The food emergency and food myths

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

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

Vandana Shiva *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Force-feeding is not free trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

GMOs are a problem for food security, not a solution

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

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

Food sovereignty is the answer to the food emergency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

From Corporate Land Grab to Land Sovereignty (Bhu Swaraj)

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/2836

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February, 02 2007

By Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva's ZSpace Page

"There is a sacred tie between the tiller and the land. Any attempt to snap the relationship is bound to face opposition".

P. Chidambaram Finance Minsiter

India's Finance Minister Mr. Chidambaram is not a friend of farmers or a friend of the earth. He is committed to the neoliberal ideology. Yet even he has had to speak out against the corporate land grab of India's small farms through the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ's) and FDI in real estate. Every place where land is being acquired to create islands of luxury and lawlessness, land wars have erupted. From Kalinganagar to Dadri, from Singur to Nandigarm the force of arms and ammunition in the hands of the police force is being used to assault and kill innocent farmers and tribals defending their land rights, guaranteed by the Constitution, through democratic means, also guaranteed by the Constitution.

The land wars are testing every aspect of India - as a culture based on the earth as a sacred mother - Dharti - who supports us all, - an agrarian economy based on small farmers and peasants, a decentralized democracy which through the 73rd and 74th Amendments has made local communities the competent bodies to make decisions on natural resources

The large scale uprooting of millions of farmers in U.P, West Bengal, Maharasthra is breaking the sacred bond between peasants and the land, which supports them. But it is also breaking the contract between citizens and the state which is based on the state being bound by the Constitution, and the fundamental rights of citizens that the Constitution guarantees.

The Union Government, after prolonged deliberations, notified the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Rules in February, 2006 operationalising the SEZ Act 2005. The Government has cleared hundreds of SEZs and applications of several other developers are pending.

SEZs are specially demarcated zones where units operate under a set of rules and regulations different from those applicable to other units in the country. The emphasis is on enhancing exports and creating an environment for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering taxsops. While units in the zone have to be net foreign - exhange earners, they are not subjected to any pre-determined value addition or minimum export performance requirements.

Any private, public, joint sector or state government or its agencies can set up SEZs. Foregin companies, too, are eligible.

SEZ units will be eligible for 100 percent tax exemption for the first five years, 50 percent for the next two and 50 percent of the ploughed back export profits for the next five years. Losses will be allowed to be carried forward. The Finance Ministry has stated this will lead to losses of nearly Rs. 2 trillion

Developers may import / procure goods without payment of duty for the development, operation and maintenance of SEZs. They will enjoy income tax exemption for 10 years, with a block period of 15 years. The developers will also have the freedom to allocate developed plots to approved SEZ units on a purely commercial basis. They will also have the full authority to provide services like water, electricity, security, restaurants, recreation centers etc. on commercial lines. Moreover, they will be exempt from paying service tax.

Within a year of the Central Act and less than six months of the enactment of the Act State legislation, Haryana started to set up the country's largest multi-product SEZ, stretching over 25000 acres between Gurgaon and Jhajjar off the Delhi-Jaipur highway. It is being set up jointly by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC). RIL alone will invest Rs. 25000 crores, while Rs. 15000 crores will be put in by companies interested in investing in the SEZ.

It is claimed that the SEZ has provisions for a cargo airport and a 2000 megawatt power plant, and would generate 500,000 jobs and that the State Government would earn revenues up to Rs. 10,000 crores. Reliance is the major stakeholder with 90 percent stake in the joint venture company while the remaining 10 percent rests with HSIIDC. On 31st December, 22 Panchayats organised a strategy to fight Reliance's Land Grab.

Reliance has also grabbed about 10,000 hectares of land for SEZ in Pen Tehsil of Raigad district in Maharasthra. The villagers now know fully well they are pitted against the formidable adversary - the giant Reliance, which has claimed 25,000 hectares land for its own SEZ in Haryana. It is spreading its wings in textiles, power, contract farming, medicinal herbs, sugar industries and retail stores. They realize that the Company has enormous sway over the political, bureaucratic establishment and the media. Yet in Raigad too farmers have declared that they will not allow their land to be taken away.

This land grab will totally pauperize our peasantry and create a new generation of corporate zamindars. Average land holdings in India are two acres and less. To rob the small peasants of what little they have and put in the hands of giants like Reliance with Rs. 100,000 crore wealth is to create a country of disposed paupers. Land grab for SEZ's will also aggravate the agrarian crisis by robbing farmers of their main resource - land.

The use of the outmated colonial Land Acqusition Act of 1894 to forcefully evict peasants and grab their lands for coproations violates the Constitution and the Human Rights of farmers. It also contradicts the rhetoric of trade liberalization - of getting the Government out of the market and the economy.

Land, a sacred trust is being commodified by using state muscle to deny farmers their rights and then establish corporate monopoly on land ownership. It also contradicts the purpose of the land acquisition act which was supposed to be used for acquiring land for public purpose, not for private gain and monopoly ownership rights. Worst of all, it undoes India's land reforms. Zamindari was the colonial mode of maximizing revenue from the land. Once India's land was usurped, the collection of public revenue became a prime concern of the colonizing powers. Someone needed to be taxed. Before the British came to India produce was taxed but the land itself was not. To collect the tax, the British needed proprietors of land who would collect rents from the cultivators and pass it on to them. How could this be done?

The answer was extremely simple - create landlords. The task of finding the landlords was not too difficult - who better than those who already were used to collect money from the peasants for the state? The Zamindars formed the majority of the new landlords.

A motley collection of rural overlords in late 18th century Bengal conveniently and misleadingly went under the single name of zamindar. To compound the confusion, these varied elements in the Bengal countryside bore no resemblance to the village zamindars. The Bengal zamindars encompassed at least four separately identifiable categories; the old territorial heads of principalities, such as the rajas of Tippera and Cooch Behar; the great landholdeing families who paid a fixed land tax and behaved like feudatory chiefs, such as the Rajas of Burdwan, Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Jessore, and Nadia; the numerous families and who held offices for collecting land revenue over a number of generations; and revenue farmers established by the grant of Diwani in 1765.

In a bad "case of mistaken identify"' Lord Cornwallis, the governor general, by a grand proclamation on March 22, 1793, followed up by a barrage of regulations, conferred the prized private property right in land to this diverse group of rural overlords unified only in name. And it was the unjust extraction of revenue that led to the great Bengal Famine. Zamindari abolition got rid of the conditions of famine of 1942 in Bengal by getting rid of concentration of land ownership and the inhuman diversion of the produce of the land to pay revenues. Besides the Zamindari Abolition Act, independent India also enacted land Ceiling Acts in rural and urban areas. By putting a ceiling on ownership of land, land was distributed among larger numbers of farmers, making India a land of small peasants, not rich landlords controlling thousands of acres.

These land reforms are now being undone by the anti-reform of the neo-liberal paradigm. The assets of the small farmers are being transferred to giant corporations. Zamindari is now being institutionalized through SEZ's. Like Lord Cornwallis' grand proclamation, hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farming land are being made the property of corporations.

West Bengal which distributed land to the tiller through operation Barga is today using police force to rob land from the tiller and create a police state. When people fight back land acquisition for Tata Motors in Singur through the Krishi Jan Raksha Committee, a plantform of nine political parties and groups, led by Trinamul Congress of Mamta Banerjee and including CPI (ML), the Party for Democratic Socialism, CUI (ML) Janmat-ul-Ulena.

In Nandigram, six farmers were killed when Bhoomi Uiched Pratirodh (Resistance to Land Acquisition) Committee resisted Land Acquisition for the Salim group in Indonesia. The Communist regime of West Bengal is fighting not just farmers but its own philosophy of land reforms based on land for the tiller. Its current philosophy has become land for corporations. In a country where 60% people depend on land, protests against land grab are inevitable.

The protests against land grab for SEZ's have spread like wildlife. On 17.1.2002 the Government was forced to suspend new clearances worried that protests would affect its fate in the upcoming elections. The proposal of the Prime Minister to give dispossessed farmers "stock options", is no solution. It is based on two false assumption - one that the Government has the right to violently appropriate the land of small farmers and peasants for its corporate friends wherever and whenever it wants. This is not democracy, it is corporate feudalism.

Secondly, the Prime Minister's assumption of "stock option" in place of farmers land rights suggests that he has a world view that small farmers can be fully dispossessed and uprooted from farming, and the real wealth of farmers in their land can be replaced by crumbs in the speculative finance economy bubble. We merely have to remember how the financial bubble burst in South East. The Prime Minister has also invited Edward de Soto who promotes commodification of land to the 10th centennial celebrations of Gandhi's satyagraha on 30th January, the day of Gandhi's martyrdom . Soto is not just for removed from Gandhi's ideas of Swaraj and satyagraha, his proposals infact total undermine Swaraj.

Now that the Government has blinked on the SEZ issue, it is important to return to first principles, and decide democratically, from the grassroots what does land mean to us? Who will own the land? What will it used for? Who will decide?

The future of the Indian people and Indian democracy rests on the land question. While the Government is forced to pause in its inhuman project of land grab, let the farmers and the democratic forces of the country join in evolving charter and an agenda for land sovereignty - Bhu Swaraj.

India needs her small farmers For food security, livelihood security, peace and democracy

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/2891

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April, 06 2007By Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva's ZSpace Page

India is a land of small farmers, with 650 million of her 1 billion people living on the land and 80 per cent farmers owning less than 2 ha of land. In other words, the land provides livelihood security for 65 per cent of the people, and the small farmers provide food security for 1 billion.

Policies driven by corporate globalisation are pushing farmers off the land, and peasants out of agriculture. This is not a natural evolutionary process. It is a violent and imposed process. The 150,000 farmers suicides are one aspect of this violence. The killing of dozens of peasants in Nandigram who were resisting land acquisition for a Special Economic Zone is another aspect of the violence involved in the forced uprooting of India's small farmers.

Citizens have been outraged and shocked by both dimensions of the violence against the providers of our food. Yet the government is putting the policies of uprooting the peasantry on fast forward. The Prime Minister, the Agriculture Minister, the Head of the Planning Commission have all made statements that are in effect a declaration of a war against the small farmers, treating two-thirds of India's population as disposable.

On 26th March 2007, while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry, Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh stated, " As I said recently in Parliament, we have to recognize that in a country like ours, where the average size of landholding is small, there are limitations to what you can do to improve agricultural productivity." (Pioneer, 27/03/07)

This is a false assumption, as Navdanya's work over two decades has shown. Infact, it is the small biodiverse farm, which has higher productivity than large industrial farms. Large farmers and industrial farming has serious limitations on increasing agricultural productivity.

Productivity is output per unit input. Biological productivity is output per unit acre. Small biodiverse farms have higher productivity than monocultures, which are a necessary aspect of industrial agriculture based on external inputs. Higher biological productivity translates into higher incomes for small farmers. In Rajasthan, monocultures of Pearl Millet gave Rs. 2480 of net profit per acre, whereas a biodiverse farm of Pearl Millet Moth Bean Sesame gave Rs. 12045, a difference of nearly Rs. 10,000 per acre. In Uttaranchal, a monoculture of paddy gave Rs. 6720 per acre, whereas a biodiverse farm gave Rs 24,600 per acre, a difference of Rs. 16,000. In Sikkim, a monoculture farm of maize gave Rs. 4950 per acre while a mixed farm of maize, radish, Lahi saag and peas gave Rs. 11,700. Navdanya's rice and wheat farmers have doubled the production of rice and wheat by using indigenous seeds and organic methods. Jhumba rice in Uttaranchal has 176 quintal per ha of biomass production compared to 96 quintal per ha of Kasturi, a high yielding rice variety. The paddy yields are 104 and 56 quintal per ha respectively.

Farmers in West Uttar Pradesh have got 62.5 quintal per ha using a native wheat variety 308 for organic production compared to 50 quintal per ha for chemically produced wheat.

Small farmers have tremendous scope for increasing productivity because the natural capital - the soil, the water, the biodiversity, can be enhanced through conservation and rejuvenation. On large farms, natural resources are exploited and depleted. The soil looses fertility through chemical fertilizers; it is compacted by heavy machinery. Water is over exploited since chemical farming needs ten times more water than ecological farming. Biodiversity is eroded since industrial scale farming can only be practised as a monoculture. And energy use is intensified, contributing to global warming. The small farms of India have the highest potential for increasing productivity. There are scientific reasons for this. A small farmer can intensify biodiversity and the higher the biodiversity, the higher the productivity and stability and sustainability of agriculture. A large farm has to intensify external inputs such agrichemicals and fossil fuels, which lower the productivity, and lead to non-sustainability and economic and ecological vulnerability. When the industrial model of high external inputs is imposed on small farmers, the result is debt and suicides. The industrial model of farming is at the root of farmers' suicides. Yet, the disease is being offered as a cure.

Small biodiverse farms based on internal inputs are in fact the only promise for increasing agricultural productivity, whether productivity is defined in terms of biological productivity or in terms of financial returns, or in terms of energy. Large industrial farms use ten times more energy than they produce as food, most of the energy goes to pollute the atmosphere and destabilize the climate. The present Prime Minister needs to remember the words of an earlier Prime Minister of India, Choudhary Charan Singh who had said,

"Agriculture being a life process, in actual practise, under given conditions, yields per acre decline as the size of the farm increases (in other words, as the application of human labour and supervision per acre decreases). The above results are well nigh universal; output per acre of investment is higher on small farms than on large farms. Thus, if a crowded, capital-scarce country like India has a choice between a single 100 acre farm and forty 2.5 acre farms, the capital cost to the national economy will be less if a country chooses the small farms."

Yet, every government institution, which should be looking after the welfare of the country and the welfare of small farmers, is launching an assault on the peasantry. The Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, whose job is to look after farmers' and provide them livelihood security has stated that farmers' need to be "weaned" off the land.

And the Vice Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia has talked of "the feasibility of large corporate ownership of farmland" (Economic Times, 28/03/07)

The peasants of Singur and Nandigram, Paradip and Kalinga Nagar, have declared loudly and consistently that they intend to farm their land. The future defined by the majority of small farmers of India is in terms of their land sovereignty and food sovereignty. India needs her small farmers because her freedom is in their hands. Wherever the totally inappropriate model of industrial corporate agriculture has been applied, farmers are in distress, the soil has been destroyed, and the water has been over exploited and polluted. And wherever the government has pushed rural communities off the land for industrialization, it has had to use violence and has created zones where Naxalism is viewed as the only alternative.

A food secure and peaceful India is in the hands of her small farmers. Without small farmers, India will be a food insecure, violent and undemocratic society.

The Congress came to power because the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) had neglected demands of the small farmers. The Congress lost two regional elections because of the crisis in food and agriculture the government is creating in order to benefit its friends in the corporate world - the Monsanto's and Cargills, the ITC's and Levers, the Reliance's and Wal-Mart's.

In 2009, India will have its general elections. If the anti-farmer, pro-corporate policies continue to be pushed by the Prime Minister, the Agriculture Minister, the Vice Chairman of the Planning Commission, the Congress will have to pay a heavy price.

EARTH DEMOCRACY THRIVES IN NANDIGRAM

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/2921

By Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva's ZSpace Page

Nandigram a little known corner of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges river suddenly entered the nations consciousness in early 2007.

The fertile land of Nandigram had been identified as a Special Economic Zone (Zone) for a chemical hub to be run by the Salim Group. The Salim group is named after its founder Liem Sior Liong, alias Sordono Salim. In 1965, when Suharto overthrew Saekarno, Salim emerged as a crony who helped build Suharto's $16 billion assets. In the 1980's and 1990's during Indonesia's oil boom, Salim set up the Bank of Central Asia. He set up noodle, flour and bread businesses. He set up Indomobil Sukses Interantional to make cars, Indo cement Tunggal Prakasa to make cement. Altogether he held 500 companies in Indonesia. This is the group that was trying to grab the land of farmers in Nandigram.

Nandigram was chosen because it is next to Haldia, a major port. SEZ's are tax free zones, where no law of the land applies - no environmental law, no labour law, no Panchayati Raj law for local governance. SEZ's were created in 2006 through the SEZ Act of 2005, which allowed the government to appropriate farmers land and hand it over to corporations.

But the small and landless peasants of Nandigram stood up in revolt. They formed the Bhoomi Uched Pratirodh Samiti (the Movement against land grab) and refused to give up their land. In January, 2007 the first violence against the movement took place. On March 14th, 17 people were killed. On 29th April, another five lost their lives.

I was in Nandigram on 28th and 29th of April to pay homage to the martyr's of Nandigram and to work with the farmers to give them Navdanya seeds for setting up seed banks and starting organic farming. The farmers of Nandigram had succeeded in driving out Salim's chemical hub. I felt it was appropriate that we work together to make Nandigram a chemical free organic zone and the local communities were willing. All day we sat together and made plans while shootouts and bombing was taking place a few miles away. And during my visit to Nandigram I witnessed the practise of Earth Democracy in its most sophisticated form.

Nandigram's Living Economy

Nandigram is rich in soil, water and biodiversity, the real capital of communities. Each village has its ponds, making for water sovereignty. Each farm is a multi functional production unit, producing "paan", coconut, rice, bananas, papaya, drumstick and the richest diversity of vegetables I have seen or tasted. In fact, during our meeting, the village square blossomed into a farmers market - with farmers selling four kinds of potatoes, eight kinds of bananas, gur (sugar) made from date palm and Palmyra palm.

Farmers markets like the one in Nandigram need no oil, no Walmart, no Reliance, no middlemen. Farmers are traders, sellers and the buyers. The market is self organised. The community organizes itself for trade. There is no Government license raj, no corporate control. This is the real free market, the real economic democracy.

The rich biodiversity of Nandigram supports a rich productivity. In conventional measurement, based on monocultures, industrial agriculture is presented as being more productive because inputs are not counted, nor is the destruction of biodiverse outputs and the soil, water and air. In a biodiversity assessment, the biodiversity dense small farms of Nandigram are much more productive than the most chemical and energy intensive industrial farms.

The lunch the community cooked for us was the most delicious food we have eaten - greens from the fields, dum-aloo made from indigenous potatoes, brinjal that melted in the mouth - and of course for the fish eaters the inevitable fish curry of Bengali cuisine. All other meals we had in Calcutta or on the way to Nandigram in fancy restaurants were costly but inedible.

Nandigram has a food richness that big cities have lost. These are not impoverished, destitute communities but proud and self-reliant communities. In fact their self reliance was the ground of their resistance.

Nandigram is a post oil economy. Cycles, and cycle rickshaws are the main mode of transport. That is why when the Government unleashed violence against the people of Nandigram, they dug up the roads so no police or Government vehicle could enter. Their freedom from oil allowed them to defend their land freedom. Their living economy allwed them to have a living democracy. This is the practice of living economy, of Gandhi's "Swadesh".

Living Democracy

The living democracy in Nandigram allowed the communities to resist. Many farmers used to be members of CPM but in their resistance to land they transcended party lives. The Land Sovereignty Movement in Nandgram is totally self organised. There has been an attempt to present the land conflict a party conflict.

However, it is a conflict between global capital and local peasants, and the peasants have got organised because defending land is not a new issue in Nandigram. Peasants of the region participated in the revolt against East Inida Company in 1857. Nandigram is a celebration of 150 years of India's first movement of independence from corporate rule with a new movement for freedom from corporate control. Nandigram was also the site of the Tebhaga Movement for Land Rights after the Great Bengal Famine. One can only enter Nandigram as a guest of the community - with their consent and their clearance. There is a high level of self-organisation, with women and children, old and young all involved in keeping watch for unwanted outsiders. Real democracy and living democracy, Gandhi's "Swaraj", is the capacity of self-organise.

Living Culture

The real strength of the people of Nandigram is their living culture - an agrarian culture, the culture of the land. This culture is common to the Hindus and the Muslims. Nandigram is strong because these community has not been divided by communal forces and the forces of religious fundamentalism. Hindus and Muslims practise their diverse faiths, but are part of one community. Even in the struggle against the SEZ and Salim, they have fought as one. Their identity with the land, their earth identity binds them together.

I have come away from Nandigram humbled and inspired. These are the elements of Earth Democracy we need to defend and protect from the violence and greed of corporate globalisation.

Bitter Harvest

Vandana Shiva
The Times of India, 4 May 2007


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bitter_harvest/articleshow/1999318.cms

Farmers of India are facing a deep crisis - 150,000 have committed suicide
in the last decade of trade liberalisation. Farmers' incomes are falling.
India's anti-farmer policies are heavily influenced by the World Bank - a
pity that the Bank's economists do not acknowledge this ('Produce And
Perish', April 26).

The crisis of farmers' falling incomes has evolved in two phases. First came
the Green Revolution (1965-1990). The second phase is the structural
adjustment and trade liberalisation phase. First, the Bank pushed India on a
monoculture path of chemical addiction. It provided credit to introduce a
capital intensive agricultural model.

The Bank and USAID exerted pressure for favourable conditions for foreign
investment in India's fertiliser industry, import liberalisation and
elimination of domestic controls to import fertilisers, seeds and
pesticides. The World Bank provided the credit.

The World Bank finances were an important element in the spread of a vast
network needed for distribution of Green Revolution varieties. In 1963, the
National Seed Corporation was established. In 1969, the Terai Seed
Corporation was started with a World Bank loan of $13 million. This was
followed by two National Seeds Project (NSP) loans.

The overall objective of the projects was to develop state institutions and
create a new infrastructure for increasing the production of certified
seeds. In 1988, the World Bank gave India a fourth loan for the seed sector
to make India's seed industry more market-responsive.

The involvement of the private sector, including multinational corporations,
in seed production is a special objective of NSP III ($150 million). This
was viewed as necessary because sustained demand for seeds did not expand as
expected. In self-pollinated crops, especially wheat and rice, farmer
retention and farmer-to-farmer transfer accounted for much of the seed used.
The Bank pressure enabled the entry of seed corporations like Monsanto.
Today, most farmer suicides are precisely in those areas where Monsanto's
seeds have spread.

Monsanto has been taken to court for its monopolistic practices. The
hoarding and monopolistic practices of corporations like Cargill, Lever and
ITC have pushed up the price of wheat. Farmers are earning less and the poor
are paying more for food. The universal public distribution system was
dismantled under World Bank pressure as have the APMC Acts. India's food
security and sovereignty is being severely undermined by every policy
intervention of the World Bank. Trade liberalisation and structural
adjustment have added to the burden of Indian farmers.

Liberalisation under the structural adjustment programme of World Bank
consists of the following elements: Liberalising fertiliser imports and
deregulating domestic manufacturing and the distribution of fertilisers;
removing land ceiling regulation, subsidies on irrigation, electricity and
credit and creating conditions to facilitate the trading of canal irrigation
water rights; deregulating the wheat, rice, sugarcane, cotton and edible oil
and oilseed industries; dismantling the food security system; and removing
controls on markets, traders, and processors, and subsidies to cooperatives.

Other elements are abolishing the Essential Commodities Act; the general ban
on futures trading; inventory controls; and selective credit controls on
inventory financing; treating farmers cooperatives on an equal footing with
the private sector.

The Bank is recommending that India stops focusing on food grains and
instead focus on export crop such as vegetables, shrimps and flowers. The
World Bank's recent report only addresses horticulture for exports. This
will not improve farmers' incomes; it will rob them of land and livelihoods.
Export crops are at the root of the land conflicts in Barnala, Punjab. An
Action Aid report shows how giant corporations drive down prices of
agricultural produce. Hooking India's agriculture to Wal-Mart and TESCO will
dispossess and deprive Indian farmers.

Our recent report on Corporate Hijack of Retail also shows how the model of
corporate industrial globalised agriculture - that the World Bank is
promoting - leads to falling prices for farmers and rising prices for
consumers.

The Suicide Economy Of Corporate Globalisation

http://www.countercurrents.org/glo-shiva050404.htm

The Suicide Economy Of
Corporate Globalisation

By Vandana Shiva

05 April, 2004

The Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction.

Two thirds of India makes its living from the land. The earth is the most generous employer in this country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more than 5000 years.

However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, and the climate, and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced by Indian peasants.

1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India. A rapid increase in indebtedness, was at the root of farmers taking their lives. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy, a loosing economy. Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for peasants - the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalisation.

In 1998, the World Bank's structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.

As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness.

As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.

The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millets, and oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton, leading to disappearance of millions of products of nature's evolution and farmer's breeding.

Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.

In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto's hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and increased poverty for already desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies.

And the crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.

The second pressure Indian farmers are facing is the dramatic fall in prices of farm produce as a result of free trade policies of the W.T.O. The WTO rules for trade in agriculture are essentially rules for dumping. They have allowed an increase in agribusiness subsidies while preventing countries from protecting their farmers from the dumping of artificially cheap produce.

High subsidies of $ 400 billion combined with forced removal of import restrictions is a ready-made recipe for farmer suicides. Global prices have dropped from $ 216 / ton in 1995 to $ 133 / ton in 2001 for wheat, $ 98.2 / ton in 1995 to $ 49.1 / ton in 2001 for cotton, $ 273 / ton in 1995 to $ 178 / ton for soyabean. This reduction to half the price is not due to a doubling in productivity but due to an increase in subsidies and an increase in market monopolies controlled by a handful of agribusiness corporations.

Thus the U.S government pays $ 193 per ton to US Soya farmers, which artificially lowers the rice of soya. Due to removal of Quantitative Restrictions and lowering of tariffs, cheap soya has destroyed the livelihoods of coconut growers, mustard farmers, producers of sesame, groundnut and soya.

Similarly, 25000 cotton producers in the U.S are given a subsidy of $ 4 billion annually. This has brought cotton prices down artificially, allowing the U.S to capture world markets which were earlier accessible to poor African countries such as Burkina, Faso, Benin, Mali. The subsidy of $ 230 per acre in the U.S is genocidal for the African farmers. African cotton farmers are loosing $ 250 million every year. That is why small African countries walked out of the Cancun negotiations, leading to the collapse of the W.T.O ministerial.

The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities are stealing incomes from poor peasants of the south. Analysis carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are loosing $ 26 billion or Rs. 1.2 trillion annually. This is a burden their poverty does not allow them to bear. Hence the epidemic of farmer suicides.

India was among the countries that questioned the unfair rules of W.T.O in agriculture and led the G-22 alliance along with with Brazil and China. India with other southern countries addressed the need to safeguard the livelihoods of small farmers from the injustice of free trade based on high subsidies and dumping. Yet at the domestic level, official agencies in India are in deep denial of any links between free trade and farmers survival.

An example of this denial is a Government of Karnataka report on "Farmers suicide in Karnataka - A scientific analysis". The report while claiming to be "scientific", makes unscientific reductionist claims that the farm suicides have only psychological causes, not economic ones, and identifies alcoholism as the root cause of suicides. Therefore, instead of proposing changes in agricultural policy, the report recommends that farmers be required to boost up their self respect (swabhiman) and self-reliance (swavalambam).

And ironically, its recommendations for farmer self-reliance are changes in the Karnataka Land Reforms Act to allow larger land holdings and leasing. These are steps towards the further decimation of small farmers who have been protected by land "ceilings" (an upper limit on land ownership) and policies that only allow peasants and agriculturalists to own agricultural land (part of the land to the tiller policies of the Devraj Urs government).

While the "expert committee" report identified "alcoholism" as the main cause for suicides, the figures of this "scientific" claim are inconsistent and do not reflect the survey. On page 10, the report states in one place that 68 percent of the suicide victims were alcoholics. Five lines later it states that 17 percent were "alcohol and illicit drinkers".

It also states that the majority of suicide victims were small and marginal farmers and the majority had high levels of indebtedness. Yet debt is not identified as a factor leading to suicide. On page 32 of the report it is stated that of the 105 cases studied among the 3544 suicides which had occurred in five districts during 2000 - 2001, 93 had debts, 54 percent had borrowed from private sources and money lenders.

More than 90% of suicide victims were in debt. Yet a table on page 63 has mysteriously reduced debt as a reason for suicide to 2.6%, and equally mysteriously, "suicide victims having a bad habit" has emerged as the primary cause of farmers suicides.

The government is desperate to delink farm suicides from economic processes linked to globalisation such as rise in indebtedness and increased frequency of crop failure due to higher ecologic vulnerability arising from climate change and drought and higher economic risks due to introduction of untested, unadopted seeds.

This is evident in recommendation no. 4.3.24.3 "The government should launch prosecution on the responsible persons involved in misleading the public and government by providing false information about farmers suicide as crop failure or indebtedness" (page 113 of expert committee report).

However, farmers suicides cannot be delinked from indebtedness and the economic distress small farmers are facing. Indebtedness is not new. Farmers have always organised for freedom from debt.

In the nineteenth century the so call "Deccan Riots" were farmers protests against the debt trap into which they had been pushed to supply cheap cotton to the textile mills in Britain. In the eighties they formed peasant organisations to fight for debt relief from public debt linked to Green Revolution inputs.

However, under globalisation, the farmer is loosing her / his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a "consumer" of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.

This combination is leading to corporate feudalism, the most inhumane, brutal and exploitative convergence of global corporate capitalism and local feudalism, in the face of which the farmer as an individual victim feels helpless. The bureaucratic and technocratic systems of the state are coming to the rescue of the dominant economic interests by blaming the victim.

It is necessary to stop this war against small farmers. It is necessary to re-write the rules of trade in agriculture. It is necessary to change our paradigms of food production. Feeding humanity should not depend on the extinction of farmers and extinction of species. Another agriculture is possible and necessary - an agriculture that protects farmers livelihoods, the earth and its biodiversity and public health.