INDIA. Man does not live by ICT alone

During the rise of the Indian economy, the agricultural sector has been grossly neglected. Today this failure is being paid for heavily. A change in eating habits, a growing population and a decreasing farming area means that India is facing a serious food crisis, at a moment when the world food prices are increasing dramatically. The food crisis could become the Achilles heel of the Indian growth model.
It is Sunday and New Year for the tribal people in Orissa, however in the building of NGO Living Farms little can be noticed about these festivities.  The present staff suffers more from the unbearable heat than from actual working on that day.  During the past ten years, the forest around the capital Bhubaneswar had to make place for more tar roads, new living areas and the expansion of the airport. 
‘The disappearance of the forest leads to these unbearable temperatures’, claims Debjeet Sarangi of Living Farms.  The forest and coolness are no the only things to have disappeared.  Sarangi: “Orissa is the birthplace of rice.  In the past, India knew 70 000 to 80 000 different rice varieties.  That amount has decreased dramatically.  We used to have 46 different kinds of millet, which is important because millet is drought resistant and Orissa is dependent on rainfall for its agriculture.  Today there are only twelve varieties left.’  According to Debjeet Sarangi this evolution is linked to government programs that encourage farmers to use hybrid seeds and fertiliser.  For most farmers, the purchase of those seeds and other supplies  is expensive, while the harvest is not at all guaranteed because the seeds are not suitable for the region.
Today especially the food production is in danger because of the competition coming from crop exports and biofuel.  An area of 20,000 hectares will soon be planted with jatropha  for biofuels.  There are plans for planting a total of twelve million hectares of jatropha by 2017.  Also the use of genetically modified cotton is on the increase.  In Orissa this year, two million hectares will be planted with the bt-cotton, a genetically modified variety from Monsanto. 
Sarangi: ‘The suicides we knew in the past, were mainly of farmers who planted bt-cotton and whose harvest failed.  How will we feed our children if the cotton harvest fails?  The government and the planners all say: “The market will feed you.”  But India is more then Mumbai or Delhi.  Go to the slums and the rural areas and look for yourself: is India shining or is India crying?’

Third World Power


Two thirds of the Indian population lives in rural areas and sixty percent of the Indian people are immediately dependent on agriculture.  But the sector doesn’t thrive.  In the years 1992-1997, agricultural production grew 4.7 percent but between the years 2002-2006 it has decreased to around 1.5 percent.  The harvests in the regions of Punjab and Haryana – the main granaries of wheat, rice and milk – have had their best days.  Suicides of farmers who worked themselves into huge debt have become a plague and more and more people leave the rural areas. 
India faces a growing gap between supply and demand in food supply, which means that today the ration of the average Indian is lower then fifteen years ago.  Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen states that the degree of malnutrition in India is even higher than in Africa.  While ten percent of the rich Indians who live in cities eat more meat and take on a Western feeding pattern, almost three hundred million Indian people live on less then twelve rupees (twenty Euro cents) a day.  India is ready for a second Green Revolution, but one of a different kind than the first.

The price of modernisation


Between 1990 and 2006,  a lot of land in Orissa has been consumed by the economical boom, claims Sanjoy Patnaik of the Regional Centre for Development Cooperation.  The area used by individual farmers in Orissa has shrunk by ten percent in that period,  The collective ground used for livestock grazing and other uses went from eight million hectares to four million and also the area of open land halved to three million hectares.  The land has been taken up by infrastructure, mining, industry, and Special Economic Zones of industrial zones. 
According to the Land Reform Act of Orissa of 1960, farm land cannot be changed into non-farming land but in 2007 the government has changed section 8A of that law, what enables a change of designation of land subject to payment.  This measure, according to Sanjoy Patnaik, is a conscious strategy aimed at stimulating farmers in difficulties to sell their land.  There are also a lot of farmers who cede their land to large companies for contract farming or lease out their land for cultivation of a crop such as jatropha.  In that case the production changes, not the designation; it stays farming land. 
‘The neo-liberal process was presented to us as a success story on every level’, concludes Patnaik.  ‘Now, fifteen years later, we can see that only a small group benefits and that the model was not suited to help the poor forward.  There are no social programs provided to help all those farmers who didn’t benefit.  And the institutions that are responsible for the distribution of wealth, have failed to achieve this.  It is a failure of the government, that doesn’t feel the pulse of the rural areas.  There is no doubt that Orissa needs to industrialise, and preferably in a very short time.  However the population asks that their needs are listened to and taken into account.  Instead, they hear that this is the price of modernisation.’

More and more people, less and less food


Due to the hunger for land of the economic model between 1990 and 2006, the area of planted land has decreased by one million hectares.  The population in the rural areas has increased.  While in 1980, one hectare of land provided the livelihood of 1.5 people, now this has to be sufficient for four people. 
India is the world’s largest producer of mangos, bananas, milk, milk products, coconuts, cashew nuts, lychees, papayas, pomegranates, black pepper, tumeric and ginger.  It is the second largest producer of rice, wheat, sugar, and ground nuts.  But for grains, rice and pod fruits, the production per hectare is way below the output of countries like China, France and the US. 
In India over the past ten years the production of grain has only grown by 0.48 percent, much less then the population.  For many years, the intensive agriculture in Punjab and Haryana provided full granaries, but now that time is over:  the ground is exhausted and the level of groundwater has decreased to an alarming level.  Over the past two decades the share of agriculture in the GDP has constantly decreased and today it is only twenty percent. 
The result is that in 2005 India produced 186 kg of food per person, while in 1995 that was 205 kg.  Until about ten years ago, India was self-sufficient for its food but today that situation has structurally been reversed. Over the past years India has had to systematically import grains and oil.  Also now, in reaction to the food riots in several cities, the government decided to import wheat in order to prevent further price increases. 

No development without agriculture


Deepak Mishra is professor at the faculty of agriculture of the Nehru University in New Delhi.  He emphasises the importance of the Green Revolution for the current economic boom.  ‘Without the farming revolution of the sixties and seventies, it would have never been possible for India to make such a jump forwards.’  According to Mishra, the huge mistake of the neo-liberal policies of the nineties can be found in the fact that there was no investment in agriculture.  ‘Economists and policy-makers believed in the market guided growth model and assumed that the growth in the agricultural sector would follow automatically.  That had a counter productive impact.’ 
In several domains the protective measures for agriculture were taken away and free market access for feeding grains was given to the private sector.  For some of the products, the prices of the local markets were a lot higher than the world market price but because of the liberalisation of the market, products became available against which Indian farmers couldn’t compete.  The wheat harvest is guaranteed to be bought by the state; however at a much lower price than the world market. That’s why farmers prefer selling their wheat to private buyers, however this leads to the necessity of the state to buy expensive wheat from Monsanto.
Also, in the nineties,  the institutional credit flow towards small scale farmers decreased.  This led to farmers borrowing from private moneylenders at high rates, or directly from those multinationals who provide the seed, fertiliser and pesticides, or from the buyer to whom they sell their crop.  This means a complete dependence on those moneylenders.  For a lot of people, farming became an impossible profession, having high costs and less credit possibilities, getting low wages compared to their investment and facing more and more difficulties due to soil exhaustion and water shortages.
Over the past ten years, 150 000 farmers committed suicide in India.  M.S. Swaminathan, the scientific father of the Green Revolution and now director of the National Commission on Farmers comments: ‘Those suicides are a manifestation of deep rooted structural problems in agriculture.  These problems are economical, social and ecological.’ 
Also according to Deepak Mishra this is all about a structural crisis: ‘We all failed to adequately acknowledge the importance of agriculture.  On top of that we blame the crisis on the backwardness of agriculture:  too little modern technology, too little market access.  However that is not the problem.  If one looks at the geography of the crisis, one can see that the crisis seems to be worst for those farmers who answered the call of the market and so grew cotton or other export products.’

Green Revolution, part two


In order to ask for attention to the problems in rural areas and to put pressure on the government, more then 25 000 small-scale and landless farmers marched by foot towards the capital in October last year.  In response, the government decided to forgive the debt in March for farmers with less than two hectares of land.  A lot of people saw this offer as mainly a populist measure due to the upcoming elections of Spring 2009.  The impact of this measure will be relative because most of the farmers have loans from private moneylenders and not from the state. 
Nevertheless, the government acknowledges the importance of the problem.  In order to do something about the stagnating production, last year the government set up the National Food Security Mission.  Its aim is to increase the grain production by twenty million ton in the course of the coming four years.  ‘This will only work if it is linked to a holistic view.’ according to Swaminathan, who draws lessons from the Green revolution. 
‘India needs a second Green Revolution that increases the productivity of agriculture, but based on a different concept’,  thinks Richard Mahapatra of the Centre for Science and Environment.  ‘We have to use a development model that really takes people out of poverty.  This is not only a technical problem or an issue of increased productivity.  The agriculture that will feed India in the future, will be the agriculture of regions who are dependent on monsoons and this implies a completely different and decentralised water policy.  Such a switch in the agricultural policy is a matter of political choices.’
It seems that this alternative way of perceiving the issue, also finds its way into government circles.  At least, the words of Prime minister Manmohan Singh at the Global Agri-Industries Forum of April in Delhi, seem to make this clear.  Singh: ‘All efforts to liberalise our economy any further, could fail because of the threat of the current food shortages and price increases.  The non-agricultural sector can not possibly flourish on the back of an impoverished agricultural sector.  We need creative solutions which stimulate the productivity in agriculture, increase the food production and the income of the farmers and at the same time provide a bigger purchasing power for the poor.’ 
It is remarkable that, as a result of the worldwide food crisis, India is the first country to forbid speculation on grain prices.  At this moment the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN is checking whether this kind of measure is legally correct. In every way it is clear that the Indian government is conscious about the seriousness of the problem.

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