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Beware! The MNC locusts are here
26 May 2007 - By Mira Kamdar - tehelka.com
India and the US are working out an agricultural deal
that seeks to entrench American corporations in India and promote
dangerous genetic manipulations
The Green Revolution that transformed Indian agriculture in the last
century was an American invention. It began in 1944 with a project
sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico. Dr Norman Borlaug,
a plant geneticist from Minnesota, was sponsored by the Foundation to
assist in breeding new plant hybrids that would boost yields of basic
food grains. The project was enormously successful: Mexico was
transformed from an importer of wheat to an exporter within a couple
of decades. In the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation helped bring the
Green Revolution to India, which was facing such severe food shortages
that there was fear of a major famine. The hybrid seeds developed in
Mexico were planted in Punjab, where yields soared.
In addition to the new hybrid seeds, the Green Revolution made heavy
use of new pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilisers and
irrigation techniques. However, it quickly became clear that the
organochlorine pesticides were harming crops more than
agricultural pests. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carlson’s Silent
Spring drew attention to the dangers of ddt, and helped launch the
worldwide movement against the chemical.
The cost of synthetic fertilisers has risen in tandem with that of
natural gas, increasing the cost of food production. Moreover,
pollution from these fertilisers in the form of nitrates is a serious
problem the world over. In the United States, where nitrogen
fertilisers are a key factor in the most productive agriculture in the
world, more public water supplies have been closed due to the
violation of drinking water standards from nitrate than from any other
contaminant. Without these fertilisers, the high yields of the
post-Green Revolution era would not be possible, yet they pose serious
risks and may permanently damage our environment, especially
our water. Too much water, delivered via irrigation, can be
environmentally harmful. Over-watering has negative impacts on soil
composition, especially in conjunction with the use of nitrogen
fertilisers where it increases the salinity of the soil. Farmers are
increasingly facing these problems in Punjab, where India’s Green
Revolution took off.
Dramatically increasing the production of food did not end hunger
in India. Though India claims food self sufficiency, more people
in India go hungry than in any other single country. At least 232
million people in India do not receive sufficient food. According to a
unicef report last year, 200 million children — one third of all the
malnourished children in the world — live in India. Nearly half of
India’s children, 47 percent, are severely underweight.
Last year, India could not meet its food grains need. The country
imported 2.2 million tons of wheat, including orders from American
giants Cargill, the world’s largest grain trading company, and Archer
Daniels Midlands. India’s strides in increased wheat production —
achieving about 70 million tons annually — cannot keep up with the
steady growth in population and swelling consumption. The diversion of
land by subsistence farmers from food crops to cash crops such as
cotton contributed to the problem, as did the reduction of land put to
cultivating traditional hardy and nutritious food grains such as jowar
(sorghum) and bajra (millet). The shortfall in wheat production caused
prices of wheat flour, the ingredient for India’s flatbread that is
the staff of life for hundreds of millions, to rise by 30 percent last
year.
A key component of the closer India–US relationship is a new
agricultural development initiative that President Bush hailed as “a
second Green Revolution” during his speech at Delhi’s historic Purana
Qila fort when he visited India last year. The initiative is called
the US-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative. Dr Norman Borlaug,
after winning a Nobel prize for his work on the first Green
Revolution, is participating in the new joint effort. The goals of the
agricultural initiative are listed as follows: (1) raise agricultural
productivity to promote food security (2) increase technology
transfer, including biotechnology (3) build a sound policy and
regulatory environment (4) expand trade and investment and promote
integration of India into the global economy (5) ensure a key role for
the US and Indian private sectors and (6) reinvigorate US-India
university partnerships.
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A core goal of the new Agricultural Knowledge
Initiative is to expand patentable intellectual property.
Its participants include
Masani Farm and ITC,
and Monsanto,
Archer Daniels Midland
and Wal-Mart. |
© Naorem Ashish |
On first glance, it seems odd to name an agricultural deal a
“knowledge initiative.” But a core goal of the agreement is to expand
patentable intellectual property. According to the Ministry of
Agriculture at the government of India’s website, the private sector
participants are Masani Farm and itc on the Indian side, and Monsanto,
Archer Daniels Midland, and, of all companies, Wal-Mart, on the
American side. Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland are already, as we
have seen, deeply involved in Indian agriculture. Wal-Mart has every
intention of being so the moment the Indian government changes the law
to let the company in. The Hindu newspaper reported last year that
“transgenic research,” meaning research on genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), “in crops, animals and fisheries would be a
substantial part of the collaboration in biotechnology.”
Reporting for the respected science journal Nature’s biotechnology
publication Nature Biotechnology, KS Jayaraman asserted: “What critics
resent most is the presence of Monsanto, the second largest gm
seed producer in the world, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest
retailer, on the board of the new
initiative.” The article goes on to quote Indian food policy analyst
Devinder Sharma on the role Indian universities are likely to play
with regard to Monsanto and Wal-Mart: “With them on the board, the US
multinationals are all set to determine the Indian agricultural
research agenda.”
The combination of India’s rich plant and animal genetic diversity, its
potentially large market, and its proven capacity as a research and
development centre, are all powerful attractions for US agribusiness
concerns. They can look forward to dramatically expanding the scope of
their intellectual property rights holdings, using Indian brain power
to help unlock new applications in biotechnology and transgenic
research, using Indian fields to test new transgenic products, and
then selling these products to Indian consumers, whether to Indian
farmers or to Indian retail customers.
I called up Suman Sahai of Genecamp in Delhi to ask her about her take
on the US-India agricultural deal. Genecamp is an ngo focused on
indigenous knowledge, biopiracy, community rights, and intellectual
property in agriculture. Suman has been very vocal in criticising the
deal, saying India will gain little and give away too much. “The
agricultural deal is pay-off for the nuclear deal. I see it very much
that way. It’s easy to understand why Monsanto needs India. There is a
huge amount of resistance to GMOs in Europe, Africa and Japan. Who are
they going to sell this stuff to? An agricultural giant like India is
hugely important for them,” she said.
In 2006, farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Texas and California sued Bayer Crop Science after an unapproved
genetically modified strain of rice it had developed entered the food
chain and contaminated the US rice crop. The modified rice
contains a protein dubbed Liberty Link
that allows it to resist herbicides used to kill weeds. After the
contamination was discovered, Japan banned imports of US rice and the
eu instituted testing requirements to ensure that rice coming from the
United States was not contaminated. This was a major blow to US rice
producers. No one knows the long-range potential effects of altered
plant or animal genes entering the food chain.
I asked Suman why the Indian government would give so much genetic capital
away to the United States. Suman would not take names, but she said
that influential policy-makers “have direct tie-ups to this”.
American companies aren’t the only ones favoured. Swiss biotech giant
Syngenta, for example, is working with the Vasantdada Sugar Institute
in Pune on genetically modified sugarcane. In general, “there has been
a huge buy-in at the top level of the Indian government on GMOs,”
Suman said.
“This has been packaged very cleverly by linking it to the Green
Revolution,” she said. “For Indians, the Green Revolution gave us our
sovereignty, it made us self-sufficient. To call this deal ‘a second
Green Revolution’ is very shrewd, but this is nothing like the Green
Revolution. All the knowledge generated by the Green Revolution was
public knowledge. This will all be private knowledge.
This is about intellectual property rights and monopoly
corporations extending the reach of what they own.”
Excerpted from Kamdar’s book Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing
Democracy is Changing the World (Scribner) |
