The Hindu : Make farming sustainable, equitable

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 03, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Make farming sustainable, equitable

By Vandana Shiva

There are two paradigms in a contest for the future of food and farming. One is based on non-sustainable production on large scale industrial farms with costly hybrid/GM seed and agrichemical inputs monopolised by a handful of biotech/agrichemical giants, such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow and Dupont, and globalised trade controlled by a handful of agribusiness corporations, such as Cargill, ADM and Pepsico. Corporate profits and global trade gains while millions go hungry. The other is based on small farms, ecological/organic internal inputs/systems, which are low cost and accessible to poor producers. Localisation, not globalisation, as the principle for trade and distribution and building food security upwards and outwards from the household to the community to regional, national and global levels. The industrial, large scale, globalised food system is non-sustainable and a source of economic inequality and food insecurity. It is also based on a false economy — both at the production and distribution level.

The false economy of the industrialised, globalised system is based on pseudo productivity at the level of production. While "high efficiency" and "high productivity" are the most common justifications for the spread of industrial techniques in agriculture, these systems have low productivity in the context of total resource use and total output. Small biodiverse farms have much higher productivity both in terms of resource use efficiency and higher production of biomass and nutrition per acre. The artificially constructed "efficiency" of industrial farms is based on excluding the high resource inputs (and focussing only on labour as an input) and focussing only on "yields" of single commodities while ignoring the diverse outputs of biodiverse farms.

This false productivity calculus has then been used to claim that without industrial agriculture, pesticides and GMOs the world cannot be fed. The solution to hunger and poverty is, however, the promotion of ecological, organic, biodiverse, small farms, which conserve resources by using less energy and natural resources, reduce costs on inputs and produce more nutritional output per unit acre.

Globalisation of agriculture under Structural Adjustment Programmes of the IMF/World Bank or the trade liberation rules of the WTO is leading to decline of farmers' incomes in the Third World both by raising costs of inputs and lowering prices of outputs.

The shift from open pollinated farm saved seeds to non-renewable hybrids and GM seeds has led to high levels of crop failure, farm indebtedness and farmers' suicides. Not only are the seeds costly, they have to be bought every season and with them have to be bought costly pesticides and herbicides.

Indian peasants are spending more than Rs. 1.32 trillion on seeds and chemicals under the globalisation regime. These costs are sure to rise as `super weeds' and `super pests' are created by GM seeds and the failure of ecological narcotics. In addition, the claims of yields by seed/biotech corporations are usually false and inflated. For example, in the maize package that Monsanto is promoting in the fragile desert State of Rajasthan, the claim in the publicity brochures is 22-50 tonnes/ha, whereas the Monsanto field staff give three tonnes/ha and the data from the fields is 1.7 tonnes/ha. Similarly, while Monsanto is carrying out global propaganda that Indian farmers are demanding GM Bt Cotton seed, farmers are suing the Government and the corporation for Rs. 5,000 million in damages due to total failure of the crop in Maharashtra. Bt Cotton has also failed in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Besides the false claims on returns, the globalised economy is also based on false prices, which do not reflect the cost of production.

There is an attempt to reduce the debate on imports distorting domestic agriculture to a debate on subsidies alone. However, this is inadequate for shifting farming to a sustainable and just path for two reasons. Firstly, it ignores the two critical issues of the need to restrict imports and bring back QRs and the built-in perversion of "decoupling", which always allows subsidies to be hidden. Secondly, it confuses support and subsidies.

Support vs. subsidies

We need to distinguish between support and subsidies. Support is public expenditure on public goods and services such as resource conservation, ecosystem, protection, generation of livelihoods, protection of culture and safeguarding of public health. Support is a necessity for sustaining social systems. Subsidies are government expenditure to increase private benefit and profit. It is a public expenditure for private gain. It is unnecessary and is the cause for false and distorted prices. By deliberately confusing support and subsidies, agribusiness and global trade interests target the dismantling of social support for sustainable agriculture and fair prices for both farmers and poor consumers. This destroys livelihood security, food security and ecological security.

While the conditionalities from global trade and financial institutions are preventing the Government from supporting the poor to have access to adequate and nutritious food, they are promoting the diversion of subsidies from people to corporations. While people have been forced to buy wheat and rice at Rs. 11.30 per kg, because of the withdrawal of subsidies, export corporations such as Cargill are getting wheat and rice at highly-subsidised prices.

This is how globalisation is causing hunger and starvation in the Third World. It is the trading giants such as Pepsi and Cargill who have benefited from withdrawal of food subsidies to the poor and the redirection of subsidies for exports. Pepsi is exporting 1,00,000 tonnes of rice from India during 2002 with Rs. 12.2 million profits, while people in India face starvation.

It is time for citizens worldwide to insist that taxes and public money be used for enhancing public good, not for subsidising global corporations and private profits.

(The writer is Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi.)

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