Archive for the ‘Economics and globalisation’ Category
Inside the deepest tourist murk of Goa
What I will describe in the next few paragraphs has to do with a spot along the coast in Goa, the small state in coastal western India where I live. It’s called Calangute, and was once a village close to the sea. There’s a beach nearby. To the immediate north is Baga, to the immediate south is Candolim, and farther south is Sinquerim, and then the headland of Aguada and its Portuguese-era fort.
But it is Calangute about which I write. It has for some years now, and by that I mean certainly 15 years, come to mean all that is ugly about tourism in Goa. If it was ugly in 2005, its ugliness is simply off the scale, off any sort of chart, today. Its ugliness is breath-taking. The ugliness of what is absurdly called tourism in Calangute, Goa, is outright paralysing.
These photographs show you why I think so. There is a bus stand in Calangute, by which is meant an open plot into which buses from other states make their way and then halt. These buses arrive crammed with tourists from those states. (I will call them ‘tourists’, for now, only because to describe them more fully will surely require an essay.) The Calangute market zone, which extends for about half a kilometre, and perhaps a bit more, in all directions, is packed with small shops and all manner of hostelries, that is, places in which tourists can stay a few nights. There are hotels too, some style themselves as resorts. But for the most part, where tourists stay in Calangute are modest lodgings, what to the generation preceding my own were known as guest houses.
The din in Calangute is deafening. There is in the first place the sounds of traffic. For non-Indian readers of this irregular journal (i dislike the neologism ‘blog’) who have not travelled in India, traffic in India is synonymous with the sound of horns, because you see, the Indian driver of a vehicle, any vehicle, simply cannot drive without tooting the horn every few seconds.
There is the constant rumble of tourist buses, which crawl through lanes that really shouldn’t accommodate more than a couple of bicycles. Every bus like this is trailed by several demon taxi drivers trying to pass the bus, and leaning on their horns in the belief that their horn blasts will magically dissolve the bus in their path. There is also nowadays the rumble of powerful SUVs, in which the more well-to-do tourists travel, shiny and ugly new vehicles which to me seem the size of small Goan houses. There are scooters and motorcycles, ridden either by kamikaze tourists or by semi-somnolent bell boys going home after their shift or by maniac delivery boys speeding chicken biryani to a room on the second floor of the Top A-1 Seashore Residency hotel.
Right in front of what used to be quite simply, in the late 1970s, called the tourist hostel and cottages in Calangute (but which today sports some grandiose title) is a sort of quadrangle. The vehicular entrance to this quadrangle is marked off by not one but two small blocks of what in India are called Sulabh Shauchalaya, that is, public urinals and toilets. That these form modern Calangute’s landmarks tell one how far, how very far and how fast, this once idyllic seaside village has fallen.
The quadrangle is a large parking space, two rows in parallel on either side of a median. Why did they have it here? Perhaps to accommodate tourist buses, perhaps to accommodate the ever growing number of large private vehicles (jeeps and vans) in which groups of mostly men travel to Calangute. Whatever the muddled first reason, space in the cursed quadrangle is taken over by any vehicle can be driven in there and parked, at times for days on end. For a category of ‘tourist’ group that makes its way to Calangute, the vehicle becomes a sort of satellite camp. Plastic containers of water, bags and satchels, soiled clothes, are all stored in the vehicle, whose roof and bonnet are used to dry clothes washed at one of the Sulabh Shauchalayas.
The sides of the quadrangle are lined, most of all, with liquor shops. These do a constant business and it is common to see groups of men in them, arguing about what sort of liqour and which brands they should collectively buy, what they should take back with them, and what beer to drink on the spot while these decisions are being taken. There are restaurants, all of them without exception rude and cheap, whose rough menus – overspiced, oversalted, overoiled – are intended only to fill deadened tourist stomachs in the shortest possible time.
There are vendors, who sell all that is tawdry and throwaway: floppy hats, sunglasses, absurd plastic trinkets for women, shorts and T-shirts, flip-flops. There are tattoo ‘parlours’, holes in the wall with two stools and internet trance channel music. There are rows of brightly painted scooters for the tourists to rent, some with A4-sized sheets of paper carrying only a name and mobile phone number, flapping in the breeze.
There are boarding houses and guest houses. These are truly, and not only here but on every road and side street of Calangute, and likewise in every alley and side-street all across the Sinquerim to Baga beach strip, the ugliness generator of Goa. Usually two storeys, at times one more, they have been cheaply built, iron rebar protruding, water pipes and electricity cables and internet wires snake in open confusion up external walls and through stairwells and around dusty verandahs and into rooms.
They sport any shade of paint that was available to their reckless owners at a discount, or was mooched from another site. They are festooned with boards and signs advertising themselves. External units of air-conditioners are jammed into masonry whever they fit, their rusty water drip making muddy puddles below. Lines of varicoloured ‘fairy’ LED lights are looped from one unfinished unpainted beam to another, behind ragged awnings and around long-empty flowerpots. Their staff are indifferent to the tourists (who are very likely more so to them), surly, unkempt, engrossed by the flicker of their mobile phones, uncaring and unmindful of anything outside their grimy walls.
Why do they still come, ever more, ever fickle, ever banal, an endless tide of human ephemera? Do they not see and feel the rampant ugliness, which stretches like a giant sore right over ten kilometres of the north Goa beach strip, with Calangute its howling, festering centre? Or are they in fact escaping a far gloomier, far darker, ugliness of the urban Indian rot from whence they travelled?
Seventy-five years of extended colonisation
There is now a third generation of young adults in India who believe, because that is what they have been led to believe, that they live in a free and democratic country. In the way that their parents did and their grandparents did, the young adult Indians consider themselves to be citizens of a sovereign nation which has the wherewithal to determine its identity and place in the world, and that within that ‘national identity’ they are free to find and play out their individual identities and personal or family aims.
This idea is sustained and fed today by a set of tools very much more sophisticated compared with those that were available and used 25 years, ago, 50 years ago and 75 years ago. Many of the new tools are of course deliverred through the internet. Twenty-five years ago it was television, Fifty years ago it was radio. Assisting the new tools that create and spread crude ideas of ‘nationhood’, ‘patriotism’, ‘love for the motherland’ and ‘unity in diversity’ are a legion of minor methods. These include what are today called influencers, advertising by Indian commercial companies – and considerably more by the foreign multi-nationals whose products and services are sold here – television serials that are now beamed through the medium of smartphones perhaps more than they are beamed to TV screens, and a myriad ‘youth’ and ‘grassroots’ organisations controlled by the political formations.
What the young adult Indian of 2022 is fed is a diet of caricatured national belonging. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party formed the national government (it formed the government again in 2019), the childish sloganeering that has, for 75 years, been a feature of Indian ‘democracy’, has increased greatly in tempo and volume. This was a staple during the two earlier national governments – that of 2009 and 2004 – under the Indian National Congress.
The excuse very often given for the great prevalence of sloganeering as the primary communication between political formations and citizens, from the later period of the Struggle for Independence (in the 1940s) and including the two most recent phases of Congress rule, was that illiteracy is widespread, and such messages make a ready impact. That was the strategy for elections in India, and ever since the 2004 central government (and especially since 2014), has also been the strategy used to foist a misshapen brand of nationalism onto citizens, except that since 2004 the brand has had as a wrapper the term ‘development’, or ‘vikas‘.
To me it is very doubtful indeed whether there were more than a very tiny minority of young adults who, by the end of August 1947, when the fervour of the celebrations had abated somewhat, looked around them and asked one another with any seriousness, what is the form and substance of our independence. I do not think that in any of the years from 1948 until today, 2022, such a minority has enlarged its numbers (as a portion of thinking and critical young adults, or indeed adults of any age group of India).
There is nearly nothing at all today, which forms the apparatus and provides the methodologies, utilising which Indian families and adults pursue their lives and livelihoods, which is Indian in thought and form. India’s cities, in which perhaps 55% of the country’s people now live, are easily amongst the most polluted in the world and, together with their abysmal civic conditions, are just as easily amongst the most unlivable in the world. There is no Indianness whatsoever in these gigantic settlements, that are criss-crossed brutally by ‘infrastructure’ and befouled by industrial and consumer effluent. They are several degrees worse than the industrial townships of the communist bloc of the 1960s, but only much bigger.
The food that young adult Indians, that their children and babies are fed, that their elderly parents are offered, is designed to injure and weaken. What was by the late 1990s called the retail revolution in India was indeed revolutionary for the country, because it cunningly household cooking a drab drudgery that chained the woman (who if freed could puruse a ‘career’ and add to the national income) and introduced food ‘convenience’ in the form of Maggi two-minute noodles, which in more recfent years has become the ‘food service’ industry, ready-to-eat packets, and food ‘takeaways’ delivered on a two-wheeler to the consumer doorstep by an underpaid, un-unionised, dangerously overworked slave of a logistics enterprise who, himself underfed, steals from ‘cloud kitchens’ whenever he can.
The medicine and ‘health care’ the young adult Indian is led to spend copious amounts of money on, for himself, children and parents (if his parents have not yet been despatched to a ‘seniors home’ or, more stylish, an ‘assisted living centre’) is, like food but more so (especially after March 2020), a fundamental means of control for the large group of transnational enterprises that in fact control the country. Whereas in the 1980s and even in the 1990s the reach of ayurveda, siddha, unani, tribal and indigenous medicine, homoeopathy, naturopathy and their allies were popular, if relatively inconspicuous, today they have been pushed well outside the margins of what is understood to be public health, whether as the government-sponsored and aided public health system or whether the commercial healthcare industry, both being equally controlled by the pharmaceutical and drugs multinationals.
There is nothing which today in India is called a ‘sector’ – by which a particular kind of activity and its asociated products and services are labelled – which is Indian in concept and finished form. Education is like a remote-controlled Frankenstein’s monster, a figure clumsily composed of ill-fitting parts. The Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management, the ‘top’ tiers of engineering and medical universities and colleges, all compel young Indians – not yet adults – to conform to the demands of global finance capital and the globalised industries such capital controls, invents and replaces.
Transport and mobility, energy and power, telecommunications, information technology, core heavy industry, all these are simulacra of the idea of western ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ transferred to Indian soil and using Indian raw materials. There is no Indian-designed equivalent of the internal combustion engine (nor even an Indian modification of the more than 100 most common kinds of automotive engines that have been invented elsewhere in the world during the last century). There is no Indian electricity-generating plant that does not burn coal or a petroleum derivative in faithful imitation of the west (the smokeless chulha remains a ‘development’ curiosity).
A public sector firm called Indian Telephone Industries used to make the rotary dial telephone instruments for decades. When the global telecom hardware industry invented the mobile phone, that too vanished. Even with the ‘smartphone’ there is no Indian telecom chipset manufacturer (naturally, because indigenous chipset development is prohibited by the same forces) nor is there an Indian operating system for the ‘smartphone’. This of course has much to do with the Indian servility, now more than 35 years old, in ‘info-tech’.
The young Indian adults, a group that forms the overwhelming majority of the ‘IT engineers’ of India, are lower than the assembly-line or factory shopfloor workers their parents and grandparents were. They modify nothing, their specialisations are extreme, their range of competencies is shockingly narrow, they are constantly goaded by externally-set and directed ‘performance markers’. They inhabit a truly frightening world. Their seniors write no standards for any product, and are chained by meaningless perquisites and stock options to the whims of the global capital vultures who use both info-tech and telecom as 21st century devices of overwhelming control.
There could be around 850 million adults in India in 2022. But we don’t know because the 2021 Census of India was not begun in 2020 and has still not begun. The administration of the colonised territory that is India has no interest in counting its people because that counting is done many times every single day – by the many subsidiaries of the transnational corporations whose smartphones, digital wallets, telecom service providers, ‘smart’ home televisions and assortment of ‘internet of things’ gadgets relay the daily minutiae of every Indian adult, child and senior that posesses them. The state, that is, what is presented as being the Republic of India, in this 75th year, is either redundant or is nearing redundancy. The notion of ‘independence’ therefore is an utterly false one.
Farmers’ protest and the shaping of public perception
Rioting and violence took place in New Delhi on 26 January 2021, Republic Day, allegedly by members of the farmers’ groups that have since November 2020 been protesting the three farm acts (‘reforms’) that were passed through Parliament.
My reading of the day’s incidents in Delhi – the destruction of corporation commuter buses by tractors, the videos of the Indian tricolour being dishonoured and a Khalistani flag being hoisted in its place, scores of Delhi police being injured and hurt – points to the beginning of a signal shift concerning India’s perception of ‘farmer’.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha – the umbrella organisation for the protesting farmers’ associations and groups – had for several days earlier said that the intentions of the movement were confronted from the outset by the central government which first stopped them from coming to Delhi, then by defaming the movement, using the Supreme Court to dilute the movement’s objectives.
It had for several days prior to today called for several events leading up to 26 January, such as a people’s ‘Kisan Sansad’ (farmers’ parliament), since the normal winter session of Parliament was cancelled.
The farmers’ organisations have been demanding a full repeal of the three recent agriculture related acts: the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, and the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020. These have been dubbed the ‘APMC Bypass Act’, ‘ECA Amendment’ and ‘Contract Farming Act’ respectively.
The grave dangers to our systems of agriculture posed by these acts – individually, when read together, and when read against the background of legislation and policy over the last 20 years that has favoured the food industry over farmers – has been well written about and discussed in many fora and channels.
An example of the effects of changed perceptions about farmers
The new worry that has today come out of the shadows is that of perception: how the Indian citizen and particularly the middle-class urban citizen, considers the farmer. Until now the tone towards the protesting farmers’ organisations has been either neutral or somewhat supportive. This is so despite consistent efforts by the ruling BJP-NDA and its many forward cells in social media to paint the protesting farmers’ as ‘privileged’ by being beneficiaries of lavish subsidies, users of free electricity who don’t pay income-tax, incited by opposition parties, accompanied by anti-national groups and so on.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha and the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee represent some 130 farmers’ associations and groups that have come together in protest. The chief coordinating organisations are the All India Kisan Sabha and the Centre for Indian Trade Unions, both of which have studied and analysed the causes of agrarian distress in India since the mid-1990s (after liberalisation began in earnest in 1991) and which have consistently mounted campaigns to forestall the corporate take-over of crop cultivation and food distribution in India.
Placed on such a time-line, the protests against the three destructive new ‘reform’ acts of 2020 represent the latest stage of a continuum.
What has however happened is the hijacking of a legitimate protest and its expression by forces about which at this point I know very little, but whose agenda is revealed. The distance between especially India’s middle-class urban citizens and the sources of their food has only widened in recent years. As long as sorted, graded, cleaned and packed raw foodstuffs are available in local markets (or from online marts) little or no thought is given by urban India to farmers.
There is a residual respect (‘jai jawan, jai kisan’ was the slogan coined by Lal Bahadur Shastri, prime minister during 1964-66) that has continued to remain. If this residual respect continues to fuel sympathy for the farmer and his lot, then it also is a potential source of support to farmers’ organisations protesting further ‘reforms’. The previous term of the BJP-NDA, 2014-19, saw the introduction of a number of policy measures (called ‘reforms’) that taken together point to the intent to corporatise cultivation and the movement of harvested crop, to a much greater degree than is currently done.
India’s urban based mainstream media not only is removed from the concerns of the rural population but also is absent the experience to understand the cumulative impacts of nearly 40 years of neo-liberal economics on agriculture and food cultivation.
During the first term of the UPA government (2004-09), farming was seen as unremunerative and a drag on the growth rate of India’s GDP. This is a position held by central government planners and economics advisers that did not change during the two following governments (UPA2 and NDA2), both of which added laws and policy to accelerate the industrialisation of food, and which the current NDA3 government (from 2019) wants to further fast track. Hence the three disastrous ‘reform’ laws of 2020 have predecessors going back more than 15 years.
A commentary published three years ago had stated: “The government also expanded the definition of industrial corridors to include land up to one kilometre on either side of designated roads or railway lines serving these corridors. Organisations such as the AIKS had called for provisions to ensure acquisition of land to the extent required and legal safeguards for landowners. However, the rights of landowners and those dependent on land and community rights were all diluted and the basic tenets of transparency were ignored. Food security safeguards were done away with, and even fertile multi-cropped land and productive rain-fed land could be acquired without any restriction.”
Yet there is a series of hurdles that have come in the way of national governments since 2004 in their bid to justify and ram through farm and agriculture ‘reforms’. The hurdles are the conditions, created by poor policy and government’s subservience to the demands of Indian and foreign agritech industry, which from the early 1990s came to be called ‘agrarian distress’, which through the 2000s intensified as the national crisis of farmers’ suicides, and which during the last decade has taken the shape of an ‘unperforming’ sector that is seen as an albatross around the neck of an Indian economy but which is claimed to have great promise.
Part of CITU’s statement on the 26 January 2020 incidents.
The responsibility for the human and community consequences of India’s agrarian distress is the state’s, but none of the central governments from 2004 onwards has acknowledged it has such a responsibility.
Further ‘reform’ has been given a distinct shape and plan over the last four years. It includes encouraging (or coercing) the cultivators and agricultural labour to migrate with family to towns and cities, leaving behind their lands. It includes dramatically increasing corporate denominated farming (under contract) and corporate controlled collection, sorting and movement of food, instead of by farmers’ cooperatives and consumers’ cooperatives. It includes the plan to introduce genetically modified seed and crop. It includes the full conversion of human labour on the farm to automation (using GPS, internet-of-things, 5G, drones, real time remote sensing and robotics).
To begin to do this, the residual respect and fraying connect between urban consumer and farmer must be severed. This severance began on 26 January 2021, with the farmers’ protest movement being hijacked. The casualty will be the citizen’s regard for and trust in the farmer. That casualty will be exploited to offer to the citizen the ‘reliability’ of food that promises to be produced in an ‘agricultural reform’ regime, in which the farmer will have no place.
It is unclear to me as of now who the prime actors are of this hijacking and where the state’s interest is. India’s commentariat has little knowledge of the 30-year-old saga of agrarian distress. Its mainstream media has done everything possible to aid the demonising of the protest and has given no airtime worth the name to farmer representatives and coordinators. Both commentariat and media appear ignorant of the greater arena, that of the gradual outlawing of the hereditary farmer, and his systems of cultivation and crop management, from farming.
30 Jahre nach dem Tag des Mauerfalls, eine neue Friedensrevolution in Berlin
Tens of thousands of people from all over Europe and many more from within Germany began reaching Berlin, the capital city, over the last two days to take part in today’s gigantic expression of peaceful protest against the social, economic, personal and cultural restrictions imposed by the German government in the name of public health.
Today’s massive march in Berlin is taking place after a very tense week, with the Berlin Administrative Court ruling just over a day earlier that today’s ‘Assembly for Freedom’ protest could take place without attracting a ban on any grounds. The Court argued that the government’s stated rationale for the ban – an imminent threat to public health and safety – was baseless.
Here is a selection of the coverage from outlets that I follow regularly (Deutsch -> English).
Corona-Protest: Erst verleumdet, dann verboten – Die Berliner Versammlungsbehörde hat für das Wochenende geplante Demonstrationen von Kritikern der Corona-Politik verboten, wie Medien berichten. Diese Entscheidung ist aus mehreren Gründen falsch: Die Begründung erweckt den Eindruck, als sollten mit dem mutmaßlich vorgeschobenen Argument des Infektionsschutzes politische Äußerungen unterdrückt werden. Sie erweckt den Eindruck, als wolle sich der Berliner Senat zum Schiedsrichter bei der Beurteilung von Protest-Inhalten machen, nach dem Motto „Gute Demos, Schlechte Demos“, das die NachDenkSeiten etwa in diesem Artikel beschrieben haben . Das Verbot bleibt auch dann falsch, wenn man sich mit den Demo-Inhalten nicht identifizieren sollte: Solange keine justiziablen Äußerungen von den Veranstaltern bekannt sind, darf der Inhalt kein Kriterium für das Gewähren des Demonstrationsrechts sein. Das Argument des Infektionsschutzes erscheint, wie gesagt, vorgeschoben.
“Corona protest: first slandered, then banned – The Berlin assembly authorities have banned demonstrations planned for the weekend by critics of the Corona policy, according to media reports. This decision is wrong for several reasons: The reasoning gives the impression that political statements are to be suppressed with the presumably advanced argument of infection protection. It gives the impression that the Berlin Senate wants to make itself the arbitrator in the evaluation of protest content, according to the motto “good demos, bad demos”, which the NachDenkSeiten have described in this article. The ban remains false even if one should not identify with the demo contents: As long as no justifiable statements are known by the organizers, the contents may not be a criterion for granting the right to demonstrate. The argument of protection against infection appears, as already mentioned, to be a pretext.”
Inakzeptabler Angriff auf eines unserer höchsten Grundrechte
– Die deutsche Hauptstadt verbietet Demonstrationen gegen die Corona-Regeln der Bundesregierung und der Länder. Das ist ein inakzeptabler Angriff auf eines unserer höchsten Grundrechte, gegen jede Verhältnismäßigkeit und obendrein an politischer Dummheit kaum zu überbieten. Eine unbequeme, in Teilen extrem unappetitliche, aber vor allem (noch) eher kleine Gruppe wird hier in die Lage versetzt, sich als Kämpfer für unser Grundgesetz aufzuspielen. Und die Stadt Berlin hat ihr alle Argumente geschenkt und alle Gefallen getan, die man einer populistischen und wenig geeinten Bewegung schenken und tun kann.
“Unacceptable attack on one of our most fundamental rights – the German capital prohibits demonstrations against the corona rules of the German government and the Länder. This is an unacceptable attack on one of our most fundamental rights, against all proportionality and, on top of that, hard to beat in terms of political stupidity. An uncomfortable, in parts extremely unappetizing, but above all (still) rather small group is put in a position here to act as fighters for our Basic Law. And the city of Berlin has given it all the arguments and done all the favours that one can give and do to a populist and little united movement.”
Berlins Rot-rot-grüne Regierung wählt den Weg der Eskalation – Die Senatsregierung dürfte sich gefragt haben: Wollen wir uns wieder um Zahlen streiten und Nazis im Demozug suchen müssen? Oder wollen wir vom Regen in die Traufe und die Demos gleich ganz verbieten? Man hat sich für letzteres entschieden, als gäbe es keinen dritten Weg, nämlich den des Rechts.
Das muss man sich einmal vorstellen wollen: Die Bundeskanzlerin stellt in Brüssel zur deutschen EU-Ratspräsidentschaft gerade erst die Freiheits- und Grundrechte als hohes Gut „in den Fokus“ ihres Interesses und nur wenige Wochen später demonstrieren Angehörige von Merkels Koalitionspartner (und Möchtegernkoalitionspartner) in der Berliner Senatsregierung, was die Uhr tatsächlich geschlagen hat: Demonstrationen am Wochenende gegen die Corona-Maßnahmen – die im Übrigen ihrem Wesen nach ohnehin längst solche gegen die Merkel-Regierung geworden sind – werden verboten.
“Berlin’s red-red-green government chooses the path of escalation – The Senate government may have wondered: Do we want to argue about numbers again and have to search for Nazis in the Demozug? Or do we want to go from the frying pan into the fire and ban demos altogether? The latter has been chosen as if there were no third way, namely the right.
“You have to want to imagine that: In Brussels on the occasion of Germany’s EU Council Presidency, the German Chancellor has just begun to “focus” her attention on freedom and fundamental rights as a high good, and only a few weeks later members of Merkel’s coalition partner (and would-be coalition partners) in the Berlin Senate government are demonstrating what the clock has actually struck: Weekend demonstrations against the Corona measures – which, by the way, have by their very nature long since become those against the Merkel government anyway – are banned.”
Demonstration der Gegner der Corona-Maßnahmen verboten – Es wäre zu begrüßen, wenn das Gericht von den Behörden Beweise dafür verlangen würde, dass die Demonstrationen der letzten Monate zur Erhöhung der Ansteckungszahlen beigetragen haben. Unerwartet kam die Ankündigung von Berlins Innensenator Andreas Geisel nicht, die für kommenden Samstag geplanten Massendemonstrationen der Corona-Maßnahme-Gegner zu verbieten. Spätestens nachdem am vergangenen Samstag eine antirassistische Demonstration in Hanau zum Gedenken an den rassistischen Mordanschlag kurzfristig verboten wurde (Wie faktenbasiert sind die Demoverbote der letzten Tage), war klar, dass es auch in Berlin eine solche Maßnahme geben wird.
“Demonstration by opponents of the Corona measures banned – It would be welcome if the Court were to ask the authorities to provide evidence that the demonstrations of recent months have contributed to the increase in infection rates. Unexpectedly, the announcement by Berlin’s Senator of the Interior Andreas Geisel to ban the mass demonstrations of Corona opponents planned for next Saturday did not come as a surprise. At the latest after an anti-racist demonstration in Hanau in commemoration of the racist assassination attempt was banned at short notice last Saturday (How fact-based are the demo bans of the last days), it was clear that such a measure will also be taken in Berlin.”
Seeds and knowledge: how the draft seeds bill degrades both
[ This comment is published by Indiafacts. ]
The central government has circulated the Draft Seeds Bill 2019, the text of which raises several red flags about the future of kisan rights, state responsibilities, the role of the private sector seed industry, and genetic engineering technologies.
The purpose of the 2019 draft bill is “to provide for regulating the quality of seeds for sale, import and export and to facilitate production and supply of seeds of quality and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto”. The keywords in this short statement of the draft bill’s objectives are: regulate, quality, sale, import, export.
This draft follows several earlier legislations and draft legislations in defining and treating seed as a scientific and legal object, while ignoring entirely the cultural, social, ritual and ecological aspect of seed. These earlier legal framings included the 2004 version of the same draft bill, the Protection of Plant Variety and Farmers Right Act of 2001, the 1998 Seed Policy Review Group and its recommendations (New Policy on Seed Development), the Consumer Protection Act of 1986, the National Seeds Project which began in 1967 (under assistance/direction of the World Bank), the Seeds Act of 1966 (notified in 1968, fully implemented in 1969), and the establishing of the National Seeds Corporation under the Ministry of Agriculture in 1961.
With 53 clauses spread over 10 chapters, the draft bill sees seed as being governed by a central and state committees (chapter 2), requiring registration (including a national register, chapter 3), being subject to regulation and certification (chapter 4), with other chapters on seed analysis and testing, import and export and the powers of central government. (The draft bill is available here, 68mb file.)
In such a conception of seed and the various kinds of activities that surround the idea of seed today, the draft bill reproduces a pattern that (a) has remained largely unchanged for about 60 years, and (b) is far more faithful to an ‘international’ (or western) legal interpretation of seed than it is to the Indic recognition of ‘anna‘ (and the responsibilities it entails including the non-ownership of seed).
The 2019 draft bill is attempting to address three subjects that should be dealt with separately. These are: farmers’ rights, regulation and certification, property and knowledge. Each of these exists as a subject closely connected with cultivation (krishi as expressed through the application of numerous forms of traditional knowledge) and the provision of food crops, vegetables and fruit. But that they exist today as semantic definitions in India is only because of the wholesale adoption of the industrially oriented food system prevalent in the western world (Europe, north America, OECD zone).
‘Farmers’ rights’ became a catchphrase of the environmental movement that began in the western world in the 1960s and was enunciated as a response to the chemicalisation of agriculture. When the phrase took on a legal cast, it also came to include the non-ownership and unrestricted exchange of seeds, as a means to demand its distinguishing from the corporate ownership of laboratory derived seed. But farmers’, or kisans‘, rights in India? As a result of what sort of change and as a result of what sort of hostile encirclement of what our kisans have known and practised since rice began to be cultivated in the Gangetic alluvium some eight millennia ago?
Regulation and certification (which includes the opening of a new ‘national register’ of seeds) is fundamentally an instrument of exclusion. It stems directly from the standpoint of India’s national agricultural research system, which is embodied in the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and which is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology, and is designed to shrink the boundaries of encirclement inside which our kisans are expected to practice their art. The draft bill exempts kisans from registering their seeds in the proposed national registry and sub-registries (an expensive, onerous process designed for the corporate seed industry and their research partners) as a concession.
But in doing so the bill prepares the ground for future interpretation of ‘certified’ and ‘approved’ seed as looking only to the registers – and not kisans‘ collections – as being legitimate. This preparatory measure to exclude utterly ignores the mountainous evidence in the central government’s own possession – the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources – of the extraordinary cultivated, wild, forest and agro-ecological biodiversity of India.
In the cereals category (with 13 groups) the NBPGR gene bank lists 99,600 rice varieties, 30,000 wheat varieties, 11,000 maize, 8.075 barley varieties. In the millets category which has 11 groups there are 57,400 total varieties. How have all these – not exhaustive as they are – become known? Through the shared knowledge and wisdom of our kisans, whose continuing transmission of that knowledge is directly threatened by the provisions of the draft bill, once what they know is kept out of the proposed registers, designated as neither ‘certified’ nor ‘approved’ and turned into avidya.
Vital to regulation and certification are definitions and a prescription for what is ‘acceptable’. The bill says, “such seed conforms to the minimum limit of germination and genetic, physical purity, seed health and additional standards including transgenic events and corresponding traits for transgenic seeds specified… “. The term ‘transgenic event’ is one of the synonyms the international bio-tech industry uses to mean genetically modified. The draft bill’s definition of seed expressly includes ‘synthetic seeds’.
The aspect of property and knowledge taken by the draft bill is as insidious as the brazen recognition of GM technology and produce. The taking of such an aspect also signals that the bill’s drafters have side-stepped or ignored even the weak provisions in international law and treaties concerning agriculture and biodiversity which oblige signatory countries to protect the traditional and hereditary customary rights of cultivators and the protection of biodiversity. These include the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV, 1961, revised in 1972, 1978 and 1991), the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and Food (ITPGRFA, 2001), and the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol (entered into force in 2014).
Aside from the desultory and perfunctorily monitored obligations placed upon India by these and other international and multi-lateral treaties that have to do with agriculture and biodiversity, the draft bill aggressively seeks to promote not only the import and export of ‘approved’ seeds (including seeds that are the result of GM and later gene editing bio-technologies), it submits the interpretation of its provisions to sanctioned committees and sub-committees which by design will be controlled by the the twinned proponents of industrial and technology-centric agriculture: the ICAR and supporting government agencies, and the food-seed-fertiliser-biotech multinational corporations and their subsidiaries in India.
Very distant indeed is the intent of this draft bill – and of India’s administrative and scientific cadres for the last three generations – from the consciousness that was given to us in our shruti: “Harness the ploughs, fit on yokes, now that the womb of the earth is ready, sow the seed therein, and through our praise, may there be abundant food, may grain fall ripe towards the sickle” (Rgveda 10.101.3)
यु॒नक्त॒ सीरा॒ वि यु॒गा त॑नुध्वं कृ॒ते योनौ॑ वपते॒ह बीज॑म् ।
गि॒रा च॑ श्रु॒ष्टिः सभ॑रा॒ अस॑न्नो॒ नेदी॑य॒ इत्सृ॒ण्य॑: प॒क्वमेया॑त् ॥३॥
The wholesale fibs party and its propaganda
(This article was first published by Vijayvaani and is available here.)
The Congress disinformation machine is up and running so hard that now it’s reinventing economics. An article in The Hindustan Times, dated Jan. 15, 2019 on the wholesale price index (WPI), with a wild headline, “Worst price slump in 18 years shows scale of farm crisis”, shows the Congress-plus-opposition agitprop firing on all cylinders. The trouble with this shoddy report and its very obvious promoters is that the wholesale price index (a) hasn’t behaved the way they claim it has (b) is not an indicator of the income health of the kisan household.
These minor inconveniences did not stop The Hindustan Times report from pronouncing that “This financial year, 2018-19 could end up being the worst year for farm incomes in almost two decades, government data indicates in a revelation that emphasises the gravity of the ongoing agrarian crisis”. The government data cited is the WPI which, as the name makes clear, is an index of the change in prices at the level of bulk sale, which for primary agricultural produce is at the mandi, or “farm gate”, as this reporter calls it fashionably. “The WPI sub-component for primary food articles has been negative for six consecutive months beginning July 2018. This means their prices are falling,” says the report.
This is false. Here are the WPI numbers for the category ‘primary articles – food articles’, for the months July to December (the latest month) 2018: July 144.8, August 144.8, September 144.5, October 145.9, November 146.1 and December 144.0 – where is the “negative for six consecutive months”?
Even the simple math the report claims to have done – based on a misreading of the WPI – is wrong. “The WPI sub-component for food components was -0.1% in December. It was -2.1%, -4%, -0.2%, -1.4% and -3.3% in the preceding five months,” says the report. Also false. The sequence of change, from December running backwards to July, is -2.1, 0.2, 1.4, -0.3, 0 and 3. And the change is a number, not a per cent, because the WPI and its components are indices.
But the HT report ploughs on unmindful: “The last time WPI for primary food articles showed negative annual growth for two consecutive quarters was in 1990. The disinflation in farm prices has also led to a collapse in nominal farm incomes, which was last seen in 2000-01.”
So many non-sequiturs in two sentences. A sequence of WPI numbers over several months is not an indicator of annual growth or contraction for what is being measured. As any Food Corporation of India warehouse manager could have told the reporter, what is indexed is the change.
Did the newspaper scrutinise WPI data back until 1990? If it did – and if the sponsors of this “data revelation” did – they would not have failed to notice that the current WPI series has the base year (from which index numbers of 697 different components are calculated) of 2011-12. The previous base year was 2004-05, before that it was 1993-94 and before even that it was 1981-82.
What happened instead is that The Hindustan Times was told to reference the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy which maintains the WPI data back to the 1981-82 series, but has shown a chart with the news report that draws the 2004-05 series. The rider while comparing indices from different series – that they be recalculated with a specific linking factor that makes two series intelligible to each other – is not mentioned at all by the reporter nor by those interviewed by the paper, and they are, in order of appearance: Himanshu, an associate professor of economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University; Niranjan Rajadyaksha, research director and senior fellow at IDFC Institute, Mumbai; Praveen Chakravarty, chairman of the Congress data analytics department. And last, BJP spokesperson Gopal Agarwal.
Their quotes, and the confused graphs thrown in, are meant to prop up the sagging storyline – that the Doubling Farmers’ Income programme of the BJP is not working, that there is ‘agrarian distress’ all over India (the reason given for the INC-Left-NGO morcha to Delhi in November 2018), that the boost to minimum support prices are not working.
“To be sure,” the report says, so that we get the point that the data certainly does not make, “the current crisis in farming is related more to a crash in farm prices rather than output growth.” And immediately adds that in July 2018, “the central government increased the minimum support prices (MSPs) of 14 crops to give farmers a 50% return over their cost of production”. In fact, the MSP was raised so that it is now no less than 50% above the cost of production. Several crops have their MSPs pegged at 60% and even 70%.
Not content with the bashing of the BJP government by those the reporter has interviewed, the newspaper then brings in still another angle, GDP (gross domestic product) data. “That disinflation in farm-gate prices has put a squeeze on farm incomes can be seen from a comparison of growth in agricultural GDP at current and constant prices,” blithely says the report.
“The first advance estimates of GDP figures for 2018-19, which were released by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) last week, show that the difference between current and constant price growth in Gross Value Added (GVA) in agriculture and allied activities was -0.1 percentage point. This differential is 4.8 percentage points for overall GVA.”
It is surprising that The Hindustan Times appears to have no access to any of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s agronomists, who could have been asked to clarify what the connection is, if any, between GDP growth rates, gross value added and the income of a kisan household in any of our 350 (and rising) districts that produce food for markets near and far. What matters to that household is the income realised for crop grown and sold, and this is where eNam, the electronic national agriculture market, is making a difference with, till date, 585 markets in 16 states and 2 union territories being integrated.
But the newspaper wants to press every available economics button in its frantic attempt to convince its readers that there is an agrarian crisis being engineered by the BJP government. And so it enlists the Reserve Bank of India, too, claiming that “The failure of MSP hikes to arrest the decline in farm-gate prices was taken note of by RBI as well”. What has been quoted from the RBI monetary policy committee meeting held during 3-5 December 2018 does not say so at all.
“The prices of several food items are at unusually low levels and there is a risk of sudden reversal, especially of volatile perishable items,” is how the RBI has been quoted. And what this means is that the consumer of food could find the weekly food bill rising; as with the other crutches this report leans on heavily, the RBI has not said what The Hindustan Times tells readers it has. The risk of the price of some food items rising is not a “decline in farm-gate prices”.
Likewise, the second quote from the RBI meeting – “available data suggest that the effect of revision in minimum support prices (MSPs) announced in July on prices has been subdued so far” – is an encouragement, far from the burden it is made out to be by the report.
Typically, a rise in the MSP would have been transferred, at least some if not most of it, by the layers of crop collection, retail and distribution, to the consumer. This transfer, said the RBI, has been subdued, which shows that the measures taken by the government to cut out profiteering middlemen are working.
Six months in 1990 are not six months in 2018. Gross value added whether at constant or current prices is in no way a measure of income for harvested crop a kisan earns at a mandi or through eNam. These and every other trick used in this report show why it is a shabby, confused, hodge-podge of opposition party innuendo that is meant to ride on data which the reading public scarcely notice. Except, when it is noticed, the whiz-bang falls flat.
It’s time to rid India of the GDP disease
A woman in the Aravalli hills of Rajasthan carries home a headload of field straw. India’s National Accounts Statistics is completely ignorant of the biophysical economy.
On 5 January 2017 the Central Statistics Office of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, issued a note titled “First advance estimates of national income, 2017-18”. The contents of this note immediately caused great consternation among the ranks of those in business and industry, trading, banking anf finance, and government who hold that the growth of India’s gross domestic product is supremely important as it is this growth which describes what India is and should be.
In its usual bland way, the Central Statistics Office said that this was “the First Advance estimates of national income at constant (2011-12) and current prices, for the financial year 2017-18” and then proeeded, after a short boilerplate explanation about the compilation of estimates, delivered the bombshell to the GDP standard-bearers: “The growth in GDP during 2017-18 is estimated at 6.5% as compared to the growth rate of 7.1% in 2016-17.” [pdf file here]
To me, this is good news of a kind not heard in the last several years.
But India’s business and financial press were thrown into a caterwauling discord which within minutes was all over the internet.
An example of one out of the many messages in a daily barrage delivered by the Government of India’s ‘GDP First’ corps. This is from what is called the Make in India ‘initiative’ of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Ministry of Commerce. “Make in India is much more than an inspiring slogan,” the DIPP says. “It represents a comprehensive and unprecedented overhaul of out-dated processes and policies.” For this childish GDP rah-rah club, environmental protection, natural reserves, watershed conservation, handloom and handicrafts are all outdated practices and ideas.
‘GDP growth seen at four-year low of 6.5% in 2017-18: CSO’ said the Economic Times: “Most private economists have pared the growth forecast to 6.2 to 6.5 percent for this fiscal year, citing the teething troubles faced by businesses during the roll out of a goods and services tax (GST).”
‘7 reasons why FY18 GDP growth forecast should be viewed with caution’ advised Business Standard: “The fact that growth will be 6.5% is significant as it is even lower than the Economic Survey assumption of 6.75-7.5% for the year. Hence, it is not expected to be higher than the base mark which means that it would be lowest in the past three years. The effects of demonetisation and GST have played some role here.”
‘CSO pegs FY18 growth at 6.5%; why forecast is an eye-opener for Narendra Modi govt’ said Firstpost: “The healthy uptick in volumes displayed by many sectors in November 2017, is expected to strengthen in the remainder of FY2018, benefiting from a favourable base effect and a ‘catch up’ following the subdued first half. Accordingly, manufacturing is likely to display healthy expansion in volumes in H2 FY2018, which should result in a substantial improvement in capacity utilisation on a YoY basis.”
‘GST disruptions eat FY18 economic growth; GDP seen growing at 6.5%, lowest under Modi government’ huffed the Financial Express: “For a broad-based recovery the rural economy needs to recover and we can expect the upcoming budget to focus on alleviating some of the stress in the rural economy and concentrating on measures to augment the flow of credit in the economy. Overall growth is likely to improve in the coming year and possibly move up beyond the 7% mark in FY19.”
‘India’s GDP growth seen decelerating to 6.5% in 2017-18 from 7.1% in 2016-17’ said the Mint: “The nominal GDP, or gross domestic product at market prices, is expected to grow at 9.5% against 11.75% assumed in the 2017-18 budget presented last year. This may make it difficult for the government to achieve the fiscal deficit target of 3.2% of GDP in a fiscally tight year.”
‘India Sees FY18 GDP Growth At 6.5%’ observed Bloomberg Quint: “Growth in gross value added terms, which strips out the impact of indirect taxes and subsidies, is pegged at 6.1 this year, versus a revised 6.6 percent last fiscal. Both GDP and GVA growth were marginally below expectations. A Bloomberg poll had pegged GDP growth at 6.7 percent. The RBI had forecast GVA growth at 6.7 percent at the time of its last policy review in December.”
‘India’s FY18 GDP growth estimated at 6.5%, says CSO data’ said Zee Business: “Real GVA, i.e, GVA at basic constant prices (2011-12) is anticipated to increase from Rs 111.85 lakh crore in 2016-17 to Rs 118.71 lakh crore in 2017-18. Anticipated growth of real GVA at basic prices in 2017-18 is 6.1 percent as against 6.6 percent in 2016-17.”
So great is the power of the School of GDP and of its regents, who are as priests of the Sect of GDP Growth, that the meaninglessness of GDP is a subject practically invisible in India today. Just as it has no meaning at all to the woman in my photograph above, so too GDP has no meaning for all, including the 2.7% (or thereabouts) who pay income tax.
This tweet shows us the scale of the problem. An article by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (a club of powerful globalists) is posted on the website of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ! The head of the ruling BJP’s information unit broadcasts it.
India’s National Accounts Statistics presents every quarter and annually, estimates of the size of the country’s GDP, of the rate of GDP growth, of the size of ‘gross value added’, to which GDP is bound in ways as complicated as they are misleading. There are wages, interests, salaries, profits, factor costs, net indirect taxes, product taxes, product subsidies, market prices, industry-wise estimates and producer prices to juggle.
For the most part, these are prices and costs alone, upon which various kinds of taxes are levied and whose materials and processes may qualify for subsidies. All these are added and deducted, or deducted and added, and finally totalled show a GVA which then leads to a GDP. The prices are arbitrary and speculative, as all prices are, the arbitrariness and speculative nature being attributed to something called market demand, itself a creation of policy and advertising – policy to choke choices and advertising to spur greed. On this putrid basis does the School of GDP stand.
The GDP and GDP-growth frenzy in India spares not a minute for a questioning of its fundamental ideas, which in certain quarters had begun to shown as hollow and destructive in the early 1970s, when the effects of the material and consumption boom in Europe, North American (USA and Canada) and some of the OECD countries after the end of the Second World War became visible as environmental degradation.
Over 30 years later, sections of those societies inhabit and practice what are called ‘steady state’ economics, ‘transition’ economics (that is, transition to low energy, low consumption, recycling and sharing based ways of collective living) and ‘de-growth’, which is a scaling down of economic production and consumption done equitably and to ensure that a society (or groups of settlement and their industries) strictly observe the bio-physical limits of their environment (pollution and pollutants, land, water, biodiversity, etc).
But the Central Statistics Office of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, is ignorant of such critical thinking. It is just as ignorant of the many efforts at swadeshi living, production, cultivation (agro-ecological) and education (informal learning environments instead of reformatted syllabi lifted wholsesale from countries whose exploitative economies installed globalisation as the default economics mode) that are visible all over India today. The CSO and MoSPI are not entirely to blame for this abysmal blindness, because the Ministry of Finance (like every other major line ministry of the Government of India, and like every state government) has decided to be even more blind.
To read the insensate paragraphs disgorged every quarter from the CSO (and Ministry of Finance, likewise the Niti Aayog, the chambers of commerce and industry, the many economy and trade think-tanks) is to find evidence to pile upon earlier evidence that here is an administration of a very large, extremely populous country which cares not the slightest about the indubitably strong correlations between ‘GDP growth’ and more forms of environmental damage than have been reckoned.
The GDP-GVA-growth fantasy cares not the slightest about energy over-use and CO2 emissions, about the effects of widespread atmospheric and chemical pollution on the health of the 185 million rural households and 88 million urban households (my estimates for 2018) of India, and about the terrible stresses that the urban households in more than 4,000 towns, district headquarters and metros are subject to as a result of their lives – through mobile phone apps, banks, the food industry, the automobile industry and the building industry – being micro-regulated so that an additional thousandth of a per cent of GDP growth can be squeezed out of them.
The GDP asura has brought ruin to India’s environment, cities, farms, households, forests, rivers, coasts and hills. Let 2018 be the year we burn the monster once and for all.
Dried out political public arenas
Considering the matter of elections in a state (Gujarat) against the experiences of India over the last 15-16 years, of price rise, the crushing banalities of urbanisation, the control that the telecom, banking and automobile industries have over ordinary lives, the manner in which media (television and newspapers earlier, social media too now) work in concert at obscuring that control, the signing away of the public sector, the vanishing of labour, the replacing of an already rickety ‘democracy’ with a techno-capital placebo.
From an interview with Jürgen Habermas, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt Main, co-publisher of ‘Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik’, who has for years advanced a critical social theory that supports the cause of human emancipation. Interview by Michaël Foessel, published in Eurozine.
“… in our increasingly interdependent but still nationally fragmented world society, global financial capitalism, which has taken on a life of its own, still largely escapes the grip of politics. Behind democratic façades the political elites technocratically implement the imperatives of the markets almost without resistance. Trapped in their national perspectives, they have no other choice. Thus, they prefer to uncouple the political decision-making processes from the political public arenas, which are in any case dried out and whose infrastructure is crumbling. This colonialisation of societies, which disintegrate from within and take up right-wing populist positions against each other, will not change as long as no political power can be found with the courage to take up the cause of achieving the political aim of universalising interests beyond national frontiers.”
“Today, however, the increasingly high-pitched appeal by politicians to ‘our values’ sounds ever emptier – alone the confusion of ‘principles’, which require some kind of justification, with ‘values’, which are more or less attractive, irritates me beyond all measure. We can see our political institutions being robbed more and more of their democratic substance during the course of the technocratic adjustment to global market imperatives. Our capitalist democracies are about to shrink to mere façade democracies. These developments call for a scientifically informed enlightenment. But none of the pertinent scientific disciplines – neither economics nor political science or sociology – can, in and of themselves, provide this enlightenment. The diverse contributions of these disciplines have to be processed in the light of a critical self-understanding.”
The struggle for the soul of food
There is food. There is no food. There is no contradiction in there being food and not-food at the same time.
But the not-food is not ‘no food’, it is primary crop that has been passed to food industry, instead of directly to households, and in that industry it is converted into a raw material that is entirely different from the cereals, vegetables, pulses and fruit forms that we consider food and which farmers grow.
That conversion is the food industry, and the demands of that conversion include the use of ‘high-response’ crop varieties, livestock and aquatic breeds, enormous doses of synthetic agro-chemicals and the flattening of ecosystems.
The food industry makes plants grow by applying pesticides and herbicides that sterilise all other life, takes those grown plants and reduces them to components, re-mixes and alters those components, infuses them with deadly formulations of chemicals so that they withstand the treatment of the supply and retail chain, packages them and sells them as ‘food’. This is the not-food that a majority of households in countries now eat.
The industrial food model is predicated on waste, on a false economy of surplus production of commodities rather than on the basis of ecological sustainability, on a biological science that has hideously distorted the rhythms of life.
In the last few weeks, several incisive new reports describe the problems with the industrial food model, and I have drawn quotes from four here. These are not the first. But the conditions they now describe for an old malady are not what we have seen before.
There is a fifth, which I call a pseudo-report. It describes the problems differently, as if they were disconnected from the source of the problems which the other four reports correctly identify. The FAO State Of Food And Agriculture 2017 report refuses to acknowledge the macro-economic, corporate science and finance capital causes for the problems.
Here are the summaries, with links:
Whereas historically the organisations’ proposal for agrarian reform referred particularly to land distribution and to access to productive resources, such as credit, financing, support for marketing of products, amongst others, the integral or genuine agrarian reform is based on the defence and the reconstruction of territory as a whole, within the framework of Food Sovereignty. The broadening of the object of agrarian reform, from land to territory also broadens the concept of the agrarian reform itself.
“Therefore the contemporary proposal for integral agrarian reform does not only guarantee the democratisation of land, but also takes into consideration diverse aspects that allow families to have a decent life: water, the seas, mangroves and continental waters, seeds, biodiversity as
a whole, as well as market regulation and the end of land grabbing. Furthermore, it includes the strengthening of agro-ecological production as a form of production that is compatible with the cycles of nature and capable of halting climate change, maintaining biodiversity and reducing contamination.”
The Industrial Food Chain is a linear sequence of links running from production inputs to consumption outcomes. The first links in the Chain are crop and livestock genomics, followed by pesticides, veterinary medicines, fertilizers, and farm machinery. From there, the Chain moves on to transportation and storage, and then milling processing, and packaging. The final links in the Chain are wholesaling, retailing and ultimately delivery to homes or restaurants. In this text we use ‘industrial’ or ‘corporate’ to describe the Chain, and ‘commercial foods’ should undoubtedly be associated with the Chain. Just as peasants can’t be comprehended outside of their cultural and ecological context, the links in the Chain – from agro-inputs to food retailers – must be understood within the market economy. All the links in the Chain are connected within the financial and political system, including bankers, speculators, regulators and policymakers. The Chain controls the policy environment of the world’s most important resource – our food.”
– From ‘Who Will Feed Us? The Peasant Food Web vs The Industrial Food Chain’, ETC Group, 2017
A significant horizontal and vertical restructuring is underway across food systems. Rampant vertical integration is allowing companies to bring satellite data services, input provision, farm machinery and market information under one roof, transforming agriculture in the process. Mega-mergers come in the context of an already highly-consolidated agri-food industry, and are ushering in a series of structural shifts in food systems. Agrochemical companies are acquiring seed companies, paving the way for unprecedented consolidation of crop development pathways, and bringing control of farming inputs into fewer hands.
“The mineral-dependent and already highly concentrated fertilizer industry is seeking further integration on the back of industry overcapacity and a drop in prices; fertilizer firms are also moving to diversify and integrate their activities via hostile takeovers, joint ventures, and the buying and selling of of regional assets– with mixed results. Meanwhile, livestock and fish breeders, and animal pharmaceutical firms, are pursuing deeper integration with each other, and are fast becoming a one-stop shop for increasingly concentrated industrial livestock industry. Leading farm machinery companies – already possessing huge market shares – are looking to consolidate up- and down-stream, and are moving towards ownership of Big Data and artificial intelligence, furthering their control of farm-level genomic information and trending market data accessed through satellite imagery and robotics.”
Power — to achieve visibility, frame narratives, set the terms of debate, and influence policy — is at the heart of the food–health nexus. Powerful actors, including private sector, governments, donors, and others with influence, sit at the heart of the food–health nexus, generating narratives, imperatives, and power relations that help to obscure its social and environmental fallout. Prevailing solutions leave the root causes of poor health unaddressed and reinforce existing social-health inequalities.
“These solutions, premised on further industrialization of food systems, grant an increasingly central role to those with the technological capacity and economies of scale to generate data, assess risks, and deliver key health fixes (e.g., biofortification, highly traceable and biosecure supply chains). The role of industrial food and farming systems in driving health risks (e.g., by perpetuating poverty and climate change) is left unaddressed. As well, those most affected by the health impacts in food systems (e.g., small-scale farmers in the Global South) become increasingly marginal in diagnosing the problems and identifying the solutions.”
– From ‘Unravelling the Food–Health Nexus: Addressing practices, political economy, and power
relations to build healthier food systems’, The Global Alliance for the Future of Food and IPES-Food, 2017
a) Industrialization, the main driver of past transformations, is not occurring in most countries of sub-Saharan Africa and is lagging in South Asia. People exiting low-productivity agriculture are moving mostly into low-productivity informal services, usually in urban areas. The benefits of this transformation have been very modest.
b) In the decades ahead, sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, will face large increases in its youth population and the challenge of finding them jobs. Workers exiting agriculture and unable to find jobs in the local non-farm economy must seek employment elsewhere, leading to seasonal or permanent migration.
c) The world’s 500 million smallholder farmers risk being left behind in structural and rural transformations. Many small scale producers will have to adjust to ongoing changes in “downstream” food value chains, where large-scale processors and retailers, who are taking centre stage, use contracts to coordinate supply and set strict standards to guarantee food quality and safety. Those requirements can marginalize smallholder farmers who are unable to adjust.
d) Urbanization, population increases and income growth are driving strong demand for food at a time when agriculture faces unprecedented natural-resource constraints and climate change. These increases have implications for agriculture and food systems – they need to adapt significantly to become more productive and diversified, while coping with unprecedented climate change and natural resource constraints.”
Taxing knowledge and nature
The success of GST cannot come at a cultural cost to India. A well-informed tax system must widen the dialogue finance has with handicrafts and hand weaves. [This article has been published by The Pioneer, New Delhi.]
On 15 September, in a notification about the Central Goods and Services Tax (GST) Act 2017, the Central Board of Excise and Customs exempted “casual taxable persons making taxable supplies of handicraft goods” from requiring to be registered under the Act. The previous day, a similar exemption was given for the Integrated GST, and which concerns the inter-state supply of handicraft and handloom goods, a traffic that contributes a substantial livelihood to many crafts households.
There are a few conditions explained in the stilted language such notifications employ, such as value of sales, the need for craftspeople and artisans to obtain a Permanent Account Number (PAN) and fill out an e-way bill.
Yet these corrections to GST, made by the Ministry of Finance, are the first signals that the entreaties made to the Government of India by craftspeople and artisans are at last being heeded and responded to. They were made, and took shape in the form of a representation, titled “A plea for reconsidering GST rates for the crafts sector” and was submitted in July 2017 to the Prime Minister’s Office.
The reason this representation had been discussed, compiled and delivered was the ruinous effect on the handicrafts and handloom sector of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which came into force on 1 July 2017 under the slogan, “the single biggest tax reform in the history of the nation”. The representation to the PMO pointed out that this single biggest tax reform had been drafted, passed and was being implemented without a single consultation with the largest national number of craftspeople and artisans in the world.
The representation went on to explain that the GST consultations had not included or even recognised “the widespread existence of crafts people, practices and products based on centuries old histories and skills, which give India a unique place in the world and brings economic benefits to dispersed rural artisans”.
Handicrafts and hand weaves provides employment and livelihood which is, in terms of numbers, next only to agriculture (indeed the two are concomitant, being based on nature and the application of knowledge). While many crafts and artisanal products are seasonal, estimates are that over 110 lakh persons are so engaged, with more than 43 lakh in the handloom sector alone.
Click for a pdf file of this article (courtesy The Pioneer).
The GST crisis for handicrafts and hand weaves has shown that this sector is constantly on the defensive. It can only proceed by causing the recognition in economy that this sector (cultivation and its ‘arts and local manufactures’ included) does not produce only food, it also produces feed for animals, fuel (both traditional fuels and biofuels) and fibres and grasses and woods, the minerals and clays, the colours, for artisanal (and industrial) production, and that the maintenance of the bio-economy – that is the service of balancing our ecological habitats upon whose gifts we base our lives, a balancing brought about by the application of uncountable streams of local knowledge – is fundamental to the well being of the country’s peoples.
“One would assume that natural materials, organic cultivation, reduction of plastics and other synthetic materials, and recycling would figure in the Centre’s approach to policies across the board,” Jaya Jaitly has observed. As president of Dastkari Haat Samiti, the conceiver of Dilli Haat and the initiator of several of India’s most innovative programmes to return dignity and viability to craftspeople and artisans, her expectation of policy coherence is well warranted.
Both dignity and viability are important, and for as long as handicrafts and hand weaves were held in high esteem by the ruling administrations of ancient and medieval, colonial and independent India, both were assured. In the 1951 Census, the first of independent India, among the list of industries and occupations according to which the working population was described were herdsmen and shepherds, beekeepers, silkworm rearers, cultivators of lac, charcoal burners, collectors of cow dung, gatherers of sea weeds and water products, gur manufacture, toddy drawers, tailors and darners, potters and makers of earthenware, glass bangles and beads, basket makers.
The liberalisation and ‘market reform’ which swept through the country from the early 1990s brought with them a view of both macro- and local economics that became more distant from ‘arts and local manufactures’. India began to pay more attention to GDP and less to the meanings which handicraft and hand weaves represented. By the middle of the decade of the 2000s, biodiversity, carbon, ecosystem services, and even cultural services had begun to be discussed and considered. Terms and ideas such as ‘externality’ and ‘social costs’ began to be used to describe the changes to society and environment that were under way, visible but never acknowledged, which weakened and sickened both.
Such discussion rarely recalled quiet efforts that had been made in the same direction only a little earlier, such as in the report of the Steering Committee on Handlooms and Handicrafts for the Twelfth Plan, which had observed that “these two sectors constitute the only industry in the country that provide low cost, green livelihood opportunities to millions of families, supplementing incomes in seasons of agrarian distress, checking migration and preserving traditional economic relationships”.
‘Green livelihood’ made a quiet entry into planning vocabulary then. Now, ‘livelihood’ has been replaced with ‘economy’, which is quite a different idea, and the recent loud calls in favour of a ‘green economy’ for India have helped shelter a variety of very ungreen enterprises and practices. Perhaps in the notifications of 14 and 15 September we are seeing the first admission from the central government’s financial and planning authorities, that there is no need for a new ‘green economy’ (especially one based on expensive finance and fickle technologies) when we have had one for all the ages that we can enumerate.
The notifications are a worthy start, and I submit to the Ministry of Finance that these can and should lead it to consider anew how incentives and encouragements in the form of taxation instruments can do much to renew, revive and strengthen a ‘green economy’ that is the only genuinely grassroots activity India has and can have.
Some aspects that still require consultation and an extra-financial view are that crafts and weaves are not commodities and should not therefore be fitted by force into the Acts’ labyrinthine system of HSN codes, that the imposition of taxes higher than 5% on handicrafts and hand weaves discourages both sustainable production and consumption (at a time when such practices are gaining international currency), and that a well-informed system of taxation must include an understanding of the continuum of natural material, habitat, and the knowledge streams that use and transform nature’s materials into craft and fabric.
Shaktichakra, the wheel of energies 