report on the upcoming Andal aeretropolis

West Bengal to give free land to poor farmers

http://www.thehindu.com/2010/04/16/stories/2010041657800100.htm

Kolkata: The West Bengal government has decided to distribute land, free of cost, to poor farmers and landless agricultural labourers by buying land from willing landowners, offering them a price which may be higher than the market value. More than two lakh families are likely to be benefited by this step, which is expected to add an important dimension to the sphere of land reforms.

Finance Minister Asim Kumar Dasgupta told The Hinduthat the Land and Land Reforms Department will initiate necessary legal and administrative steps and the matter is likely to be placed before the Legislative Assembly when it commences its session in the third week of June.

Land acquisition

He said the acquisition of homestead land (up to a stipulated limit) for distribution among the rural poor who may be occupying that land as homestead, but without any ownership rights, has been a significant component of land reforms.

In order to distribute more land to landless poor farmers, the existing scheme of purchase of land from willing farmers at 10 per cent higher price than the market price, it is proposed to make the scheme more attractive by offering a price which may be up to 25 per cent higher.

In 1980, the State government had covered landless agricultural labourers, rural artisans and fishermen, implementing relevant sections of the Acquisition of Homestead Land Act, 1975.

According to the extant provisions of the Act, those who were in possession of homestead land as on June 26, 1975, were covered. The State government has now decided to implement this Act again for the same category of rural population with reference to December 31, 2009, as the date of possession of homestead land and ownership rights on such homestead land up to five cottas (about 3,500 sq.ft.) would be vested on them. This has already been announced by Mr. Dasgupta in his 2010-11 budget statement.

He said the total agricultural land distributed in the State up to February 28, 2010, is 11.3 lakh acres. Over 30 lakh farmers, of which 55 per cent belong to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, have benefited from this measure.

“In the alternative policy, redistributive land reform remains the fundamental basis of increasing employment oriented production.”

Slums as self-confrontation

http://www.sacw.net/article1389.html

By Ashish Nandy

The attempt to free cities of slums will only make them invisible

Many see slums as failed parts of cities. They are regarded as parts of a city that do not conform to ruling ideas of an ideal city held by people in other parts of the city.

There have been some changes in the way people have looked at slums ever since colonial cities emerged. At one time, slums were seen as a kind of an invisible city: a place where servants and the poor blue collar workers stayed and one did not have to care for them. The architect-activist Jai Sen had a term for this attitude: in an essay in the journal Seminar he called a slum an Unintended City. There was little or no genuine attempt to accept the poor and disadvantaged as part of the city’s future—to accept them as equal and integral citizens or to re-plan the city according to their needs—Sen wrote.

I think things have changed in the three decades since Sen said this.

Slums are not just the unintended city. They are now regarded parts of the city that should not be visible. City authorities in Delhi and Mumbai are planning to cover up slums for the Commonwealth Games. They are an embarrassment, which foreign visitors to the city must not see. A slum is a part of the city that has no business to be there

Then there is the political-economic perspective on slums: people with low earnings prefer to stay in slums because they are close to their places of work. So the rich and middle classes get their cheap labour—drivers, vegetable vendors, domestic helps—from the slums. This approach has a built-in contradiction. The upper and middle classes do not want to pay their domestic helps at First World rates, but they want slums eliminated as in some First World cities, or in Asian cities pretending to be First-World cities like Singapore and Hong Kong. They will not do what citizens of Singapore and Hong Kong have done to eliminate slums. In Singapore and Hong Kong, too, you have to pay through your nose to get a domestic help or a chauffeur.

There is another way of looking at slums, which is not only more creative but also more compassionate and humanitarian. Slums are parts of the city that constantly reminds us of our moral and social obligations. They are reminders that another India exists. People loathe slums not just because of the poverty they display, not just because the slums embarrass them in front of foreign visitors, but also because the slums look to them like indicators of their backwardness and do not allow them to forget or deny the poverty and the exploitation on which their prosperity is built. They blow up Rs 40,000 for a dinner for four persons at a five-star hotel while people scavenge for food outside the hotel. The slums are reminders of the open wounds of a city. That reminder is painful. Many do not want such reminders to be there.

Slums are not regarded as political issues in many countries. But that is not so in India. Here, elections still reflect some of our real issues. You are always afraid when you see slums: it reminds the middle class they are sitting on a volcano. The fact that our political system has not forgotten the slums makes the wealthy and the middle class nervous.

Such anxieties have cultural consequences. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that in the West, the more interesting cities have slums. New York has slums; Houston does not, not at least visibly. Los Angeles does not have conspicuous slums, Washington has and it’s a more interesting city because of that. The contradictions of the city are in full display. A society’s creativity depends on the oscillation and dialogue between slums and the rest of the city.

New York is an intellectually rich city because it has many things that are going out of fashion in mainstream America, such as street life and street food, street graffiti, street-side artists and musicians. It also has crime, sleaze and drugs. The latter have an effect somewhat similar to that of the activities of the Naxalites or the Maoists: they remind the middle classes and rich sections of a large number of disposable people living at the margins of desperation. In New York, the capital of global capitalism, more than 40,000 homeless adults live in streets, subways, and under bridges and train tunnels of the city; and 25 per cent of all children live in families with incomes below the official poverty line. New York is New York because it has, to some extent, learnt to live with slums. Many other cities in the West have dismantled slums but not homelessness.

Slums highlight such contradictions. If you have disowned parts of yourself and built up an elaborate system of psychological defenses, the contradictions do not vanish. They remain and you feel you are always being held accountable, being accused—by yourself. Such contradictions sharpen creativity. They impinge on the writers, artists and thinkers. The finest Dalit poetry in India, for example, has come not from writers in rural India where the situation may be more oppressive for the Dalits or from Dalits who have made it, but from writers living at the margins of society. They have lived either in a slum or close to it

This is not an attempt to romanticize slums but to emphasize that the slums are often the only connection the urban middle class has with some of the grim realities of society. The well-known Bangladeshi economist Mohammad Yunus once said that the only time the country’s rich and the wealthy faced what the poor in the country’s villages had lived with for centuries was when floods came to Dhaka. Likewise, the slums create a certain awareness, which we can afford to ignore at great risk. If we remove slums, the only people in touch with that reality may well be the Naxals, the Gandhians and some of the much-maligned, politically-aware ngos.

Town planners in many countries think slums can be replaced with low-cost housing. Low-cost housing has relevance but it is neither foolproof nor offers a long-term solution. Once you give people such houses some of them might sell them to developers for gentrification and, ultimately, the other city encroaches on such projects. People who had some protection in slums, at least had a roof on their heads, lose that protection. Low-cost housing might lead to American-style gentrification in our political economy, too.

Even by conservative estimates, one-fourth of India is poor. They cannot be ignored. In our political system, electoral pressures and vote banks matter. And empowerment can be a solution. It is working in the case of the Dalits. It can bring small reliefs such as better sanitation, cleaner water, minimal healthcare and more toilets. Even now, without such facilities, lots of people prefer to stay in slums; they try to make something beautiful out of whatever little they have. Human beings are a resilient species and many prefer to live in a place where such resilience is in full display. The well-known Hindi film director Manmohan Desai used to stay in a locality that could be classified as a glorified slum. So did Vinod Kambli, the famous cricketer. Harlem has even become fashionable; former President Clinton has an office there now. Slums are not infra-human.

Planning cannot eliminate slums. As long as there is large-scale deprivation, as long as our rulers, our media and our urban middle class believe that proletarianization is better than being a farmer, artisan or a tribal, there will be sizeable number of people who will be made available for blue-collar work in our cities. Such people will like to stay close to their places of work. If you upgrade or destroy one slum, others will come up in its place a few hundred feet away.

The recent attempts to free Indian cities of slums will merely make the slums less visible. This is not a new project. Sanjay Gandhi tried it. Jagmohan tried it. I don’t blame them any more in retrospect. The urge to make slums invisible is there in almost every unthinking Indian—not just in the powerful, the foolish and the heartless.

The desire to secure services from slums and yet not see them is one of the diseases of our times that is taking an epidemic form.

A sociologist and a clinical psychologist, Ashis Nandy is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

An Article by Aditya Nigam

http://www.india-seminar.com/2010/607/607_the_problem.htm

THE recent killing of 24 jawans of the Eastern Frontier Rifles in the Silda area of West Midnapore, close to the troubled Maoist-dominated Lalgarh reminds us, as if we needed reminding, of the violent conflict marking parts of our countryside. The gruesome killings of the EFR jawans have been widely condemned, as they should be. The West Bengal state secretary of the CPI(M), Biman Bose, has termed the Maoist operation as a ‘war against democracy.’

From all accounts, the attack was led by an adivasi woman in her thirties – Jagari Baskey – who has been described as a ‘woman with a cobra-like hypnotic gaze.’ As one of the shopkeepers of Silda market told Times of India reporters, ‘(H)er eyes were intense. One look and you knew she meant business.’ There were reportedly other women participating in the operation as well. Jagari Baskey, of course, has already emerged as a mythical figure, her legend relayed through the media. It is difficult to miss the feeling of secret admiration lurking behind the accounts offered by the locals. And so, as one reads through these reports, it is evident that it is an entirely different world out there.

Popular narratives, even when they are opposed to the brutality of the killings, clearly portray that much of the urbane, sophisticated indignation at the killings arises because all we see is the ‘freeze shot’ of a movie that has been on for a long time – a movie where killings, rape, brutality, implication in false police cases and even torture by uniformed agents of the state is a daily affair. It has been a long time since people hereabouts have known peace in their everyday lives. ‘Uniformed brutes’ was probably the only ‘form’ in which they encountered the state. Thus, as one newspaper report put it, it was many years ago that the local adivasis, the Lodhas and the Sabars, first ‘invited’ the ‘forest party’ (bon parti) to come to their area.

They did not invite the ‘bon parti’ to Jangal Mahal because they thought the party would give them development. So, let us get one shibboleth out of the way at the outset. Yes, there is virtually no development – roads, schools, health centres – available to the adivasis of the area. There have even been some starvation deaths in the region in recent years, indicative of the abysmal conditions that obtain. There probably was a time when some basic ‘development’ might have helped. But what seems to have made matters intolerable is not so much the supposed lack of development, but a vicious combination of local power nexuses – forest contractors, the police and the local CPI(M) – which together has so far held the population of the area under its iron grip. And this is what the adivasis are at war against in Lalgarh today. The moment of providing ‘development’, if ever there was any, has clearly passed.

Lalgarh, in that sense, is a typical area of Maoist influence. Yet, while there is sufficient evidence to show that even though the Maoists have been operating in the area for a couple of decades, they were at best a marginal force. It was really the mass uprising against continued police harassment from November 2008 onwards that finally opened the floodgates for them. The situation reached an insurrectionary level only after the electoral defeat of the CPI(M) and the Left Front in May-June 2009 – for this was when the power bloc started showing cracks. And the Maoists stepped into the breach.

In many other areas of Maoist influence as well, there is no difference in at least one thing: alongside the absence of development is the complete impunity with which local power blocs exploit, harass and torture local adivasi populations. This is what provides the Maoist movement its greatest attraction.

Of late, however, something else has happened. If once ‘development’ meant, at the very least, provision of basic amenities to ordinary people, it no longer does, not at least in dominant discourse. Despite tall talk of ‘human development’ and ‘inclusive growth’, progress, particularly economic progress, seems to have been reduced to an obsessive fascination with GDP and the Sensex. And higher growth rates require accelerated and more frenetic exploitation of ‘natural resources’ – forests, mines, land cleared of populations for setting up new steel plants and other industrial projects. In the years since the 1990s, it is this imperative that has been driving our leaders and planners – Capital is the new God and whatever it demands must be provided. If adivasis have to be cleared off their traditional habitats, so be it. In the end, we are told, everything is for the Nation’s development and, of course, what is good for capital is good for the nation. (Remember the old American saying: What’s good for General Motors is good for America?)

It is not simply the ‘lack’ of development but precisely the Thing-Itself, in the way it is conventionally understood, that is the problem. The regions where the Maoists have been in ascendance are precisely the areas where new corporate designs for clearing land are being put in place. And while there indeed are many similar places where non-violent resistance and militant mass struggles have been reported, in areas where there are no mass struggles, ‘Maoism’ certainly begins to look like an attractive option.

How then do we understand this phenomenon called Maoism? As a symptom, maybe? The symptom of a malaise that is slowly and steadily eating away at the body politic. The story of ‘Maoism’ reminds us that there is something seriously wrong somewhere – with our democracy, our justice system and with our priorities of ‘economic growth’.

This issue of Seminar attempts to put together a range of different positions that, hopefully, will help us better understand both the story of Maoism, as well as the other story which runs beneath. There are positions that defend the Maoist movement, as also those that provide a friendly critique; there are positions that present their criticism of the Maoist worldview and praxis head on and others which believe that the symptom – the insurgency – needs treatment (counter-insurgency) as well. Moving away, and beyond, engagements with Maoist theory and worldview are other narratives that map the terrain on which the conflict is taking place.

There is, however, one recurrent problem with taxonomy that needs to be addressed to aid comprehension. ‘Maoism’ is both a genus and a species. As genus, it refers to a whole range of currents that trace their lineage back to the revolt in Naxalbari in 1967. And while most of these currents have adopted some form of a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ tag to describe themselves, it is only two of them (out of the scores that emerged from that burst of ‘spring thunder’) that merged to form the CPI (Maoist). This is the species-Maoism that is under discussion. It may thus help, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion, to use the term ‘Naxalite’ to specifically refer to the genus-Maoism and ‘Maoist’ when referring to the specie.

Far too often, in official parlance, all these terms dissolve into each other – or into that even more nebulous term, left-wing extremism. Such a conflation by the powers-that-be and mainstream media helps thereby to brand all varieties of militant struggle in the countryside as ‘Naxalite’ or ‘Maoist’ or ‘left-wing extremism’, and thus delegitimize them all. Equally, human rights groups questioning the actions of counter-insurgency forces or groups like the Salwa Judum, are far too often derided as Maoist sympathizers. The fact, however, is that most of the Naxalite groups and parties have to varying degrees moved away from the politics of nihilistic armed violence that distinguishes the CPI (Maoist). Tarring them all with the same brush is not merely simplistic – it can be destructive – as it contributes to the endlessly bloated sense of the Maoist’s strength while, at the same time, marginalizing all other tendencies.

Arundhati Roy's article and the responses

Walking with the Comrades
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738

Responses and newspaper reports:
http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/

http://kafila.org/2010/03/23/moonwalking-with-the-comrades/

www.thehindu.com/2010/04/13/stories/2010041362811300.htm

http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-eyes-for-eye.html

http://2x3x7.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-dubious-battle.html

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=377146935381&id=597954530&ref=nf

http://www.facebook.com/notes/jairus-banaji/arundhati-further-response-from-sumitra-ghosh-nffpfw/379645885063

http://tinyurl.com/ygun4ef

http://tinyurl.com/y8dj9sp

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264871

On Arundhati Roy's 'Walking with the Comrades'

Interim Observations of the Jury - Independent People’s Tribunal on Land Acquisition, Resource Grab and Operation Green Hunt

http://www.sacw.net/article1398.html

April 11, 2010

Interim Observations of the Jury, 11th April 2010

The jury heard the testimonies of a large number of witnesses over three days from the States of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa as well as some expert witnesses on land acquisition, mining and human rights violations of Operation Green Hunt. The immediate observations of the Jury are as follows:

Tribal communities represent a substantial and important proportion of Indian population and heritage. Not even ten countries in the world have more people than we have tribals in India. Not only are they crucial components of the country’s human biodiversity, which is greater than in the rest of the world put together, but they are also an important source of social, political and economic wisdom that would be currently relevant and can give India an edge. In addition, they understand the language of Nature better than anyone else, and have been the most successful custodian of our environment, including forests. There is also a great deal to learn from them in areas as diverse as art, culture, resource management, waste management, medicine and metallurgy. They have been also far more humane and committed to universally accepted values than our urban society.

It is clear that the country has been witnessing gross violation of the rights of the poor, particularly tribal rights, which have reached unprecedented levels since the new economic policies of the 90’s. The 5th Schedule rights of the tribals, in particular the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act have been grossly violated. These violations have now gone to the extent where fully tribal villages have been declared to be non-tribal. The entire executive and judicial administration appear to have been totally apathetic to their plight.

The development model which has been adopted and which is sharply embodied in the new economic policies of liberalization, privatization and globalization, have led in recent years to a huge drive by the state to transfer resources, particularly land and forests which are critical for the livelihood and the survival of the tribal people, to corporations for exploitation of mineral resources, SEZs and other industries most of which have been enormously destructive to the environment. These industries have critically polluted water bodies, land, trees, plants, and have had a devastating impact on the health and livelihoods of the people. The consultation with the Gram Sabhas required by the PESA Act has been rendered a farce as has the process of Environment Impact Assessment of these industries. This has resulted in leaving the tribals in a state of acute malnutrition and hunger which has pushed them to the very brink of survival. It could well be the severest indictment of the State in the history of democracy anywhere, on account of the sheer number of people (tribals) affected and the diabolic nature of the atrocities committed on them by the State, especially the police, leave aside the enormous and irreversible damage to the environment. It is also a glaring example of corruption -financial, intellectual and moral - sponsored and/or abetted by the State, that characterizes today’s India, cutting across all party lines. Peaceful resistance movements of tribal communities against their forced displacement and the corporate grab of their resources is being sought to be violently crushed by the use of police and security forces and State and corporate funded and armed militias. The state violence has been accentuated by Operation Green Hunt in which a huge number of paramilitary forces are being used mostly on the tribals. The militarization of the State has reached a level where schools are occupied by security forces.

Even peaceful activists opposing these violent actions of the State against the tribals are being targeted by the State and victimized. This has led to a total alienation of the people from the State as well as their loss of faith in the government and the security forces. The Government - both at the Centre and in the States - must realize that it’s above-mentioned actions, combined with total apathy, could very well be sowing the seeds of a violent revolution demanding justice and rule of law that would engulf the entire country. We should not forget the French, Russian and American history, leave aside our own.

Recommendations:

1. Stop Operation Green Hunt and start a dialogue with the local people.
2. Immediately stop all compulsary acquisition of agricultural or forest land and the forced displacement of the tribal people.
3. Declare the details of all MOUs, industrial and infrastructural projects proposed in these areas and freeze all MOUs and leases for non-agricultural use of such land, which the Home Minister has proposed.
4. Rehabilitate and reinstate the tribals forcibly displaced back to their land and forests.
5. Stop all environmentally destructive industries as well as those on land acquired without the consent of the Gram Sabhas in these areas.
6. Withdraw the paramilitary and police forces from schools and health centres which must be effectuated with adequate teachers and infrastructure.
7. Stop victimizing dissenters and those who question the actions of the State.
8. Replace the model of development which is exploitative, environmentally destructive, iniquitous and not suitable for the country by a completely different model which is participatory, gives importance to agriculture and the rural sector, and respects equity and the environment.
9. It must be ensured that all development, especially use of land and natural resources, is with the consent and participation of the Tribal communities as guaranteed by the Constitution. Credible Citizen’s Commissions must be constituted to monitor and ensure this.
10. Constitute an Empowered Citizen’s Commission to investigate and recommend action against persons responsible for human rights violations of the tribal communities. This Commission must also be empowered to ensure that tribals actually receive the benefit of whatever government schemes exist for them.

The Independent People’s Tribunal took place from 9th - 11th April, 2010, at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. This was organized by a collective of civil society groups, social movements, activists, academics and concerned citizens in the country. The people’s jury, comprising of Hon’ble Justice P. B. Sawant, Justice H. Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Dr. V. Mohini Giri, Dr. P. M. Bhargava, and Dr. K.S. Subramanian heard testimonies from the affected people, social activists and experts from Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal.

For more information, please contact: Sherebanu 9953466107; Purnima 9711178868

Making a killing from hunger

http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39

For some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm. The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year.[1] Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone,[2] and just last week it hit record highs on the Chicago futures market.[3] For most of 2007 the spiralling cost of cooking oil, fruit and vegetables, as well as of dairy and meat, led to a fall in the consumption of these items. From Haiti to Cameroon to Bangladesh, people have been taking to the streets in anger at being unable to afford the food they need. In fear of political turmoil, world leaders have been calling for more food aid, as well as for more funds and technology to boost agricultural production. Cereal exporting countries, meanwhile, are closing their borders to protect their domestic markets, while other countries have been forced into panic buying. Is this a price blip? No. A food shortage? Not that either. We are in a structural meltdown, the direct result of three decades of neoliberal globalisation.

Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world’s cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it’s true,[4] but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to all of those who need it. Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system. We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.

Market realities

The policy makers who have shaped today’s world food system – and who are supposed to be responsible for averting such catastrophes – have come out with a number of explanations for the current crisis that everyone has heard over and over again: drought and other problems affecting harvests; rising demand in China and India where people are supposedly eating more and better than in the past; crops and lands being massively diverted into biofuel production; and so on. All of these issues, of course, are contributing to the current food crisis. But they do not account for the full depth of what is happening. There is something more fundamental at work, something that brings all these issues together, and which the world’s finance and development chiefs are keeping out of public discussion.

Nothing that the policy makers say should obscure the fact that today’s food crisis is the outcome of both an incessant push towards a “Green Revolution” agricultural model since the 1950s and the trade liberalisation and structural adjustment policies imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the 1970s. These policy prescriptions were reinforced with the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in the mid-1990s and, more recently, through a barrage of bilateral free trade and investment agreements. Together with a series of other measures, they have led to the ruthless dismantling of tariffs and other tools that developing countries had created to protect local agricultural production. These countries have been forced to open their markets and lands to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food exports from rich countries. In that process, fertile lands have been diverted away from serving local food markets to the production of global commodities or off-season and high-value crops for Western supermarkets. Today, roughly 70% of all so-called developing countries are net importers of food.[5] And of the estimated 845 million hungry people in the world, 80% are small farmers.[6] Add to this the re-engineering of credit and financial markets to create a massive debt industry, with no control on investors, and the depth of the problem becomes clear.

Agricultural policy has completely lost touch with its most basic goal of feeding people. Hunger hurts and people are desperate. The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent price hikes have meant that an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately.[7] Governments are frantically seeking shelter from the system. The fortunate ones, with export stocks, are pulling out of the global market to cut their domestic prices off from the skyrocketing world prices. With wheat, export bans or restrictions in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina mean that a third of the global market has now been closed off. The situation with rice is even worse: China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, India and Cambodia have banned or severely restricted exports, leaving just a few sources of export supply, mainly Thailand and the US. Countries like Bangladesh can’t buy the rice they need now because the prices are so high. For years the World Bank and the IMF have told countries that a liberalised market would provide the most efficient system for producing and distributing food, yet today the world’s poorest countries are forced into an intense bidding war against speculators and traders, who are having a field day. Hedge funds and other sources of hot money are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, putting food stocks further out of poor people’s reach.[8] According to some estimates, investment funds now control 50–60% of the wheat traded on the world’s biggest commodity markets.[9] One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007.[10]

The situation today is untenable. Look at Haiti. A few decades ago it was self-sufficient in rice. But conditions on foreign loans, particularly a 1994 package from the IMF, forced it to liberalise its market. Cheap rice flooded in from the US, backed by subsidies and corruption, and local production was wiped out.[11] Now prices for rice have risen 50% since last year and the average Haitian can’t afford to eat. So people are taking to the streets or risking their lives to journey by boat to the US. Food protests have also erupted in West Africa, from Mauritania to Burkina Faso. There, too, structural adjustment programmes and food-aid dumping have destroyed the region’s own rice production, leaving people at the mercy of the international market. In Asia, the World Bank constantly assured the Philippines, even as recently as last year, that self-sufficiency in rice was unnecessary and that the world market would take care of its needs.[12] Now the government is in a desperate plight: its domestic supply of subsidised rice is nearly exhausted and it cannot import all it needs because traders’ asking prices are too high.

Making a killing from hunger

The truth about who profits and who loses from our global food system has never been more obvious. Take the most basic element of food production: soil. The industrial food system is a chemical-fertiliser junkie. It needs more and more of the stuff just to keep alive, eroding soils and their potential to support crop yields in the process. In the current context of tight food supplies, the small clique of corporations that control the world’s fertiliser market can charge what they want – and that’s exactly what they are doing. Profits at Cargill’s Mosaic Corporation, which controls much of the world’s potash and phosphate supply, more than doubled last year.[13] The world’s largest potash producer, Canada’s Potash Corp, made more than US$1 billion in profit, up more than 70% from 2006.[14] Panicking now about future supplies, governments are becoming desperate to boost their harvests, giving these corporations additional leverage. In April 2008, the joint offshore trading arm for Mosaic and Potash hiked the price of its potash by 40% for buyers from Southeast Asia and by 85% for those from Latin American. India had to pay 130% more than last year, and China 227% more.[15]

Table 1. Profit increase for some of the world’s largest fertiliser corporations

Company	Profits 2007 (US$ million)	Increase from 2006 (%)
Potash Corp (Canada)	1,100	72%
Yara (Norway)	1,116	44%
Sinochem (China)	1,100	95%
Mosaic (US)	708	141%
ICL (Israel)	535	43%
K + S (Germany)	420	2.8%

Source: Compiled from corporate reports

While big money is being made from fertilisers, it is just a sideline for Cargill. Its biggest profits come from global trading in agricultural commodities, which, together with a few other big traders, it pretty much monopolises. On 14 April 2008, Cargill announced that its profits from commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86% higher than the same period in 2007. “Demand for food in developing economies and for energy worldwide is boosting demand for agricultural goods, at the same time that investment monies have streamed into commodity markets,” said Greg Page, Cargill’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Prices are setting new highs and markets are extraordinarily volatile. In this environment, Cargill’s team has done an exceptional job measuring and assessing price risk, and managing the large volume of grains, oilseeds and other commodities moving through our supply chains for customers globally.”[16]

Table 2. Profit increase for some of the world’s largest grain traders

Company	Profits 2007 (US$ million)	Increase from 2006 (%)
Cargill (US)	2,340	36%
ADM (US)	2,200	67%
ConAgra (US)	764	30%
Bunge (US)	738	49%
Noble Group (Singapore)	258	92%
Marubeni (Japan)	90*	43%*

Source: Compiled from corporate reports
*Data is for Marubeni’s Agri-Marine division only.
Absent from this list is Louis Dreyfus (France), a private agricultural commodities trader with annual sales in excess of US$22 billion, which does not report its profits.

Managing and assessing are not so difficult for a company like Cargill, with its near monopoly position and a global team of analysts the size of a UN agency. Indeed, all of the big grain traders are making record profits. Bunge, another big food trader, saw its profits of the last fiscal quarter of 2007 increase by US$245 million, or 77%, compared with the same period of the previous year. The 2007 profits registered by ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, rose by 65% to a record US$2.2 billion. Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Foods, a major player in Asia, is forecasting revenue growth of 237% this year.

The world’s big food processors, some of which are commodity traders themselves, are also cashing in. Nestlé’s global sales grew 7% last year. “We saw this coming, so we hedged by forward-buying raw materials”, says François-Xavier Perroud, Nestlé’s spokesman.[17] Margins are up at Unilever, too. “Commodity pressures have increased sharply, but we have successfully offset these through timely pricing action and continued delivery from our savings programmes”, says Patrick Cescau, Group CEO of Unilever. “We will not sacrifice our margins and market share.”[18] The food corporations don’t seem to be making these profits off the back of the retailers. UK supermarket Tesco reports profits up 12.3% from last year, a record rise. Other major retailers, such as France’s Carrefour and the US’s Wal-Mart, say that food sales are the main factor sustaining their profit increases.[19] Wal-Mart’s Mexican division, Wal-Mex, which handles a third of overall food sales in Mexico, reported an 11% increase in profits for the first quarter of 2008. (At the same time Mexicans are demonstrating in the streets because they can no longer afford to make tortillas.[20])

It seems that nearly every corporate player in the global food chain is making a killing from the food crisis. The seed and agrochemical companies are doing well too. Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, reported a 44% increase in overall profits in 2007.[21] DuPont, the second-largest, said that its 2007 profits from seeds increased by 19%, while Syngenta, the top pesticide manufacturer and third-largest company for seeds, saw profits rise 28% in the first quarter of 2008.[22]

Such record profits have nothing to do with any new value that these corporations are producing and they are not one-off windfalls from a sudden shift in supply and demand. Instead, they are a reflection of the extreme power that these middlemen have accrued through the globalisation of the food system. Intimately involved with the shaping of the trade rules that govern today’s food system and tightly in control of markets and the ever more complex financial systems through which global trade operates, these companies are in perfect position to turn food scarcity into immense profits. People have to eat, whatever the cost.

The urgent need for a policy rethink

The larger backdrop to this perverse food market situation is the global financial system, which is now teetering on its flimsy axis. What began as a localised housing loan collapse in the US in 2007 has unravelled into something far more serious, as people realise that the emperors of the global financial system have no clothes. The world economy is living on debt that no one can pay. While central bankers and Lear jet executives try to patch the holes and restore confidence, the underlying truth is that the system is close to bankruptcy and no one in power wants to take the necessary tough measures: not the IMF, nor the World Bank, nor the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations. Not much more than public relations glitter can be expected from the G8 meeting in June.

Similar problems lie at the heart of the food crisis: an ideologically driven elite has forced countries to wrench open markets and let the free market run, so that a few megacorporations, investors and speculators can take huge payoffs. Many countries have lost that most basic power: the ability to feed themselves. This loss, coupled with the corruption that plagues our countries and trading systems, shows that neoliberalism has lost any legitimacy that it might once have had. It is a measure of how out of touch these ideologues are that many now openly call for more trade liberalisation as a solution to the food crisis, with some even proposing that the rules of the WTO be changed to prevent countries from imposing export restrictions on food.[23]

The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has tried to win the world over with his call for a “New Deal” to solve the hunger crisis, but there is nothing new about it: he calls for more trade liberalisation, more technology and more aid. Today’s food crisis is the direct result of decades of these policies, which must now be rejected. While immediate action is necessary to lower food prices and to get food to those who need it, we also need radical changes in agricultural policy so that small farmers around the world gain access to land and can make a living from it. We need policies that support and protect farmers, fishers and others to produce food for their families, for the local markets and for people in cities, rather than money for an abstract international commodity market and a tiny clan of corporate boardroom executives. And we need to strengthen and promote the use of technologies based on the knowledge and in the control of those who know how to grow food. To put it another way, we need food sovereignty, now – the kind that is defined and driven by small farmers and fisherfolk themselves.

Social movements around the globe have been struggling to promote such a reversal of strategy, only to be dismissed as unrealistic and backward by those in power, and often violently repressed. The glimmer of hope in this crisis is that the situation can be reversed. Peasant organisations have concrete proposals about what needs to be done to resolve the crisis in their countries, and governments should listen to what they are saying. Already some governments are talking of a policy change towards food self-reliance.[24] Others are starting to question the fundamental rationale of pushing for more free trade. Neoliberal hawks at the top of the global food policy pyramid have lost whatever credibility they may think they once had. It is time for them to move out of the way so that the visions of food sovereignty and agrarian reform that come from the grassroots can take their place and get us out of this hellish mess.

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Going further:

• Overview: FAO, World Food Situation: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation
• Overview: Financial Times, “The global food crisis”, interactive map, last updated 21 April 2008: http://tinyurl.com/6knmy8
• Overview: Stefan Steinberg, "Financial speculators reap profits from global hunger", Global Research, Centre for Research on Globalisation, Montreal, 24 April 2008.
  http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8794
• Overview: Confédération Paysanne, “Les révoltes de la faim dans les pays du Sud : l’aboutissement logique de choix économiques et politiques désastreux”, Press release, 18 April 2008: http://tinyurl.com/5glx8u (French only)
• Structural Adjustment Programmes: “UNCTAD official blames food crisis on structural adjustment programme,” This Day, Lagos, 23 April 2008: http://allafrica.com/stories/200804230375.html
• Food sovereignty: http://www.viacampesina.org and http://www.nyeleni2007.org
• Agrofuels: GRAIN, Agrofuels special issues, Seedling, July 2007, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=68
• Rice in the Philippines: GRAIN, Philippines and beyond: rice crisis – reaping the 'fruit' of market capitalism, Hybrid rice blog, 22 April 2008, http://www.grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=201

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References

1 Bloomberg, quoted by the BBC, London, 14 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7344892.stm

2 BBC, “Action to meet Asian rice crisis”, London, 17 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7352038.stm

3 See http://www.riceonline.com for daily reports. With many Asian rice exporters out of the game, needy countries from Asia and Africa are turning to the US market where prices are going through the roof.

4 Brian Halweil, “Grain harvest sets record, but supplies still tight”, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5539

5 Katarina Wahlberg, “Are we approaching a global food crisis?”, World Economy & Development in Brief, Global Policy Forum, 3 March 2008,

6 Food policy expert interviewed on Radio France International, Paris, 20 April 2008.

7 “UN food chief urges crisis action,” BBC, London, 22 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7360485.stm

8 Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie, “U.S. food producers, speculators square off”, Globe and Mail, Toronto, 23 April 2008,

9 Ibid. and Paul Waldie, “Why grocery prices are set to soar”, Globe and Mail, Toronto, 24 April 2008,

10 Paul Waldie, “Why grocery prices are set to soar”, op cit.

11 Bill Quigley, “USA role in Haiti hunger riots”, ZNet, US, 23 April 2008,

12 World Bank, “Can the world market for rice be trusted”, Box 1 on p. 52 of “Philippines: Agriculture Public Expenditure Review,” Technical Paper, World Bank, Washington DC, 2007, http://go.worldbank.org/TGRSK19300

13 Potash and phosphates are two of the main ingredients in chemical fertiliser.

14 David Ebner, “Saskatchewan: A lot more than wheat” Globe and Mail, Toronto, 11 April 2008,

15 John Partridge and Andy Hoffman, “China deal sends Potash soaring” Globe and Mail, Toronto, 17 April 2008,

16 “Cargill income up sharply in third quarter”, World Grain, Kansas City, 14 April 2008,

17 “Tightening belts,” The Economist, London, 10 April 2008,

18 Jonathan Sibun, “Unilever profits surge despite price pressures,” Daily Telegraph, London, 3 November 2007, http://tinyurl.com/6p8tcx; and, “Get set for more price hikes: Unilever chief,” Business Standard, India, 16 March 2008, http://tinyurl.com/694cqn

19 Foo Yun Chee, “Major European retailers post higher profits for 2007,” Reuters, 6 March 2008, www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/06/business/RETAIL.php

20 Associated Press, “Wal-Mart de Mexico’s 1Q profits rise 11 percent on higher sales, cost controls,” 8 April 2008,

21 Monsanto, Annual Report, 2007.

22 DuPont, Annual Report 2007, and “Syngenta anuncia cifra negocio en progresión 28 por ciento primer trimestre”, EFE, 22 de abril 2008,

23 Isabel Reynolds, “WTO should pressure food exporters – Mandelson”, Reuters, 23 April 2008,

24 See, for example, recent comments from West African farmers and officials: Noel Tadégnon, “Le ROPPA préconise une pression sur les autorités politiques pour soutenir l’agriculture africaine,” APA, 23 April 2008, http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?article61599; and, “Réunion extraordinaire du Conseil des ministres de l`UEMOA, hier : 200 milliards pour freiner la flambée des prix,” Le Nouveau Réveil, Abidjan, 24 April 2008, http://www.lenouveaureveil.com/a.asp?n=290011&p=1903

The food emergency and food myths

http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=552

Why Bush is wrong to blame Indians for the rise in food prices

Vandana Shiva *

United States President George W. Bush has a new analysis of the global rise in food prices. At an interactive session in the US state of Missouri on the economy, Bush argued that prosperity in countries like India had triggered increased demand for better nutrition. “There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle-class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealthy, you start demanding better nutrition and better food so demand is high and that causes the price to go up.”

The myth that Bush is propagating is that of growth. It is being repeatedly stated that the rise in the price of food is due to “surging demand” in emerging economies like China and India. The argument is that, since the economies of China and India have grown, their people have become richer and are eating more, and this increased demand is leading to a price rise. This story might succeed in diverting US political debate away from the role of US agribusiness in the current food crisis, both through speculation and through the hijacking of food into biofuels, and in presenting economic globalisation as having benefited Indians, but the truth is that President Bush’s statement is false on many counts.

First, while the Indian economy has grown, the majority of Indians have become poorer because they have lost their land and livelihoods as a result of globalisation. Most Indians are, in fact, eating less today than a decade ago, before the era of globalisation and trade liberalisation. Per capita availability of food has declined from 177 kilograms per person per year (485 grams per day) in 1991 to 152 kg per person per year (419 g per day) today. Economic growth has gone hand in hand with growth in hunger. One million children in India die every year for lack of food.

Secondly, nutrition has deteriorated, even for the middle classes, from how it was before globalisation. The poor are worse off because their food and livelihoods have been destroyed. The middle classes are worse off because they are eating less healthily, as junk food and processed food enter India through globalisation. India is now at the epicentre of the problems of both malnutrition of the poor, who do not get enough food, and malnutrition of the rich, whose diets are being degraded. India has today not only the world’s largest number of hungry children but also the world’s largest number of diabetics.

India is perceived as an economic superpower with 9 per cent growth. Yet because this growth is based on a large-scale takeover of the land of tribals and peasants and large-scale destruction of the livelihoods of millions in agriculture, textiles and small-scale industry, poverty has grown.

In the past Indian farmers had seed security because 80 per cent of seed was farmers’ own seed, and 20 per cent came from the public sector seed farms. Globalisation has forced India to allow biotech giants such as Monsanto into the seed market. And Monsanto’s growth comes at the cost of farmers’ lives. More than 150,000 have committed suicide as they have got trapped in debt created by high cost, non-renewable, unreliable seed.

Indian farmers had market security. While producing the diverse crops they ate, they also used to grow rice and wheat for the national food security system, which, while paying the farmers a remunerative price, also provided the poor with affordable food through the Public Distribution System (PDS). Globalisation has destroyed the security of both the producers and the poor by integrating the local and domestic food economy into the speculative global commodity trade controlled by agribusiness.

Force-feeding is not free trade

While Indians are eating less, India is buying much more soya and wheat on the international market. These imports have been forced on India by US agribusiness, aided by the pressure of WTO rules and the US government. Such imports were not necessary before, because India was self-sufficient in wheat and edible oils.

The new food imports are the not the result of “demand” from India, but of the imposition of bad food. In 1998 India imported soya, even though we had adequate edible oils. With the US product benefiting from subsidies of nearly US$200 per tonne, these imports amounted to dumping. Millions of India’s coconut, mustard, sesame, linseed and groundnut farmers lost their market, their incomes and their livelihoods. And India’s healthy edible oils were replaced by unhealthy, genetically engineered soya oil and palm oil – industrial oils that have not been eaten in any traditional culture.

In 2005 India imported wheat as part of the US–India agreement on agriculture, even though India produced 74 million tonnes of wheat and did not need more. These imports are designed to destroy domestic production to create markets for US agribusiness. This is force-feeding, not free trade. The US wheat was declared unfit to eat, but the US arm-twisted India to dilute its health standards. Destruction of domestic production worldwide can only result in food scarcity and food insecurity. When food gets into the hands of global agribusiness, which makes profits through price fixing and speculation, a food emergency is inevitable.

We are seeing the serious consequences of the forced integration of the world’s food systems into a global commodity market through access rules of “free trade” controlled by agribusiness. The perturbations this is causing in local food systems are serious. Production everywhere is getting destabilised by speculative trade, creating both an absolute decline in local food production capacity and a relative decline in the entitlement of the poor, because of rising food prices.

The absolute decline in food production arises from three factors. First, the transformation of ecological biodiverse systems to chemical monocultures that produce more commodities but less food for the household and for local economies. Second, the shift from food crops to cash crops for export. Third, the vulnerabilities created by climate change, to which industrial farming and globalised food systems make a significant contribution.

Food security requires a strengthening of local and domestic food economies, the defence of rural livelihoods and small farmers, and the reining in of the global grain giants and their price fixing. We need anti-trust action against the agribusiness corporations which are at the heart of the current food crisis.

GMOs are a problem for food security, not a solution

There is increasing reference to new seeds and GMOs as a solution to the food crisis. GMOs, however, are part of the cause of the food crisis. Bt cotton has destroyed food production in India and has pushed farmers to suicide. Cotton used to be grown as an intercrop with food crops. Now it is a monoculture. With high production costs and low prices for their crops, farmers are trapped in both debt and hunger. GMOs do not, in any case, produce more food. There are only two traits commercialised in twenty years – herbicide resistant crops, and Bt toxin crops. Neither is a trait to improve yield. In fact, research shows a yield drag in GM crops. In India we see high risks of crop failure, with average yields of Bt cotton at 300–400 kg/acre, not the 1,500 kg/acre advertised by Monsanto.

It is a myth that industrial, chemical agriculture produces more food. Industrial monocultures produce more commodities, not more food. This is good for Cargill, ADM and Conagra. It is bad for farmers, the poor and the planet.

Food sovereignty is the answer to the food emergency

The current food emergency is a result of half a century of farming unsustainably, and one and a half decades of trading unfairly in food. The United Nations called an emergency meeting in early June 2008 to address the food emergency. Even the World Bank felt the need for an urgent response. Will the response intensify unsustainability and injustice, or will the global community use the crisis to advance sustainability, justice and fairness?

There are already signs that global agribusiness, which has created the crisis both historically and currently, will use it to increase its stranglehold on the world food system. Reducing import duties has been one response of governments to deal with rising food prices. But lowering import duties encourages the destruction of domestic markets and domestic production, thus aggravating the agrarian crisis, pushing more farmers into poverty and leading to an overall decline in food production. The crisis of rising food prices is a direct result of countries being forced by the World Bank, the WTO and regional and bilateral agreements to import food from US agribusiness that they did not need. Mexico was forced to import maize. India has been forced to import soya oil and wheat.

The World Bank’s call for contributions to the World Food Programme to increase by US$500 million and President Bush’s request to Congress to add US$770 million to the country’s food aid could become another subsidy to Cargill and ADM if the additional money is not accompanied by the creation of fair markets for farmers at local and regional levels. Emergency food aid cannot correct the distortions, unfairness or unsustainability of the food system as it is currently organised. Both trade rules and the paradigm of food production need to be changed.

The globalised system under corporate control is a recipe for food disasters and famines. Either we stop the damage through food democracy and rebuild food sovereignty by strengthening local economies and sustainable agriculture, or the corporate powers that have created the emergency will use it to deepen and expand their profits and control, while billions are condemned to starvation and death. And while people suffer, the corporations’ close allies, such as Bush, will continue to put a false spin on the causes of the food crisis.

China not to blame GRAIN Vandana Shiva argues forcefully that Indians are not eating better and, despite what President Bush says, the food crisis cannot be blamed on their “better nutrition” and “better food”. But it is also true that a small elite in both India and China are eating more meat. As Vandana Shiva points out, much of this meat is being consumed in the form of junk food and is thus less healthy, but could this additional demand nonetheless be contributing to the food crisis? Daryll Ray, an investigator at the University of Tennessee, shows that this is not the case with respect to China. In a recent policy article, he looked at meat consumption in China. [1] Beef consumption indeed rose from 1.1 million tonnes in 1990 to 7.4 million tonnes in 2007. However, China supplied this additonal demand with additional domestic production, even achieving a small surplus, which it exported. The same with pork: consumption increased from 23 million tonnes to 45 million tonnes, but once again domestic production met the demand. It is almost the same with poultry: chicken consumption rose from 2.4 million tonnes to 11.5 million tonnes, with domestic production satisfying all the increased demand until 2007, when a small quantity (124,000 tonnes) was imported. What about rice? Did China import a lot, thus causing scarcity elsewhere? Again the answer is “no”. Consumption rose from 124 million tonnes in 1990 to 134 million tonnes in 1999, but domestic production met the additional demand and provided a surplus, which was exported. And maize for animal feed? Yet again, China covers its own consumption and is an important exporter. Daryll Ray concludes: “The data do not support the often-stated implication that the sharp increase in grain prices is attributable to the Chinese diet change.” So what does lie behind the food crisis? University lecturer Alejandro Nadal, commenting on Daryll Ray’s figures in an article in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, has no doubts: “Today conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge, Monsanto and Syngenta have so much control over markets and infrastructure that they can manage stocks, invest in grain futures and manipulate prices on a world scale so that they can obtain huge profits. But neither the WTO or the FAO are interested in tackling this problem.” [2] 1 http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/408.html 2 Alejando Nadal, “Precios de alimentos: adiós al factor China”, La Jornada, 11 June 2008, http://tinyurl.com/5lr3k8

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* Vandana Shiva is founding director of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, based in Delhi, India. She is the author of Staying Alive and many other books and articles.