India
is under siege from international capital. It is on course not only to
be permanently beholden to US state-corporate interests but is heading
towards environmental catastrophe much faster than many may think.
According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of
its loans in the history of the institution. Unsurprisingly, therefore,
the World Bank exerts a certain hold over India. In the 1990s, the IMF
and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of
agriculture. In return for up to £90 billion in loans,
India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system,
reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer
incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The
plan for India involves the mass displacement of people to restructure
agriculture for the benefit of powerful corporations. This involves
shifting at least 400 million from the countryside into cities. A 2016 UN report said that by 2030, Delhi’s population will be 37 million.
Quoted in The Guardian, one of the report’s principal authors, Felix Creutzig, says:
“The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.”
The
drive is to entrench industrial farming, commercialise the countryside
and to replace small-scale farming, the backbone of food production in
India. It could mean hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work given that India is heading (or has already reached) ‘jobless growth’. Given the trajectory the
country seems to be on, it does not take much to imagine a countryside
with vast swathes of chemically-drenched monocrop fields containing
genetically modified plants or soils rapidly turning into a chemical cocktail of proprietary biocides, dirt and dust.
The
WTO and the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture are
facilitating the process. To push the plan along, there is a deliberate
strategy to make agriculture financially non-viable for India’s small
farms and to get most farmers out of farming. As Felix Creutig suggests,
the aim is to replace current structures with a system of industrial
(GM) agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food
processing and retail concerns.
Hundreds
of thousands of farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and
many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt,
a shift to (GM) cash crops and economic liberalisation. The number of
cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between
2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022
the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.
For
all the discussion in India about loan waivers for farmers and raising
income levels, this does not address the core of the problem affecting
agriculture: the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling
input costs, lack of government assistance and the impacts of cheap,
subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.
Take the cultivation of pulses, for instance. According to a report in the Indian Express (Sept 2017), pulses production increased by 40% during
the previous 12 months (a year of record production). At the same time,
however, imports also rose resulting in black gram selling at 4,000 rupees per quintal (much less than
during the previous 12 months). This has effectively driven down prices
thereby reducing farmers already meagre incomes. We have already
witnessed a running down of the indigenous edible oils sector thanks to
Indonesian palm oil imports on the back of World Bank pressure to reduce
tariffs (India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils in the
1990s but now faces increasing import costs).
On
the one hand, there is talk of India becoming food secure and
self-sufficient; on the other, there is pressure from the richer nations
for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers
and open up to imports and ‘free’ trade. But this is based on hypocrisy.
Writing on the ‘Down to Earth’ website in late 2017, Sachin Kumar Jain
states some 3.2 million people were engaged in agriculture in the US in
2015. The US govt provided them each with a subsidy of $7,860 on
average. Japan provides a subsidy of $14,136 and New Zealand $2,623 to
its farmers. In 2015, a British farmer earned $2,800 and $37,000 was
added through subsidies. The Indian govt provides on average a subsidy
of $873 to farmers. However, between 2012 and 2014, India reduced the
subsidy on agriculture and food security by $3 billion.
According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma subsidies provided to
US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two
crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives subsidy
worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.
How
can the Indian farmer compete with an influx of artificially cheap
imports? The simple answer is that s/he cannot and is not meant to.
The
opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about
increasing agricultural productivity, creating jobs and boosting GDP
growth. But India is already self-sufficient in key staples and even
where productivity is among the best in the world, farmers still face
massive financial distress. Given that jobs are being destroyed,
relatively few are being created and that as a measure of development
GDP growth is unsustainable and has actually come at the expense of
deliberately impoverished farmers in India (low food prices), what we
are hearing is mere rhetoric to try to convince the public that an
increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a relative few
corporations – via deregulations, privatisations and lower labour and
environmental protection standards – constitutes progress.
We
can already see the outcome of these policies across the world: the
increasing power of unaccountable financial institutions, record profits
and massive increases in wealth for elite interests and, for the rest,
disempowerment, mass surveillance, austerity, job losses, the erosion of
rights, weak unions, cuts to public services, environmental
degradation, spiraling national debt and opaque, corrupt trade deals,
such as TTIP, CETA, RCEP (affecting India) and TPA.
Making India ‘business friendly’
PM
Modi is on record as saying that India is now one of the most
business-friendly countries in the world. The code for being ‘business
friendly’ translates into a willingness by the government to facilitate
much of the above, while reducing taxes and tariffs and allowing the
acquisition of public assets via privatisation as well as instituting
policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign corporations.
Image on the right: World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and India PM Narendra Modi
When
the World Bank rates countries on their level of ‘ease of doing
business’, it means national states facilitating policies that force
working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on free market
fundamentalism. The more ‘compliant’ national governments make their
populations and regulations, the more ‘business friendly’ a country is.
In the realm of agriculture, the World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture‘
entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their
fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds. Rather than work
to eradicate corruption, improve poor management, build storage
facilities and deal with inept bureaucracies and deficiencies in food
logistics, the mantra is to let ‘the market’ intervene: a euphemism for
letting powerful corporations take control; the very transnational
corporations that receive massive taxpayer subsidies, manipulate
markets, write trade agreements and institute a regime of intellectual
property rights thereby indicating that the ‘free’ market only exists in
the warped delusions of those who churn out clichés about letting the
market decide.
According
to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and
good for business. But just how many actually get created is another
matter – as is the amount of jobs destroyed in the first place to pave
the way for the entry of foreign corporations. For example, Cargill sets
up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people;
but what about the agricultural jobs that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the village-level processors who
were cynically put out of business via bogus health and safety measures
so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?
The process resembles what Michel Chossudovsky
notes in his 1997 book about the ‘structural adjustment’ of African
countries. In ‘The Globalization of Poverty’, he says that economies
are:
“opened up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished.” (p.16)
If people are inclined to think farmers would be better off as foreign firms enter the supply chain, we need only look at the plight of
farmers in India who were tied into contracts with Pepsico. Farmers
were pushed into debt, reliance on one company and were paid a pittance
India
is looking to US corporations to ‘develop’ its food and agriculture
sector. With regard to what this could mean for India, we only have to
look at how the industrialised US system of food and agriculture relies
on massive taxpayer subsidies and has destroyed farmers’ livelihoods.
The fact that US agriculture now employs a tiny fraction of the
population serves as a stark reminder for what is in store for Indian
farmers. Agribusiness companies (whose business model in the US is based
on overproduction and dependent on taxpayer subsidies) rake in huge returns, while depressed farmer incomes and massive profits for food retailers is 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 Walmart-type supermarkets that offer a largely monoculture
diet of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based
on crops soaked with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils
according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less
climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food
security.
The alternative would
be to protect indigenous agriculture from rigged global trade and trade
deals and to implement a shift to sustainable, localised agriculture
which grows a diverse range of crops and offers a healthy diet to the
public.
Instead,
we see the push for bogus ‘solutions’ like GMOs and an adherence to
neoliberal ideology that ultimately privileges profit and control of the
food supply by powerful private interests, which have no concern
whatsoever for the health of the public.
Taxpayer-subsidised
agriculture in the US ultimately promotes obesity and disease by
supporting the health damaging practices of the food industry. Is this
what Indians want to see happen in India to their food and health?
Unfortunately,
the process is already well on track as ‘Western diseases’ take hold in
the country’s urban centres. For instance, there are massive spikes in
the rates of obesity and diabetes. Although around 40 per cent of the
nation’s under-5s are underweight, the prevalence of underweight
children in India is among the highest in the world; at the same time, the country is fast becoming the diabetes and heart disease capital of the world.
Devinder Sharma has
highlighted where Indian policy makers’ priorities lie when he says
that agriculture has been systematically killed over the last few
decades. He adds that 60% of the population lives in the villages or in
the rural areas and is involved in agriculture but less than two percent
of the annual budget goes to agriculture: when you are not investing in
agriculture, you are not wanting it to perform.
Support
given to agriculture is portrayed as a drain on the economy and is
reduced and farmers suffer yet it still manages to deliver bumper
harvests year after year. On the other hand, corporate-industrial India
has failed to deliver in terms of boosting exports or creating jobs,
despite the hand outs and tax exemptions given to it.
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, jobless ‘growth’ had finally arrived in India.
So
where are the jobs going to come from to cater for hundreds of millions
of agricultural 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?
Development
used to be about breaking with colonial exploitation and radically
redefining power structures. Now we have dogma masquerading as economic
theory that compels developing countries to adopt neo-liberal policies.
The notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and
the concept of poverty depoliticised and separated from structurally
embedded power relations, not least US-driven neoliberal globalisation
policies resulting in the deregulation of international capital that
ensures giant transnational conglomerates have too often been able to
ride roughshod over national sovereignty.
Across
the world we are seeing treaties and agreements over breeders’ rights
and intellectual property have been enacted to prevent peasant farmers
from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds.
Large corporations with their proprietary seeds and synthetic chemical
inputs have eradicated traditional systems of seed exchange. They have
effectively hijacked seeds, pirated germ plasm that farmers developed
over millennia and have ‘rented’ the seeds back to farmers. As a result,
genetic diversity among food crops has been drastically reduced, and we
have bad food and diets, degraded soils, water pollution and scarcity
and spiralling rates of poor health.
Corporate-dominated agriculture is not only an attack on the integrity of ‘the
commons’, soil, water, food, diets and health but is also an attack on
the integrity of international institutions, governments and officials
which have too often been corrupted by powerful transnational entities.
Whereas
some want to bring about a fairer, more equitable system of production
and distribution to improve people’s quality of lives (particularly
pertinent in India with its unimaginable inequalities which have spiraled since India adopted neoliberal policies), Washington regards ‘development’ as a way to further US interests globally.
As economics professor Michael Hudson said during a 2014 interview (published on prosper.org under the title ‘Think Tank Times’):
“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports, not on industrial exports as people might think. It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.”
Of course, many others such as Walden Bello, Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written on how a geopolitical ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy has fuelled this process over the decades.
Capitalism and environmental catastrophe joined at the hip
In
India, an industrialised chemical-intensive model of agriculture is
being facilitated that brings with it the numerous now well-documented
externalised social, environmental and health costs. We need look no further than the current situation in
South India and the drying up of the Cauvery river in places to see the
impact that this model has contributed to: an ecological crisis fuelled
by environmental devastation due to mining, deforestation and
unsustainable agriculture based on big dams, water-intensive crops and
Green Revolution ideology imported from the West.
But
we have known for a long time now that India faces major environmental
problems rooted in agriculture. For example, in an open letter to
written to officials in 2006, the late campaigner and farmer Bhaskar Save (image
on the right) noted that India, next to South America, receives the
highest rainfall in the world. Where thick vegetation covers the ground,
and the soil is alive and porous, at least half of this rain is soaked
and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata. A good amount then
percolates deeper to recharge aquifers, or ‘groundwater tables’. Save
argued that the living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as
gigantic, ready-made reservoirs gifted free by nature.
Half
a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all year
round, long after the rains had stopped and gone. But clear the forests,
and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically.
Streams and wells run dry.
Save
went on to not that while the recharge of groundwater has greatly
reduced, its extraction has been mounting. India is presently mining
over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950. Much of
this is mindless wastage by a minority. But most of India’s people –
living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising
only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water
per person, as they did generations ago.
According
to Save, more than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation,
with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops.
Maharashtra, for example, has the maximum number of big and medium dams
in the country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its
cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters.
One
acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would
suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize. The sugar factories too
consume huge quantities. From cultivation to processing, each kilo of
refined sugar needs two to three tonnes of water. This could be used to
grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious
jowar or bajra (native millets).
While
rice is suitable for rain-fed farming, its extensive multiple cropping
with irrigation in winter and summer as well is similarly hogging water
resources and depleting aquifers. As with sugarcane, it is also
irreversibly ruining the land through salinization.
Save
argued that soil salinization is the greatest scourge of
irrigation-intensive agriculture, as a progressively thicker crust of
salts is formed on the land. Many million hectares of cropland have been
ruined by it. The most serious problems are caused where water-guzzling
crops like sugarcane or basmati rice are grown round the year,
abandoning the traditional mixed-cropping and rotation systems of the
past, which required minimal or no watering.
Salinization aside, looking at the issue of soil more generally, Stuart Newton, a researcher and botanist living in India, says
that India must restore and nurture its depleted, abused soils and not
harm them any further with chemical overload. Through his analyses of
Indian soils, he has offered detailed insights into their mineral
compositions and links their depletion to the Green Revolution. In turn,
these depleted soils in the long-term cannot help but lead to mass
malnourishment. This is quite revealing given that proponents of the
Green Revolution claim it helped reduced malnutrition.
Various high-level official reports, not least the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge and Science for Development Report, state
that smallholder, traditional farming can deliver food security in
low-income countries through sustainable agroecological systems.
Moreover, given India’s huge range of biodiversity (India is one of
Nikolai Vavilov’s strategically globally important centres of plant
diversity) that has been developed over millennia to cope with diverse
soil and climate conditions, the country should on its own be more than
capable of addressing challenges that lie ahead due to climate change.
Instead,
policy makers continue to look towards the likes of Monsanto-Bayer for
‘solutions’. Such companies merely seed to break farmers’ environmental
learning ‘pathways’ based on centuries of indigenous knowledge, learning
and practices with the aim of getting farmers hooked on chemical
treadmills for corporate profit (see Glenn Stone and Andrew Flach’s 2017
paper in the Journal of Peasant Studies, ‘The ox fall down:
path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture’).
Wrong-headed policies in
agriculture have already resulted in drought, expensive dam-building
projects, population displacement and degraded soils. The rivers are
drying, farmers are dying and the cities are creaking as a result of the
unbridled push towards urbanisation.
In terms of managing water resources, regenerating soils, and cultivating climate resilient crops, agroecology as a solution is
there for all to see. Andhra Pradesh is now making a concerted effort
to roll-out zero budget agroecological agriculture across the state.
However, in the absence of this elsewhere across India, agroecological
approaches will be marginalised.
India
faces huge problems in terms of securing access to water. As Bhaskar
Save noted, the shift to Green Revolution thinking and practices
(underpinned by geopolitical and commercial interests: World Bank loans;
export-oriented monocropping, commodity crop trade and dependency on
the US dollar; seed sovereignty issues and costly proprietary inputs,
etc) has placed enormous strain on water resources.
From
glacial melt in the Himalayas that will contribute to the drying up of
important rivers to the effects of temperature rises across the Indo
Gangetic plain, which will adversely impact wheat productivity, India
has more than its fair share of problems. But despite this, high-level
policy makers are pushing for a certain model of ‘development’ that will
only exacerbate the problems.
This
model is being driven by some of the world’s largest corporate players:
a model that by its very nature leads to environment catastrophe:
“… our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year – the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits. That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And then double them again over the next 20 years from their already doubled state.” – Jason Hickel, writing in The Guardian (July 2016).
Politicians
and bureaucrats in Delhi might be facilitating this model and the
system of agriculture it is tied to, but it is ultimately stamped with
the logo ‘made in Washington’.
*
Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Asia-Pacific Research.
The original source of this article is Asia-Pacific Research
Copyright © Colin Todhunter, Asia-Pacific Research, 2018