and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement arrives.’

Evergreen’s website describes its security arm as having “nearly five decades of experience working with the U.S. Armed Forces, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, the United Nations, NASA, and the U.S. Air Mobility Command. Many of our contracts include highly sensitive work-scope, and take place in locations ranging from the deserts of the Middle East to the jungles of South America to the highest peaks of Mt. McKinley in Alaska.”

According to the News Register, Evergreen “exudes the gung-ho patriotism that is associated with the company founder, a political conservative who enjoys close ties with the federal government and military.”

No kidding. Back in the late ’80s, the company “acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.” More recently, Evergreen’s parent company flew Bill O’Reilly into Kuwait in 2006, according to SourceWatch.

But rest easy: The Oregonian reports that the company struck out with its sales pitch.

First, Tao Shoulong burned his company’s financial books. He then sold his private golf club memberships and disposed of his Mercedes S-600 sedan.

And then he was gone.

And just like that, China’s biggest textile dye operation — with four factories, a campus the size of 31 football fields, 4,000 workers and debts of at least $200 million — was history.

“We’re pretty much dead now,” said Mao Youming, one of 300 suppliers stiffed last month by Tao’s company, Jianglong Group. Lighting a cigarette in a coffee shop here, the 38-year-old spoke calmly about the bleak future of his industrial gas business. Tao owed him $850,000, Mao said, about 60% of his annual revenue. “We cannot pay our workers’ salaries. We are about to be bankrupt too.”

Government statistics show that 67,000 factories of various sizes were shuttered in China in the first half of the year, said Cao Jianhai, an industrial economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. By year’s end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed.

As more factories in China shut down, stories of bosses running away have become familiar, multiplying the damage of China’s worst manufacturing decline in at least a decade.

Speaking in Washington on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Robert Gates expressed concern that some Russian nuclear weapons from the former Soviet arsenal may not be fully accounted for.

“I have fairly high confidence that no strategic or modern tactical nuclear weapons have leaked beyond Russian borders,” Gates said.

“What worries me are the tens of thousands of old nuclear mines, nuclear artillery shells and so on, because the reality is the Russians themselves probably don’t have any idea how many of those they have or, potentially, where they are,” he added.

“Such allegations are entirely groundless,” the ministry’s press and information department said in a statement.

“Despite all the difficulties that our country faced in the early 1990s, Russia maintained very high standards of ensuring the safety and physical protection of its nuclear arsenals,” the statement said.

China’s leap to one of the biggest suppliers of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world happened over the last decade, as the Chinese government subsidized the construction of manufacturing plants that have undercut prices everywhere. Generic drug makers in the United States, where price competition is fierce, were the first to seek cheaper drug ingredients in China. Last year, generic drug applications to the F.D.A. listed 1,154 plants providing active pharmaceutical ingredients: 43 percent of them were in China, and another 39 percent were in India. Only 13 percent were in the United States. Branded drug makers, with their fatter profit margins, resisted buying ingredients from China for years, but with their businesses now suffering, even major pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Baxter and Pfizer have announced deals to outsource manufacturing to China.

Six attorneys hired to represent clients in the cases say UBS brokers touted the so-called structured notes as low-risk investments and failed to emphasize they were unsecured obligations of Lehman, which filed for bankruptcy in September. State regulators are fielding so many calls about Lehman’s notes they’re considering a task force to investigate the sales, said Rex Staples, general counsel for the North American Securities Administrators Association Inc., a group of 67 state and provincial regulators based in Washington.

The real shocker was the price tag: $12,000 to $15,000 to repair tattered cartilage. Dijak, a creative director for an entertainment company, has no health insurance, so he started shopping for a deal.

He found it in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey at Christus Muguerza High Specialty Hospital, owned by Dallas-based Christus Health. Here, the staff treated him more like a big shot than a bargain hunter. An English-speaking employee picked him up at the airport. Dijak recuperated in a private hospital room with a flat-screen television and a view of the peaks of the Sierra Madre. His surgeon recorded the operation on video and gave Dijak a DVD copy for his peace of mind.

Total cost, including airfare: $4,500.

“I got better care there than I would have in the United States, unless I were a billionaire,” he said.

“Pupils are growing potatoes, tomatoes, runner beans and courgettes,” said Diana Watkins, the head teacher of the school of 231 students, including 40 boarders, in the town of Salisbury. Planting took place in the spring, crops are tended by children and staff, and “every patch of grass is being used,” Watkins said.

“The financial turmoil has made it clear to all Danes that there is both a political and economic cost of staying out of the eurozone and that’s why we should join it as soon as possible,” the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said this week. He voiced frustration at not having a say in bail-out plans drafted by Eurozone economies. “We just had to follow the rest, who took a decisive lead.”

Danes were now having to carry a “very heavy burden”, Mr Rasmussen said, after the Danish Central Bank’s move to raise interest rates to 5.5 per cent to support the krone. The Danish currency is closely pegged to the euro and has come under fierce pressure as investors dump it in favour of bigger and safer currencies. “Over half of the electorate is now in favour of the Euro and the reason is simple: before, we had to warn them about the danger of staying out, now they’re actually experiencing it for themselves.”

In Sweden, the krona has plummeted to its lowest value against the euro since the currency’s launch in 1999. “We should have joined the euro a long time ago, we would have been far better off,” Cecilia Malmstrom, Sweden’s Europe Minister said yesterday. “It makes no sense whatsoever for us to stay out and if we could hold a referendum tomorrow, we would.”

Euro fervour has even spread as far as Iceland, which although not a member of the European Union, is now also seriously considering swapping its own currency which has nose-dived by more than 40 per cent this year.

A large majority of Swedes voted against the euro in 2003 but a new opinion poll shows a major turn-around in public opinion, with over 46 per cent saying they are now ready to surrender their beloved krona, which is emblazoned with their queen’s image. “This has change has happened without any campaigning from our side so I’m sure that we turn it into big majority, which is why we should try to hold a re-run of a referendum as soon as possible,” Ms Malmstrom said.

Although the Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, says he will not organise a referendum before 2010, three out of the four ruling parties say they will hold a poll soon after. The Danish Prime Minister has refused to name a referendum date but senior officials say they do not rule out a poll as early as next year. But despite the current enthusiasm, both governments will struggle to address deep-rooted fears among their voters that giving up their currencies would tie them closer to the EU.