Indian
Government Is Self-inflicting India With A Humanitarian Crisis
Indian Government Is Self-inflicting India With A Humanitarian Crisis
In exchange for bags of money government officials in India are
producing a massive humanitarian and food crisis inside India for the profits
of global agri-business.
Entrenching
Capitalist Agriculture in India Under the Guise of “Development”
Global Research, December 10, 2016
Washington’s
long-term plan has been to restructure indigenous agriculture across the world
and tie it to an international system of trade based on export-oriented
mono-cropping, commodity production for the international market and
indebtedness to international financial institutions (IMF/World Bank).
This result has been the creation of food surplus and food deficit
areas, of which the latter have become dependent on agricultural imports and
strings-attached aid. Food deficits in the Global South mirror food surpluses
in the North. Whether through IMF-World Bank structural adjustment
programmes, as occurred in
Africa, trade agreements like
NAFTA and its impact on Mexico or, more generally, deregulated
global trade rules, the
outcome has been similar: the devastation of traditional, indigenous
agriculture for the benefit of transnational agribusiness and the undermining
of both regional and global food security.
In the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of
millions out of agriculture. India was advised to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies
and run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the
growing of cash crops. As the largest
recipient of loans from the
World Bank in the history of that institution, India has been quite obliging
and has been opening up its agriculture to foreign corporations.
India is on fast track to bring agriculture under corporate control…
Amending the existing laws on land acquisition, water resources, seed,
fertilizer, pesticides and food processing, the government is in overdrive to
usher in contract farming and encourage organized retail. This is exactly as
per the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as
the international financial institutes.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers have taken their lives since 1997 with
many more experiencing economic distress or leaving farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and overall economic
‘liberalisation’. This is a result of the plan to make agriculture
financially non-viable for India’s small farms and enable the World Bank model.
The aim is to replace current structures with a system of
chemical-intensive, industrial-scale agriculture suited to the needs of Western
agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns. This is to be facilitated by
the World Bank’s ‘Enabling the
Business of Agriculture’ strategy, which
entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers,
pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds. What we are seeing is the
further commercialisation of rural India designed to entrench the forces
of capitalist agriculture under U.S. leadership and its transnational
agribusiness corporations.
We need look no further than the impact of chemical-intensive farming
in Punjab to see some of the impacts. The application of synthetic pesticides
have turned the state into a ‘cancer
epicentre‘. In Maharashtra, the growing of cash crops is heavily water intensive and is placing a
massive stain on water resources. As a whole, according to the Indian Council
of Agricultural Research, India is losing 5.3 million tonnes of soil every
year because of the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides.
Soil is becoming degraded and
lacking in minerals, which in
turn contributes to malnutrition. Across the world, the corporate-led, chemical-laden
Green Revolution has entailed massive social, health
and environmental costs. In an open letter written in 2006 to policy makers in India, farmer and campaigner
Bhaskar Save summarised some of the impacts of this model of agriculture in
India.
As a mirror image of what has happened in other countries (as described
by Michel Chossudovsky in ‘The Globalization
of Poverty and the New World Order‘), the Indian economy is being opened-up through the
concurrent displacement of a pre-existing (very) productive system for the
benefit of foreign corporations. Despite the rhetoric, jobs are not
being created in any substantial number but hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods are being destroyed to enable these companies to gain a financially
lucrative foothold (see this and this).
It begs the question: are we to see a system of food and agriculture
based on the U.S. model taking hold in India?
The fact that U.S. agriculture now employs a tiny fraction of the
population serves as a stark reminder for what is in store for Indian
farmers. Giant agribusiness companies (whose business model in the US is
based on overproduction
and huge taxpayer subsidies) rake in huge
profits, while depressed farmer incomes, poverty and higher retail prices
become the norm.
The long-term plan is for an overwhelmingly urbanised India with a
fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large
suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer a largely monoculture diet
of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based on crops
soaked with toxic chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils based on
an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant,
less diverse and which was never designed to achieve food security. The
bottom line was always geopolitical
interest and commercial gain.
The number of jobs created in India between 2005 and 2010 was 2.7
million (the years of high GDP growth). According to International
Business Times, 15 million enter
the workforce every year. And data released by the Labour Bureau shows that in
2015, the trend towards jobless
‘growth’ had finally arrived
in India. A speech this week by the governor of the Bank of England sets out a
scenario where 15 million
jobs in the U.K. could
eventually be lost due to automation.
So where are the jobs going to come from in India to cater for hundreds
of millions of agricultural and rural-based workers who are to be displaced
from the land or those whose livelihoods will be destroyed as transnational
corporations move in and seek to capitalise small-scale village-level
industries that currently employ tens of millions?
If we really want to feed the world, assist poor farmers in low income
countries and contribute to effective and inclusive social and economic
development at the same time, we should address the political, economic and
structural issues laid out here which fuel poverty and hunger. Policy makers should also follow
the recommendations of various
reports that conclude
agro-ecological approaches and/or low input farming strategies are more
suitable for these countries.
Any genuinely inclusive programme of social and economic development
must start in the countryside where most people reside. Instead of trying to
empty rural India of most of its population and eradicate small farms,
development should be centred on small farms that currently form the backbone
of food production in the country, despite the adverse policy framework they are forced to cope with.
An alternative model to the current one would involve protecting indigenous
agriculture from rigged global trade and corrupt
markets and a shift to
sustainable, localised agriculture which grows a diverse range of crops and
offers a healthy diet to the public (alongside appropriate price and/or
income support and infrastructure).
It is vital to invest in and prioritise small farms. They are after
all, despite the commonly-held perception, more productive per unit land area
than large-scale industrial farms. Moreover, again contrary to the popular
belief, smallholder farms feed
most of the world, not
industrial-scale farming. Whatever measures are used, small farms tend to outperform large
industrial farms, despite the
latter’s access to various expensive technologies.
Let us turn to what food and agriculture researcher and analyst Peter Rosset
said in 2000 to fully
appreciate the vital importance of the contribution that small farms make to
food security:
In monocultures, you have rows of one crop with bare dirt between them…
It’s going to be invaded and taken advantage of by… weeds. So, if that bare
dirt is invaded, the farmer has to invest labor or spray herbicides or pull a
tractor through to deal with those weeds. Large farmers generally have
monocultures because they are easier to fully mechanize.
He explains that smaller farms tend to have crop mixtures. Between the
rows of one crop there will be another crop, or several other crops. The
smaller farm with the more complex farming system therefore gets more total
production per unit area, because they’re using more of the available niche
space.
Rosset adds:
It might look like the large farm is more productive because you’re
getting more, say, soybeans per acre. But you’re not getting the other five,
six, ten or twelve products that the smaller farmer is getting. And when you
add all of those together, they come to a much greater total agricultural
output per unit area than the larger farms are getting.
Also, with small farms, there’s recycling of nutrients and biomass
within the system, which helps makes it more efficient and productive.
The smaller the size of the farms, the easier it is to have more
complex systems of crop production:
As farms get very large, labour costs and logistics become prohibitive,
so farmers switch to machinery, and machinery requires simpler systems. With
machines, you can’t achieve the same level of complexity and therefore the
level of productivity that you can with a smaller size.
India’s wrong-headed development model is to eradicate small farms in a
country dominated by small farms. Under World Bank instructions, it involves
displacing the rural population and moving them to cities to do non-existent
jobs. What should be happening is investing in and prioritising small farms
(and associated local food production activities) that sustain livelihoods and
which keep food and money in local economies. Corporate
imperialism, often under the
guise of ‘foreign direct investment’, sucks money from India and merely swells
the profit margins of foreign capital, which captures and dominates markets for
narrow self-interest, with often devastating effects. We have seen this happen
with Monsanto, its monopolisation of cotton and is exorbitant
‘royalty fees’ placed on its
GM seeds and the mass suicide
of farmers resulting from the debt entailed.
In finishing, let us return to Peter Rosset who notes that the post-war economic ‘miracles’ of Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan were each fuelled initially by internal markets centred in rural areas.
He argues that this was real triumph for ‘bubble-up’ economics, in which
re-distribution of productive assets to the poorest strata of society created
the economic basis for rapid development.
So, we might ask, why isn’t such a model of development being pursued?
The glaringly obvious answer is that low input, sustainable models of food
production and notions of local or regional self-reliance do not provide
opportunities to global agribusiness to sell their products and cash in on
the vision of a trillion-dollar
corporate hijack of India.
The original source of this article is Global Research
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.