Understanding the current crisis of agriculture, requires a study of the history of global development since the second world war. Initially, immediately after the war, the USA
was faced with the problem of reorienting the production of its massive war
oriented industry and agriculture. This was done on the one hand by making
civilian cars, trucks, tractors, planes and cargo ships instead of armoured vehicles and
on the other by transforming the explosive manufacturing units into fertiliser
and pesticide producing units. Obviously so many cars, tractors, planes and ships and so
much fertiliser and pesticide could not be consumed by the Americans alone and
so the high flying consumerist lifestyle of cars and private jets and heavy
eating of processed meat and cereals was spread all over the world and a market
created for these products. Cattle can eat much more cereals than human beings
and so the people of the developed world were encouraged to eat the meat of the former and
the people of the poorer countries were fed the excess cereals resulting from
increased use of fertilisers and pesticides along with the cattle. A significant
development was the worldwide adoption of soybean at the behest of the
Americans who pushed its exports and cultivation through cheap aid to
developing countries so as to provide cheap feed for beef production and also
cheap edible oil for processing this food into ready to eat marketable forms.
Thus an artificially highly productive and environmentally unsustainable
agricultural system was established worldwide backed by massive state
subsidies. A golden era of capitalist development, booming on the production
and sale of the "world car" and the "world steer" by multinational corporations (MNCs),
ensued in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.
The party came to an end in the nineteen
seventies with a double whammy being delivered by nature. Firstly the biologist
Rachel Carson sounded the first warning cry in 1962 about the way in which
chemicals and especially pesticides were causing immense environmental and
health hazards thus sparking off the modern environmental movement and
seriously questioning the excessive gorging of the world steer. The tremendous groundswell of protests that followed led to the problem
of environmental pollution resulting from modern development becoming a burning
issue by the early nineteen seventies with the holding of the first United
Nations Conference on Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Secondly the finiteness
of the natural resources that were being so wantonly used up was driven home
with the Arab crude oil producing countries increasing its price by a whopping
four times in 1974 thus pushing the capitalist world economy into a deep
recession by undermining the very basis of the world car.
Faced with the serious economic and environmental crisis
brought on in the nineteen seventies the MNCs which straddle global production,
finance and trade put pressure on the US Government, the World Bank and the IMF
to push a policy, known as the "Washington Consensus" that would
further open up the economies of the developing countries to exploitation
through free flows of finance and commodities, which has plunged most of these
economies further into debt and stagnation.
All this has had a devastating effect on
Indian agriculture and the millions of people who are dependent on it for their
livelihoods. The vast majority of farmers in India cultivate small plots of
land on terrain that is unsuitable for flood irrigation and they have
traditionally been driven by the desire to produce for subsistence rather than
for profit. They have over thousands of years developed a system of agriculture
that makes the most of the locally available resources in terms of seeds,
organic fertilisers, soil moisture and natural pest management. This led Sir
Albert Howard, the pioneer of modern organic farming who did most of his work
in Indore, to remark some seventy years ago, “What is happening today in the
small fields of India ... took place many centuries ago. The agricultural
practices of the orient have passed the supreme test, they are as permanent as
those of the primeval forest, of the prairie, or of the ocean”.
The clever use of rotation of a bewildering variety of crops ensured that
despite flood and drought some part of the harvest was always saved. Famines
occurred not because of the failure of agriculture but because of
socio-economic factors such as excessive levies by kings and colonial rulers or
due to usury and hoarding by moneylenders. Indeed the levying of
excessive taxes and usury have been a severe constraining factor on the
development of agriculture all over the world from ancient times and in India
this intensified greatly during colonial rule because the moneylender doubled up as the
tax-collector also, resulting in one Bhili proverb that goes - " I love
the moneylender so much that I have given him a fat belly".
Thus, what was necessary after independence in
India was to remove the obstacles in the path of development of this
traditional agriculture and strengthen it with further research, extensive land
reforms, support for in situ soil and water conservation, cheap institutionalised credit and market support. Studies have shown
that the indigenous agricultural practices of India, which have been honed by
farmers over the centuries, are as productive as the HYV seeds and artificial
input based green revolution agriculture.
But this was not to be because the Americans had in the meanwhile since the
nineteen thirties devised a new model of industrial agriculture in which hybrid
seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, big dam irrigation and machines were used to
ramp up agricultural production with huge state subsidies which eventually went
to the corporations which not only supplied these inputs but also owned most of
the farms and traded in the outputs. So farm gate prices remained low leaving
the actual small farmers who had always struggled against usury like elsewhere
in the world no alternative but to gradually sell out and become unemployed, leading to tremendous destitution. Moreover, the
post World War II urgency to sell the excess production of fertilisers,
pesticides, tractors and trucks arising from the reorientation of production in
plants from explosives and armoured vehicles necessitated the replication of
the American agricultural system worldwide.
So at the behest of the research foundations
set up by American MNCs and with financial support provided by the World Bank
and the money from the exports of American wheat to India which were recycled
for this purpose, the American agricultural pattern was promoted with the
introduction of foreign hybrid varieties of wheat and rice as green revolution
agriculture in the late nineteen sixties in a few pockets in the country
leaving the other areas literally high and dry. The Americans forced the Indian
government to forcibly sideline Indian agricultural scientists who had
developed indigenous strains and opposed this introduction of foreign hybrids. This form of agriculture has now become problematical
throughout the world because of reasons to be discussed a little later and can
be continued only through the provision of massive state subsidies to the MNCs
that produce its inputs and trade in its outputs. The direct government subsidy
to agriculture in the USA peaked in the year 2000 to US$ 30 billion and
constituted about 40% of the net cash income derived by it. The biggest 10% of
the recipients of these state subsidies, which are big corporations, which
included billionaires like the media mogul Ted Turner, cornered 65% of this
huge amount. Somewhat in the same way as our own movie star
Amitabh Bacchan has got himself recorded as a farmer to be able to own large
tracts of agricultural land that he does not himself cultivate. A less dramatic
but similar state of affairs prevails in Europe. In this way the comparative
advantage that the third world countries have in the agricultural sector is not
only neutralised but the excess production thus achieved is dumped in those
countries devastating their agriculture. In fact the current Doha round of
trade negotiations of the WTO has brought out as never before the hollowness
and hypocrisy of the WTO’s claims of promoting “free trade” and it is
deadlocked at the moment because the developed countries are refusing to reduce
these subsidies.
According to an estimate the input subsidies
in India’s case had reached the unsustainable level of 164.02% of the central
government’s planned annual expenditure on agriculture by 1992 . When the subsidy that was being given in the form of free
electricity and free water from dams and for the procurement of the produce of
the farmers at artificially supported high prices is also taken into account
the long-term economic un-sustainability of this agriculture was inevitable.
Unlike in the USA, a greater proportion of the subsidies in India were going to
the actual farmers big and small. The pursuit of economic liberalisation from
the nineteen nineties and financial constraints, forced the Indian Government to
drastically reduce the quantum of subsidies in agriculture, investment in irrigation,
price support and budgetary support for cheap institutional credit to the
farmers. This withdrawal of support came precisely at the
time when green revolution agriculture was beginning to fail. The main problem
with artificial input agriculture is that there is a natural limit to the
artificial inputs that the soil can take and so the amount of fertilisers,
pesticides and water to be applied goes on increasing while the yields go on
falling and sometimes the crop fails altogether. Consequently the economic
costs go on increasing while the realisation of the value of agricultural
products in the market does not keep pace.
Inevitably this leads to farmers falling into the clutches of moneylenders and spiralling
debt. The crisis has now assumed serious proportions with thousands upon
thousands of farmers having committed suicides, sold their lands, houses and
even their kidneys . Things have come to such a sorry pass that
forty percent of the respondent farmers expressed the desire to give up farming
and take up other professions in a survey conducted by the National Sample
Survey Organisation of the Government of India in 2003.
This collapse of the agricultural sector, not
only in India but also all over the developing world, has created a parallel
problem of massive seasonal or permanent migration from the rural areas to the
cities which offer comparatively better livelihood opportunities due to the
greater investments taking place there. However, once there, these migrants
occupy the base of the occupational pyramid earning only subsistence wages. So
even after working for a considerable time, these people cannot afford to buy
legal accommodation and other civic amenities and so have to live in illegal
slums without proper drinking water and sanitation facilities continually under
the threat of eviction. Given the severe lack of resources with governments for
the provision of proper infrastructure in these slums and the pressures from
private property developers to displace them and build high value buildings
instead, urban sustainability has become the newest challenge for development
planners. In the developed countries on the other hand there
is the problem of inner city decay as regular manufacturing jobs are decreasing
due to the shift of manufacture from these countries to the developing
countries, leaving the once comfortable working class in dire straits doing
casual menial jobs for a living and unable to maintain their homes any more.
The affluent people are moving out of the cities to the suburbs thus reducing
the tax base of urban governments and their capacity to renew the inner city
areas. So the movement of
capital is creating problems in both the rural as well as the urban areas all
over the world by changing the structure of the global economy in ways that
harm the poor.
The tremendous economic and political power
of MNCs like Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer, which are directly or
indirectly in control of the input industries, the agricultural processing
industry and marketing entities that make up the agriculture cum food chain has
meant that instead of turning to more sustainable agricultural practices the
crisis in modern agriculture is being sought to be solved through the
application of even higher and far more costly bio-technology. This involves further state subsidies given the higher levels of funding
required for the expensive research and application techniques involved and
also uncharted environmental dangers resulting from gene tampering. The
American MNCs' maniacal obsession with promoting more and more beef eating
worldwide as the panacea for the ills of the inevitable market slumps that
hound capitalism has now manifested itself in the development of genetically
engineered Bovine Growth Hormones to push up beef production which has driven
the cows also mad! The continuing loss of natural bio-diversity, the
concentration of genes of landraces in the hands of MNCs and patenting of life
forms by them have together created a serious danger of the future of the
planet being permanently mortgaged to their greed for profits.
While the Americans have become obese from
this over consumption of beef and are suffering from a number of physical and
mental disorders as a result, the Bhil adivasis in Madhya Pradesh have become
proportionately under nourished so as to be able to provide for this overeating
of the former. With the reduction in the acreage under coarser cereals and
pulses which have been replaced by soybean and the greater monetisation of the
rural economy, the marginal adivasi farmers have had to buy their food from the
market instead of getting it cheaply from their farms and this has reduced
their nutritional levels well below healthy standards. Thus, they have become sufferers of the problem of chronic hunger that today engulfs
the poor in much of the developing world and even in the developed countries
because the shrinking of livelihood opportunities has meant that they are not
able to earn enough to buy wholesome and adequate food.
So the supply of cheap food to all, which is a basic requirement of running a
capitalist economy is in jeopardy because nature has been ravaged beyond repair
by the artificial input based agriculture for profit that has been intensively
practised since the Second World War.
The biggest problem arising from the adoption
of green revolution agriculture, however, has been that of the increasing
scarcity of water. Most of the water needed for irrigation in India is being
provided by groundwater extraction and this has led to a situation of
"water mining" wherein water collected in the deep confined aquifers
over hundreds of thousands of years were used up in the space of a decade and
large parts of the country have been facing a ground water drought from the
nineteen nineties onwards. Since then there has been less and less
ground water available for not only irrigation but also for drinking and the
cost of its extraction is continually going up. Big dams, however, are the
environmentally and socially most harmful component of the green revolution
package and have come in for serious criticism in recent years and dam
construction has been totally halted in the developed countries with some dams
even having been broken in the USA to limit environmental damage. The World
Bank, which has been a major funder of dams worldwide, was forced by public
criticism arising from the fiasco of its funding of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to
constitute a World Commission on Dams (WCD) to review the performance of big dams,
which has submitted a comprehensive report. The report brings out
the fact that the benefits in terms of irrigation and power gained from big dam
construction have been at an unacceptable and unnecessary higher cost in terms
of environmental destruction and human displacement. There has been lack of
equity in both the distribution of benefits and costs with the poor having lost
out on both counts. Considering the increasing importance of conservation and
harvesting of water resources, the WCD has recommended that in future, people’s
participation in these processes should be made mandatory so that more
effective and less harmful solutions to the problems in this sphere can be
worked out.
Worldwide there is a burgeoning movement in
ecological farming combined with local area watershed development that has come
up as a reaction to the deleterious effects of modern agriculture. This
movement is theoretically underpinned by the green ideology of development in
harmony with nature and at its own leisurely pace. Many localised efforts have
thrown up viable solutions to the intransigent problems created by
unsustainable agricultural production and inequity in the distribution of
benefits and costs of water resource development. In the western
Madhya Pradesh region, too, there have been successful localised experiments in
this sphere and a blueprint for the development of sustainable dry-land
agriculture backed up by local area watershed development involving the poor in
project formulation and implementation has been drawn up.
Thus, the comprehensive decentralised solutions to the problems of agricultural
sustainability and the resulting threat to food and livelihood security of the
poor are there, waiting to be adopted on a large scale. However, the World Bank
acting as a front for the interests of the MNCs, sees decentralised natural
resource management only as a tool for the mitigation of the harmful effects of
globalised industrial development and participatory group formation as a means
of deflecting the discontent arising from this. Given its
near total hegemony over development thinking it is not surprising that
governments and institutions all over the world follow its lead in not
questioning the centrality of capitalist industrial development and only pursue
decentralisation and sustainable development as a safety valve to let off the
steam that is continually boiling up as a result of the former and not as a mainstream holistic solution to the problems of unsustainable industrial development.
The net result of this massive propaganda and
funding by the World Bank and the central and state governments of a revamped
version of green revolution agriculture has been that the ordinary farmers in
this country are unable to pursue more sustainable agricultural alternatives as
the switch from the one to the other takes time and money. The ground reality
in the western Madhya Pradesh region is that farmers are still
trying to continue in the green revolution regime and diversifying into the
farming of fruits, horticulture and other cash crops and then storing the
produce in cold storages with the intention of trading through the national
commodity exchange but as yet with uncertain incomes because increasingly the agricultural produce market is coming under the control of global MNCs and even financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.
To break this destructive march towards
environmental and social collapse it is necessary to proceed towards an
“economy of permanence” as suggested by the Gandhian economist Kumarappa, which respects both nature and the
human being and prioritises leisurely decentralised communitarian living based
on the collective local consumption and husbanding of renewable resources over
the frenetic, non-renewable, resource guzzling pulls of globalised market led
industrialisation. This can provide the rural poor with
sustainable livelihood opportunities for wholesome living while at the same
time reorienting centralised industrialisation to the fulfilling of the needs
of the majority and so deciding the kind of science and technology to be
pursued. This will in turn ensure a much more peaceful world than at present
and obviate the heavy and wasteful expenditures being incurred worldwide on the
military and the police.
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