Where are Bharat’s local leafy greens in this chart?

Here is the list of the principal vegetables grown, according to the third advance estimates for 2013-14 (the agricultural year is July to June) for horticultural crops. The figures are from the usual source, the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture. The quantities are in million tons. Where’s the vegetable diversity? Where are the leafy greens? Are they included in that bland circle called ‘others’? The DAC won’t/can’t tell us.

This is an enlightening comment a reader of Resources Research. Neville said:

“We moved to Goa 5 years ago from California. First thing that shocked us was the (low) quality and diversity of greens and other vegetables here. Most farmers here have stopped growing due to the soaring price of land, so veggies are trucked in from Belgaum where there doesn’t seem to be any oversight or regulations. For example, we stopped buying spinach and other leafy greens as they reek of DDT 90% of the time. The average person doesn’t seem to notice / care. There is a healthcare crisis here in Goa – soaring rates of cancer and stroke and I am convinced it is due to the bad quality of food and the rampant burning of plastic waste. We now grow our own veggies or buy from small-time villagers. Sad state of affairs indeed.”

The numbers are: Beans 1.213; Bitter gourd 0.971; Bottle gourd 2.192; Brinjal 13.842; Cabbage 9.109; Capsicum 0.156; Carrot 1.19; Cauliflower 8.585; Cucumber 0.69; Muskmelon 0.702; Okra/Ladyfinger 6.461; Onion 19.769; Peas 4.165; Potato 44.306; Radish 2.561; Sitaphal/Pumpkin 0.356; Sweet Potato 1.126; Tapioca 7.778; Tomato 19.193; Watermelon 1.827; Others 21.953.

India’s 268,000 crore agri sales to a hungry world

In 2013-14 India exported agricultural products worth Rs 268,469 crore, according to data from the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation (Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India). Marine products, basmati rice and meat were the major export earners. This amount is equivalent to around 44.67 billion US dollars.

There are, as usual, problems with the data. The ‘meat and preparations’ category, the third biggest earner with Rs 27,247 crore, has no quantity figure. Nor does ‘paper/wood products’, the eighth biggest earner (Rs 12,529 crore). Nor do ‘miscellaneous processed items’ (Rs 6,882 crore) or ‘fresh vegetables’ (Rs 5,117 crore).

Here are the top earners by value for 2013-14: Marine Products (Rs 30,617 crore),  Rice Basmati (Rs 29,300 crore), Meat and Preparations (Rs 27,247 crore), Cotton Raw Incld. Waste (Rs 22,248 crore), Rice (Other Than Basmati) (Rs 17,493 crore), Oil Meals (Rs 17,034 crore), Spices (Rs 15,981 crore), Paper/Wood Products (Rs 12,529 crore), Guargam Meal (Rs 11,734 crore). These are the earners above Rs 10,000 crore.

Here are the major quantities exported in 2013-14, in thousands of tons: Rice (Other Than Basmati), 7,019; Oil Meals, 6,564; Wheat, 5,560; Other Cereals, 4,609; Rice Basmati, 3,757; Sugar, 2,460; Cotton Raw Incld. Waste, 1,941; Spices, 1,029; Marine Products, 999; Guargam Meal, 602; Castor Oil, 545; Groundnut, 512; Pulses, 343; Sesame Seeds, 257; Coffee, 254; Tea, 248; Tobacco Unmanufactured, 237; Mollases, 212; Cashew, 121.

Fewer cereals still for more rupees

The Labour Bureau of the Government of India has done us a most valuable service by disaggregating from the consumer price indices, separate indices for the individual items that a household typically buys, whether every day, periodically (weekly or monthly) and even annual purchases.

I have charted here the data for the cereal and cereal substitutes. This group consists of rice, wheat, maida (flour), suji (coarse wheat flour), bread, sewai (rice vermicelli), maize atta, wheat atta, tapioca, jowar, sago, ragi, bajra, maize, sattu (ground cereals) and the grouping of beaten or flattened rice (chira, muri, khoi, lawa (CMKL)).

The chart describes the movement – over 96 months from 2006 January to 2013 December – of the price indices (not the prices) for these foods. These are calculated as all-India prices using the consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW) and the base is 2001 = 100.

There are several significant findings from examining the movement of this group of price indices. (1) Over 2008, 2009 and 2010 the rise was steadily upward with a pronounced spike in some items that lasted from 2009 August to 2010 May. This is noteworthy as no spike is visible (for the group as a whole) during 2007-08 when there was a worldwide steep rise in the prices of foods.

(2) From around 2010 May, maida, maize atta, CMKL, bread, wheat atta, rice, wheat increased at a muted rate and even remained flat over short periods whereas other cereals and cereal substitutes rose steeply and/or showed volatility in their indices. (3) From 2012 June the price indices of all items in this group rose steadily and steeply – more steeply than at any time since 2006 January and have continued this accelerated pace until the end of the recorded period, 2013 December.

This is another excellent release into the public domain of valuable indicators by the Labour Bureau which help describe the relentless rise in the prices of food staples in India. As the Labour Bureau has shown, whether it is the consumer price indices it maintains or whether it is the individual goods and services necessary to maintain an acceptable minimum standard of living for the households engaged in agriculture, manufacture or which are dependent on self-employment, the so-called ‘India growth story’ that the ruling government and its supporters speak triumphantly about in fact imposes burdens on the working classes that have grown heavier every month.

India’s 259 million ton target

Self-sufficiency or price volatility? There are choices to be made for food cultivators in India. Illustration: Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation

Quietly, the Ministry of Agriculture has issued its first estimate for the crop year 2013-14. Food price inflation in every single state and union territory has been rising over the last four to five years, and with the furore over the WTO Ministerial Conference just over, and with promises to keep over the National Food Security Act, the big bottom-line should have been accompanied by a number of careful statements from ministries and departments concerned with cultivation and with the supply of food.

These would be the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, the Ministry of Agriculture itself, the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, the Ministry of Commerce (whose minister represented us at the WTO meeting), the Ministry of Rural Development (under which the gigantic rural employment guarantee programme now includes work on agriculture, and safeguards against leaching labour away from the fields when it is needed in those fields), and so on. But, we have a 259 million ton bottom-line number for the country for 2013-14 and there’s no elaboration of it whatsoever from any chamber of the government.

Here are the key numbers in million tons (with the first advance estimates, where given, in parentheses). Rice 105 (92.32), wheat 92.5, pulses (which is tur, gram, urad, moong, other rabi and kharif pulses) 19 (18.02), coarse cereals (which is jowar, bajra, maize, ragi, small millets, barley) 42.5 (43.99). To this I have added vegetables and fruit – these are for reasons I cannot fathom (but have suspicions about) still omitted from the targets and from the estimates; this happens four times a year, and they are released with a dullness and lethargy that belie the frantic scenes in the districts whenever a fair price shop is restocked. [You can get the xlsx file with the latest data here.]

Using averages of all-India production of vegetables and fruit for the last three years available (these are 2012-13, 2011-12 and 2010-11) I can supply what could serve as ‘targets’ for horticultural production as follows: vegetables 154.1 mt, fruit 76.3 mt. But, to hint at my suspicion, this is lucrative export produce and the government agency, the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), working in concert with the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, is responsible for converting our vegetables and fruit into produce shipped off in containers, or into raw material for India’s growing ‘food service’ industry (awful term, as if we needed yet another service to add to the inequitous burden of the info-tech and financial services) and the domestic organised retail trade (yes that means Walmart, Tesco, Auchan, Carrefour, Metro and who knows who else).

The organic foods divide in India

The recently-held Biofach India 2013 in Bengaluru – which is an annual meeting about and exhibition of organic producers and products – has helped confirm three disturbing trends concerning Indian organic produce.

These are:
(1) that the urban market for organic products is growing at a rapid pace and a ‘junior’ food retail system (junior as compared with established, large-scale food retail as a consumer goods sub-sector) devoted to these products is aggressively rounding up consumer interest and budgets;
(2) that under central government programmes to encourage and promote cultivation based on organic principles (like the Rashtriya Jaivik Kheti Pariyojana, or National Project on Organic Farming) state governments have administrative and budget capacities (even though small) to develop organic produce but these efforts are evolving into parallel, local-specific knowledge and practice networks; [update in response to the valuable comment below: the networks coming about is a good thing for the long term, but there is apparently less and less connection between the produce from these networks (if there is a surplus townspeople can buy) and the retail frontrunners in the organic foods business. If this separation continues along this path, organic foods and beverages will be an upper middle class consumable that bears no relation with the human-scale cultivation these networks locally are fostering.]
(3) that the connection between the organic farming family in the rural district and the consumer is being exploited in a sophisticated manner by a growing roster of new companies whose profit margins do not lead to higher or necessarily more secure incomes for the cultivating household. [Read the full article at Infochange India.]

A simple poster in Kannada about organic farming methods

The real destiny of most organic foods grown in India, processed and packaged by *Indian organic food traders (under third-party certification), and promoted abroad (particularly in Europe and North America) is as exports. The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), which is responsible for promoting food exports, said that India exported almost 70,000 tons of organic products, valued at around US$ 130 million (around Rs 715 crore) in 2010-11. This rose to 115,000 tons worth over US$ 360 million (around Rs 2,090 crore) for 2011-12. An APEDA statement quoted in the business press attributed the financial assistance it has given the organic foods export sector (about Rs 210 crore) as being responsible for this growth. Furthermore, APEDA has forecast that exports of organic foods and beverages from India could double by 2014.

At Biofach India 2013 (held during 2013 November 14 to 16), the pavilions of the major organic foods and beverages retailers – such as Phalada, Organic Tattva, 24 Mantra, Sanjeevani Organics, Amira Organic, Mother India Farms, Ecolife Organic and Morarka Organic – resembled those to be seen at a conventional food and agriculture industry exposition (like those routinely organised by major industry associations such as CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM). In contrast were the tables and small kiosks (at times no more than a pair of posters, a desk and two stools) of the state government-supported organic cultivation agencies – yet these were the ones that had brought cultivators to the fair, who were wandering the air-conditioned aisles astonished by the prices they read printed on the packets of the organic foods on display.

The rich list of shame

The billionaires by country are: USA (442), China (122), Russia (110), Germany (58), India (55), Brazil (46), Turkey (43), Hong Kong (39), United Kingdom (37), Canada (29), Taiwan (26), Indonesia (25), France (24), South Korea (24), Italy (23), Australia (22), Japan (22), Spain (20), Israel (17), Mexico (15), Chile (14), Sweden (14), Switzerland (13), Philippines (11), Malaysia (10), Peru (10), Singapore (10), Thailand (10), Ukraine (10), Austria (8), Saudi Arabia (8), Egypt (7), Denmark (6), Lebanon (6), Netherlands (6), Norway (6), South Africa (6), Argentina (5), Colombia (5), Ireland (5), Kazakhstan (5), Kuwait (5), Czech Republic (4), Poland (4), United Arab Emirates (4), Cyprus (3), Greece (3), Monaco (3), Morocco (3), New Zealand (3), Portugal (3), Venezuela (3), Belgium (2), Nigeria (2), Angola (1), Belize (1), Finland (1), Georgia (1), Guernsey (1), Nepal (1), Romania (1), St. Kitts and Nevis (1), Swaziland (1), Vietnam (1).

Here is the 2013 list of those who are publicly counted as the wealthiest in the world. These 1,426 people (and families) are responsible for a level of inequality no civilisation before ours has seen, they are the land grabbers and the glib champions of ‘reform and austerity’ that have over the last ten years impoverished tens of millions.

They sell guns and oil, and lend money at usurious rates. Their companies make rubbish electronics, pollute streams and rivers, leave toxic smears across the landscape, pay less than minimum wages to their workers, dodge labour law, bribe officials wherever they do business, write rubbish software, run third rate banks that make pawnshops look good.

They are responsible for overfishing, for mountaintop removal, for deforestation, for the GM crop and GM food that they turn into processed snacks that make us sick, to seek false cures in the vulpine hospitals they run so that their pharmaceuticals can be sold and ingested to further add to our cancerous woes. They are responsible for the insanity of over-consumption, their factories are assistants of climate change, their sales armies watch our every move, they want to buy our world though it is not for sale.

Not on this list: the many more whose personal fortunes may range from US$100 million to many billions but whose balance sheets are off limits to the maintainers of wealth indexes. Also not on this list: the thousands upon thousands of politicians great and small, in every single country and territory of the world, whose careers have in one way or another been shaped, influenced or otherwise fashioned by the ambitions of those on this list and those off it, but who have themselves amassed wealth so far beyond the civil servant’s (and public servant’s) wage as to be as good as incalculable, and who are partners with these giddy rich barons in every sordid capitalist enterprise that is dedicated to the aggrandisement of the very few at the grimy and toiling expense of the many.

This is the list that ought to shame our civilisation.

(Get a xlsx file of the full list here.]

The big money in India’s cities

Almost seven out of ten rupees banked in India are to be found in the top 100 centres. They account for 68.5% of the total bank deposits in India.

The concentration of the country’s bank deposits in India’s urban centres can be seen in this detail from a table I have assembled using data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

This is the quarterly series that the RBI puts out and is called ‘Quarterly Statistics on Deposits and Credit of Scheduled Commercial Banks’.

The intriguing table which forms the image is of the top 100 urban centres ranked by bank deposits, and arranged alphabetically, for the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013. The city names and total deposits (in crore rupees) are seen. This is the lower end of the table, and I have coloured ten cities to show how their deposits have changed over six years.

The rate of growth has been extremely steep. We have here Panaji, Patiala, Pune, Ranchi, Shillong, Thane, Thiruvananthapuram, Udaipur, Varanasi and Visakhapatnam for no reason other than their entries for all four years are visible. The patterns for the rest of the top 100 centres is generally the same.

For these ten cities, the average growth rate of their total bank deposits over these six years is 190%! This is most significant to us, especially considering the food inflation, the cost of cultivation, wage rates of agricultural labour and allied issues I write about in this diary. Have the wage rates for agricultural labour grown over these last six years at even one-third this average rate? Not at all.

From this small set of ten cities alone, the lowest rate of growth of total bank deposits is 88% (Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh) and the highest is 249% (Thane in Maharashtra).

The progression of the size of total deposits can be seen from Shillong (in Meghalaya) from Rs 2,577 crore in 2007 to Rs 8,311 crore in 2013 (which is dwarfed by the others). In Ranchi (Jharkhand) total bank deposits have grown from Rs 6,436 crore in 2007 to Rs 21,688 crore in 2013!

That is why the top 100 centres accounted for 68.5% of the total bank deposits in India – this is a ratio that has remained roughly the same for the last six years. In addition, as the ‘Quarterly Statistics’ has noted in its highlights, the top 100 centres also accounted for 76.9% of total bank credit.

And that is why it means little for central and state governments, and for businesses and NGOs and social entrepreneurships to talk about ‘financial inclusion’ when we have proof – quarter after quarter – of the persistence of financial inequality between India and Bharat.

Appraising World Food Day 2013

It must be difficult to be a senior official in the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN these days, especially if the official is above 40 years old and has spent the last two decades working “in the field” (which usually means away from some capital city somewhere, in discomfort that is amusingly relative to most of us proletarian toilers). For, I do think that there is still a majority of folk in the FAO who care about their work and the aims of the organisation, muddled though these get when 190-odd member states each bring their own version of reality (and ambition) into the proceedings.

More difficult it is nowadays in an FAO that is being shepherded more closely into the embrace of the OECD, the World Bank-International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation embrace, with its murmuring old boys’ clubs all shadowy in their suits, adept at facilitating the trade of political positions for corporate board seats. And more difficult it is nowadays in an FAO that is scrutinised every day by NGOs and civil society groups that have successfully ensured that negotiations called ‘multi-lateral’ must be open before public gaze and can no longer hide behind empty principles when hunger – FAO’s single problem – stalks the planet.

Perhaps that is one reason why the FAO has called this year’s World Food Day ‘Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition’ – and notice the addition of ‘nutirion’, there’s no getting away from the N-word these days, so loaded has it become. The theme, to borrow from the typically bland FAO pronouncement, “gives focus to World Food Day observances and helps increase understanding of problems and solutions in the drive to end hunger”. Well said, for the umpteenth time.

But there have been departures from the corporate script lately which are surprising. On 2013 October 04 the Director General of FAO, José Graziano da Silva, formalised a tie with La Via Campesina, recognising it as the most important voice of small food producers worldwide. This is seen by Campesina as “yet another welcome step in a series of ongoing reforms of the FAO, which have created a unique and unprecedented space to collaborate with civil society and democratize the arena of global food policy”. Easier wished for than done, as Campesina well knows, because the financiers and bankers, agri-commodity trading oligopolies and mafioso, the crooked politicians in the European Union and their willing partners in the ‘developing’ world are not going to quietly let this happen.

These reforms are aimed at giving the FAO not just more political legitimacy by becoming more inclusive, but also at reviving it as the cornerstone for international cooperation in the area of food security, starting to take such policy decisions out of the hands of the World Bank (WB) or the World Trade Organization (WTO.) While these developments are welcome, the global peasants’ movement remains realistic about the amount of energy that should be put into the UN, maintaining its greatest strength on the ground mobilizing farmers and building alternatives.

The IFPRI Global Hunger Index 2013 world map, blatantly patronising in its North-South exclusion. The white areas are not even in the map legend. They correspond to the OECD/’industrialised’ world, and the IFPRI/CGIAR view is that the chronic mis-nutrition of western societies has no place in a report on global hunger. Nor does this map consider the growing effects of working class poverty in the OECD countries.

In 2012, at the 39th session of FAO’s Committee on Food Security (CFS), the G20 approached the CFS and asked the Committee to agree with what it said on price volatility in agricultural commodities, which since 2007 has dragged tens of millions of households in South and North into hunger and debt. When that happened, and when a compromised CFS agreed, the civil society delegation to the session walked out. The NGOs, social movements, representatives of peasants’ federations and associations who were present had, on the contrary, demanded strong regulation of the commodity futures markets that fuel price volatility and the food insecurity of the poorest. But the G20 (and that means the investors in a global agribusiness industry) won that round.

With the help of the CGIAR, what for the sake of convenience we call the G20 will want to win every time. The CGIAR is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research which runs 15 centres around the world that are described as “independent, non-profit research organizations, innovating on behalf of poor people in developing countries” and as being “home to almost 10,000 scientists, researchers, technicians, and staff working to create a better future for the world’s poor”. The descriptions about ‘independent’, ‘non-profit’ and ‘for the poor’ are lies, as they have been for every single one of the 40 years of this plague called the CGIAR. But the CGIAR system is large, powerful, almost invisible and little understood except by those in agricultural research systems (such as those in the Indian Council of Agricultural Research) in ‘developing’ countries.

And that is why the release, a few days ago, of the ‘Global Hunger Index’ 2013 needs to be interpreted for what it is, because it is the product of one of the CGIAR centres, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The annual index offers a ranking of hunger, or food insecurity/security for many countries but not all (see the image of the map and its caption). The IFPRI functions worldwide as a motivated think-tank that commissions carefully scripted research to fulfil pre-determined outputs that serve the interests of those who profit from the industrial agricultural system and retail food system.

That such an obvious fifth column finds residence and a willing ear in India ought to be a matter of shame to us. Here is a small example why. The IFPRI, in the 2013 Global Hunger Index, has distributed its ‘recommendations’ which are from the typical neo-liberal charter of subjugation of the working classes and the denial of choice, all camouflagued by whichever development jargon is found to be currently in vogue.

The cover of the Global Hunger Index 2013 report. Read the recommendations to grasp why this has been released, ignore the data.

Hence “broader policy coherence for development is also a key requirement for efforts to strengthen resilience. Policies that undermine resilience must be revised. To foster resilience to undernutrition, policies should be designed with the intention of improving nutrition outcomes and realising the right to adequate food” in fact means – do away with policies that still see a role for the state and the public sector, hide this behind trendy concepts like ‘resilience’ and ‘right to food’, but include nutrition (which I mentioned earlier) because that is the route the MNCs have successfully used.

Hence “encourage and facilitate a multisectoral approach to resilience (as the Scaling Up Nutrition movement encourages a multisectoral approach to nutrition, for example), coordinating plans and programs across line ministries” in fact means – phase out your thinking and replace it with ours, which comes with a United Nations endorsement and which places private business at the centre of policy and its implementation.

Hence “adjust policies and strategies that undermine the resilience of poor and vulnerable groups, such as the low import tariffs or the structural neglect of smallholder agriculture in Haiti” in fact means – remove barriers to food imports, stop subsidies and subventions that the poor, marginalised and vulnerable have a right to in your country (consider the ruckus the World Trade Organisation has been making about India’s new National Food Security Act) and spout righteous claptrap about ‘neglect’.

Hence “ensure that policies and programs draw on a wide range of expertise such as collaborative, multiagency, and multisectoral problem analysis. National governments should support the emergence of multistakeholder platforms and make active use of such forums” in fact means – the expertise will be foreign and provided by the CGIAR and its numerous allies in all garbs, these ‘multi’ platforms will be public showcases to conceal an agenda already set.

[The full IFPRI Global Hunger Index 2013 report is here. The ‘issue brief is here’ for those who want a condensed dose of dangerous neo-liberal vitamins. And the obligatory data set used to support the well-set arguments is here.]

There is no comparison between the IFPRI propaganda and the annual report of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2013, the sixth edition of which was released in 2014 October. The Watch identifies a number of policies that generate hunger and malnutrition instead of reducing them. The Watch insists on the need for meaningful participation – at every level – of people and communities in the development of those public policies which affect their lives.

You will find here national case studies and analysis that show (1) policies that foster violence and discrimination against women with regard to equal access to natural resources, inheritances, equal wages and political decision-making, (2) policies that systematically limit and exclude large groups, including peasants, agricultural workers, fisherfolks, pastoralists and indigenous peoples from participating in those decisions that affect their very livelihoods and (3) policies on a global level that facilitate land grabbing, concentrated ownership of natural resources and the commodification of public goods that deprive smallholders and other people of their food resources.

Finally some good news from the IMF

The Dalai Lama at the IMF? Not at all, but we think he would like the IMF’s new de-growth manifesto and would be delighted if all macro-economists turned vegetarian. Photo: Courtesy the official website of His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet <http://www.dalailama.com/&gt;

The first signs of the long-awaited change in thinking at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can now be seen in the World Economic Outlook report. This routine blatherfest, which is issued by the IMF’s slick-but-barmy public relations department, is unremarkable on every occasion and the only reason you’d want to punish yourself by plodding through the 500-odd pages of this ode to deforestation is to admire the very latest chic for presenting boring graphs and charts. But this time, it’s as if a Buddhist rinpoche has edited the manuscript.

What’s changed and why? For the year 2013 the IMF has said that ‘global output’ (output of what, you may well ask, but do hold your horses) to expand 2.9% instead of the 3.1% it had, in an unsporting manner, forecast this July. Between that monsoon month and this one some heads must’ve rolled at the IMF (many more to follow suit I hope) because now the IMF has taken a firm long stride towards its manifest destiny: bringing about the no-growth economy.

However, some die-hard lumpens are still doing their best to rally growth insurrectionists to their tattered flag. They are still making announcements like “our analysis attributes the slowdown in part to cyclical forces, including softer external demand and in part to structural bottlenecks” and are wondering why “this has happened in spite of supportive domestic macroeconomic policies, (still) favorable terms of trade, and easy financing conditions, which only began to tighten recently” but confess to being bemused by “a non-trivial portion of the slowdown remains unexplained, suggesting that other factors common to emerging markets are at play”.

Not to worry, these radical elements will soon be overwhelmed, rounded up, their iPads and Nasdaq terminals will be confiscated and they will be issued the standard entry level rations of organically grown tulsi tea, second-hand kolhapuri sandals (‘chappals‘ to the initiated) and Indian khadi kurtas.

All you ever wanted to know about excel charts but were afraid to ask. I have suggested to our IMF comrades that they rename the ‘current slowdown’ bubble ‘the fish’n’chips crisis’.

Nonetheless, I will be the first to admit that their ideologues present quite a different challenge. You can see for yourself how difficult it is going to be to dislodge some of the rebel ideologues from an IMF that has already, in rank and file, enthusiastically redefined odious growth to in fact mean none at all. This soporific video will help you judge. I couldn’t get beyond 00:07 of the footage before falling over with acute narcosis, but perhaps you are made of sterner stuff.

Likewise, one of the leading rebel subcomandantes is broadcasting a steady tattoo of counter-revolutionary propaganda. She has been recorded as saying “changing global growth constellations have exacerbated risks in emerging market economies” and that “monetary policy accommodation combined with domestic vulnerabilities in emerging market economies may lead to further market adjustment globally” and even threatening “risks of asset price overshooting or even balance of payments disruptions”.

It is only a matter of time before this resistance is overcome. Meanwhile, I would be remiss in my duties as a degrowth advocate along the inspiring lines now redrawn by IMF if I did not remind these recalcitrants that Chairman Mao had said “A revolution is not a dinner partyy” or that Muammar Gaddafi had written (the Green Book, naturally) that “Mandatory education is a coercive education that suppresses freedom. To impose specific teaching materials is a dictatorial act” and that General Vo Nguyen Giap had when confronting the enemy firmly said “Their morale is lower than the grass”.

Finally, intelligence reports just in have confirmed that the conclusion of the IMF’s revolutionary new no-growth tract, which reads “a new round of structural reforms is a must for many emerging market economies, including investment in infrastructure, to reignite potential growth” is in fact a printer’s devil.

A tiring tale from the FAO that again ignores the global food industry

Cheap processed food advertised in Chengdu, P R China.

Why has the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) not stated what has become painfully obvious to households the world over – that the macro-economics which determines everything from what farmers grow and what city workers pay for food is utterly out of control?

This silence is why FAO’s ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013’ – with its updated estimates of undernourishment and its diplomatic paragraphs about progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets – remains conceptually crippled.

The roles of the food industry, its financiers, its commodities satraps, the marketers and their fixers in government, the networks that link legislators and food business investors in countries with growing processed foods businesses, all these shape food security at the community and household level. Yet none of these are considered critically by an FAO report that ought to be thoroughly non-partisan on the matter.

The FAO ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013’ (condensed to SOFI 2013) has said that “further progress has been made towards the 2015 MDG target, which remains within reach for the developing regions as a whole, although marked differences across regions persist and considerable and immediate additional efforts will be needed”.

How many more food insecurity indicators are needed to tell governments what their working class households already know? The table of SOFI 2013 indicators.

In the first place, let’s consider the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target concerning hunger. This is to halve the proportion of hungry people in the total population. There is also the World Food Summit (WFS) target, which is to halve the number of hungry people. Both have 2015 as the target year. However, any hunger has no place in a world that today produces more than enough food to adequately feed every elder, child, woman and man.

But there is another aspect, and this is: who does the FAO think is paying attention to ‘global’ targets and placing these targets above any local needs or ambitions? Just as the MDGs are scarcely known and recognised outside the enormous development industry which perpetuates a growing mountain of studies and reports on the MDGs, nor are ‘global’ hunger reduction targets. When alleged leaders of the world gather together in the United Nations General Assemblies and other grand international fora and ask (in a tiresome and repetitive way) how we are going to feed 9 billion people, no individual smallholder farmer listens, because growing and feeding is done locally, and therefore ‘targets’ are also local, just as food insecurity or security is local.

This is why the SOFI 2013 approach – which is to say that “the estimated number of undernourished people has continued to decrease [but] the rate of progress appears insufficient to reach international goals for hunger reduction” – is utterly out of place and does not in any way reflect the numerous variety of problems concerning the provision of food, nor does it reflect the equally numerous variety of local approaches to fulfilling food provisioning.

Next, it is way past high time that FAO and the UN system in general jettison the “developing regions” label. It has no meaning and is an unacceptable legacy of the colonial view. Besides, as I point out a little later, food inadequacy (including insecurity and outright poverty) is becoming more and not less prevalent in the so-called developed regions. And moreover, I object to “considerable and immediate additional efforts will be needed” to reverse food insecurity, as the SOFI recommends, because this is the green signal to the global industrial agri-food industry to ram through its destructive prescriptions in the name of additional efforts.

SOFI 2013 also “presents a broader suite of indicators that aim to capture the multi-dimensional nature of food insecurity, its determinants and outcomes”. Once again, it is way past high time that the FAO ceased encouraging a proliferation of indicators of every description (and then some) that do next to nothing to ensure low external input and organic agriculture supported by communities and local in scale and scope, and in which the saving of seed and the preservation of crop and plant diversity is enshrined. There is not one – not a single indicator from FAO (and not one from any of its major partners, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – for this need that is at the core of the myriad wonderful expressions of human civilisation.

Oxfam has made graphic the growing poverty in the European Union.

SOFI 2013 also said that “recent global and national food consumer price indices suggest that changes in consumer prices were generally much more muted than those recorded by international price indices, often influenced by greatly increased speculation in spot, futures and options markets”. This unfortunately is completely untrue, for even FAO’s own database on national consumer price indexes (supplied by FAO member countries themselves) suggests that the CPI follows international price indices (this blog has pointed out the correlation a number of times in the last two years). And it is the same macro-economics that rewards speculators in “in spot, futures and options markets” which also deepens food insecurity every year.

Now, to return to the question of who is “developing” and who is not. The European Union (28 countries) has a population of 503 million (the early 2012 estimate). The USA has a population of 313 million (mid-2012 estimate). How large a group in both the European Union and the USA are hovering around the poverty lines, or who are plain poor, and who cannot afford to buy enough food for themselves?

In a report released in September 2013, the Oxfam aid agency warned that the poverty trap in Europe, which already encompasses more than 120 million people, could swell by an additional 25 million with austerity policies continuing. The report, ‘A cautionary tale: Europe’s bitter crisis of austerity and inequality’, said that one in two working families has been directly affected by the loss of jobs or reduction of working hours.

The food insecurity problem has been growing in the non-“developing” world just as fast as it has been growing in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, south-east Asia and other “developing” regions that the FAO’s flagship reports habitually places in the foreground. In early 2012 news reports in European Union countries were mentioning regularly how “ever more people are threatened with poverty”. The European Commission’s office for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion said so too: “Household incomes have declined and the risk of poverty or exclusion is constantly growing.”

Across the Atlantic, a US Census Bureau report released in September 2013 titled ‘Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012’, poverty was found to be “at a near-generation high of 15 percent, close to the high point since the 1965 War on Poverty, the 15.2 percent rate reached in 1983”. This report found that 46.5 million USA ctitzens (about 9.5 million families) live in poverty and that some 20.4 million people live on an income less than half of the official poverty line of the USA.

FAO’s ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013’ will with its present methods, outlook and biases be useful neither to cultivating communities growing the food we eat, nor to administrators in districts and provinces who must plan and budget to encourage local action that brings about food security, nor to the member countries of the United Nations if it continues to ignore the very large and growing numbers of the poor in the European Union and USA – 170 million poor people, and therefore food insecure, is a population that is considerably larger than that of any country in sub-Saharan Africa which inevitably figures in these reports.

Here are the materials for FAO’s ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013’: The FAO news story. A frequently asked questions document. The FAO page on State of Food Insecurity 2013. The executive summary. The full pdf file and chapters. The e-book. The food security indicators data.