White-collared threats

The corporatisation of agriculture and an obsession with exportoriented cultivation is ruining India's traditional farming systems and destroying its biodiversity, says Dr Vandana Shiva

Corporate globalisation has pushed Indian agriculture and Indian peasants into a crisis of indebtedness arising from multiplying cost of production and declining incomes. Thousands of farmers have committed suicide and in Karnataka alone more than 3,000 farm suicides have taken place in the last 2 years. The solution offered by the Indian government to this corporate globalisation-induced farm crisis is in turn a greater corporate control over agriculture through contract farming.

The Veeresh Committee report on ‘Farm Suicides in Karnataka’ recommends that, “Special Economic Zones for selected crops may be notified. By promoting contract farming, consolidation of small and marginal holdings should be achieved and thereby such holdings should be made economically viable”. This recipe however offers the disease as the cure or, in other words, the problem as the prescription.

SMALLER THE BETTER

The $400 billion subsidies given by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to their agribusiness sector is leading to a dumping of cheap produce in the country, leading to a collapse in the domestic farm incomes. The low prices that the Indian farmers are getting for their produce is a result of agribusiness monopolies and not the inefficiency of small farmers.

Productivity is quite different, however, when it is measured in the context of maintaining diversity. Measures that naturally engender the preservation of the natural biodiversity of a particular agroclimactic zone come naturally to small farmers who, if duly empowered, can feed the world. A multiplecrop yield results in a truly high productivity, which essentially is a combination of diverse species that are in turn used for multiple purposes. Thus, productivity is not lower on smaller units of land and, on the contrary, it can be much higher.

For example, reportedly in Brazil, the productivity of a 10-hectare farm was $85 per hectare, while the productivity of a 500-hectare farm was $2 per hectare. Similarly in India, a 5-acre farm has displayed a productivity of Rs 735 per acre, while a 35-acre farm had a productivity of Rs 346 per acre. Therefore, a deliberate destruction of small farms is a policy that could destroy both rural livelihoods and food security, since large industrial farms in countries like India could prove less productive than small ones in terms of judicious usage of resources, energy, and the effective dissemination of basic levels of nutrition.

FARMER’S WOES

After Andhra Pradesh and Punjab, the farmers, especially the potato growers of Uttar Pradesh are facing a grim agricultural crisis leading to debts and an increasing number of suicides. While the farmers are spending Rs 255 per quintal on production, the potatoes are being sold at a rate of Rs 40 per quintal, leaving them with a loss of Rs 200 for every quintal produced.

The grim condition of the potato growers was very akin to the crisis faced by the producers of tomatoes, cotton and oil seeds and other crops and is directly related to the trade liberalisation policies driven by the World Bank and WTO, of which the new agricultural policies of India is a direct outcome. The policies of globalisation and trade liberalisation have created the farm crisis at large and the potato crisis in particular at three crucial levels:

• A shift from ‘food first’ to ‘trade first’ and ‘farmer first’ to ‘corporation first’ policies
• A shift from diversity and multi-functionality of agriculture to monocultures, and standardisation and deregulation of the input sector, especially seeds, leading to rising costs of production
• Deregulation of markets and withdrawal of the state from effective price regulation leading to a collapse in prices of farm commodities.

The new agriculture policies are based on withdrawing support from farmers, and creating new subsidies for the agro-processing industry and agribusiness. In a debate over the potato crisis, the UP Agriculture Minister referred to the subsidies given for cold storage and transport. But it is extremely crucial to realise that.....

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