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.

From farm to mandi, vegetable prices go up by 400%

Economic Times


New Delhi: Did you know that there is a 400% mark-up on vegetables in the last mile when it travels from the wholesale market — the mandi — to

the vegetable vendor? If cauliflower, for instance, is being sold by dealers at Rs 5 a kg at the mandi, by the time it travels a few miles to the vendor its price is Rs 20-25 a kg.

The poor farmer gets a fraction of this. He gets just Rs 3 from dealers at the mandi, despite his toil and risks. These figures, obtained by TOI after going backward from the vendor to mandi to farmers, revealed another stunning fact — there is no shortage of food items in the wholesale market. As a matter of fact, rates have been dropping in the past one month.

Since October, prices of food items in the city had started stabilizing. The effect of the delayed monsoon was over and any shortage was being made up by local produce. But local vendors have been doubling their profits, claiming that supply from farms is affected. The government’s inaction has encouraged profiteering by retailers.

Tracking the vegetable supply chain to study the causes for soaring prices, a Times City team went to Palla village on the banks of the Yamuna. Village pradhan Tek Chand said farmers in his area barely scrape through each month while people in the city were minting money without putting in any effort. ‘‘Seasonal vegetables like spinach and cauliflower are growing in abundance here and we are not getting high rates in the mandi. In a day, we barely make Rs 100-Rs 125 from which we need to pay our labourers, take care of our costs and bear the risk of crop failure,’’ he said.

Farmers like Tek Chand take their daily produce to mandis across the city each morning and sell either to dealers or directly to retailers through an auction. At the mandi, where rates are decided by the quantity and quality of each produce, the vegetable becomes dearer by a few rupees.


In the last journey, from mandi to the retail market, however, the humble vegetable becomes a precious and pricey commodity. Depending on the area of the city, a kg of spinach that earns the farmer Rs 3 and the dealer at Azadpur Mandi Rs 10, costs the consumers around Rs 40. In areas like east and north Delhi, the prices might be slightly lower while in south Delhi areas you would be paying more.

The government has so far kept out of this. Said Brahm Yadav, chairman, Delhi Agricultural Market Board: ‘‘The government has no control over retail and we have been telling them for months now that there is a need for massive checks. The mandi is functioning as usual with both arrival and quality of food items absolutely normal. The earlier shortages have been met and if anything, prices of several items have come down.’’

Pawar Rules Out rice imports

http://www.mynews.in/News/Pawar_rules_out_rice_import__N33514.html

The government on Wednesday ruled out importing rice this year, saying it had comfortable stock position even after factoring strategic reserve requirements.

"Our stock position is better, (and) over and above the buffer norms and strategic reserves," Food and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said, discounting the need for imports although rice production is expected to dip by 13 MT this year.

He was speaking on the sidelines of the annual general meeting of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

According to the buffer norms, the Centre should have 118 lakh tonnes of rice as on January one every year. The norms for the minimumstock that the government has to maintain are fixed on a quarterly basis.

According to government sources, the Centre had 229 lakh tonnes of rice as on December one, 2009.

Pawar also said Food Corporation of India (FCI) has sought permission from Uttar Pradesh government to allow it to purchase paddy from the state as there was a complaint that farmers are selling their paddy below the minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 1,000 a quintal (including Rs 50 bonus).

"I am getting complaints that prices are below the MSP. We have to gear up FCI machinery, for which we have requested the state government to allow us to purchase," he said.

He also pointed out that the current low market price of paddy in UP is because "there is no purchasing machinery".

The real issues behind land acquisition

The real issues behind land acquisition

The real issues behind land acquisition

By Pranab Bardhan. The Hindu, August 1 2009

The opportunistic and partisan stalling of the Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bills in the Cabinet recently by Mamata Banerjee has provided an opportunity to rethink some of the important provisions of the Bills (which she is not concerned about, but should have been).

Under the prospective legislation, a company must first buy directly from landowners 70 per cent of the land required. The state steps in to buy the rest in case some recalcitrant landowners are holding out; even here, the sellers are guaranteed a 60 per cent premium on the average land price over the previous three years. While this is an improvement on the existing colonial land acquisition law, this is quite unsatisfactory, particularly from the point of view of stake-holders in agricultural land. Let us spell out the reasons:

First, while leaving the major part of the transaction to the market may stop the matter from becoming a political game of football in populist competitive politics (as has happened in West Bengal), it is an inadequate solution to a complicated problem. Even assuming that the purpose for which the land is to be transferred is a legitimate one from an economic and environmental point of view, Indian history is replete with instances of uninformed, cash-strapped peasants being induced to sell their land at nominal prices by the lure of ready cash from developers, speculators, and touts of large corporate interests. This is how many Adivasis have lost their land even in recent years. Even in the case of informed, market-savvy sellers, thousands of small, uncoordinated farmers are no match for a large corporate buyer in the bargaining process.

Of course, in many cases the State government did very little to get the landowners a good price; but there is potential here for community organisers (and panchayats) to get involved in ensuring a fair price. In particular, the provision of a 60 per cent premium on the past average price is not good enough. The average past price is for the land as agricultural land, whereas use for industrial or infrastructure purpose will probably multiply the value many times, the gain from which the farmer is deprived. So, over and above the value of the agricultural land being considered as a minimum floor of basic compensation, the farmers should be compensated with a share in the enterprise or company, so that they can benefit from future profits.

Of course, the poor farmer may not have the capacity to bear the risks of fluctuating share prices. Here the role of the state is to put the farmers’ shares of the new company in an independently managed trust fund which will bear the risks at the cost of some management fees. Out of this trust fund, the farmer should be paid a steady “pension” (or annuity) every six months or so. Given the large gap between productivity in agriculture and the new activity for which the land is acquired, the farmer can be assured of a reasonable stream of pension. This will go a long way in assuaging the anxieties of an uncertain future that the farmer may contemplate in selling the land.

Also, a regular pension may be more advisable than a one-off cash payment, which often tends to get frittered away. In case the land is acquired for public infrastructure building (where there may not be any direct company profits to be shared), the land should be given out by the farmer on long-term lease with the rent periodically readjusted in accordance with the current value of surrounding pieces of land and the rental increases deposited in a trust fund.

Secondly, a land sale displaces not just landowners, but other stakeholders as well (sharecroppers and agricultural labourers working on the land, for example). In West Bengal, the government had announced compensation to be paid to registered sharecroppers (which Ms Banerjee never paid much attention to). But the state also needs to be involved in some form of welfare payments (and job training and so on) to unregistered sharecroppers and landless workers.

Thirdly, the state often needs to get involved in building roads, providing electricity, water supply and so on for the new company, and this may require coordination in the land transaction itself between the transactors and the state right from the beginning.

Of course, politicians often lack credibility in any process of obtaining fair compensation to land sellers. Cases of politicians, middlemen, and contractors defrauding poor sellers of their compensation and resettlement rights are far too many. So it may be desirable in some cases to hand over the responsibility of determining fair prices and managing the process of transfer and resettlement to an independent commission, provided political interference with the working of such a commission can be minimised and enough opportunity is given to community leaders and organisations to serve in such commissions or present their cases at hearings before the commission, and to generally act as watchdogs in the whole process.

Thus, what is at stake with the new Bills is much larger and deeper than Ms Banerjee’s political gripe.

The author is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ban lays out steps to save billions from hunger

http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=208206

A three-day United Nations summit on world food security opened in Rome Monday, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warning that on this day alone more than 17,000 children will die of hunger -- one every five seconds, 6 million a year -- even as the planet has more than enough food for all.

“Today, more than one billion people are hungry,” he told the assembled leaders, calling for immediate action on long-term remedies, a day after he himself fasted for 24 hours in solidarity with all those billion. “It was not easy. But, for too many people, it is a daily reality.”

He laid out a full, comprehensive spectrum of measures to combat a scourge gravely exacerbated by climate change and population growth that will see two billion more mouths to feed in 2050 – 9.1 billion in all – with an overall need to grow 70 percent more food.

The steps range from immediate needs such as food aid, safety nets and social protection to the longer-term goals achieved through increased investments in agricultural development, including provision of seeds, water supplies and land to ensure higher productivity, better market access, and fairer trade, above all for smallholder farmers, especially women.

“These smallholder farmers are the heart and soul of food security and poverty reduction,” Mr. Ban declared. “We must resist protectionism and end subsidies that distort markets. This, ladies and gentlemen, lies at the core of food security. Our job is not just to feed the hungry, but to empower the hungry to feed themselves.”

He warned of a chain reaction over the past year that threatens the very foundations of life for millions of people, with rising energy prices driving up food costs and eating away the savings that would otherwise be spent on health care or education.

“It is a vicious cycle that impoverishes not only its immediate victims but all people,” he said. “Millions of families have been pushed into poverty and hunger. Suffering on this scale spills over borders. It sets back development and undercuts social order, as we well know. Over the past year and a half, food insecurity led to political unrest in some 30 countries.”

But it is not enough just to deal with the crisis when it arrives, even though the world responded with the greatest-ever food aid, pledging funding and improved policies at various summits, and even worse potential damage was averted.

“Because the underlying problems persist, we will continue to experience such crises, again and again - unless we act,” Mr. Ban said. “The food crisis of today is a wake-up call for tomorrow.”

He stressed the inter-relationship between the food and global warming crises, pleading for agreement at next month's climate change summit in Copenhagen on curbing greenhouse gas emissions to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.

The melting of Himalayan glaciers would affect the livelihoods and survival of 300 million people in China and up to 1 billion people throughout Asia, while Africa's small farmers, who produce most of the continent's food and depend mostly on rain, could see harvests drop by 50 percent by 2020, he warned.

“Today's event is critical. So is the climate change conference in Copenhagen next month. There can be no food security without climate security,” Mr. Ban declared. “They must produce results -- real results for people in real need, results for the one billion people who are hungry today, real results so millions more will not have to suffer when the next shock hits.

Indian Villages For Sale

http://www.countercurrents.org/gl-sharma130206.htm

By Devinder Sharma

13 February, 2006



Harkishanpura is a non-descript village in Bathinda district of Punjab in northwestern India. It suddenly made its way into news when in an unprecedented move the village panchayat announced that the village was up for sale. That was in Jan 2001. Since than five more villages in Punjab - in the midst of the food bowl of the country - are awaiting auction.

What began as an isolated and an extreme case of rural distress is now slowly and steadily spreading its tentacles throughout the country. In December 2005, Dorli in Wardha district of Maharashtra in central India became the first village outside the frontline agricultural state of Punjab - the harbinger of Green Revolution in India - to make itself available for sale. With signboards pasted all around, and the slogan " Dorli village is for sale" painted on the cattle back and trees, what appeared to be a bizarre tale is now becoming a sad but widespread reality.

Dorli village comprises 270 residents, 500 livestock, and nearly 600 acres of agricultural land. Every villager, including children, has an outstanding debt of Rs 30,000 (425 pounds).

A few weeks later, hundreds of residents of Chingapur village in Yeotmal region of Maharashtra, invited the President of India, Dr Abdul Kalam, and the Prime Minister, Mr Manmohan Singh, to preside over a 'human market' for the sale of kidneys. Unable to repay the mounting debts, the villagers had decided to go in for mass sale of kidneys. The situation in the neighbouring villages is no better. Agricultural distress is written all around.

In the neighbouring village, Shivani Rekhailapur, banners read: "This village is ready to be auctioned. Permit us to commit mass suicides." Rural indebtedness has reached such alarming proportions that village communities are being forced to sell not only their body organs but also their lands - willing to lose control over their only means of economic security.

Malsinghwala is a tiny village in the Mansa district of Punjab. The village owes upto Rs 50 million to banks and another Rs 25 million to private moneylenders and commission agents. " We are neck deep in debt. We are left with no other option but to sell of our land," says village panchayat head Jasbir Singh. Showing the panchayat resolution that authorized the sale, he said that each of the 4000 residents had an outstanding debt of Rs 13,000. With crop yields faltering, and with no other hope of repaying the outstanding debts, the village had decided to sell off its assets spread over 1800 acres.

Five years after Harkishanpura in Bathinda district was put up for sale, the village is still awaiting a buyer. Like any other village in prosperous Punjab, Harkishanpura has nothing to indicate that it is different from others. With some 125 families, and 1170 acres of land, the village somehow continues to slog in its march for survival. Mounting indebtedness and an indifferent Punjab government is slowly and steadily pushing several villages in its neighbourhood into a severe socio-economic crisis.

Bhuttal Kalan in Sangrur district comprises 1000 acres of land. The neighbouring Bhuttal Khurd has 1200 acres of land. Eighty per cent of the village land is already mortgaged to moneylenders and commission agents. While both these villages are up for sale, the situation is no better in the adjoining villages. "The situation is alarming. But no one seems to take any notice of our cry for help," says Hardayal Singh, sarpanch of the adjoining village of Govindpura Jawaharwala. No wonder, 40 per cent of the farmers have in the latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report expressed the desire to quit farming.

And yet, it doesn't shock the conscious of the world's biggest democracy. There was no public outrage when earlier reports showed that sixty-five of the 243 farmers who committed suicide in Vidhrabha region of Maharashtra in 2004 alone had debts as little as Rs 8,000 (110 pounds). That Meena Prakash Rechpade, widow of the 36-year-old farmer, Prakash, of village Dhanori, near Wardha, in Maharashtra, had no money to arrange for the last rites of her husband, who took the fatal route to escape the misery of Green Revolution, did not evoke strong reaction. Except for routine inquiries and promises, such stories have failed to move the nation.

Not only in Punjab and Maharashtra, tens of thousands of farmers throughout the country are migrating every season looking for menial jobs in the urban centres. Mofussil newspapers in the heartland of the cyberstate - that's how Andhra Pradesh in south India wanted itself to be called - are full of advertisements inviting people to mortgage their gold and silver belongings. In Karnataka, where farmer suicide rate is equally high, the over-emphasis on technology had only alienated a large percentage of farming populations from economic growth and development. The biggest tragedy being that both the states have turned into a national capital of shame for farmers' distress, visible more through the increasing rate of suicides in the rural areas

While the rural misery continues to multiply, what is more depressing is that the government is clueless of the reasons that aggravate agrarian crisis. Nor is there any effort from agricultural scientists, economists, and social scientists to come out with proposals to put an end to this shameful blot on the country's image. The reason is obvious. No one has the political courage to point a finger at the fundamental reason behind the collapse of the Green Revolution. It not only acerbated the crisis leading to an environmental catastrophe but also destroyed millions of rural livelihoods.

The alarm bells had been ringing for quite some time now. For nearly a decade, agricultural production had almost stagnated, than began the downslide. All this happened at a time when high-chemical input based technology had already mined the soils and ultimately led to the lands gasping for breath, with the water-guzzling crops sucking the groundwater aquifer dry, and with the failure of the markets to rescue the farmers from a collapse of the farming systems. By ignoring the critical connection between agricultural production and access to food -- with the focus shifting to agro- processing linked to foreign investment and exports -- it was bound to happen.

While the input costs kept on increasing over the years, encouraging farmers to back up with more loans, the farm prices remained steady. The entire input-output ratio gradually went upside down, with a large number of farmers sliding into debt that kept on mounting with each year. A recent UNCTAD report that showed agricultural produce continues to be sold at 1985 prices. In other words, the price farmers were getting today is in reality the same at which they were selling their produce 20 years back.

Such is the growing apathy that without first ascertaining where has the farm equation gone wrong, and without learning from the bloody aftermath of the Green Revolution, a second green revolution is being forced, which will increase dependence over external inputs and thereby add on to farmers costs. The second Green Revolution has all the ingredients to further accentuate the prevailing crisis in sustainability and speed up the marginalisation of the farming community.

Agricultural reforms that are being introduced in the name of increasing food production and minimising the price risks that the farmers continue to be faced with, is actually aimed at destroying the production capacity of the farm lands and would lead to further marginalisation of the farming communities. Encouraging contract farming, future trading in agriculture commodities, land leasing, forming land-sharing companies, allotment of homestead-cum-garden plots, direct procurement of farm commodities and setting up of special purchase centres will drive out a majority of the 600 million farmers out of agriculture.

Village for sale will then become a common feature of the Indian landscape.

(Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based writer and commentator)

The Indian Seed Act And Patent Act: Sowing The Seeds Of Dictatorship

http://www.countercurrents.org/gl-shiva150205.htm


By Vandana Shiva

15 February, 2005


Since the beginning of farming, farmers have sown seeds, harvested crops, saved part of the harvest for seeds, exchanged seeds with neighbours. Every ritual in India involves seeds, the very symbol of life’s renewal.

In 2004 two laws have been proposed – a seed Act and a Patent Ordinance which could forever destroy the biodiversity of our seeds and crops, and rob farmers of all freedoms, establishing a seed dictatorship.

Eighty per cent of all seed in India is still saved by farmers. Farmers indigenous varieties are the basis of our ecological and food security. Coastal farmers have evolved salt resistant varieties. Bihar and Bengal farmers have evolved flood resistant varieties, farmers of Rajasthan and the semi-arid Deccan have evolved drought resistant varieties, Himalayan farmers have evolved frost resistant varieties. Pulses, millets, oilseeds, rices, wheats, vegetables provide the diverse basis of our health and nutrition security. This is the sector being targeted by the Seed Act. These seeds are indigenous farmers varieties of diverse crops – thousands of rices, hundreds of wheats, oilseeds such as linseed, sesame, groundnut, coconut, pulses including gahat, narrangi, rajma, urad, moong, masur, tur, vegetables and fruits. The Seed Act is designed to “enclose” the free economy of farmers seed varieties. Once farmers seed supply is destroyed through compulsory registration by making it illegal to plant unlicensed varieties, farmers are pushed into dependency on corporate monopoly of patented seed. The Seed Act is therefore the handmaiden of the Patent Amendment Acts which have introduced patents on seed.

New IPR laws are creating monopolies over seeds and plant genetic resources. Seed saving and seed exchange, basic freedoms of farmers, are being redefined. There are many examples of how Seed Acts in various countries and the introduction of IPRs prevent farmers from engaging in their own seed production. Josef Albrecht, an organic farmer in Germany, was not satisfied with the commercially available seed. He worked and developed his own ecological varieties of wheat. Ten other organic farmers from neighbouring villages took his wheat seeds. Albrecht was fined by his government because he traded in uncertified seed. He has challenged the penalty and the Seed Act because he feels restricted in freely exercising his occupation as an organic farmer by this law.

In Scotland, there are a large number of farmers who grow seed potato and sell seed potato to other farmers. They could, until the early 1990s, freely sell the reproductive material to other seed potato growers, to merchants, or to farmers. In the 1990s, holders of plant breeders’ rights started to issue notices to potato growers through the British Society of Plant Breeders and made selling of seed potato by farmers to other farmers illegal. Seed potato growers had to grow varieties under contract to the seed industry, which specified the price at which the contracting company would take back the crop and barred growers from selling the crop to anyone. Soon, the companies started to reduce the acreage and prices. In 1994, seed potato bought from Scottish farmers for £140 was sold for more than double that price to English farmers, whilst the two sets of farmers were prevented from dealing directly with each other. Seed potato growers signed a petition complaining about the stranglehold of a few companies acting as a ‘cartel’. They also started to sell non-certified seed directly to English farmers. The seed industry claimed they were losing £4 million in seed sales through the direct sale of uncertified seed potato between farmers. In February 1995, the British Society for Plant Breeders decided to proceed with a high profile court case against a farmer from Aberdeenshire. The farmer was forced to pay £30,000 as compensation to cover royalties lost to the seed industry by direct farmer-to-farmer exchange. Existing United Kingdom and European Union laws thus prevent farmers from exchanging uncertified seed as well as protected varieties.

In the US as well, farmer-to-farmer exchange has been made illegal. Dennis and Becky Winterboer were farmers owning a 500-acre farm in Iowa. Since 1987, the Winterboers have derived a sizeable portion of their income from ‘brown bagging’ sales of their crops to other farmers to use as seed. A ‘brown bag’ sale occurs when a farmer plants seeds in his own field and then sells the harvest as seed to other farmers. Asgrow (a commercial company which has plant variety protection for its soybean seeds) filed suit against the Winterboers on the grounds that its property rights were being violated. The Winterboers argued that they had acted within the law since according to the Plant Variety Act farmers had the right to sell seed, provided both the farmer and seller were farmers. Subsequently, in 1994, the Plant Variety Act was amended, and the farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed was amended, establishing absolute monopoly of the seed industry by making farmer-to-farmer exchange and sales illegal.

Similar laws are being introduced in India. The entire country is being taken for a ride with the introduction of the Seed Act 2004 on grounds that the Act is needed to guarantee seed quality. However, the Seed Act 1966 already performs the function of seed testing and seed certification. Twenty labs have been declared as seed testing labs under the 1966 Act in different States. Nine seed corporations have been identified as certification agencies.

Under pressure from World Bank the Seed Policy of 1988 started to dismantle our robust public sector seed supply system, which accounted for 20% of the seeds farmers grow. Eighty per cent of the seed prior to globalisation is the farmers’ own varieties, which have been saved, exchanged and reproduced freely and have guaranteed our food security.

A License Inspector Raj for Seeds

The introduction of 2004 Seed Act needs to be assessed in the context of the simultaneous introduction of the 3rd Patent (Amendment) Act. Our 1970 Patent Law has been changed under the coercive pressure of WTO in spite of the overdue mandatory TRIPS review. Patents will now been granted for seeds, plants, micro-organisms, cells and even GMO’s and animals.

Quite clearly a monopolistic patent regime cannot be established as long as farmers have the alternative of their own zero cost, reliable, time tested high value seeds of their traditional varieties of indigenous agro-biodiversity.

The Seed Act 2004 has one and only one objective of stopping farmers from seed saving, seed exchange and seed reproduction.

In the objective the 2004 Act clearly states that it is aimed at replacing farmers saved seeds with seeds from private seed industries.

The repeated reference to ‘barter’ in the Seed Act will prevent farmer’s exchange, a necessary aspect of maintaining high quality seed supply at the community level.

Further the compulsory registration of seed combined with the power of seed inspectors to enter and search premises (which now mean farmers’ huts and fields), the power to break open any container and any door is tantamount to creating a ‘Seed Police’ to terrorize farmers who are conserving biodiversity and practicing a sovereign self-reliant agriculture. The fine for seed exchange and barter of unregistered seed (thousands of farmers varieties has a fine of up to Rs. 25000). While criminalizing farmers who consume biodiversity and traditional varieties, the Seed Act fails to do one thing it should have done, which is to regulate and hold liable private seed industry for seed failure and genetic contamination from GMO’s. For Example the failure of maize seeds in Bihar last year cost more than 1000 crores to Bihar farmers and the constant failure of Bt. cotton annually is costing more than a billion dollars to Indian farmers.

In the new Seed Act farmers can only claim compensation under the Consumer Protection Act. This option is in any way is available to the farmers presently and the brutal power of the Central Authority, which acts to prevent farmers from growing own seeds, provides no safety and remedy to our farmers from untested and hazardous seeds MNCs are selling in the Indian market.

The Seed Act has also undermined the role of the State governments. The Central Seed Committee in 1966 Act has representatives nominated by the government of each State. Now only 5 State will be represented in the Central Seed Committee and even these will be nominated not by the State governments but by the Centre.

The 2004 Seed Act has nothing positive to offer to farmers of India but offer a promise of a monopoly to private seed industries, which has already pushed thousands of our farmers to suicide through dependency and debt caused by unreliable, high dependency and non-renewable seeds.

The 1966 Act has served the country well and should continue to provide the framework for seed testing and seed certification.

Farmer varieties and indigenous agro-biodiversity is already been registered by Local Biodiversity Committee through Community Biodiversity Registers (CBRs). We do not need a Centralized Seed Authority with police power which uses compulsory registration to prevent farmers from growing, saving and exchanging their own seeds.

It is the MNC seed industry that need regulation and not the small farmers of our country without whose seed freedom the country will have no food sovereignty and food security.

Product Patent on Seeds

Methods of agriculture and plants were excluded from patentability in the Indian Patent Act 1970 to ensure that the seed, the first link in the food chain, was held as a common property resource in the public domain. In this manner, it guaranteed farmers the inalienable right to save, exchange and improve upon the seed was not violated.

But recently, two amendments have been made in the 1970 Patent Act. The 2nd Amendment makes changes in the definition of what is NOT an invention. This has opened the flood gates for the patenting of genetically engineered seeds.

According to Section 3(j) of the Indian Patent Act, the following is not an invention:

Any process for the medical, surgical, creative, prophylactic or other treatment of human beings or any process for a similar treatment of animals or plants or render them free of disease or to increase their economic value or that of their products.

In the 2nd Amendment however, the mention of “plants” have been deleted from this section. This deletion implies that a method or process modification of a plant can now be counted as an invention and therefore can be patented. Thus the method of producing Bt. cotton by introducing genes of a bacterium thurengerisis in cotton to produce toxins to kill the bollworm can now be covered by the exclusive rights associated with patents. In other words, Monsanto can now have Bt. cotton patents in India.

The Second Amendment has also added a new section (3j). This section allows for the production or propagation of genetically engineered plants to count as an invention. Its status as an invention thus deems it. But this section excludes as inventions “plants and animals including seeds, varieties and species and essentially biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animals”. Since plants produced through the use of new biotechnologies are not technically considered “essentially biological,” section 3j has found another way to create room for Monsanto. This loophole, couched in the guise of scientific advancement, thus allows patents on GMOs and hence opens the flood gate for patenting transgenic plants.

What is most concerning is how the language of section 3j is a verbatim translation into India law of Article 27.3 (b) of TRIPS Agreement. Article 27.3 (b) of TRIPS states:

Parties may exclude from patentability plants and animals other than micro-organisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes. However, parties shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof. This provision shall be reviewed four years after the entry into force of the Agreement establishing the W.T.O.

As Monsanto had a hand in drafting the TRIPS agreement, it is not surprising that the Monsanto Amendments have also made their way into India’s patent laws.

As Monsanto had a hand in drafting the TRIPS agreement, it is not surprising that the Monsanto Amendments have also made their way into India’s patent laws.

However, Article 27.3(b) is under review. The Government should have insisted on the completion of the review, a commitment of the Doha Round, instead of changing India’s Patent Law. As a result of sustained public pressure, after the agreement came into force in 1995, many Third World countries made recommendations for changes in Article 27.3 (b) to prevent biopiracy. India, in its discussion paper submitted to the TRIPS Council stated:

“Patenting of life forms may have at least two dimensions. Firstly, there is the ethical question of the extent of private ownership that could be extended to life forms. The second dimension relates to the use of IPRs' concept as understood in the industrialized world and its appropriateness in the face of the larger dimension of rights on knowledge, their ownership, use, transfer and dissemination

Informal system, e.g. the shrutis and in the Indian tradition and grandmother's portions all over the world get scant recognition. To create systems that fail to address this issue can have severe adverse consequences on mankind, some say even leading to extinction.

Clearly, we must re-examine the need to grant patents on life forms anywhere in the world. As we continue to assess this situation, in the meantime it may be advisable to:

1. Exclude patents on all life forms.

2. If (1) is not possible, then we must exclude patents based on traditional/indigenous knowledge and essentially derived products and processes from such knowledge.

3. At the very least, we must insist on the country of origin to disclose the biological source and associated knowledge, and obtain the consent of the country providing the resource and knowledge, to ensure an equitable sharing of benefits.”

To prevent competitors from selling seeds and to prevent farmers from saving seeds, Monsanto has now turned to the patent laws to get monopoly rights. The Monsanto Amendments of India's patent laws are a logical consequence of the clearance for the commercial planting of GMOs in Indian agriculture, as we saw earlier with the March 26th decision of the Indian government to allow Bt. cotton.

Patents on seeds are a necessary aspect of the corporate deployment of GM seeds and crops. When combined with the ecological risks of genetically engineered seeds like Bt. cotton, seed patents create a context of total control over the seed sector, and hence over our food and agricultural security.

Looking with closer analysis, there are three ways that the 2nd Amendment and 3rd Amendment of the Indian Patent laws have jeopardized our seed and food security, and hence our national security.

Firstly, it allows patents on seeds and plants through sections 3(i) and 3(j), as we saw above. Patents are monopolies and exclusive rights which prevent farmers from saving seeds; and seed companies from producing seeds. Patents on seeds transform seed saving into an “intellectual property crime”.

Secondly, genetic pollution is inevitable. Monsanto will use the patents and pollution to claim ownership of crops on farmers’ fields where the Bt. gene has reached it through wind or pollinators. This has been established as precedence in the case of a Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser, whose canola field was contaminated by Monsanto’s “Round up Ready Canola,” but instead of Monsanto paying Percy on the basis of the pollute principle, Monsanto demanded $200,000 fine for “theft” of Monsanto’s “intellectual property”. Thousands of U.S. farmers also have been sued. Will Indian farmers be blamed for theft when Monsanto’s GM cotton contaminates their crops? Or will the government wake up and enforce strict monitoring and liability?

When combined with the 3rd product patents amendment, these changes can mean absolute monopoly. A decision on a plant patent infringement suit has set a new precedent for interpreting plant patent coverage. In the case of Imagio Nursery vs. Daina Greenhouse, Judge Spence Williams, for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled that a plant patent can be infringed by a plant that merely has similar characteristics to the patented plant. When combined with the reversal of burden of proof clauses, this kind of precedence based on product patents can be disastrous for countries from where the biodiversity that gave rise to those properties was first taken, more so, if the original donors of the biodiversity are accused of ‘piracy’ through such legal precedence in the absence of the prior existence of laws on traditional knowledge that prevent the misuse of such legal precedence.

In countries, where plant patents are not allowed, patenting genes is available as an opening for patenting properties and characteristics of the plant, and hence having exclusive rights to those properties and characteristics. This is how Monsanto was able to establish monopolies on seeds through patents on genes in Canada, even though Canada does not allow patents on life forms.

Patent protection implies the exclusion of farmers’ right over the resources having these genes and characteristics. This will undermine the very foundations of agriculture. For example, a patent has been granted in the U.S. to a biotechnology company, Sungene, for a sunflower variety with very high oleic acid content. The claim was for the characteristic (i.e., high oleic acid) and not just for the genes producing the characteristic. Sungene has notified others involved in sunflower breeding that the development of any variety high in oleic acid will be considered an infringement of its patent.

Corporate Rights Vs Farmers Rights

The State is under siege. New Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) legislation is being introduced in the area of plant genetic resources (PGR) under pressure of the U.S. government as well as the requirements of the TRIPS agreement of the W.T.O. while W.T.O. gives a five year transition period to introduce PGR legislation, the U.S. pressure was to introduce such legislation immediately. Further, the U.S. has been demanding monopoly protection for Transnational Corporations (TNCs) which control the seed industry. On the other hand people’s organisations are fighting to protect farmers’ rights to their biodiversity and their right to survival as well as the freedom of scientists to work for the removal of hunger rather than corporate profits. Farmers organizations, biodiversity conservation groups, sustainable agriculture networks and public interest oriented scientists are trying to ensure that farmers’ rights are protected, and through the protection of farmers’ rights, sovereign control over our biological wealth and its sustainable use in agricultural production is ensured. The conflict over PGR legislation is a conflict between farmers and the seed industry and between the public domain and private profits, between an agriculture that produces and reproduces diversity and one that consumes diversity and produces uniformity.

On January 29, 1996 at an address at the Indian Institute of Agricultural Research, the Unite States Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Daniel Glickman directly addressed the issue of the protection of seed Multinationals (MNCs). He said, “I hope our new legislation will provide a responsible and reasonable protection to private seed companies, which will encourage them to provide the best seeds available for your farmers. There would be very few inventions of anything, particularly in agriculture, without patent protection because it is the fundamental fact of nature that people will not go through the expense of development of new ideas just for the altruistic benefit of the human race.

The U.S. IPR orthodoxy is based on a fallacious idea that people do not innovate or generate knowledge unless they can derive private profits. However, greed is not a “fundamental fact of human nature” but a dominant tendency in societies that reward it. In the area of seeds and plant genetic resources, innovation of both the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ systems has so far been guided by the larger human good. Norman Borlaug the scientist behind the Green Revolution and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, made this clear in his statement at a Press Conference at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi on 8th Feb 96. He expressed concern against private companies and TNCs gaining control of plant genetic resources and seeds and patenting plants. Prof. Borlaug said,

We battled against patenting. I and late Glen Anderson (of International Wheat an Maize Research Institute) went on record in India as well as other for a against patenting and always stood for free exchange of germplasm.

He saw IPRs in PGRs as a prescription for famine. Commenting on the U.S. demand for patents he said:

God help us if that were to happen, we would all starve.

Besides using a fallacious essentialist argument about human nature, Mr. Glickman also stressed the inevitability of farmers’ dependence on MNCs for seeds due to trade liberalization and its impact on agriculture.

According to him,

As income increases throughout Indian society, food needs will change – higher vegetable oil consumption, a shift from rice to wheat in urban areas and some shifting from grain to poultry and livestock products. Also, the needs of the new food processing industries will change the types of crops demanded. Therefore, farmers must have access to new crop varieties in order to meet changing consumer preferences.

In other words, what the U.S. government is coercing the Indian government to do is introduce unhealthy fat and meat rich diets through the expansion of U.S. agribusiness, agroprocessing and fast food industry. The proposal is to replace the small peasant and farmer based agricultural economy of India with agribusiness controlled industrial agriculture. This shift is associated with a transformation of farmers as breeders and reproducers of their own seed supply to farmers as consumers of propriety seed from the seed industry. It is also a shift from a food economy based on million of farmers as autonomous producers to a food system controlled by a handful of TNCs which control both inputs and outputs. This is a recipe for food insecurity, biodiversity erosion and uprooting of farmers from the land.

It is often stated that IPRs will not stop traditional farmers from using native seeds. However, the Seed Act 2004 is designed to do just that. Further when it is recognised that IPRs are an essential part of a package of agribusiness controlled agriculture in which farmers no longer grow native seeds but seeds supplied by the TNC seed industry, IPRs become a means of monopoly that wipe out farmers rights to save and exchange seed. This leads to TNC totalitarianism in agriculture. TNCs will decide what is grown by farmers, what they use as inputs, and when they sell their produce, to whom and at what price. they will also decide what is eaten by consumers, at what price, with what content and how much information is made available to them about the nature of food commodities.

IPRs are a significant instrument for the establishment of this TNC totalitarianism. The protection of the rights of citizens as producers and consumers needs the forging of new concepts and categories, new instruments and mechanism to counter and limit the monopoly power of TNCs in agriculture. Community rights are an important balancing concept for protecting the public interest in the context of IPR protection for corporations. In the field of food and agriculture, farmers’ rights are the countervailing force to breeders rights and patents on seed and plant material. Farmers’ rights in the context of monopoly control of the food system become relevant not just for farming communities, but also consumers. They are necessary not just for the survival of the people but also for the survival of the country. Without sovereign rights of farming communities to their seed an plant genetic resources, there can be no sovereignty of the country.

Farmers’ rights are an ecological, economic, cultural and political imperative. Without community rights, agricultural communities cannot protect agricultural biodiversity. This biodiversity is necessary not just for the ecological insurance of agriculture. Rights to agricultural biodiversity is also an economic imperative because without it our farmers and our country will loose their freedom and options for survival. Since biodiversity and cultural diversity are intimately linked, conservation of agricultural biodiversity is a cultural imperative also. Finally, without farmers’ rights, there is no political mechanism to limit monopolies in agriculture and inevitable consequence of displacement, hunger and famine that will follow total monopoly control over food production and consumption through the monopoly ownership over seed, the first link in the food chain.

Markets Hate Farmers

http://www.countercurrents.org/gl-sharma260207.htm

By Devinder Sharma

26 February, 2007

Farmers in United States, Europe and for that matter in other rich and industrialised countries are quitting agriculture. That makes me wonder. Why? After all, they get huge subsidies. They have the advantage of being literate and techno-savvy. They can take benefit of future trading and commodity exchanges. Linked to supermarket retail stores, they supposedly get a bigger share of the consumer price.

Yet they are herding out of agriculture. How can this be possible if the market was working to the benefit of farmers? How can this be a reality at a time when the private trade is believed to be providing higher income to farmers? Still, there must be some reason for the collapse of family farms in the developed world. Either the ground realities in the rich countries are far away from our perception of farming or something must be terribly wrong in our understanding of the market economy and farming.

What makes it still worse is that the same prescription of farming is being doled out to Indian farmers. Policy makers and the agribusiness companies never feel tired to tell us that such a paradigm shift alone will bring about a second Green Revolution and liberate farmers from the clutches of the old mandi system. What they don't tell us is that the same farming model is not working in America. Farmers are abandoning agriculture at a pace that remains unprecedented. Farming has moved into the hands of agribusiness corporations.

Take the case of Europe. It is the biggest provider of farm subsidies. You get subsidies for entering into agriculture, you get subsidies based on the land you own, you get subsidies for keeping cow, pig or horses. You get subsidised credit for farm machinery, which is often written-off subsequently. You get subsidies for preserving biodiversity, for even planting hedges. The rural infrastructure works very efficiently, farmers have access to credit and insurance and there are no mandis (local market yards) like in India. In other words, farmer is linked to the private markets.

And yet, every minute one farmer quits agriculture. In America, there are more people in jails than on the farm. There are approximately 7 million people in jail or on parole and bail. And only about 700,000 people are left on the farm. Thanks to the farm policies, American farmers have been driven out of agriculture. In its last census in 2000, America did not count the number of farmers for the first time in history. In need not. After all the number of farmers has plummeted to a historic low. So when America talks of agriculture, it actually talks of corporations and machines.

On the other hand, despite the industrial farming systems linked to supermarkets, the number of middlemen has actually grown in the US. The new breed of middlemen operates under one umbrella organisation. You have the quality control man, the standardiser, the processor, the retailer and so on. It is primarily for the increase in the number of middlemen that the farmer's income has got squeezed. Studies have shown that in 1995 when a farmer went to the market to sell his produce worth one dollar, his income would be 70 cents. Ten years later, in 2005, farmer's income has dropped to a paltry four cents. The middlemen have neatly pocketed the rest.

Economists and socialites who back the entry of global retailers like Wal-mart, Tesco, Reliance and Bharti Telecom repeatedly tell us that while the intermediaries may be sulking over being left out from the newly acquired value chain, for the farmers, hopes, opportunities and wealth are all finding their way into their homes. Well, the reality is that the American farmers were actually pauperised by the value chain. If that is the situation in the Mecca of second Green Revolution, I wonder what will happen to the Indian farmers when the retail chains take over.

In any case the proponents of market economy feel that talk of farmer suicide is cheap. Like an Ostrich we should all bury our heads in the sand, and see only what they want us to see.

In America, knowing that distress sale is what the farmer faced, the government had stepped in and provided them with direct support. Each farm receives something close to US $ 33,000 a year in federal support. In Canada, the National Farmers Union has in a study shown that while the 70-odd agribusiness companies are raking in profits, farmers are the only segment of the food chain incurring losses. Farmers in the rich countries essentially live on government doles.

It is now the turn of 600 million farmers in India. Like the farmers in the rich and industrialised countries, it is now their turn to be oppressed. Whatever that remains of the marginalized farming community is now up for grabs. Not only agribusiness companies, private banks and the new micro-finance army that replaces the private money lenders with organised money lending through Self-Help Groups are getting ready to expand their activities. As the ICICI chief K.V.Kamath said: "After all, there is a lot of money to be made from rural areas".

The economic prescription therefore is not for the farmers to get a bigger slice of the consumer price. It is not going to result in new homes rising in rural lands and children going to good schools. As the global experience shows, it is actually aimed at letting the agribusiness industry walk away with the entire cake. Who said you can't have your cake and eat it too? #

(This article first appeared in Deccan Herald, Jan 18, 2007)

www.dsharma.net

Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm

By Walden Bello

April 27, 2007


The 20th century was a terrible blight on small farmers everywhere. In both wealthy capitalist economies and in socialist countries, farmers paid a heavy price for industrialization. In advanced capitalist countries like the United States, a deadly combination of economies of scale, capital-intensive technology, and the market led to large corporations cornering agricultural production and processing. Small and medium farms were relegated to a marginal role in production and a minuscule portion of the work force.

The Soviet Union, meanwhile, took to heart Karl Marx's snide remarks about the “idiocy of rural life” and, through state repression, transformed farmers into workers on collective farms. Expropriation of the peasants' surplus production was meant not only to feed the cities but also to serve as the source of the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital for industrialization.

Today, perhaps the greatest threat to small farmers is free trade. And the farmers are fighting back. They have helped, for instance, to stalemate the Doha round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This tug of war between farmers and free trade is nowhere more visible than in Asia.

The Triple Threat to Asia’s Peasantry

Asian governments placed the burden of industrialization on the peasantry during the phase of so-called developmentalist, industry-first policies. In Taiwan and South Korea, land reform first triggered prosperity in the countryside in the 1950s, stimulating industrialization. But with the shift to export-led industrialization in 1965, there was demand for low-wage industrial labor, so government policies deliberately depressed prices of agricultural goods. In this way, peasants subsidized the emergence of Newly Industrializing Economies. Peasant incomes declined relative to urban incomes, and the resulting stagnation of a once-vibrant countryside led to massive migration to the cities and a steady supply of cheap labor for factories. The farmers left in the countryside were primarily poor and aging, and they formed an increasingly small part of the national work force.

In Thailand, for instance, a tax on rice exports insulated the domestic market from price movements in the international market, depressing the price of rice and reducing the wage costs of non-agricultural employers. A transfer of real wealth from the countryside to the city took place every year between 1962 and 1981, except for 1970. Not surprisingly, despite the image of Thailand as an agricultural superpower, a large percentage of the rural population remains poor.

In China, millions of peasants died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward as the government requisitioned grain surplus to finance Mao Zedong's super-industrialization drive. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution allowed peasants to regain a degree of control over production because the government was in crisis. Following the death of Mao in 1976, Deng Xiaoping dealt with the crisis by introducing the “household contract responsibility system.” Each family was given a piece of land to farm, along with the right to sell what was left over after a fixed proportion of the produce was sold to the government at a state-determined price. This led to peasant prosperity that, as in Taiwan, stimulated industrial production to fulfill rural demand.

But, as in Taiwan, this golden age of the peasantry came to an end, and the cause was identical: the adoption of urban-centered, export-oriented industrialization. Primitive capital accumulation for industry took the form of requisitioning peasant surpluses via heavy taxation. Currently, the various tiers of the Chinese government foist a total of 269 different taxes on farmers, along with often-arbitrary administrative charges. Not surprisingly, in many places, taxes now eat up 15% of farmers' income, three times the official national limit of 5%. Not surprisingly, too, while the economy has been growing at 8-10% a year, peasant income has stagnated, so that urban dwellers now have, on average, six times the income of peasants. True indeed is the observation of the rural advocates Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao that the urban industrial economy has been built “on the shoulders of peasants.”

The Typhoon of Trade Liberalization

The forcing of peasants to subsidize industrialization was indeed harsh. But at least trade policies at the time helped to mitigate the pain by barring agricultural imports that were even cheaper than local commodities. Practically all Asian countries with agricultural sectors tightly controlled imports via quotas and high tariffs. This protective shield, however, was severely eroded when countries signed the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and began joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting in 1995.

The AOA forced open agricultural markets by banning quotas, which were converted to tariffs, and required governments to import a minimum volume of each agricultural commodity at a low tariff. At the same time, under the pretext of controlling the heavy subsidization of agriculture in developed countries, the AOA institutionalized the various channels through which subsidies flowed, such as export subsidies and direct cash payments to farming interests in the northern hemisphere.

As a result, the level of subsidization of agriculture actually increased in developed countries in the first decade of the WTO. The total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by the OECD's member governments rose from $182 billion in 1995 to $280 billion in 1997, $315 billion in 2001, $318 billion in 2002, and almost $300 billion in 2005. The United States and the European Union (EU) were spending $9-10 billion more on subsidies in the early 2000s than they were a decade earlier. For every $100 of agro-exports from the United States, government subsidies accounted for $20-30. In the case of the EU, the figure was $40-50. While unsubsidized smallholders in the developing world had to survive on less than $400 a year, American and European farmers were receiving, respectively, an average of $21,000 and $16,000 a year in subsidies.

With massive American and European subsidies distorting global prices in a downward direction, developing country agriculture became “non-competitive” under the conditions of WTO-mandated trade liberalization. As the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) notes, instantaneous import surges following the adoption of the AOA in a number of developing countries led to “consequential difficulties” for “import-competing industries.” The report continued, “Without adequate market protection, accompanied by development programs, many more domestic products would be displaced, or undermined sharply, leading to a transformation of domestic diets and to increased dependence on imported foods.”

This historic shift to dependence on food imports was, needless to say, accompanied by the displacement of millions of peasants.

Even before the AOA took effect, the World Bank was predicting that Indonesian farmers would lose out under the new regime. Indeed, since 1995, farmers in rice and other basic commodities have been marginalized. Meanwhile, competitive pressures induced by trade liberalization led to the expansion of commercial plantations at the expense of smallholders.

In the Philippines, corn farmers, chicken farmers, cattle raisers, and vegetable growers were driven to bankruptcy in huge numbers. In Mindanao, where corn is a staple crop, many farmers were wiped out. As analyst Aileen Kwa has described, “It is not an uncommon sight to see farmers there leaving their corn to rot in the fields as the domestic corn prices have dropped to levels [at which] they have not been able to compete.” With production stagnant, land devoted to corn across the country contracted sharply from 3,149,300 hectares in 1995 to 2,150,300 hectares in 2000.

In China, tens of thousands of farmers, including those growing soybeans and cotton, have been marginalized with China's entry into the WTO. Indeed, to maintain and increase access for its manufacturers to developed countries, the government has chosen to sacrifice its farmers. According to the Institute of International Economics: “The challenge of managing the farm sector has grown with China's WTO commitments in agriculture, which are more far reaching than those of other developing countries and in certain respects exceed those of high-income countries. The Chinese government agreed to reduce tariffs and institute other policies that meaningfully increase market access; accepted tight restrictions on the use of agricultural subsidies; and pledged to eliminate all agricultural export subsidies. These commitments went far beyond those made by other participants in the Uruguay Round negotiations that led to the WTO's creation.”

In Sri Lanka, thousands of small farmers staged street demonstrations to protest the import of chicken parts and eggs, claiming they were being driven out of business. The FAO concurred, noting that import surges on major food items like chilies, onions, and potatoes made local production “precarious, as reflected in the significant drop in areas of production.”

In India, tariff liberalization, even in advance of WTO commitments, has translated into a profound crisis in the countryside. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has described the calamity as “a collapse in rural livelihoods and incomes” owing to the steep fall in the prices of farm products. Along with this has come a rapid decline in consumption of food grains, with the average Indian family of four consuming 76 kg less in 2003 compared to 1998 and 88 kg less than a decade earlier. The state of Andra Pradesh, which has become a byword for agrarian distress owing to trade liberalization, saw a catastrophic rise in farmers' suicides from 233 in 1998 to over 2,600 in 2002. One estimate is that some 100,000 farmers in India have taken their lives owing to collapsing prices stemming from rising imports.

Governments under Pressure

The resistance to the new regime so opposed to the interests of small farmers has come from several sectors. At the international level, trade liberalization and other anti-agriculture policies led to the formation of two blocs of developing countries: the Group of 20 and the Group of 33. The G-20 put the developed countries on notice that, unless they significantly reduced unfair domestic support for agriculture, there would be no more concessions on market access. The G-33 demanded exemptions from tariff liberalization for certain products considered vital to agricultural production and employment (special products or SPs). They also wanted the right to raise tariffs and resort to other measures -- special safeguard mechanisms (SSMs) -- to protect their products from surges of agricultural imports. When the EU and the United States refused to compromise on these issues, the WTO's Fifth Ministerial Meeting in Cancun in 2003 collapsed.

The Ministerial Declaration of the Sixth Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong in December 2005 recognized the right of developing countries to designate SPs and institute SSMs. However, the U.S. backtracking on this commitment as well as its refusal to significantly reduce its domestic subsidies led to the collapse of the Doha Round of negotiations in July 2006. Developing countries simply could not provoke more discontent among their peasant populations by opening their markets even more in exchange for cosmetic reductions in the massive EU and U.S. agricultural subsidies.

The driving force behind the positions some developing countries have taken in these multilateral forums is the backlash in the countryside. In 2004, for instance, a rural backlash against agrarian distress led to the unexpected defeat of the BJP-led ruling coalition that had campaigned on the vision of “India Shining.” India's rural electoral revolt was part of a global phenomenon that put governments on notice that the countryside would no longer accept policies that sacrifice farmer interests. In Asia, protests in the form of land occupations, hunger strikes, violent demonstrations, and symbolic suicides made rural distress a pressing issue. In China, what the Ministry of Public Security calls “mass group incidents” -- in other words, protest actions -- increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005, most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a powder keg that needs to be defused.

Farmers' Internationale?

The suicide of the Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae at the barricades in Cancun in September 2003 was a milestone in the development of farmers' resistance globally. Committed under a banner that read “WTO Kills Farmers,” Lee's suicide was designed to draw international attention to the number of suicides by farmers in countries subjected to liberalization. He succeeded only too well. The event shocked the WTO delegates, who observed a minute of silence in Lee's memory. By adding to what was already a charged atmosphere, Lee’s act was certainly a key factor in the unraveling of the talks.

In December 2005, invoking Lee's sacrifice, hundreds of Korean farmers tried to break through police lines in an effort to storm the Hong Kong Convention Center. Some 900 protesters, the bulk of them Korean farmers, were arrested.

Both Lee and the Korean farmers protesting in Hong Kong were members of Via Campesina, an international federation of farmers established in the mid-1990s. Since its founding, Via Campesina -- literally translated as the Peasants' Path -- has become known as one of the most militant opponents of the WTO and bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements. While there are other international farmers' networks, Via is distinguished by its position that small farmers must not only fight to survive in the current global system of corporate-dominated industrial farming, they should lead the process to transform or replace the current system. Commenting on the vision of Jose Bove the famous French activist who dismantled a MacDonald's restaurant in his hometown of Millau, France and other Via leaders, one progressive journal has described the aim of the organization as the creation of a Farmers' Internationale in much the same way that Communist and Social Democratic groups sought to establish the Communist International and Socialist International to unite workers in the 20th century.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman. A longer version of this piece comes out in the April 2007 issue of Global Asia. It is republished with permission.

Displacing Farmers: India Will Have 400 Million Agricultural Refugees

http://www.countercurrents.org/sharma220607.htm

By Devinder Sharma

22 June, 2007

It was on the cards. With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announcing the formation of a new rehabilitation policy for farmers displaced from land acquisitions, it is now official -- farmers have to quit agriculture.

Ever since the Congress-led UPA Coalition assumed power after an angry rural protest vote threw out the erstwhile BJP-led NDA combination in May 2004, the Prime Minister had initiated a plethora of new policies for the spread of industrialization. After having laid the policy framework that allows private control over community resources – water, biodiversity, forests, seeds, agriculture markets, and mineral resources -- the UPA government finally looked at the possibility of divesting the poor people of their only economic security – a meagre piece of land holding.

“Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is an idea whose time has come,” the Prime Minister had said at an award ceremony in Mumbai sometimes back. Supported by all political parties, including the Left Front, he has actually officiated a nationwide campaign to displace farmers. Almost 500 special economic zones are being carved out (see The New Maharajas of India). What is however less known is that successive government’s are actually following a policy prescription that had been laid out by the World Bank as early as in 1995.

A former vice-president of the World Bank and a former chairman of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a body that governs the 16 international agricultural research centers, Dr Ismail Serageldin, had forewarned a number of years ago. At a conference organised by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai a few years back, he quoted the World Bank to say that the number of people estimated to migrate from rural to urban India by the year 2015 is expected to be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany.

The combined population of UK, France and Germany is 200 million. The World Bank had therefore estimated that some 400 million people would be willingly or unwillingly moving from the rural to urban centres by 2015. Subsequent studies have shown that massive distress migration will result in the years to come. For instance, 70 per cent of Tamil Nadu, 65 per cent of Punjab, and nearly 55 per cent of Uttar Pradesh is expected to migrate to urban centres by the year 2020.

These 400 million displaced will constitute the new class of migrants – agricultural refugees. Twice the number of people that are expected to be displaced by global warming worldwide are alone be pushed out of agriculture in India.

Acerbating the crisis are the policy initiatives that promotes privatization of natural resources, take over of farm land, integrating Indian agriculture with the global economy, and moving farmers out of agriculture – in essence the hallmark of the neo-liberal economic growth model.

Agricultural reforms that are being introduced in the name of increasing food production and minimising the price risks that the farmers continue to be faced with, are actually aimed at destroying the production capacity of the farm lands and would lead to further marginalisation of the farming communities. Encouraging contract farming, future trading in agriculture commodities, land leasing, forming land-sharing companies, direct procurement of farm commodities by amending the APMC Act will only drive out a majority of farmers out of subsistence agriculture.

Although the land holding size is diminishing, the answer does not lie in allowing the private companies to replace farmers. Somehow the entire effort of the policy makers is to establish that Indian agriculture has become a burden on the nation and the sooner the country offloads the farming class the better it will be for economic growth.

Contract farming therefore has become the new agricultural mantra. Not realising that private companies enter agriculture with the specific objective of garnering more profits from the same piece of land. These companies, if the global experience is any indication, bank upon still more intensive farming practices, drain the soil of nutrients and suck ground water in a couple of years, and render the fertile lands almost barren after four to five years. It has been estimated that the crops that are contracted by the private companies require on an average 20 times more chemical inputs and water than the staple foods.

Sugarcane farmers, for instance, who follow a system of cane bonding with the mills, actually were drawing 240 cm of water every year, which is three times more than what wheat and rice requires on an average. Rose cultivation, introduced a few years back, requires 212 inches of groundwater consumption in every acre. Contract farming will therefore further exploit whatever remains of the ground water resources. These companies would then hand over the barren and unproductive land to the farmers who leased them, and would move to another fertile piece of land. This has been the global experience so far.

Allowing direct procurement of farm commodities, setting up special markets for the private companies to mop up the produce, and to set up land share companies, are all directed at the uncontrolled entry of the multinational corporations in the farm sector. Coupled with the introduction of the genetically modified crops, and the unlimited credit support for the agribusiness companies, the focus is to strengthen the ability of the companies to take over the food chain.

I have always warned that agribusiness companies in reality hate farmers. Nowhere in the world have they worked in tandem with farmers. Even in North America and Europe, agribusiness companies have pushed farmers out of agriculture. As a result, only 7,00,000 farming families are left on the farm in the United States. Despite massive subsidies in European Union, one farmer quits agriculture every minute. Knowing well that the markets will displace farmers, the same agriculture prescription is being applied in India.

A Planning Commission study has shown that 73 per cent of the cultivable land in the country is owned by 23.6 per cent of the population. With more and more farmers being displaced through land acquisitions, either for SEZ or for food processing and technology parks or for real estate purposes, land is further getting accumulated in the hands of the elite and resourceful. With chief ministers acting as property dealers, farmers are being lured to divest control over cultivable land. Food security and food self-sufficiency is no longer the country’s political priority.

The government has very conveniently taken refuge behind an NSSO study that says some 40 per cent of the farmers have expressed the desire to quit farming. After all, what the government is facilitating is to make it easier for the farmers to abandon their land. It believes that a rehabilitation policy for the farmers therefore is the need of the hour. What is however not being seen through is that an agrarian economy like India cannot afford large-scale displacement of farmers. It will lead to social unrest the kind of which has not been witnessed. What India needs desperately is a policy paradigm that restores pride in agriculture, stops take-over of agricultural lands, and ensures sustainable livelihoods for 600 million farmers.

Devinder Sharma is a food and agriculture policy analyst. He can be contacted at dsharma@ndf.vsnl.net.inThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it , or visit www.dsharma.org.