Behind India's food crisis
By Peter Snowdon
NEW DELHI — India stands on the brink of a food crisis to rival the darkest periods of its modern history. "In five years' time, this issue will be settled in the streets with riots, massacres, bloodbaths ... We have about one year to settle this as decent human beings", said Dr Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, one of India's leading environmental organisations.
Shiva was addressing the final session of a one-day conference on "Trade Liberalisation and the Crisis in Agriculture" hosted by the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi in early August.
Since the beginning of the year, thousands of farmers in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere have committed suicide. Caught in a vicious cycle of debt, fluctuating prices and crop failures, they found themselves unable to repay loans or obtain supplies of pesticides on which their plants depend.
As the monsoon rains, already a month late, refuse to fall over western India, the death toll mounts each day. In this context, to take one's own life is an act of both despair and protest.
The IIC seminar, chaired by minister of agriculture Sonpal, was intended to highlight the crisis and define an agenda for urgent change. It also sought to identify the "free trade" arrangements presided over by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as one of the chief culprits behind the collapse of Indian agriculture.
Imperialism
Some trace the roots of the current crisis back to the erosion of traditional forms of subsistence agriculture under the British Raj. Since then, the rich countries of the north have treated the sub-continent as a source of resources rather than as a integrated sovereign economy with its own ecological limits.
The 1970s "Green Revolution" in agriculture substituted new high-yielding, high-input strains of crop for more nutritious but less profitable indigenous varieties. The result was a massive shift from subsistence to consumer crops.
In this period, the national oil-seed industry virtually disappeared as the west persuaded India to grow wheat and rice for export on land made suitable by large-scale perennial irrigation.
The result was to undermine local food security. As Naradev Singh from Punjab Jamhoori Morcha describes it: "Instead of bringing the much acclaimed all-round prosperity to Indian farmers, the Green Revolution only ended up forcing us to grow what the industries of America or England needed."
Most devastating has been the deregulation of the Indian market in seeds and pesticides, beginning in 1988. New legislation, reinforced by the structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund in 1991, opened the country to an onslaught by the major players in international agribusiness. Multi-national corporations such as Monsanto moved in, taking advantage of the new conditions to provide a comprehensive "service" which few have been able to resist.
The multinationals were soon promising yields of four or five times better than previously obtainable, through combinations of the latest designer seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. Such propaganda fell on fertile ground: since independence, the average size of Indian farmers' holdings had fallen by approximately 70%.
Many of those who have committed suicide over the past months were low-caste men in their twenties. They belonged to a new generation of farmers who have neither the skills required for high-manipulation agro-techniques nor access to forms of credit appropriate to the level of investment that is required. What they do have in abundance is a desperate desire to earn money by which to live.
Playing on that desire, the seed-fertiliser-pesticide merchants turned money lenders and supplied the shortfall in credit.
Shiva told the Al-Ahram Weekly that she had heard of interest rates as high as 150% per annum. In Andhra Pradesh, where more than 350 farmers took their lives in the first five months of this year, average interest rates range between 35% and 85%.
According to a recent study by Professor Venugopal Rao of Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University, the average small farmer working two to three acres of land ran up debts exceeding 100,000 rupees (US$2200) last year — equivalent to half their average annual gross income in a good year.
Devastation
It is five years since there has been a good year in the state. Bad advice, often provided by the merchants, has meant that farmers have been planting cotton continuously, without alternating other crops, leading to serious nutrient depletion of the soil.
Farmers have also been encouraged to overuse pesticides, with the result that new resistant strains of pests have begun to appear, while many of the bugs' traditional enemies, such as rats, birds, frogs and snakes, have been decimated in the process.
The high prices of seeds and other inputs have, meanwhile, created a vigorous black market in substandard, adulterated and spurious supplies, sold at reduced prices and accompanied by fake certification.
Inadequate irrigation and erratic climatic conditions complete the picture.
Instead of rising, yields have fallen dramatically: last season, Andhra Pradesh cotton farmers brought in barely two to three quintals (200-300 kilograms) per acre, instead of the normal 10 to 12 quintals. At the same time, commodity prices have been fluctuating wildly. According to Rao, in only one season this decade have cotton farmers in Andhra Pradash been able to make a profit on their annual harvest.
At the IIC seminar, Sonpal previewed his new agricultural policy, which will be announced in September and endorses many of the demands made by the environmental lobby. Eighty million hectares of uncultivated land is to be allotted to small farmers, coarse grains are to be privileged over elite varieties, traditional knowledge is to be given priority over western scientific experiments and food security is to be given priority over trade.
Unlike many agriculture ministers around the world, Sonpal is both a farmer by training and an environmentalist by instinct. But despite the seriousness and obvious competence with which he debated the issues, he still refused to use the term "crisis" to describe what he considers merely "deep-rooted problems".
Moreover, there is no way of knowing what policy will eventually emerge from his good intentions, for Sonpal is only the agriculture minister. In India, authority over agriculture is shared between the ministers for agriculture and commerce, and, as a rule, the latter's industrial connections give him/her a stronger hand.
Food security
This was demonstrated last month when the minister for commerce announced that India had agreed to import almost 1 million tonnes of soya beans. As Shiva told the Al-Ahram Weekly, "Sonpal has his hands tied. India has bound its tariff rates at zero per cent for many key crops and is committed under the WTO to removing quantitative restrictions over the next three years."
The importation of soya beans will destroy the market in oil seeds, which has been painstakingly revived over the last 10 years through government subsidies. "Once rice starts getting dumped on the market, every farmer in Punjab and Haryana will be wiped out", Shiva said.
Those who are encouraging India down the path of export-oriented agriculture argue that the foreign exchange earned will always be sufficient to buy the food the country can no longer grow itself. This conveniently ignores the fact that the prices of the fashionable "high-value" crops that the north has been encouraging the south to grow, such as flowers, fruit and vegetables, have crashed because everyone is trying to get a piece of the action.
If India was to successfully convert to supplying the imperial powers with mange-tout peas and winter roses, it still would have to buy its staple foods from somewhere. A recent World Bank study projects that by 2020 China will be importing 18% of total world food production; 42% by 2030. As one IIC participant asked, "Where then is India supposed to get its food from?".
The case of India is not an isolated one. Indonesia now has an estimated 83 million people on the verge of starvation. The Philippines, which has long prided itself on its self-sufficiency, is beginning to talk about importing grain.