It's showing a small bump in 2004 after Bt cotton was first introduced, and a precipitous drop in suicides in 2006, when Bt cotton had more wide-spread adoption.
It's a rather small time-frame to draw conclusions from (especially since we should have 10 more years of data), but the obvious one you would draw from this graph is that Bt cotton is associated with fewer suicides, and the bump in 2004 was likely unrelated to the introduction of Bt cotton.
It's showing a small bump in 2004 after Bt cotton was first introduced, and a precipitous drop in suicides in 2006, when Bt cotton had more wide-spread adoption.
Thanks, Alexa. I actually didn't look much at the graph, one way or another. My point was simply that in a country as large as India (or even not nearly as large), one should be looking at at local rates (and local factors of potential causality) not simply national averages, if ones wants to make heads or tails of a complex set of claims like these.
Your conclusion ("was likely unrelated") differs with what the authors of that study put forth in their abstract, BTW.
Hey man, you asked me what I would make of that graph; I told you.
It's been awhile since I've read in depth on this subject, but I believe when the authors say in the abstract "Nevertheless, in specific districts and years, Bt cotton may have indirectly contributed to farmer indebtedness, leading to suicides, but its failure was mainly the result of the context or environment in which it was planted.", they're referring to analysis showing that the suicides mainly correlated with regions where the banking infrastructure was under-developed (and good loans were not available to the farmers, to help them through rough times) that were subsequently hit with a bad year; within those regions, farmers who had planted Bt cotton were slightly worse off than farmers who hadn't, but it was a weaker correlation than the rest.
(But again, it's been years since I read in depth on this, and I could be confusing this paper with another.)
It's a rather small time-frame to draw conclusions from (especially since we should have 10 more years of data), but the obvious one you would draw from this graph is that Bt cotton is associated with fewer suicides, and the bump in 2004 was likely unrelated to the introduction of Bt cotton.
Is that, uh, what you thought it showed?