Ethiopia at centre of global farmland rush

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/21/ethiopia-centre-global-farmland-rush

It's the deal of the century: £150 a week to lease more than 2,500 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset – for 50 years. Bangalore-based food company Karuturi Global says it had not even seen the land when it was offered by the Ethiopian government with tax breaks thrown in.

Karuturi snapped it up, and next year the company, one of the world's top 25 agri-businesses, will export palm oil, sugar, rice and other foods from Gambella province – a remote region near the Sudan border – to world markets.

Ethiopia is one of the world's largest recipients of humanitarian food and development assistance, last year receiving more than 700,000 tonnes of food and £1.8bn in aid, but it has offered three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of virgin land to foreign corporations such as Karuturi.

"It's very good land. It's quite cheap. In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India," says Karmjeet Sekhon, project manager for what is expected to be one of Africa's largest farms. "There you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5%. We don't need fertiliser or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it.

"To start with there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils and maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs, dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. "This is phase one. In three years time we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000 workers. We could feed a nation here."

Sparsely-populated Gambella is at the centre of the global rush for cheap land, precipitated by the oil price rise in 2007/2008, when many countries racked by food riots encouraged their farmers to invest abroad to grow food.

The lowest prices are in Africa, where, says the World Bank, at least 35 million hectares of land has been bought or leased. Other groups, including Friends of the Earth International, say the figure is higher. The Ethiopian government says 36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land there.

Gambella has offered investors 1.1 million hectares, nearly a quarter of its best farmland, and 896 companies have come to the region in the last three years. They range from Saudi billionaire Al Amoudi, who is constructing a 20-mile canal to irrigate 10,000 hectares to grow rice, to Ethiopian businessmen who have plots of less than 200 hectares.

This month the concessions are being worked at a breakneck pace, with giant tractors and heavy machinery clearing trees, draining swamps and ploughing the land in time to catch the next growing season.

Forests across hundreds of square km are being clear-felled and burned to the dismay of locals and environmentalists concerned about the fate of the region's rich wildlife.

Local government officers have denied claims that people are being forcibly moved to make way for foreign companies.

"This year we will relocate 15,000 people to give them better access to water, schools and transport. [But] it is a coincidence that the investors are coming at the same time as the villages are being relocated," said Kassahun Zerrfu from Gambella's department for investment.

"We are not relocating people to give land to the investors. The problem is there is no infrastructure where they have lived. It's all voluntary."

Under the government's "villagisation" programme, three or four villages at a time are being moved closer to roads and services, but many people say they are not being compensated and are having to wait. "We were promised a school, a health clinic and fresh water eight months ago. We only have one water pump so far," said Udul Ujulu, chief of Karmi village, a new village of 250 people nine miles outside Gambella town.

Others displaced by new farms said they were scared for their lives if they complained. "What power do we have to stop them? We just stay silent," said one farmer told to move off his land.

"There is no movement of population. It's their choice to have these basic services. But they have to abandon their previous way of life," said farm minister Wondirad Mandefro.

Contradictions of ‘development’ in contemporary India

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/swapna-banerjee-guha/contradictions-of-%E2%80%98development%E2%80%99-in-contemporary-india?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_'2011-02-11+05:30:00'

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit?

About the author

Swapna Banerjee-Guha is Professor of Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,Mumbai. Most recently she publishedAccumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order(Sage Publications, 2010).

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit? A large number of Indians from various cross-sections are currently enraged about this crucial question. While official outlets make frantic efforts to project this tendency as a contradiction between modernity and backwardness and label anyone questioning the validity of the above development model as ‘anti-development’ or ‘unlawful’, innumerable lived experiences go on reflecting heightening inequalities and the increasing expendability of the poor.

Take the case of the resource-rich tribal heartland of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh located in central and eastern India. Mining areas in these states are enthusiastically being leased out to global corporations leaving the poor tribal community homeless; common lands and waste lands in several states that have been traditionally providing livelihood and survival means to the poor are being taken over to make Special Economic Zones; rich coastal areas with enormous bio-diversity are being handed over to corporations like Dow Chemicals for making chemical hubs; natural resources like rivers are being privatised for industrial and commercial purposes, like the Sheonath river in Chattisgarh. Examples abound. This ‘development’ process that rests heavily on displacement, dispossession and destruction of the environment is creating an irreversible production structure in favour of the rich that is actively supported by all major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and the like and facilitated by the neoliberal Indian state.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Specific areas in India – large and small, rural and urban - are being identified as global economic regions to carry out modern hi-tech corporatised activities. Essentially global, these new economic spaces (location choices are made by investing corporations) are carved out from existing agricultural areas, forest lands, mining areas, fishing zones, peripheries of metropolitan regions, villages, even slums and dilapidated areas inside cities. In the process of converting these spaces into newer ones, large numbers of farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen, in short a huge section of economically active but poor people are being displaced and dispossessed leading to fierce resistance struggles, inviting in response, state atrocities and violence.

The phenomenon has become pan-Indian: whether in Raigad in Maharashtra, Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, in Jagatsinghapur-Kalinganagar in Orissa or Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, the patterns are comparable. The official argument says that as the State is not financially capable of providing ‘world class infrastructure’ in a short time, it is necessary to invite private capital to provide it initially in chosen pockets that will boost economic growth in the surrounding regions. While private capital undertakes this task, it becomes obligatory on the part of the State to offer them concessions and subsidies, in exchange. Land acquisition for such global spaces is undertaken by invoking a Colonial Act of 1894 that says that the State is the ultimate owner of land and can take over any tract for ‘public purposes’ by paying reasonable (sic) compensation. Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy.

The vociferous state

This newer form of capitalist development depends on global finance and technology and a supportive neoliberal hegemonic discourse. It goes beyond the previous practice of disaggregation and production relocation in areas with lower social reproduction costs to an altogether newer design of total appropriation of space for a novel exploitation process. Set to mutate all existing social relations, it further modifies the non-Fordist labour process, transforms relations between the dominant and the dominated and alienates space-economies from their respective social realities to construct an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory. The common collective interest and the public good start getting negotiated away by ideological, political and economic power-plays that privilege individual accumulation, subordinating the common people and their rights in a way that is even used to underpin justifications for state violence.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Resting on a contradictory framework of inclusion (of the few) and exclusion (of the many) it materialises a multiscalar, uneven development involving integration of selective regions and sections of societies in a globalised market framework. A destructive ensemble of obsoletism and reconstruction diffuses across the old spaces, displacing the existing use values and altering the discursive as well as the material geography of such spaces, creating a solid, material background for intense conflicts. A typical neoliberal construction of space, place and scale is taking place in India that is reconstructing a new geography of centrality and marginality, making the issues of production and capitalisation of space extremely crucial. The resultant landscapes of conflict invite resistance and contestation from below by those whose livelihoods get jeopardised and who are systematically marginalised by the state apparatus in diverse ways that expose their vulnerability in the current order.

To identify the causal factors, one needs to look at the direction of India’s current economic momentum. There has been a far-reaching shift in her economic policy, facilitating ingress of global capital in all economic sectors, downsizing labour, outsourcing economic activities, and promoting an aggressive urbanism based on gentrification and privatisation. Based on exploitation of the product of labour, pillage of nature and expropriation of social property, such policies have a close connection with international financial institutions, the global corporate sector, and quite significantly, the major capitalist countries. The State, backtracking from its previous role of a provider takes a neoliberal stance, becoming a vociferous facilitator of private capital pitching heavily on a ‘politically neutral’ practice of developmental governmentality. While the country’s growth roars ahead at an annual 8 per cent, growth in regular employment in recent years is found to have exceeded not even 1 per cent. Quite logically India accounts for the largest number of homeless, illiterate and ill-fed people in the world.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.

Amidst the euphoria of creating a free market, in practice the contemporary policies are resulting in a dramatic intensification of a coercive disciplinary form of state intervention to impose a market rule that subjugates the majority and protects the ‘strong’. This is taking place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape in which newly emerging ‘economic spaces’ stand in conflict with inherited regulatory arrangements, providing a political arena through which subsequent struggles over accumulation by dispossession and its associated contradictions are getting articulated and fought out at various scales questioning the prevailing development path of the country, assuming a national character, often supported by pan-Indian coalitions of regional resistance groups, broadly/basically left oriented but not belonging to mainstream left parties. The resultant negotiating strategy of the neoliberal state creating multi-level contradictory spaces of conciliation, coercion and atrocity is significant in exposing the porosity of the state apparatus.

One needs to emphasise that the contextual embeddedness of the current exclusionist economic policy in India, produced at national, regional and local scales, are not only getting defined by the nexus of policy regimes, disciplinary political authorities and their regulatory practices, but also by resistance struggles, consolidated grassroots movements and mobilisation of progressive forces that are challenging the state sponsored corporatised development paradigm. Peripatetic global capital in collision with state power may exhibit its authority in controlling spaces and territories for some time, but the ongoing struggles clearly point at an emerging discourse in search of an alternate paradigm, based on a democratically oriented sustainable development practice.

For references and full development of issues see:

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (1997). Spatial Dynamics of International Capital, Orient Longman, Hyderabad.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2002). 'Critical Geographical Praxis: Globalisation and Socio-Spatial Disorder', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.37 (44 & 45), pp. 4503-09, Mumbai.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2008): ‘Space Relations of Capital and Significance of New Economic Enclaves: SEZs in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43(47), pp. 51-60, Mumbai

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2009): ‘Contradictions of Enclave Development in Contemporary Times: Special Economic Zones in India’ Human Geography, Vol. 2(1), pp 1-12, Massachusetts

Bhaduri, A (2008): 'Predatory Growth', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43(16), pp.10-13, Mumbai.

Bourdieu, P (1998): 'The Essence of Neoliberalism', Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998.

Brenner, N and N. Theodore (2002): ’Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 34, pp 349-379

Conway, D and N Heynen (2006): 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalisation' in Denis Conway and Nik Heynen, (eds.)., Globalisation's Contradictions, Routledge, U.K.

Cox, H (1999): 'The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation',Atlantic Monthly, March, pp.18-23.

Gill, S (1995): ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, Vol. 24, pp 399-423.

Harvey, D (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York

Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.

Letter from PSSS to Jairam Ramesh, August 2010

http://kafila.org/2011/02/01/a-green-signal-for-the-rape-of-justice-and-the-people-posco-pratirodh-sangram-samiti/

The following is the statement issued by the POSCO PRATIRODH SANGRAM SAMITIon the latest decision of the Environment Ministry on POSCO. The image below from an earlier round of land acquisition attempt is a telling illustration of how the ‘free market’ functions. Received via Shankar Gopalakrishnan.

Land being acquired for POSCO. Image courtesy The Hindu

Jairam Ramesh and the UPA government have shown their true colours with their decision today on the POSCO project. Ignoring the reports of its own advisory bodies and enquiry committees, violating its own orders and the laws of the land, this Ministry has shown that the naked face of corporate greed – it is not the “rule of law”, the “aam aadmi”, “inclusive growth” or any of these other lies – that rules this country. The decision today can be summarised in one sentence:”Repeat your lies, give us promises that we all know are false, and then loot at will.”

We repeat: we will not give up our lands, our forests and our homes to this company. It is not the meaningless orders of a mercenary government that will decide this project’s fate, but the tears and blood of our people. Through the road of peaceful demonstrations and people’s resistance we have fought this project, in the face of torture, jail, firings and killings. If this project comes it will come over our dead bodies.
We note the following about today’s decision:

The Orissa government has been asked to give an “assurance” that the affected people of the area are not forest dwellers under the Forest Rights Act, after which the “final forest clearance” will be granted. The Orissa government has already lied on this count on numerous occasions. Indeed, the majority report of the POSCO Enquiry Committee said “The Committee finds that the government’s own records such as census reports and voters list confirm that there are both other traditional forest dwellers (OTFD) and forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes in the project area and the statement of the District Collector of Jagatsinghpur to the contrary is false” (para II.1, Conclusions and Recommendations). Even the dissenting member agreed that the Act had not been implemented. The same finding had been reached by the subcommittee of the Saxena Committee earlier. After the Ministry’s own enquiry committees have found the Orissa government guilty of lying, what is the meaning of saying the project can proceed if the liars repeat their lies?

This Ministry has earlier made a song and dance of respect for people’s views and environmental laws. Under the Forest Rights Act, the consent of the gram sabhas of the area is an essential requirement, and this was confirmed by the Ministry’s own order. Three different committees – the Saxena Committee, the POSCO Enquiry Committee and the Ministry’s own Forest Advisory Committee – all therefore said the clearance should be withdrawn. The Minister today claims that the project can go ahead if he and the Orissa government decide they want it to. So much for the law and for people’s rights.

On the environment clearance, we recall again the words of the majority Enquiry Committee, which said “Potentially very serious impacts…have not even been assessed, leave alone planned for…The cavalier and reckless attitude of the concerned authorities to such potentially disastrous impacts is horrendous and shocks the collective conscience of the Committee….There appears to be a predominant belief that conditionalities in the EIA/ CRZ clearances are a substitute for comprehensive evaluation and assessment of the environmental impact by the authorities. Imposing vague conditionalities seems to be a way out for the various agencies from taking hard decisions on crucial issues.” Again, it is not us who said this – it is the Ministry’s own Committee! And yet this is exactly what the Minister has chosen to do.

Independent reports and studies by reputed academics have confirmed what we have always said – this project will be of no benefit to anyone except POSCO’s profit margins. But yet we find this being called a project of “strategic importance.” To whom?

Today the veil stands ripped open; the government stands exposed before the nation, a mercenary willing to put its regulations, officials and security forces at the disposal of the highest bidder. Let the UPA and the Central government answer: where is the rule of law today, in the name of which you crush struggles across the country? Where is your much vaunted love for the people and for the environment? What do you stand for if not for corporate greed?

Prashant Paikray
Spokesperson, PPSS
09437571547

Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues Read more: Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues - The Times of Ind

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Posco-clearance-Govt-to-wait-watch-on-mining-MoU-issues/articleshow/7400073.cms

BHUBANESWAR: Enthused over the Centre's nod to Posco's mega steel plant, the Orissa government on Monday said it would soon resume land acquisition work at the project site, but preferred a wait-and-watch approach on issues like mining and MoU renewal delaying fruition of India s biggest foreign direct investment.

"We welcome the decision and thank Union environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh for granting approval, although the process got delayed," steel and mines minister Raghunath Mohanty said. "Posco project is important not only for Orissa but for the country as it will provide employment and spur economic activities. We will begin the land acquisition process as soon as possible," he added.

The state government was forced to halt land acquisition for the 12 billion USD project in August following a central government s stop-work order on grounds of violation of Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006.

Ramesh announced environment clearance for the South Korean company's proposed steel and captive port projects near Paradeep in Jagatsinghpur district, but sought Orissa government's assurance that those claiming dependence on or cultivating land in the project area cannot be categorized as "other traditional forest dwellers" under FRA before it can give final nod for diversion of 1253 hectares of forest land for Posco project.

Posco's bid to access the Khandadhar iron ore reserves in Sunergarh district, around 600 km from the proposed 12 million tonne per annum-capacity steel facility site, is also pending before the Supreme Court.

Possibly keeping these in mind, CM Naveen Patnaik reacted to the development with caution. "It is good news," said Naveen, hours after Ramesh declared his decision in Delhi. "We will take appropriate action," Naveen replied to queries from journalists on when the state government would renew its memorandum of understanding with the company. The state government on June 22, 2005, signed with Posco a MoU valid for five years.

Senior government officers said Ramesh gave the green signal as he did not have "much option", but sounded caution about the Posco project becoming a reality. "A positive step has been taken. But there are a few other issues, most importantly mining, which need to resolved before the project can materialize," a senior government officer said.

Paradeep MLA and minister Damodar Rout attributed the controversy over forest law violations to "wrongful recording of forest land" and said people who cultivated betel vines on government land will be adequately compensated. The administration has identified 1877 people growing betel vines for their livelihood on 304 acres of government land. It had paid compensation to 96 of the farmers and retrieved around 11 acres of land.

Posco welcomed Ramesh's decision and said it appreciated the concerns of stakeholders on sustainability of environment and livelihood of affected people. "We are committed to take sustainable green initiatives and effective measures for conserving the land and marine environment of the area. We are also committed to create sustainable livelihood opportunities for the project affected people by implementing the R&R (rehabilitation and resettlement) package sincerely," it said, adding, "We will continue to work for welfare of the local community and plough back part of our earnings for CSR (corporate social responsibility) after operations commence."


Read more: Posco clearance: Govt to wait & watch on mining, MoU issues - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Posco-clearance-Govt-to-wait-watch-on-mining-MoU-issues/articleshow/7400073.cms#ixzz1Ci4lGcUV

Letter from PSSS to Jairam Ramesh, August 2010

http://kafila.org/2010/08/19/posco-pratirodh-sangram-samiti-to-jairam-ramesh/

This is a press release issued in August 2010 by PPSS, pointing out the illegalities being committed by the Orissa government and the Central Ministry of Environment and Forests in connection with the POSCO project.

POSCO PRATIRODH SANGRAM SAMITI

Dhinkia, Nuagaon, Gadkujang; Jagatsinghpur District, Orissa

11.08.2010

To:

Shri Jairam Ramesh

Minister of Environment and Forests

Paryavaran Bhavan

New Delhi

Sub: Regarding POSCO project – need for withdrawal of illegal final clearance; new Meena Gupta Committee clearly aimed at delaying matters

Dear Sir,

We are the people’s organisation spearheading the struggle against the illegal and unjust POSCO project in Orissa. We are writing to you in the context of the ongoing illegalities being committed by the Orissa government and the Central Ministry of Environment and Forests in connection with this project. We also condemn the decision of the Ministry to constitute yet another Committee to “look into the matter” instead of remedying its own illegal decision to grant final forest clearance to the project on December 29, 2009.

We wish to bring the following to your attention. While we welcome the stop work order of the Ministry dated August 6, 2010, we condemn the Ministry’s failure to withdraw the illegal clearance granted on December 29, 2009 to the project.

We, political leaders and now your Ministry’s own Committee to Study the Forest Rights Act (the NC Saxena Committee) have all pointed out that:

1. We are indeed Other Traditional Forest Dwellers and eligible for rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006. It may be noted that the palli sabhas of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Govindpur have also asserted this fact and it is therefore now simply illegal for any other authority to deny it without going through the process under the Forest Rights Act.

2. As we are other traditional forest dwellers, our consent is required for the

diversion of any forest land (this is also stated in your own Ministry’s circular of August 3, 2009). The palli sabhas of Nuagaon, Dhinkia and Govindpur have denied consent to any diversion on February 4, 5 and 6 of this year, which has also been admitted by your Ministry in its latest “stop work” order.

3. The process under the Forest Rights Act has not been completed in the area. No rights have been recognised and no claims processed. This has also been admitted by the Ministry and by the Orissa government itself, which has said in writing to you that it has not processed any claims.

In short, every single condition required with respect to the Forest Rights Act for a legal forest clearance has not been met; but the clearance was granted anyway on December 29, 2009.

Moreover, now that the palli sabhas have denied their consent, all other issues become irrelevant, and the clearance is invalid in any case. If the Ministry intends to comply with the law, it has no choice but to withdraw the clearance and reject the project’s application.

Yet instead of doing this, we now find the Ministry has constituted yet another Committee to “investigate” the status of “implementation of the Forest Rights Act” as well as “relief and rehabilitation” (vide its order dated 28.07.2010). It is clear that this new Committee is nothing but a delaying tactic intended to muddy the waters. What exactly is this Committee going to

do?

Please consider:

· The Committee cannot investigate whether or not we are eligible under the Act; we have already produced documentary proof of the same which has been accepted by the NC Saxena committee. In any case, at the most this can only be challenged by anyone through the process under the Forest Rights Act; the District Collector’s lies about the lack of eligible persons have no legal standing and should have been rejected in the first place. How many more Committees do you need to “investigate” this matter? What are they going to “investigate”?

· Although we are eligible under the Forest Rights Act, the Orissa government itself admits that it has not processed any claims. It is therefore clear that the Act has not been implemented. What exactly is there for the Committee to “ascertain”?

· The fact that the palli sabhas of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Govindpur have denied consent for the project in February 2010 is known and accepted. This requires no “investigation” except looking at the concerned panchayat registers. The clearance is therefore invalid. How then is any further investigation relevant?

· The key question before the government is why the Ministry issued a clearance on December 29, 2009, in violation of the law and its own orders and despite having none of the required documents. This can only be answered by the Ministry, not by any inquiry in our area.

· There is a direct conflict of interest in the composition of the Committee, in that the Chairperson was herself the Secretary of Environment and Forests when the project was granted environmental clearance. As such she is being asked to review a project which she has already taken a decision in favour of.

We may also note that on June 22 the MoU with POSCO for this project lapsed. In light of this the entire basis for the forest clearance becomes infructuous as there is no longer any project in existence. If a new MoU is signed, the existing clearance is in any case invalid as it relates to the earlier proposal.

In sum, there is no purpose in the Committee “investigating and ascertaining” any matters with respect to the Forest Rights Act. It also cannot look into any questions of “relief and rehabilitation” because no rehabilitation has been done yet. It cannot even consider the general wisdom of the clearance because there is no longer any clarity on what the project is.

We therefore reject this irrelevant Committee as an obvious attempt to delay and confuse matters. No doubt some elements will try to use it to muddy the waters and come up with bureaucratic excuses for continuing to violate the law. We call upon you to cancel this committee, withdraw the illegal forest clearance and finally reject the application by POSCO India for diversion of forest land in Jagatsinghpur. This is the minimum that is required by law.

We will continue our peaceful and democratic agitation for our rights.

Sincerely,

Abhay Sahoo

Chairperson

POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti

Contact:
Prashant Paikray,
Spokesperson,
POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti
09437571547

Tigers and Terrorism

http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Tigers-and-Terrorism.html&Itemid=52

by Bittu Sahgal

I have been making calls across the country to establish whether or not the forest authorities are aware of the way in which insurgents, separatists and insurrectionists of all descriptions are using unprotected forest wealth to finance their anti-national activities. I was alarmed to discover that forest officers in most states, including Assam, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra ARE aware of this truth, but believe that other departments should be handling this issue as their jurisdiction does not extend beyond the areas in their charge.

There is a lot of truth in what they say, but in light of the kind of mayhem that was unleashed upon us in Mumbai recently at the hands of just ten terrorists, surely this systemic flaw in our country's administration should be plugged? By some accounts the revolving door between the illegal trades in narcotics, arms and wildlife could be offering anything in excess of Rs. 500 crores per annum to the purveyors of violence. If this terror supply-tap is not switched off, no amount of hand wringing, or television advice from experts is going to help India.

The root cause of the problem is the low priority extended to wildlife and forest protection by economists whose advice is gospel for both politicians and bureaucrats. We therefore end up with a situation where thousands of crores of rupees worth of standing timber, and all the mineral and wildlife wealth contained therein, is left in the charge of a miserably funded, poorly equipped and apathetic field force. When I wrote of these connections in 1999 in Sanctuary, I was invited to speak at the National Defence College and other official fora for a period of a few months. Then all was forgotten. I hope this is not going to be the fate of the recent impetus to shore our defence against terrorism this time too.

The right right

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/editor.asp?foldername=20090415&filename=Editor&sec_id=2&sid=1

The world’s cheapest car, the Nano, rolls out in India this week. Manufacturer Tata Motors says it will change the way Indians drive, for the inauguration places the personal car within the reach of people who once could only dream of owning one. Indeed, the Nano has been marketed as an ‘aspiration’—the right of every Indian to a car. No quibble here. There is no question an affordable car is better than an expensive one; or that a small car, being more fuel efficient, is better than a big one. No question, too, that every citizen of India has as much right to a car as every citizen of America, where vehicle numbers are obscene: some 800 vehicles for 1,000 people (old and young) against our measly 7 per 1,000 people (urban and rural).

Let me roll out my concerns. The issue is not the Nano. The issue is all cars and whether cars still are the future of the world economy. Over years, in different continents, vehicle manufacturers invented and re-invented this appliance for self-mobility, for different market segments. In India, two-wheeler manufacturers can rightly claim that over the 1980s they, too, provided technology innovation and affordable mobility for vast numbers. They can also claim they were the first to break the class barrier. Then, in the early 1990s, when Sanjay Gandhi’s people’s car, the Maruti 800, hit the roads, gender barriers also fell—this was a car women could drive and it gave new freedoms. No question, therefore, of what Nano will bring to new owners.

But this launch comes at a time when the production of personal vehicles itself is becoming old-economy. It is not surprising the car industry has become the first big dinosaur of the 21st century. Every country today is working to bail out its automobile industry. The big four companies are still on the brink of closure. There is huge over-capacity in the world of cars—sales are down and the industry is bleeding. You might think it is a temporary phase: cars will zoom again, as recession blues turn pink. But this is far from the reality.

The fact is cars could only make it big in the old economy because they were highly subsidized, or incentivized through cheap bank loans. If people could not afford the next car, the bank worked overtime to make sure the loans kept rolling, even if that eventually broke the bank’s back. But that is the past. The future, too, will not be too different. The bank might recover, but the cost of the fuel to drive the dream vehicle will not. Oil experts will tell you black gold prices will rise again, when the world economy re-boots.

Add to this what can only be called the mother of all subsidies—the free-ride personal vehicles have got, in the world, to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases and pump them into a common atmospheric space. As the rights over this ecological commons will be determined, as they must, carbon dioxide emissions from the cars of the rich will have to be limited and taxed. This will cost. It will make driving more expensive.

The global automobile industry knows it is not our future. It is our past. Unfortunately, this message has not yet come home. Unlike the car-saturated West, we still have a large number of people who are potential buyers. But the fact is in India, because of the even greater price-sensitivity, personal vehicles are viable only if they are subsidized to the brim.

Take the Nano. My colleague Chandra Bhushan has calculated the incentives rolled out by Narendra Modi’s Gujarat government amount to a fat write-off—as much as Rs 50,000-60,000 per this Rs 1 lakh car. In other words, its cost is so low only because the state has doled out a largesse. Every past and present automobile has got this benefit (more or less). We can afford a car because our government pays for it. We can also afford it because we are not asked to pay the price of its running—the tax on cars is lower than what buses pay in our socialist country. We do not pay for its parking, a cost, which, if added, would make us think twice before we bought or drove our new dream vehicle, whatever the variant.

As the Nano rolls out, think of how we subsidize the car and tax the bus. Public buses pay taxes as commercial passenger vehicles, each year and based on the number they carry. In many states, they pay over 12 times more tax than cars. Think of the public transport bus service in your city and ask how much of its revenues go in taxes: half, in most cases. Think also that the same Tata company, that has managed to roll out the car of our dreams in record time, does not possess the capacity to build the buses cities need.

Such an old-economy approach becomes completely perverse when one considers that already today, and definitely tomorrow, the greater proportion of people who are or will commute are using and will continue to use public transport—a bus or a train. Today, as much as half of rich Delhi takes a bus, and another one-third walk or cycle because it is too poor to even take the bus.

Think again about the car inequity in India—7 per 1000 people. Can the government write off the costs—Nano style—so that all can buy the car? Can the government pay for our parking, our roads and our fuel, so that all can drive the car? If not, then is this the right right at all?

The issue, then, is not the right to own a Nano. The issue is the right to a slice of the public subsidy so that everybody has the right to mobility. There is no other right.

— Sunita Narain

The Mad Hatter’s PARTY

Bittu Sahgal on how politicians have brought India to the brink of ecological ruin

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JS00vMjAwOC8wNi8wMSNBcjAwOTAy&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom




The Mithi River mouth has been blocked by what should be called the Mithi dam, which goes by the name of the Mahim Causeway, built by dumping rocks to narrow the entrance of the river into the Mahim bay. This year, instead of installing a ‘stent’ to widen this blockage, in their wisdom, the city of Mumbai has instructed its engineers to clamp it. As you read this, bulldozers are dumping more rock and mud to narrow the exit. In an era of climate change when Mumbai is threatened with climate change-caused infrastructure losses of over Rs 2,00,000 crore, the latest news suggests that salt pan lands that hold millions of tons of sea water are to be filled up to make way for buildings. Here, in mismanaged Mumbai ‘they’ also want to destroy mangroves to allow flood waters to escape into the sea. The chief minister of Maharashtra, it appears, has asked his lieutenants to study the possibility of sand being stripped from beaches because he was informed that it was ecologically ill-advised to take it from rivers. And Maharashtra’s environment minister would have us sell the last few remaining open spaces in Mumbai to builders to defray Maharashtra’s debt.

Such amazing thought processes are part of a planning legacy in India that has brought one billion people to the brink of ecological ruin.

Way back in the 1970s, of all the harebrained ideas that scientists in search of funding came up with, the Frankenstein Award would surely go to the guys who wanted to spray coal dust on the polar ice caps to “speed up ice melt’’.

This, they opined, would “improve’’ Earth’s weather by reducing the climatic extremes between the poles and equator. After being rejected in the corridors of world power, the idea inevitably arrived in India, almost two decades later, when some equally harebrained scientific advisors appointed during the Rajiv Gandhi regime actually pushed to spray coal dust on Himalayan glaciers to “solve the problems of drought in the northern plains’’.

Both ideas were dropped (as was a proposal to shave 15 metres from the top of the Western Ghats because the clouds would always get stuck there and be unable to deliver rain to Karnataka!), not because better sense prevailed, but because of the cost involved. Something like 1.4 billion tonnes of coal dust was needed to coat the poles with just 4/1000th of an inch. And India had no foreign exchange to blanket its glaciers in coal, or to shave off the Western Ghats.

When environmentalists decried the ambitions of such people who had been gifted much power and little wisdom, they responded as such people invariably tend to respond: “Why are you behaving so negatively? Can you prove that melting the ice caps will be harmful?’’

Presumably Lord Nicholas Stern, Al Gore and Dr Rajendra Pachauri have presented today’s would-be Frankensteins with enough empirical data to answer such stupid questions, but this does not stop the list of absurdities from growing. Mumbai city, for instance, is actively considering hacking hundreds of acres of irreplaceable mangroves in the Mithi river, because “they are coming in the way of water that has to exit to the sea’’.

Chattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand continue to entertain proposals from all manner of politicians to solve the Naxalite problem by “cutting forests in which the criminals hide’’. After crushing corals for years to feed cement factories, Gujarat now wants to dam the estuaries of Saurashtra to replace sea water with sweet water from its (highly polluted) rivers.

And the latest brainwave has come from Chattisgarh, which says it wishes to cut 5.7 million “extra’’ trees in its state, because leaving 80 to 90 trees standing per hectare is more than enough to look after the forest ecology.

What on earth are we to do with these people? According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (no paragon of virtue itself), two billion tonnes of carbon enter the atmosphere each year due to forest loss, which amounts to around 25 per cent of all manmade emissions of the greenhouse gas CO 2. According to the FAO, such forests store around 283 gigatonnes of carbon in their biomass alone, and the total weight of the carbon stored in forest biomass, deadwood, litter and soil put together amounts to roughly “50 per cent more than the amount found in the atmosphere—adding up to one trillion tonnes’’.

Clearly we need to prevent this carbon from going up in smoke. For this we need to curb deforestation and the incompetent leaders in whose hands we have left our forests and environment.