Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Indian Lives Matter

Colin Todhunter’s insightful writings have frequently been cited by the SOYMB blog. Albeit we may not agree with every detail of his analysis but on many issues we share similar viewpoints. The following areextracts from an article he wrote on India where lived and worked and where there exists a companion party, the World Socialist Party (India) 

India was the richest country in the world and had controlled a third of global wealth until the 17th century. Political unity and military security helped evolve a uniform economic system, increased trade and enhanced agriculture productivity. India was an exporter of spices, food grains, handicrafts, handloom products, wootz steel, musk, camphor, sandalwood and ivory items, among other things. The village was the centre of a rural economy that was an economic powerhouse. the economic fabric of the village was once enshrined in a performing eco-system and a healthy social life based on fellow feelings and mutual co-operation. However, the British Raj almost dismantled this system by introducing mono crop activities and mill made products, and post independent India failed to repair the economic fabric.

Eradicating poverty in that country requires every person having access to safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, nutrition, health and education. Out of its 1.2 billion-plus population, India is home to over 340 million destitute people and is the second poorest country in South Asia after war-torn Afghanistan. Some  640 million poor people live in India (40% of the world's poor).

20 years ago,  India had the second-best social indicators among the six South Asian countries ( India,  Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka , Nepal and Bhutan ). Now it has the second worst position, ahead only of Pakistan. Bangladesh has less than half of India's per-capita GDP but has infant and child mortality rates lower than that of India. In Bangladesh, 82% of children are fully immunised, 88% get vitamin A supplements and 89% are breastfed within an hour of birth. The corresponding figures for Indian children are below 50% in all case and as low as 25% for vitamin A supplementation. Moreover, over half of the population in India practices open defecation, a major health hazard, compared with less than 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has overtaken India in terms of a wide range of basic social indicators, including life expectancy, child survival, enhanced immunisation rates, reduced fertility rates and particular schooling indicators.

“We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost of the welfare of the downtrodden and the environment. We don't think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran CV

The poverty alleviation rate in India remain around the same as it was back in 1991 or even in pre-independence India (0.8 percent), while the ratio between the top and bottom ten percent of the population has doubled during this period. Amartya Sen and the World Bank's chief economist Kaushik Basu have argued that the bulk of  India 's aggregate growth is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes at the upper end of the income ladder . To use Arundhati Roy's term, the poor in India are the ‘ghosts of capitalism': the ‘invisible' and shoved-aside victims of a now rampant neoliberalism. India's social development has been sacrificed on the altar of greed and corruption for bulging Swiss accounts, and it has been stolen and put in the pockets of the country's ruling class ‘wealth creators' and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are now swooping.

According to the Organisation for Co-operation and Economic Development, this doubling of income inequality has made India  one of the worst performers in the category of emerging economies. It is being driven through by what Vandana Shiva says is the biggest forced removal of people from their lands in history and involves one of the biggest illegal land grabs since Columbus, according to a 2009 report commissioned by the rural development ministry. Almost 300,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and economic liberalisation.  And yet the corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to bad food, bad soil, poor quality or no water, bad health, poor or falling yields and an impending agrarian crisis. In addition to displacing people to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, unconstitutional land grabs for Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other projects have additionally forced many others from the land. In ‘The Greater Common Good', Arundhati Roy writes about the thousands of tribal people displaced by the Narmada Sarovar Dam. Moreover, it has been a case of massive tax breaks for industry and corporations and underinvestment in rural infrastructure and farming. It's not difficult to see where policy makers' priorities lie.

In the West, the route to capitalism or urbanisation was not ‘natural' and involved the unforeseen outcomes of conflicts and struggles between serfs, lords, peasants, landowners, the emerging bourgousie and class of industrialists and the state. The outcomes of these struggles resulted in different routes to modernity (communism, fascism, capitalism) and levels of urbanisation. Unsurprisingly, struggles (both violent and non-violent) are now taking place in  India . The naxalites and Maoists are referred to by the dominant class as left wing extremists who are exploiting the situation of the poor. But how easy it is to ignore the true nature of the poor's exploitation. How easy it is to lump all protesters together and create an ‘enemy within'. How easy it is to ignore the state-corporate extremism across the world that results in the central state abdicating its responsibilities by submitting to the tenets of the Wall Street-backed ‘structural adjustment' pro-privatisation policies, free capital flows and unaccountable cartels. That's the real nature of extremism. It is the type of extremism that is regarded as anything but by the mainstream media.

With GDP growth slowing and automation replacing human labour the world over in order to decrease labour costs and boost profit, where are the jobs going to come from to cater for hundreds of millions of former agricultural workers or those whose livelihoods will be destroyed as corporations move in and seek to capitalise and mechanise industries (eg wheat processing) that currently employ tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions)? It is clear that farmers (and others) represent a ‘problem': a problem while on the land and a problem to be somehow dealt with once displaced. But food producers, the genuine wealth producers of a nation, only became a problem when Western agribusiness was given the green light to take power away from farmers and uproot traditional agriculture in  India  and recast it in its own corporate-controlled image. This is who is really setting the ‘development' agenda.

India  is acquiescing to foreign corporations. Take a look at the free trade agreement being hammered out behind closed doors between the EU and India. It all adds up to powerful trans-national corporations trying to by-pass legislation that was implemented to safeguard the public's rights. We could see the Indian government being sued by multinational companies for billions of dollars in private arbitration panels outside of Indian courts if national laws, policies, court decisions or other actions are perceived to interfere with their investments. This is already a reality in many parts of the world whereby legislation is shelved due to even the threat of legal action by corporations. Such free trade agreements cement the corporate ability to raid taxpayers' coffers even further via unaccountable legal tribunals, or to wholly dictate national policies and legislation. This agreement could see rural Indian society being restructured and devastated in favour of Western corporate interests and adversely impacting hundreds of millions and their livelihoods and traditional ways of living. The bedrock of any society is its agriculture. Without food there can be no life. Without food security, there can be no genuine independence. Nowhere is this the case than in  India  where 64% of the population derives its sustenance from the agricultural sector. To control Indian agriculture is to exert control over the country. One needs to control only seeds, agro-chemicals and resultant debt and infrastructure loans. The World Bank, the IMF and the US State Department are well aware of this fact. US foreign policy is about power and control: the power to control food, states and entire populations.

In an attempt to control agriculture and despite evidence that suggests otherwise, agritech corporations promote the notion that they have the answers to feeding the world. People are generally hungry not because of insufficient agricultural production but because they do not have money to buy food, access to land to grow food or because of complex problems like food spoilage, poor food distribution systems and a lack of reliable water and infrastructure for irrigation, storage, transport and financing. If these deeper problems are not addressed and as long as food is not reaching those who are hungry and poor, increased agricultural production will not help reduce food insecurity. We already produce enough food to feed the world's population and did so even at the peak of the world food crisis in 2008. Moreover, India can already feed itself and arguably  doesn't need modern technology of poisonous pesticides, destructive fertilizers and patented GE seeds that can't match 1890 or even 1760 AD yields in India. By shifting towards a commercialised system that would also give the poor cash to buy food in the market place, rather than the almost half a million ‘ration shops' that currently exist, the result will be what the WTO/ World Bank/IMF have been telling India to for a long time: to displace the farming population so that agribusiness can find a stronghold in India (aided by the free trade agreement, which could see land in the hand of foreign entities who prioritise cash crops for export).


No comments: