:: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 ::

Bittersweet:

Samir, a physically challenged boy, looks at boys playing in the waves after heavy rains in Bombay, India, Saturday, June 29, 2002. Heavy rains have killed at least 64 people since last Saturday and have badly disrupted rail communications in India's western state of Maharashtra. (A P Photo/Rash Nitride)

:: Vikash Yadav 10:41 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Biotechnology and Agriculture in India

Vikash, I would like to clarify that I am not suggesting a direct link between the occurrence of peasant suicides and the introduction of transgenic crops. The chronology alone would not support such an assertion as almost all transgenic crops such as bt. cotton are only being field tested and have not been distributed on a commercial scale (though there has been illegal use of these crops in certain areas such as Gujarat) therefore it would be untenable to claim a direct link. I would like to explore a broader link between the introduction of modern productionist techniques in agriculture and the penetration of new forms of capital into the countryside. While the plight especially of poor and small peasants and farmers is to be critically understood and ameliorated, I would like to point out that they are by no means at the bottom of the rural or economic hierarchy. In a technical sense such groups still have some access to assets such as land and a level of security unlike the landless labourers, migrant workers and tribals who are the real marginalised and are at the very bottom of economic society or outside it in the case of many tribal communities. On a political level this shows the internal contradiction in peasant society – didn’t Lenin say that the peasant has two souls that of a producer but that of a capitalist as well: this reveals the dual nature of the small as well as the middling and large peasants while they are all exploited to varying degrees they have a stake in the economic system unlike the agricultural proletariat and the marginalised groups therefore while on the one hand they will mobilise for reform and redistribution they concerns will be sectional and their aims limited. Rising prosperity and a concession of their demands will be enough to satisfy them – needless to say this will not address the situation of the agricultural proletariat or the other marginalised groups (a similar story can be told of the mobilisation of the Backward castes and the Dalits) we need to make a difference between those mobilisations and groups which want to improve their standing within the system and those which seek to change the system altogether. However, I will turn to some of the points of concern you have raised. We should avoid any simple Manichean divide that polarises the debate into two simple sides – let me complicate the narrative a little:

The Debate within India:

The oppositional discourse in India has been constructed in terms of threats – of dominance by Multinational corporations, threats to nature by biological pollution and to farmers in the form of bondage to monopoly seed corporations. Biodiversity is pitted against biological reductionism; swadeshi against reliance on market forces and safety over risk. One of the most prominent critics of GM Vandana Shiva has explicitly compared the seed to the spinning wheel; seeds are also constructed as carriers of the many virtues of a disappearing peasant society. There is an attempt to code seeds with notions of cyclical renewal and regeneration. The link between the “terminator seeds” (so named as they permitted the engineering of seeds to produce plants that could reproduce, forcing farmers to buy new seeds at the start of the new season) renamed as suicide seeds and then the rash of farmer suicides was linked to the suicide seeds (incorrectly). The powerful dramaturgy put forward in the collective name of farmers came up against its own problems.

The Gene Revolution:

The neo-Malthusian logic of the proponents of GM technology has been supported by various international development organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The argument is that the increases in yields gained by the Green Revolution is levelling off as the population continues to rise. The ecological effects of energy intensive yield increases are destructive, threatening ecological health and future production. The Green Revolution path is seen as unsustainable, and future yield are seen in re-engineering the gene structure of plants. Re-engineering plants through traditional breeding techniques is claimed to be both time intensive and inefficient as many traits are transferred in each breeding cycle not just those desirable for the task at hand – there is a certain amount of genetic roulette involved in traditional breeding.

In 1996 the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds company (Mahyco) obtained permission to import and test genetically altered seeds obtained from Monsanto (it was thought that Monsanto had actually taken over Mahyco, but Indian foreign investment rules would not allow this and the actual stake of Monsanto was 26%, though how much pressure Monsanto can exert behind the scenes is debatable). This was bt. cotton which is already used in the US, South Africa and China where it has allowed farmers to reduce pesticide usage. As cotton is a crop especially vulnerable to pests it is amongst the most sprayed crops in the world. In India it is estimate that about 50%-80% of all pesticides used are sprayed on cotton. There is also a pesticide treadmill where more and more pesticides are required for less and less effect as pests acquire immunity. There is also an enormous social cost to pesticide use as it leads to contamination of farm workers, soil and water as well as destr4cution of non-target insects, birds and aquatic life. Mahyco obtained the seeds from Monsanto, and received permission for field trials throughout the country on five different agricultural crops –interestingly it was only bt. cotton that sparked the protests.

The Resistance from Below:

The core of the organised resistance to GM crops came from the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) founded in 1980 the organisations original mission was to mobilise farmers around the traditional issues of: debts, taxes, subsides inputs and procurement prices. Like many farmers’ organisations in India it was led primarily by rich, surplus farmers with the formal leader being a Professor of Law Nanjundanswamy. The KRRS was explicit in claiming that it was resisting the foreign domination of the seeds of the farmers and thus of India as well as the unnatural nature of Monsanto’s terminator technology. The terminator technology and the evocative image of suicide seeds were an excellent rhetorical move behind garnering support for the KRRS – this ignores the fact that the terminator technology was not commercialised due in part to resistance from international agencies such as the President of the Rockefeller foundation Gordon Conway).

D.R. Nagaraj in his “Anxious Hindu and the angry farmer” has an excellent analysis of the response by the anti-GM movement to the introduction of this technology. The intertwining of religion with the farmers’ discourse is not accidental as much of the resistance was couched in highly charged religious terms and imagery. Nagaraj notes that for many globalisation is both threatening and puzzling. As a result one feels helpless and protest becomes more difficult – one needs a style of protest in a Mcluhanese world where the issue is more than the issue. This accounts for the picking of an object of protest, which has wider resonances and carries out an action, which disguises ones ambivalence to it. Nagaraj remarks that like the sorcerer one “creates a new straw dummy of the enemy and sticks needles into it. The symbol is hurt hoping it will pierce the real as well”. Nagaraj notes that the KRSS assault on a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet had this quality about it.

January 30th, 1996 was the 48th anniversary of Gandhi’s martyrdom. On this day the farmers’ movement in Karnataka led an assault in the KFC outlet in Bangalore. The attack was carried out in classical Gandhian fashion – customers were politely asked to leave the place, the cashier was told to collect his money and lock the safe before the ransacking of the store is begun. This Gandhian attention to avoid violence against people and respect for property rights is extremely important in understanding the character of the movement as it shows the both the strengths and limitations of such actions. Nagaraj raises an intriguing reply to the query why chicken? Why KFC? Globalisation he argues is “a mystical experience derived from everyday objects. Junk foods, toilet items, clothes, music, condoms, credit card” are all familiar vehicles in the rituals of globalisation. Globalisation destroys the familiarity of everyday objects and worse threatens the traditional technological forms that make them. Traditional technology is no longer respectable and replicable in a global context. This covers food crops, local species of crops or animals. The various anti-globalisation movements are eager to protest the difference such changes impose and these differences are “located in the everyday details of daily life, which are vulnerable to the violence of the changing modes of production and consumption imposed from above.”

The Battle Commences:

The rhetorical narratives of Monsanto and KRRS are brilliant foils to each other. Cotton, bollworm and farmer suicides are fused in the public imagination. The protests have strong Gandhian and Socialist overtones (interesting that the richer farmers once seen as a primary obstacle to the implementation of proper socialism are now one of its last defenders). The state is caught in the middle of these protests not willing to antagonise the “kisan” but also vulnerable to the pressures of international capital and corporations. The advisor to the Union government’s department of biotechnology who was responsible for granting permission for cotton trials stated, “there was no reason to deny permission”. Smarting from assaults in the media he said “Activists should at least get their facts before going to town. If we are accused of working in secrecy, what are they doing? Creating panic without a cause?”

Not that the contrast should be one of raucous protest and scientific misunderstanding on the one hand and corporate professionalism on the other. Monsanto relies as much on aggressive salesmanship and secrecy as it does on technological success. As John Vidal reports in the Guardian “Monsanto wanted to introduce Bollguard cotton to India this year in a blaze of publicity, jingles, posters, ads and leaflets in many languages. It was pretty confident of success. It uses an international PR company and has heavily lobbied the policy makers. It also sponsors, sports, competitions and links its name to religious celebrations such as Diwali and the 300th Anniversary of the Sikhs.” Monsanto’s aims were grandiose “We are aiming to consolidate the whole food chain” a Monsanto director told the press last year. Along with aggressive salesmanship there is also the scientific promise of a cornucopia and a solution to the problem of hunger.

The KRRS too has its problems. It has been accused of being autocratic and many farmers felt that Najundaswamy was getting political mileage out of these events. Down to Earth quotes a farmer as saying “Najundaswamy has no right to set the mob on us. We have been dealing with various seed and chemical companies. We know Mahyco well and have no reason to believe it is involved in anything sinister”. Najundaswamy’s campaign of “Cremate Monsanto” is dismissed by Monsanto which sees him as an “opportunist, rabble rouser” and a man with no political support who wants only fame and money”. Najundaswamy in turn accuses Monsanto, KFC and Pepsico pf “perverting Indian culture”. Of course it should be added that the farmers rallying to Najundaswamy are not marginal farmers or peasants but represent the middling and large farmers who do represent the prosperity of the Green Revolution. The fact that the Green Revolution produced a class of well off farmers is something the KRRS and critics like Vandana Shiva would not like to admit preferring as the latter is wont to do in portraying the Green Revolution as a curse on the peasantry.

There are also divisions with the movement. The Cremate Monsanto campaign burned two of the three trial fields of bt. cotton in Karnataka but the third at Haveri was not burned. The farmer who owned the plot, Shankrikoppa, was willing to co-operate until the state level Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (a BJP Affiliated farmer’s organisation) asked him not to. He then asked for and received police protection for his crops. Once a member of the KRRS, Shankrioppa turned against the movement. His desertion proved to be politically significant and saved the bt. seeds from his trial plot and germinated them. The foliage did not seem to harm insects other than bollworm or mammals. Shankrioppa called the arguments of Najundaswamy as a “cheap publicity stunt” and said other farmers in his area were eager to get the new seeds (I have drawn heavily on N.R. Birasal, Times of India, December, 5th 1998). The burning of plots and protests in the Andhra Pradesh convinced the state government there to stop and ban the trials in its domain despite the pro-technology leanings of the Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu. This was probably the height of KRSS power within India. Since then the movement has not enjoyed as much success despite sporadic attacks on a few plots supposedly containing “terminator seeds”. To the argument that destroying offices and crops is violent and thus not within Gandhian ideology Nanjundaswamy replies that “During the Quit India movement against the British, Gandhi was asked whether burning cargo trains constituted violence and he said it didn’t unlike passenger trains” (note that passenger trains were actually burned during the partition riots and more recently at Godhra in Gujarat).

Farmers’ movements inevitably raise the question of who speaks for the farmer. The deviation of the one KRRS dissident who refused to have his crop burned and instead asked for police protection points towards the larger problems of such mobilisation – it should also be noted that the BJP-affiliated trade union played an important role in this change of heart; symptomatic I think of the BJP’s wider desire to harness the opportunities made possible by international capital. Leaders of the KRRS were decrying GM seeds even while Shankrioppa was multiplying the seeds for future use. Najundaswamy claimed a membership of 10 million for the KRRS yet when he stood for an assembly seat in Karnataka he polled only 3,000 votes and lost his deposit. The KRRS when it transformed itself into a political party failed to garner any seats for itself in the state elections. It was Vandana Shiva who acting as a public intellectual and through her Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology proved to be more successful. She moved the Supreme Court in 1999 to stay approval of the new tests of bt. cotton. The court ruled that the trials should be suspended until concerns of biodiversity and safety were adequately addressed. The ban did not last long but was one of the few victories of the movement against GM seeds.

In contrast to industry and Government arguments one of the main issues raised by actors in civil society was the way in which the existing system functions – they did not refute the need for an elaborate governance system but debated how the system was implemented. With the case of bt. cotton the point of contention was that the permission for undertaking large-scale field trials was an illegal one as it was granted to Monsanto by the Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation (RCGM) and not by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) – it is unclear as to which committee actually gave permission. The anti-GM movement’s reading of the rDNA safety guidelines is that “Field experiments need to be cleared by the GEAC since they place in the open environment and their risks are not contained…the moment trials are conducted on the open environment, the GEAC governed by the ministry of environment and forests becomes active under the Environmental Protection Act 1986” (quoted from Vandana Shiva’s petition to the Supreme Court).

More worryingly there were questions as to how the field trials were carried out. By criticising the way data was collected from the field trials, one of the interviewees pointed out that the existing system was not working. An interviewee pointed out that the sowing of cotton for the field trial last year was done two months later than the usual month. That means that the results submitted to the government’s body understate the level of insect attacks by not incorporating the insect attacks from the first two months.

Beneath the Regulatory Gaze of the State:

Opposition to the field trials of bt. cotton was in opposition to the central government’s regulatory raj emanating from New Delhi. Opponents to field trials claimed specifically that states were by-passed in an opaque process of approving trials from the centre. This argument took on an additional strength, as agriculture is constitutionally a state subject in the federal division of powers. Of course with the introduction of GM foods almost all the regulatory bodies were federal not state based.

Farmers operate beneath the regulatory gaze of the state – I too am impressed by James Scott’s work on Seeing like a State but I feel it has several weaknesses. Apart from anything else the state in India has been singularly weak in noticing and correcting challenges to it’s regulatory framework (land reform legislation is an excellent example of this) as David Low notes in his seminal The Egalitarian Movement states in the Third World have struggled mostly unsuccessfully to correct inequities in rural society since decolonisation. The bt. case also shows that the state claims of high modernism and regulatory surveillance is beyond its means and power. Despite the ban on testing of bt. cotton by October 2001 there were reports of actually existing fields in thousands of hectares of illicit bt. cotton in Gujarat. Farmers had been voting with their ploughs under the regulatory gaze of New Delhi and had acquired bt. cotton. The GEAC ordered the state-level Biotechnology Coordination Committees to uproot and burn the GM crop. In an extremely ironic replay of the “Cremate Monsanto” campaign the roles of the activists and the state were reversed as farmers mobilised to prevent the state from burning their crops. This also shows the problems of the Farmers’ Movements as Sharad Joshi the leader of the Shetkari Sanghathana (a farmers’ organisation based in Maharashtra) pledged that farmers would burn with their crops before they would allow the government to burn them. The pure religiosity of the used in such mobilisations can be underlined by the fact that Joshi explicitly evoked satyagraha in asking farmers to be burned alive with their crops if necessary – the appeal was made on the hallowed banks of the Narmada at the Nilkantheshwar temple a monument to the blue Shiva (the god not the activist) alluding to the voluntary act of Shiva where he ingested the deadly Hala Hala poison tuning his skin blue (a possible connection with the symbolisation of toxins which can alleviate the threat of poisons to the body public, just as Shiva’s swallowing of poison saved the world from contamination). The overlap between social movement and pilgrimage becomes significant. Joshi concluded, “by depriving the farmers of their freedom to choose the seed, the Governments in Gandhinagar and New Delhi are indulging in terrorism” (From A.Shaik, Times of India, October, 31, 2001). The federal issue emerged immediately as the state government in Gujarat expected the central government to compensate its farmers if the need arose but questioned the need for a scorched earth policy in the first place. By October 31st the GEAC had modified its stand in order to bend to reality – most of the cotton had been quickly harvested and had already gone to market and it was difficult to distinguish the remaining fibre that was left from GM and non-GM sources.

It is not clear how far GM cotton has spread in India: it is definitely being grown in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat – though there are unsubstantiated rumours of it being grown in other states as well. Despite the supposedly high modernist surveillance power of the state bt. cotton had spread – mainly due to a business rivalry, which reflected the wider logic of the market. The variety being grown in Gujarat was supplied by Navbharat Seed Limited, which had registered the seed as a hybrid but claimed no knowledge of its transgenic nature. Mahyco, which had spent a reported $8 million preparing the bt. cottonseeds for commercialisation in India and originally received permission for the field trials, reported Navbharat to the GEAC for selling illegal seeds. Mahyco would probably have not discovered this had not bollworm infestation hit Gujarat in 2001. The infestation was quite severe and made the healthy field stand out sharply. The speculation of the origins of the seed of Navbharat is that they were obtained from the US where they are readily available were brought back to India and crossed with indigenous verities. Navbharat’s defence is that they did not know the cross source was genetically engineered. This is possible but somewhat unlikely as unless the seeds had special characteristics it would be unnecessary to create new crosses from them. The relative initial success of the bt. cotton in Gujarat has led to a division within the farmers’ movements the president of the Kisan union in the Punjab is asking for bt cotton seeds to be grown there and the Gujarat farmer’s unions are unfazed by claims of environmental danger saying that the government should give scientific proof to substantiate these claims.

Few are willing to take on the farmers, as they possess a strong class power across different states and regimes even if they have no formal party of their own. The state government of Gujarat supported its cotton farmers against the Centre and the Centre itself has been slow to move against illegal plantings. Every major actor agrees that Navbharat should be penalised for the illicit use of GM seeds but no one has said anything against the farmers growing the illicit crops. Environmental activists have been careful not to come out against the farmers despite their strong attacks on GM seeds. Instead anti-GM activists have pressed to bring charges against the corporations.

Farmers in my view will be driven more by economic interest than any ideology or wider societal considerations. Indeed many are forces of conservatism not of change (for example on the issue of labourers rights, caste atrocities, and gender relations the farmers are in the conservative camp) in the countryside and this is something else the environmental lobby in India is not willing to acknowledge.

Biotechnology and the Poor:

My concern however is as stated earlier with the impact on the poor and the politics of poverty is central to the biotechnology debate. The optimistic side of this debate deploys poverty as a major theme of legitimisation. The views of biotechnology as a means of ending poverty as adopted by Indian firms such as Mahyco and by international ones such as Monsanto, reflect the older Nehruvian faith in modernisation and science. In this logic modernisation overwhelms poverty, which is a residue of backwardness. The clearest global example of this argument is the Rockefeller Foundation, which supports biotechnology along with traditional techniques as a means of feeding the poor – which have cyclically emerged and disappeared as an object of policy over the last few deaceds in development policy rhetoric.

The debate resonates with earlier conflicts over the Green Revolution where Malthusian assumptions and a benign view of science se technology as a saviour and claim that poverty would have worsened in the absence of massive production increases as opposed to the critics who point out the class skewed rates of adoption, inequality of outcomes. Poverty lies at the core of these disputes over technology and strategy for the rural sector. As Ashutosh Varshney outlines these take one clear political divides with the Left favouring a land-redistibutivist stance while the Right prefers a strategy of technological modernisation and nominal targeting of specific programmes for the poor. Proponents of biotechnology claim the poor as their constituency – their arguments rest on three pillars. First, the traditional seeds are inaccurately romanticised by opponents of biotechnology and are woefully inadequate in terms of yield and adaptability to farm constraints. Second, higher farm revenues will result as the beneficial effects of reduced expenditure on pesticides and other inputs give way to higher yields, in this sense the biotechnology revolution is held to be more scale neutral than the Green Revolution. Thirdly, biotechnology can be tailored to meet the specific needs of the poor who often only have access to marginal lands and poor water supplies by for example engineering plants that are drought resistant and tolerate poor soils. The phenomenon of “golden rice” can also be seen in this light as it provides Vitamin A supplements in rice to consumers who cannot afford natural vegetable sources of the vitamin and promises to cure endemic vitamin deficiency amongst vulnerable groups such as children.

This ignores the unequal nature of property rights in rural society. The Green Revolution favoured those farmers with access to state subsidised inputs and surpluses and led to an increased polarisation in the countryside. Property regimes will influence the impact of technical changes on the poor. The cost of biotechnologies is a factor in this scenario - for all its rhetoric about GM seeds being the salvation of the hungry Monsanto and other corporations are geared towards profit not poverty alleviation and there is a debate over to what degree the opportunity cost of capital is deployed by multinationals as a cost. If development costs are legitimate for private capital to recover via sales, poor farmers will be priced out of the market. Markets are international – following the dissemination of bt. cotton there was an agreement between Nath Seeds and Biocentury Transgene (China) company, to introduce transgenic cotton technology in India. Biocentury’s patent’s are for Bt and Bt.+ genes developed by the Biotechnology Research institute (BRI) of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and applicable across a range of crops besides cotton (Economic Times, December 26th, 2001). The Chinese genes however, were developed within the public sector, where profit alone is not the driving mechanism and the cost to users will be lower than Monsanto’s.

There are contradictory empirical effects that need to be explored. The bt. case is a good example; in China the use of Bt. cotton has reduced the use of market purchased pesticides. Such reductions would benefit poorer farmers, but would also reduce demand for labour in application, at the cost of wage labourers. These labourers would gain a health advantage in avoiding exposure to pesticides but would lose their daily wages. Moreover, the yield advantages of the gene technologies have been limited, the effect on consumer prices and farmer incomes may not be large, though it is precisely these effects that are central in corporations’ presentations of their technologies as saviours of the poor. The empirical ambiguities are very large though both sides of the debate present their case as rooted in clear evidence, when the evidence is in fact mostly absent. This is something that will need further investigation before a conclusion that can be reached. I remain somewhat sceptical of the claims made in the name of the poor by GM and biotech firms simply because looking at the innovations and gene technologies that have been developed are not those that directly appeal to the interests of those at the bottom of the rural hierarchy – there is little investment in semi-arid agriculture and in drought resistant crops or those that can grow on poor soils. Golden Rice is another example of how claims and counter claims can proliferate. Golden Rice, which has a supplementary quality of Vitamin A, was supposed to provide much needed nutritional access to those who could not afford other sources of vitamins or those who did not have access to grow sufficiently nutritious food for themselves. Critics have pointed out that many of those who currently suffer from VAD (Vitamin A Deficiency) are those who lost access to the traditional sources of Vitamin A as a result of the modernisation of agriculture and hence remain sceptical as to whether further modernisation of agriculture will successfully resolve the problem of VAD.

Current research has produced little of benefit to the poor directly. Consumers generally have not benefited from the major developments in biotechnology and GM agriculture, efforts have been concentrated more on selling more chemicals and lowering farmers costs per unit of production. The needs of commercial farmers have been paramount, as this is where the profits are. Many of the attacks on GM crops are really as observers such as Nagaraj note are attack on globalisation and capitalism. Research priorities will not automatically incorporate the needs of the poor. A genuine mobilisation of the poor would have to begin with these priorities – there is at present in India little evidence of a political force wiling and able to take on that battle. A truly radical mobilisation of pro-poor forces would involve changing the direction of research in GM agriculture not in banning or destroying it, which diverts the debate away from distributional concerns to a simple for or against one.

Areas for Resolution:

It is not my intention to provide any easy solutions to the problems thrown up by GM and biotechnology in agriculture for none are really possible, however I would like to explore two areas which I feel are key to the future of the debate: the issue of Property Rights and Risk/Uncertainty.

Property Rights:

Many of the controversies will revolve around property regimes. An alternative property regime would undercut three of the main issues on which resistance is based: biopiracy, domination by Multinationals and bondage of farmers to seed companies. Poverty is also an outcome of the existing property regime a reinvigorated public sector both at the national and international levels could play an important role. With appropriate property institutions, most importantly a strengthening of both national and international commons holding germplasm and conducting research would reduce the concerns over national sovereignty and poverty. . With proper safeguards to prevent biopiracy fears of threat and loss of specifically national property would be mitigated. At present there is a three-cornered contest for what the international property regime will become. The competing models are: fee-simple ownership, national ownership as envisioned under the Convention of Biological Diversity and the United Nations’ model of biota being the “common heritage of mankind” – i.e. a common property regime in which pool resources are publicly maintained with open access to all.

Debate around the relative weight of the elements of these property regimes revolves around national sovereignty, social justice and incentives for progress. Patents are seen by industry and many liberal economists as necessary to spur investment. However in a rapidly changing field of technology property rights, which are too broad or too strong, may stifle innovation by increasing transactions costs. A common analogy, which is used, is with literature. Though it seems reasonable that books are worthy of copyright protection to provide authors with a living, it would seem perverse to allow a creation in individual words used by an author in a work of fiction. Genomics enables a drastic possibility: the patenting of words, even letters of the alphabet or sequences of letters. If even gifted individuals or artists such as Shakespeare had been allowed to patent individual words in his corpus, creative work in literature would have been strangled (in English at any rate).

Farmers’ protests in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh were less about the unnatural character of genetic engineering that looms in the international protest movement than about a new bondage to multinational corporations. The resistance language as described earlier stressed “invasion” of foreign companies and swadeshi as an alternative strategy, echoing the Gandhian emphasis on self-reliance. The argument from the Indian perspective looks more like a dispute over the international division of labour, wealth and power than a dispute over genetic engineering. This is the consequence of the domination of biotechnology dominated by Western Capital. Of course with the possibilities of increased profits from using the GM crops farmers started using bt. cotton in their fields. While the long-term impact of this is yet to be seen we can note how quickly the modes of resistance employed against multinationals such as Monsanto were then turned against the Central government as it threatened to burn/destroy the farmers’ illicit bt. crops. This reflects my earlier point about the contradictory position of the peasant due in part to class differentiation and the dual nature of many peasants as surplus producers and emergent capitalists as well as potential recruits for the agricultural proletariat if they lose access to their land and other physical assets.

Risk and Uncertainty:

In the oppositional discourse the risk entailed by humans playing god can lead to dangerous consequences. However, at the same time there is no progress without risk. The problem with genetic engineering is that we are dealing with uncertainty not risk: critical probabilities are not known, perhaps unknowable in the short and medium term. Moreover there is no individual choice about environmental risk. In the absence of labelling even informed choice about risk is difficult to obtain for those who fear ingestion of GM foodstuffs. In the US, such food has so permeated the food chain that it is difficult to avoid them. Given how much is unknown rational calculation of risk and benefit is not possible. I think Vikash can say more on this, as risk is his area of expertise.

By way of a conclusion, I think we can notice some of the complexities in the debate over the role of GM in India and the waters appear much murkier than either side of the debate would like to admit. Given the current direction of the debate what I feel is of concern is the weakness of the State and the power of Capital. The State in India has been singularly inept in reining in and disciplining the dominant proprietary classes, it has rather been penetrated by these very same classes and in what sense one can think of state autonomy vis-à-vis these groups is highly debatable – just as an example no government in India has been able to nationalise the trade in foodgrains even Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian administration had to admit failure and reverse its polices in this regard. I will turn Scott’s thesis of Seeing like a State on its head and instead argue that we also need to understand how those under the gaze of the State see it. Secondly, the workings of Capital, particular as seen through workings of the multinationals and corporations which reflect a metropolitan logic in shifting the costs of technical applications away from them while extracting the benefits. This is not to say that they should be rejected – what is needed is a radical cynicism and a properly Machiavellian approach to the issue. It may well be necessary to utilise arguments by the anti-GM movement to manoeuvre and gain further concessions from Capital; playing off diverse interests, in the absence of a direct mobilisation of the poor, may well be the only way to shift the terms of the debate that actually are relevant to the concerns of the poor in the rural sector in a meaningful fashion.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:26 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Rethinking Liberalization:

Xerox has just admitted that it bribed the Indian government to win contracts. The company spent approximately $600,000 in its bribery campaign. This news is particularly disturbing given the fact that Enron also spent large sums of money "educating" Indian politicians.

In my opinion, the problem lies not with Indian politicians so much as the US corporations. In my interviews with established American businessmen, I have found that those who were most successful viewed bribery not as a cost of doing business but as an admission that they did not understand how the system works in India. The most successful businessmen believed that they were in it for the long term and the saw the Indian bureaucracy as a challenge rather than an obstacle to their goals. Very few foreign investors these days have the patience to try to understand how to do business in India. When they become frustrated, they resort to bribery.

This is not to say that the Indian government should be let off the hook. Bribery scandals indicate that the mentality of the License Raj is still around. Politicians continue to extract rents in return for granting contracts. The neo-liberal impulse is to believe that the solution is simply to deregulate and therefore deprive the authority of the government officials. I disagree, the problem of corruption and bribery will only exacerbated by deregulation. The ultimate solution involves addressing the moral and ethical basis of economic behavior. The forms of knowledge that predominate in economics and political science are currently ill equipped to transform beliefs rather than behavior. Economists in particular are barely concerned whether or not businesses comply with laws because they believe the laws are correct. Compliance is seen as sufficient. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to tackle beliefs if change is to occur.

Vikash Yadav

:: Vikash Yadav 3:46 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Indian farmers sow rice paddy in thier field near village Kunwarpur, 60 kilometers south of Allahbad India, Thursday June 27, 2002. Monsoon rains have covered most parts of India with the meteorological department predicting a normal monsoon. Indian farmers depend kargely on the monsoons for irrigating their fields. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh).

:: Vikash Yadav 10:35 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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GM Foods in the Indian Context:

Conrad, along with Jason, I am not yet convinced that Genetically Modified (GM) foods can be linked to the extremely distressing problem of farmer suicides. Although, I am confident that GM foods will do nothing to resolve this problem (particularly as there is little reason to believe that GM foods will increase farmers' profits). I do agree with you that the plight of the small famer in India and the malnourished population is directly related to the role of moneylenders and the problem of distribution in a weak state.

Let me lay out a few points of concern that I do see with the introduction of GM foods in India:

1. Intellectual Property Rights: GM technology has been patented and those farmers who wish to use this technology must pay a royalty to the (US) corporations and universities that have developed this technology. What I find troubling is that this is a Western conception of "intellectual property." Ownership of property is conferred only to individual entities (humans or corporations) operating within the legal matrix of the state. The "intellectual property" of civilizations and communities is not recognized by these laws, nor is anyone required to pay for the wisdom developed and mainted by such groups. On a broader level, I believe that intellectual property rights are a barrier to free trade. I actually believe that the real problem with capitalism is that it has yet to be put into place. True competition would not allow a system of "rents" that obstructs the efficient (international) division of labor. As an academic, I certainly believe that intellectual property should be rewarded, however, I do not think that this requires a royalty fee... I believe that a Nobel Prize or other award should be sufficient for any scientist or laboratory working to improve the lot of their fellow man.

2. Cultural Impact: What does it mean to combine the DNA of a sturgeon with a strawberry to prevent frost damage? Does the strict vegetarian violate his/her faith by eating such a creation? I know the scientific community will dismiss this as ridiculous, but I believe that Indians who happen to be vegetarians will want this issue to be taken seriously. One can also argue on health grounds that this introduces the prospects for dangerous allergic reactions as people may consume foods unaware of the DNA elements that have been added.

3. Regulatory Infrastructure: Do transnational bio-engineering firms choose to do test trials in countries like India because they know that the requisite regulatory infrastructure to monitor such experiments is lacking? With no disrespect intended for the Indian bureaucracy, it is apparent that the US government failed to prevent Starlink (c) corn, which had been deemed unfit for human consumption, from entering the human foodchain (via Taco Bell). If a country with a regulatory network like the US cannot manage to regulate field tests, can one really expect a country such as India to do any better?

4. Pathologies of Rationalism: The most troubling aspect of GM foods is the "promethean technophile" or "technocratic" ideology that supports this type of research. Scientists continue to believe that specific problems in the natural world can be treated in isolation and resolved. The systemic impact of minor tinkering with the biosphere is rarely addressed or understood. James Scott has an excellent example of the pathologies of rationalism in his chapter on scientific forestry in the bookSeeing Like a State. The chapter essentially shows how the German practice of scientific forestry (i.e., planting trees in monospecies fields at equidistant spaces, etc.) resulted in a stark ecosystem that made the trees highly susceptible to disease and other unexpected maladies. Similarly GM foods are attempts to resolve specific problems in nature (e.g., BT cotton and the bollweavel) without an attempt to understand the systemic impact (e.g., on monarch butterflies that eat from milkweeds located next to BT corn crops). We know that technology is never an abstract discourse, technology emerges from within particular institutions and limited perspectives. How will this technology developed in the West operate once it moves to India? What are the assumptions that are incorporated into this technology that do not hold in the sub-continent?

5. Consumer Concerns: Will consumers be made aware that certain products are genetically modified? Are corporations which market this technology willing to pay compensation at "Western" rates if any damages result from the consumption of their products? Who will verify the GM labels of corporations?

Overall, the process of agricultural production has become an industrialized process. In the latest revolution, high tech genetic modification is replacing low technology pesticides; however it is the same companies that once sold pesticides who are now selling the GM foods. Given the failures and side-effects of pesticides, why should we trust these companies a second time around?

:: Vikash Yadav 12:49 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Some more Questions and Answers on Transgenic Crops and their Relevance in India:

What are the tropical crops for which GM has relevance? Many GM crops are grown in tropical and subtropical regions. Wheat, rice, soyabean, cotton, mustard, rapeseed, maize, potato, tomatoes, papaya, sugar beet, canola, squash, radicchio are some of the main crops of which GM varieties are being commercially cultivated, or are being test sown in different parts of the world. Genetic engineering is also used to develop several fruits, and fish, poultry and dairy animals resistant to common diseases and to increase the yields of the products. For example, the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone stimulates milk output.

How much more productive are the GM crops? No conclusive evidence has yet been found regarding the higher productivity of GM crops. Data from some tests have revealed that yield of non-GM varieties of several crops sown under ideal conditions have been more than or similar to yield of GM varieties. Agri-business companies like Monsanto, on the other hand, claim that GM varieties have higher yields. One reason for this is that ideal conditions are rarely available, and the Monsanto tests are done in actual field conditions, where GM varieties are more likely to realise the potential output than non-GM varieties.

Soyabean : A study by the University of Wisconsin agronomy department, summarising more than 3,000 variety trials from 40 university performance tests in eight northern US tests for 1998, finds that Roundup Ready Soyabean varieties have on the average 4 per cent lower yields compared to potential yields of conventional varieties. However, potential yield advantages of conventional varieties are often not realised in actual field conditions due to poor weed control or injury from pesticides. Some other studies have found that GM and non-GM soyabean have same yields. From these tests it appears that there is no yield advantage or disadvantage in using Roundup Ready varieties over conventional ones. However, according to Monsanto, an independent study conducted in 2000 by PSL Genetics of Tipton, Indiana, found that Monsantos Asgrow Roundup Ready soyabeans grown in the US provided a yield advantage of 107.6 kgs per hectare over conventional soyabean varieties. In Argentina, Roundup Ready soyabeans yielded about the same as conventional varieties in 2000, but cultivators of the GM varieties had lower herbicide costs. In Romania, Monsanto soyabean enjoyed a 68 per cent higher yield than conventional varieties.

Maize : Bt maize has a higher yield than non-GM varieties in the US as it can resist European Corn Borer (ECB), a disease which results in a crop loss of 5 per cent of the total value of maize production in the US. According to Monsanto, its Yieldgard maize shows, on the average, a 10 per cent yield advantage over conventional varieties in the US. In Canada the company claims to have an average yield that is 224.2 kgs more than conventional maize varieties per hectare. In Argentina the yield of Monsanto maize was 14 per cent higher than that of conventional varieties.

Canola : Analysis of the profitability of GM canola in Canada using actual farm survey data show that yield for GM varieties may be lower than that of conventional ones, and cost reductions may not compensate the farmer for this yield differential. But, again, this analysis holds good only if the conventional varieties are sown under ideal conditions. On farm, Roundup Ready canola has exhibited a yield advantage of 134.5 kgs to a hectare over conventional canola.

Cotton : A couple of surveys in Southern and South-eastern United States have revealed that yield of Bt cotton is about a tenth higher than yield of conventional cotton varieties. Economic comparison studies across the US Cotton Belt in 2000 found that Monsantos Bollgard Cotton had a yield which was 45 kgs more than the yield of conventional cotton varieties. Bollgard cotton also needed lower amounts of insecticides, and hence lowered cultivation costs.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of sowing GM varieties?

Advantages

Crops
- Enhanced taste and quality
- Controlled maturation time: for example, researchers at Singapore's National University are reported to have developed a system of modifying genes to delay fruit ripening by up to four months. Increased nutrients, yields, and stress tolerance at costs cheaper than those of organic farming
- Improved resistance to disease, pests, and herbicides
- New products and growing techniques
- Health benefits, such as extra vitamins, can be engineered in
- They could help farmers cultivate marginal land prone to drought or salt
- They could help the environment by reducing the need for herbicides and pesticides

Animals
- Increased resistance, productivity, hardiness, and feed efficiency
- Better yields of meat, eggs, and milk
- Improved animal health and diagnostic methods

Environment

- "Friendly" bioherbicides and bioinsecticides
- Conservation of soil, water, and energy
- Bioprocessing for forestry products
- Better natural waste management
- More efficient processing

Society

Increased food security for growing populations: as conventional varieties can reach potential yield levels only under ideal farm conditions which are rarely available, introduction of GM varieties raises output as GM varieties enjoy higher yields than non-GM varieties under field conditions.

Disadvantages

Safety

- Potential human health impact: allergens, transfer of antibiotic resistance markers, unknown effects through food consumption
- Potential environmental impact: unintended transfer of transgenes through cross-pollination; unknown effects on other organisms (e.g., soil microbes); and loss of flora and fauna biodiversity; and emergence of super pests, etc.
- Access and Intellectual Property
- Domination of world food production by a few companies
- Increasing dependence on companies in industrialised nations by developing countries
- BiopiracyResearch in GM crops need genes from different varieties of a crop. This requires gene collection from different parts of the world and thus encourages foreign exploitation of natural resources

Ethics

- Violation of natural organisms' intrinsic features by altering the original genetic make up of organisms
- Tampering with nature by mixing genes across species
- Objections to consuming animal genes in plants and vice versa
- Stress for animals and plants

Labelling

- Not mandatory in some countries (e.g., United States)
- Mixing GM crops with non-GM confounds labelling attempts

Society

- New advances may be skewed to interests of rich countries
- May be unsuitable for poor farmers who could become locked into a technology they cannot control
- Expensive: could force farmers into debt and prevent them from saving seed
- Land reform, manure and traditional breeding techniques could deliver more benefits
- Many claims are exaggerated or unproved. Reduced use of chemicals is debatable

What should the Indian government do to ensure that Indian products meet international standards? Dealing with certification and meeting various international standards is very expensive. Small cultivators neither have the resources, nor the technical expertise to meet such standards. Also the process of meeting the standards might be lengthy and raise costs, and hence also lead to an increase in prices. There is a critical role for the state in terms of providing both internationally recognised certification and accreditation agencies and the technical and financial resources for farmers to meet such requirements Unfortunately, while there have been some attempts, especially through the Bureau of Indian Standards and APEDA, to meet the first role, the second and probably the more crucial role has been mostly neglected or underfulfilled.The agricultural extension services across rural India should provide technical expertise about prevailing national and international standards, and assist farmers in changing cultivation practices to meet these standards. Currently even the few richer farmers who can meet the expenses take the help of profit-oriented private companies for this purpose. Resources for such activities are not provided to Indian farmers in the form of financial assistance, which puts them at a clear disadvantage relative to those from other countries with more organised and financially secure systems.There is therefore much that needs to be done in this regard by the government especially, in order to both protect Indian farmers and allow them to use whatever opportunities do exist in international markets

Who is in the Bt business? Chemical, seed and biotechnology companies like Novartis (formed by merging Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz) of Switzerland, Monsanto of USA, Delta and Pine Land (partly owned by Monsanto) of USA, Pioneer Hi-Bred (licensing agreements with Monsanto), which is based in Iowa, USA and is a subsidiary of DuPont, USA, DeKalb (partly owned by Monsanto) of USA, Calgene (controlled by Monsanto) of USA and Mycogen (formed by the merger of Mycogen Seeds and Cargill Hybrid Seeds) of USA are the major developers of Bt crops.Monsantos Bt variety of cotton is known as Bollgard cotton.

Has Bt cotton been successful against the three pests? There have been reports from many US cotton growers about the failure of the technology.In 1996, the first year of sowing of Bt cotton seeds, farmers had reported cotton bollworm damage, first in Texas and then all the way to the Atlantic coast. By the end of the first summer, 40 per cent of Bt cotton growers had to spray chemicals to control the cotton bollworm, some more than once. Many farmers were irate, insisting that Monsanto had led them to believe the sprays would be unnecessary.

What are the possible economic dangers of GM crops for countries like India? The biggest danger in allowing commercial use of GM crops is that the multinational chemical, seed and biotechnology companies may wrest control of global food production. The US has consistently argued for liberal laws regarding trials on genetically altered varieties and at the same time pushed for strong patent protection for seeds, plant varieties, and genetically modified plants, animals and micro-organisms. It does so for its own interests. The world today consist of the bio-diversity rich (or gene rich) South and the Patent rich North. What it means is that an overwhelming majority of plant and animal species are found in the countries in Africa, Asia and South America while Patents for a variety of technologies are largely held by corporations in the US, Europe and Japan. Till recently there was a general consensus that life form patenting is a subject that should not even be considered. But the US has tried to alter the rules of the game by aggressively promoting the concept of life-form patenting. Even the European Union was reluctant to fall in line, but major concessions have now been provided in this area in the last couple of years, though strong opposition to life-form patenting persists in many European countries. The US wants life form patenting in order to wrest control over the remaining biological resources of the globe. It also wants to wrest control over agricultural production all over the world.

Which are the Indian companies in the Bt business? The Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (MAHYCO) is the Indian partner of Monsanto promoting cultivation of Bt cotton in the country.The New Delhi-based Proagro PGS, now part of the multinational Aventis group of France, has developed the hybrid mustard, the only product besides cotton to have reached the open field trial stage

What are the potential environmental problems of Bt crops? The three major worries are that pests could develop a resistance to Bt toxin, that the Bt gene will become established in wild relatives of Bt crops, and that farmers who grow other crops may find that the pests affecting these crops are also developing resistance to Bt toxin.

Resistance in pests As insects feeding on Bt crops are exposed to toxins continuously, they are likely to evolve a resistance to these toxins. This would make ineffective both the Bt genes in transgenic crops and Bt toxins in sprays. Because of the resistance problem, scientists have estimated that the useful life of Bt in major crops like corn, cotton and potato could be as short as two to three years unless effective resistance management plans are implemented. Otherwise, the environmental benefit of Bt crops would be short-lived as many conventional farmers are likely to return to chemical pesticides. Moreover, Bt resistance would also mean the loss of Bt sprays important to organic and other sustainable farmers.

Bt gene flow to wild relatives Where Bt crops are grown near wild relatives (varieties of the crops which grow naturally), it is highly probable that the Bt gene will transfer to the wild populations as a result of pollination. As a result, wild plants may produce enough Bt to ward off insects that normally feed on them. What impact this will have on the natural ecosystems is yet to be ascertained, since there has been little research in this area. In some cases, the new gene may strengthen the wild plant allowing it to become a weed in farmers' fields. With the Bt advantage, some plant populations may be able to displace other populations in natural ecosystems, altering local biological diversity. Such an outcome could be particularly troublesome in areas of crop diversity, parts of the world that contain substantial populations of wild plants. Plant breeders often rely on genes from these wild relatives to enhance crops.

Loss to organic and sustainable farmers There is a possibility that even farmers who grow non-Bt cotton may have to switch to Bt varieties. This can happen if a neighbouring farmer sows Bt cotton and pests from his/her field move into the fields where non-Bt varieties are sown. The non-Bt growers would then be compelled to switch over to Bt varieties or they have to bear increased pesticide costs. Biodiversity will be destroyed if all cotton farmers have to shift to Bt varieties.Even farmers who do not grow cotton, and have used the toxic property of Bt (for example, by periodically dusting the crops with dried extracts of soil rich in the bacteria) to ward off pests, may find that these pests are also developing resistance to Bt.

How much does Monsanto gain from the sale of Bt cotton seeds? Through licensing agreements with Delta and Pine Land Company, Monsanto sells seeds of Bt cotton varieties, charging farmers a technology fee of $32 per acre (roughly Rs. 1,560) in addition to the cost of the seed

Have returns from Bt cotton always been higher than conventional cotton for US growers? As the acreage of GM crops in the US rapidly expanded over the last 3 or 4 years, more and more research emerging from US universities, has indicated that these crops rarely provide economic benefits to farmers. Either yields are disappointing or the anticipated cost savings are not materialising. This has become particularly apparent with herbicide resistant and Bt corn products. However, despite early warning signs that the technology is already breaking down, Bt cotton is being cited in many quarters as the one genuine GM financial success story for US farmers. Farmers have been reducing insecticide applications on these crops without damaging financial returns - or at least that is how it appeared.

A report from North Carolina State University now shows that in fact there is no financial gain to be had for farmers growing Bt cotton in fact figures from a field research carried out by the university in 2000 show that normal cotton is marginally ($2 per acre) more profitable. This is a blow to the reputation of the biotechnology industry's flagship GM crop, and it places a further major question mark against its long-term role in US and global agriculture.There is now not a single major GM crop in the US which has successfully delivered what was originally promised by pro-biotechnology academics and industry although much of the farming community, the general public and the media may have been led into believing the opposite.

How are Bt crops regulated in the United States? Three federal agencies oversee the commercialisation of Bt crops. Before the Bt crop can be sold, the U.S. Department of Agriculture must determine that it will not become a plant pest. Companies must register Bt crops as pesticides with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which evaluates human health and environmental risks. As it has for Bt corn and Bt cotton, EPA may also require companies to develop and implement Bt resistance management plans as a condition of registration. Finally, the Food and Drug Administration, through a largely voluntary programme, consults informally with companies on the safety of transgenic crops as food.

Compiled from: www.Kisanwatch.org and the Food and Agricultural OrganisationYearbook.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:21 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Farmer Suicides and Rural Dilemmas

Jason, I believe you raise some key issues and I would like to take the opportunity to discuss them at some length. There are no aggregate figures for suicides by small peasants that I am aware of, all of the sources I have cited have been from various newspapers that have carried these stories. There are some important points to note here, firstly Jason, you are absolutely right about the wariness needed to interpret media bias in reporting such issues; however, as I had pointed out in an earlier post on the Indian media the problem is not so much of factual inaccuracy as of ignorance towards causality, the media reports the Event not the processes leading up to it; this is something that has been noted by several journalists themselves most notably P. Sainath in his coverage of rural issues for the Times of India. The interesting thing about these cases is that many of them appear only as short column stories of only a few lines each in most of the national dailies - you know the sort invariably in any national paper you will have a few lines devoted to various small stories in the states, so many times the blowing up of a police van carrying several police officers in rural Andhra for example or an attack in one of the North eastern states will be reported in this way. Also some very reliable media sources such as Frontline and the Statesman do occasionally carry longer pieces but otherwise many of the examples are restricted to state/provincial newspapers. Robin Jeffrey in his book India's Newspaper Revolution has suggested a useful model of how such themes become national media concerns e.g. starting with the stringers working for the local vernacular press getting hold of a story and then the story gradually being picked up by regional papers and then finally being reported in the national media - a sort of periphery to core model of dissemination, while this is would need closer examination the Kalahandi case is an interesting example to se in this regard. What is noteworthy is that the press can create a large fuss over starvation deaths (or any other contentious issue) in a relatively backward/isolated area and there will be a lot of heat and energy spent on visible political and administrative action but the basic ground realities can still remain the same; the Kalahandi issue is a good example of this as are the regular caste massacres in Bihar - the latter an extremely complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to simple caste or class dynamics as the press often does (Vikash will be able to say more on this than I can). However, generally when it comes to reporting actual events, as opposed to processes and political manoeuvring the Indian press I feel is actually not bad – even though given the proclivities of the English-reading mainly urban and upper/lower middle class audience they address, poverty and the plight of the poor is not a priority (we can discuss this later as well). I too, remember first reading of such suicides in the newspapers in 1997-8, but these stories have been consistently reported on an intermittent basis since, especially in the local newspapers so one would then have to explain why this would be the case unless there was some trend at work.

It is obviously in the interests of state governments not to investigate too closely such occurrences unless they are forced to do so – hence the pressure leading to the establishing of commissions of inquiry; the very fact they have done so leads me to suspect that we are seeing an occurrence that is not the normal state of affairs. As you note, Jason, given the many biases of much of the statistical data for India, especially outside the urban and formal sectors I am afraid that “thick” individualistic descriptions are the richest sort of data we have. For more quantitative assessments one could look at the Commission reports- the Verma Commission in Karnataka being an example. However, I would note with respect to the fact that states have been forced into setting up such commissions to inquire into the occurrences of suicides is in itself an indication that the problem has shown a tendency to increase; what we should be asking is why none of the recommendations of these inquiries have been implemented – in support of your point Jason that such occurrences are not new the Ojha Commission was set up in Andhra Pradesh over a decade ago in response to the 1987-88 episode of suicide deaths – so these are not new spectres in the Indian countryside by any means.There is little formal work being done that I am aware of, though most of the advocacy for such groups comes from staunchly leftist groups such as the CPI (M-L) who have activists that compile such case studies.

In response to your queries on the nature of socio-economic changes in the countryside and the relation they have with peasant suicides I will just list some of my thoughts:

1) The moneylender theme was a common factor running through all the cases I had compiled and Jason correctly points out that these relations of production pre-date the introduction of new technologies such as transgenic crops. However, we must differentiate between different layers of analysis here. At a very general level I would suppose that a Marxist framework would see the functioning of usurer’s capital as a way of drawing in small producers into the capitalist network of relations. It is possible to go far back in delineating the relationship between moneylenders and peasants – David Hardiman’s book Feeding the Baniya is an important step in this regard. At the micro-level there will be quite a lot of variation between how such relationships work at the level of region, state and district depending on political, historical and ecological factors. I think the way merchant capital in the countryside works in say what I call the Green Revolution Triangle (Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh) is very different from how it works in the forested tribal areas of Jharkhand or Orissa and the dryland/Semi-arid regions of the Deccan. What this means for our discussion is that the introduction of new farming techniques into relatively backward districts, which have seen little public investment in rural infrastructure can have disruptive influences on the local economy.

2) As an aside on moneylender-peasant relations, I think we need to differentiate between the old patronage links that can be traced back to the pre-colonial period (Sanjay Subrahmanyam has done excellent work on this is South India) and the newer relationships that have emerged in the post- Green Revolution period. As Hardiman points out in his magisterial survey of moneylending in western India in the pre-independence era, the moneylender was always a somewhat parasitical figure in the countryside but up to the later colonial period with the constraints of the prevailing technological production frontier, such a relationship was a symbiotic one: the moneylender made sure the peasant never was able to fully escape from debt if possible but it was also in his interest to keep the peasant alive and make sure that he was able to survive. As loans in this scenario were predominantly for consumption purposes or for social expenditures such as weddings, funerals dowries etc. they were of a recurring nature tied to family and individual life cycles not to production capabilities or output. This also meant that just as debt was passed from father to son so was the credit passed from one merchant generation to another and the merchant living in peasant society had an incentive not to push the boundaries of the “village moral economy” too far – after all his dealing were of a long-term nature with the peasant communities – What I am arguing here is that you would not get a situation where money lenders would try to get their client to commit suicide so as to get a slice of the compensation then given by the state government to his family ( as in the case of Ravi Jaggu posted by Vikash) – not out of any sentimentality towards the peasant but because for the village moneylender the peasant represented a long-term investment in that his debt would be recycled over his lifetime and then taken on by his children in a self-perpetuating cycle. The merchant also, had limited means of investing his capital in a different sector of production altogether – though when opportunities for cash crop cultivation did occur such as in the 1860’s when the US civil war disrupted smooth cotton supplies, farmers in the Bombay Presidency met the demand with nudges from their merchant sponsors. The type of moneylending we are looking at now is somewhat different as it is tied to production loans and much of it is not routed through the village moneylender but instead has a different financial chain originating in trader networks which sell the inputs such as pesticides, fertiliser and hand pumps. Many loans are also run by informal finance companies, which penetrate the countryside to generate an agricultural surplus, which they can, they convert into a financial one – and also shift the risk from themselves onto the farmers who are doing the actual cultivating. The emergence of this type of moneylending started at the end of the colonial period and has increased since; it is really I suppose the result of a commercialisation of agriculture and the spread of cash cropping.

3) In addition I think that developments in South India are very interesting. Long term studies of south Indian market towns such as Arni in Arcot district of Tamil Nadu by anthropologists and the work at a larger regional level like for example Carol Upadhyaya on the coastal entrepreneurs of Andhra Pradesh, shows how in many small/medium towns an entrepreneurial group mobilises agricultural surpluses through moneylending which they then transfer to small-scale informal production in the urban sector. I would be happy to outline such a social structure of accumulation in detail in a later post. What is important to note here is the way capital in urban centres relates to rural production: it can be parasitic or generative depending on the context. However, such mercantile capital does push itself out to the more previously isolated areas in order to mobilise their labour power and incorporate them into the regional economy. This is why I think the introduction of lending for production can be a shock to relatively poorer districts such as Bidar in Karnataka and areas of Warangal (not all of the latter, it is important to note – ecological boundaries frequently cut across administrative ones) in Andhra Pradesh – being less favoured ecologically and having received less public infrastructure in terms of irrigation canals, roads, electrification etc. they are already very vulnerable to water shortages and poor monsoons. This makes small peasants very vulnerable and as the risk has been transferred to them already they are the ones left with the burden of adjustment in the wake of a harvest failure. This is a relatively newer for of mercantile capital that is more short-term in outlook and seeks to extract a surplus from agriculture where it can (mostly the landless labour through employment in the informal urban economy and small peasants through usury) and transfer it to the urban sector. This is one of the crucial ways in which dependence on mercantile capital has changed in the countryside with negative consequences for the smaller peasants.

4) What I find disturbing in particular is the improper and uncontrolled canalisation of such vital inputs like seeds and pesticides. Already in Gujarat there is controversy over the distribution of GM seeds by Navbharat have been deemed illegal by the Genetic Engineering Committee (GEAC), despite this the 11,000 acres (EPW, May 18, 2002) of cotton planted with such seeds last year have now been used to provide further seeds for distribution to farmers in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and it is suspected Tamil Nadu as well as Maharashtra, as the report in EPW comments there have been a host of companies which are “fly-by-night” operators using this opportunity to sell what they claim are Bt. Seeds to unsuspecting farmers, when in most cases many of these agents don’t even know what Bt cotton is. Similarly with pesticides, many suicides were averted as the pesticides sold on were adulterated or spurious and did not prove fatal to those who ingested them. The uncontrolled and unregulated trade in vital inputs is a major source of concern; especially when we are now dealing with transgenic crops such as bt cotton where uncontrolled utilisation could lead to a disastrous monoculture with its attendant weaknesses. This again I argue is part of the structure of accumulation that is being pursued by groups, which operate in the grey and black economy in India. This is in part a failure of regulation as well, as the Indian state especially at the sub-federal level has not been very good at enforcing industrial and agricultural legislation or providing a stable regulatory framework.

5) I do think you are right to point out the bias of US agricultural policy, which was certainly weighted to the larger farmers. The Morill Act of 1862 which established the Land Grant University System and the Hatch Act of 1887 which established State Agricultural Experimentation Stations did incline towards larger farmers, commodity specific research and the search for yield-enhancing varieties which relied on the heavy use of bio-chemical inputs supplied by industry. Claims of scientific independence here in US agricultural research hid distributional issues and led to a preoccupation with increasing productivity rather than a questioning of the ends to be served by those increases. Negative consequences to scientific advances were dismissed as adjustment problems or the price to be paid for progress. These processes were abetted by commodity-specific organisations of client groups, whose interest lay in obtaining seeds that would yield high outputs. The social consequences that were ignored as a result included: the displacement of millions of the farm population – in 1920 the farm population of the US was 32 million about 30% of the total population, by 1979 this figure had fallen to 6.2 million or 3% of the population (Busch and Lacy cite these figures –though I must add that large waves of European immigration and the Great Depression also played a role in inflating the urban population and pushing farmers off the land), other effects included: the growing influence of large corporate interests in agriculture, questions of sustainability raised by the indiscriminate employment of energy intensive inputs and chemicals, the enormous increase in the concentration of land and of output, the reduction of family farms and the emergence of a set of production relations where oligopolistic sellers of inputs into agriculture and oligopolistic buyers of agricultural output dominated over smaller farm producers who were squeezed in the middle – the formal subsumption of Labour to Capital. These developments I would argue were essentially negative for those left in the farm sector who were only buoyed up by large government subsidies (this obviously had a negative effect on Third World grain producers). I would argue that India would need to be careful to avoid such path, given the large relative size of the agricultural sector and the inability of the non-agricultural economy to subsidise it.

6) As far as land reform is concerned, this is again a tricky topic and one that I think would need a separate discussion altogether. But to note the salient features, I do agree that the political climate is unfavourable towards land reforms and with recent demographic developments it is debatable as to whether land reform can prove to be an agricultural remedy for reduced poverty and growth – though other policies to help the small peasant such as land consolidation and tenancy regulation could have been pursued further. Land redistribution I think has largely been a failure in India: in Kerala a key sector namely the productive plantation economy (Kerala being a major grower of spices such as cardamom, cinnamon and pepper) managed to escape much of the legislative impact by gaining industry status and utilising loopholes, the only notable success in Kerala was the implementation of minimum wage legislation and the effectiveness of agricultural labour unions – which have guaranteed agricultural labour a measure of income security something no other state has managed. In West Bengal redistributive land reforms broke down under the United Front state government of 1967, with illegal land-grabbing and the rise of the Naxalite movement. The much lauded Left Front government which has ruled the state since 1977 has not redistributed any more surplus land nor has been able to make much headway in agricultural taxation (see Ross Mallick's book Development Policy of a Communist State Government for details, he is a trenchant critic of the state government and builds a good case for the prosectution) the only redistributive measure was the successful registration of some 2 million sharecroppers and the protection extended to their right to till the land and receive a predetermined share of the harvest – a considerable achievement but not land reform on a large scale by itself (other vulnerable groups such as Tribals and landless labourers did not do so well here). The limited nature of land reform even in these ostensibly progressive leftist states shows the difficulty in implementing a really radical land reform and it must be acknowledged that the land reforms carried out in East Asia were generally under a military/authoritarian government or under colonial/imperial occupation.

7) I would however, emphasise the importance of equity in the “East Asian Miracle”. Drawing on the eponymous report by the World Bank numerous economists have scrutinised the record of the NICs in this regard. More specifically Dani Rodrik and Stephen Haggard have both argued that an egalitarian distribution of income was an important component of the NIC’s success. Of course what is also important was the relatively high levels of schooling for most of these countries as well – by 1960 universal schooling was a reality for all countries in the region except for Indonesia. The table below shows the Gini co-efficients for land and income for selected countries around 1960. What we can see is a high degree of equality – the NIC with the highest degree of economic inequality – Hong Kong still lies below the average for the non-NIC countries. The differences are even higher for land distribution.

Distributive indicators for NICs and selected Comparator Countries in 1960

Economy Gini Co. for Income Gini Co. for Land
Hong Kong 0.49 N/A
Indonesia 0.33 N/A
Japan 0.40 0.47
S. Korea 0.34 0.39
Malaysia 0.42 0.47
Singapore 0.40 N/A
Taiwan 0.31 0.46
Thailand 0.41 0.46
Average 0.39 0.45
Others
Argentina 0.44 0.87
Brazil 0.53 0.85
Egypt 0.42 0.67
India 0.42 0.52
Kenya 0.64 0.69
Mexico 0.53 0.69
Philippines 0.45 0.53
Turkey 0.56 0.68
Average 0.50 0.68

Source: Dani Rodrick and Alberto Alesina, Distributive Politics and Economic Growth, 1998.

Although running cross-country regressions is always a dangerous exercise, even a basic one using the World Bank data will show that land distribution is a significant variable in explaining growth – in the most robust growth model constructed by Rodrick and Alesina more than 50% of the variation in growth rates in the above two groups of sample countries can be explained by using income distribution, land distribution and education levels alone. Much of the growth of S. Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand according to the same model can be explained by the exceptionally high levels of primary schooling and egalitarian distribution. What is even more interesting is that I have tested the impact of initial distributions of income4 and assets by including the initial endowment levels in the model and this tracks the actual growth performance of the NIC countries much more accurately than the World Bank neo-classical one. Thus once initial levels of equity are taken into account together with high levels of educational investment there seems to be nothing “miraculous” about the NICs growth. While arguments about education and human capital development are fairly well known – those between initial equality and subsequent growth are less clear. The reasons advanced include: the fact that a reasonable level of equal income distribution results in a middle class which is a natural source of demand for home-based manufactures. This draws heavily on the Japanese and Taiwanese experience where demand by farmers for manufactures seemed to have played an important role in the early stages of industrialisation.

Other arguments are primarily political in nature: in an inegalitarian society there is more pressure for a redistribution of income, and such pressures it is claimed will result in policies that are harmful to private investment and growth. There is also a link between economic inequality and political stability- Latin America’s inequality is often mentioned as a reason for the region’s macroeconomic instability and populist electoral cycles.

If we look at rural social structure the big difference in the NICs and other countries is the lack of large landlord classes in the countryside. Hong Kong and Singapore obviously did not suffer from this problem due to their stature as city-states. Indonesia and Thailand both lacked indigenous landlord classes – though there was a land problem in Java it had more to do with land fragmentation of holdings not extreme concentration of ownership. Malaysia had the most inegalitarian land distribution with foreign and Chinese-owned plantations playing an important role in the economy- but even Malaysia had a more equal land distribution than Latin America or India or the Philippines. The Malay government was also willing to act aggressively in offsetting the inequality arising from the initial unequal endowment of land – facilitated no doubt by the fact that most of the assets such as land and business capital was owned by ethnic Chinese and Non-Malays.

Japan, S.Korea and Taiwan of course all underwent major land reforms under special conditions: the land reforms in S. Korea were enacted under the strong political pressure of the example of drastic land reform in the communist north and the fact that the government was sensitive to accusations that it was protecting the property of Japanese collaborators who had acquired their holdings under Japanese colonialism. Interestingly, in a similar fashion to India much of the larger landholders had compromised themselves by collaborating with Japanese rule and had made themselves deeply unpopular by doing so, the violence with which Japan ruled Korea has made relations between the two regions quite bitter. Even so the initial land distribution only covered holdings previously owned by the Japanese and only the advent of the Korean War did a more complete redistribution occur under wartime pressures.

Similarly with the KMT, which was unable to address the rural question on the mainland due to its involvement with the landlord class, was able to implement a fairly radical land reform – the most radical I can think of outside a revolutionary scenario. The lack of political and social connections with the KMT and the indigenous landlord elites probably was a decisive factor in this regard. Compare this with say the case in the Philippines, where a powerful landlord oligarchy blocked land reform and large landowners have diversified into protected banking and manufacturing activities, turning the landed elite into a powerful opponent to political and institutional reforms as well. It is not coincidental that the Philippines rivals Indonesia in the weakness of its civil service, despite the fact of its higher GDP per capita and a deeper educational inheritance (Vikash could I please ask you to provide some figures pre-1997 for the region). The decentralised nature of land-based power and the close links between elites and the government are important in explaining the weaknesses of the central government – a problem that still plagues the Philippines today.

I don’t think we can ignore the role that such redistributions played in influencing the course of development in the region. The fact that all the successful NICs did undergo such a process in my opinion strengthens the link between redistribution of initial assets particularly land and growth. Though one doesn’t need to use an economic framework for this, Mushtaq Khan has developed an interesting theory of rent-seeking to explain the divergences in behaviour in different states. Khan argues that rent seeking can be unproductive or productive depending on how far the state is able to insulate itself from its clients. Khan proposes that in India a range of “intermediate classes ” have come to occupy positions of leadership in civil society and can exert political pressure on the state. These classes can influence the state’s disbursement of rents (subsidies, tax breaks and licences for example) by extracting more rents and impeding the state’s efforts to remove unproductive rents. Using the example of Robert Wades’s pioneering work on irrigation systems and corruption in South India, Khan outlines how these groups secure their position by strengthening links with the police and political classes.

He contrasts rent seeking in India with rent seeking in South Korea, where the relatively weak political organisation of the intermediate classes has allowed the state to maintain some autonomy in dispersing and giving rents. Khan thus distinguishes between clientist networks where the state is weak relative to its clients which he sees typical of India and patrimonial networks where the state is relatively strong compared to rent seeking groups in society which he saw to be typical of state like South Korea. He also noted that within clientist regimes, the “fragmentary clientelism” existing in India, leads to a situation where the authority to distribute rents is dispersed through a multi-layered and complex bureaucracy and other countries such as Malaysia which also had clientist networks but had in place a system where the process of rent seeking was more centralised and where avenues to create and obtain rents were few and simple. Therefore what matters is not the level of corruption per se but the nature eof corrupt systems – Japanese, Korean and Thai politics for example are not less corrupt than Indian poolitcs in terms of magnitude: what differs is the arrangment of corruption and why corrupt politicians/buracrats can deliver effective policies and services elsewhere but generally fail in India. There would be a lot less comaplaint about government corruption in India if it actually delivered on some of its promises – this is what really bothers me about the Indian state not its corruption but its negligence.

Many of the factors you mention on the East Asian miracle are also important but I have not considered them here as I would agree with their – such as Japanese colonial practices, the large level of US aid, access to markets and security umbrella and strong centralised states (though I would hesitate to include Confucian Values in this schema – I mean is there really such a thing?!) and therefore it is not easy to replicate elsewhere, certainly not in India with any ease but we should take note of the example and not deny that a more egalitarian society with high levels of investment in its people through education and health is part of the solution and a precondition of growth not a utopian dream and the mere result of modern economic growth. Besides, the East Asian miracle has its own Dark Side e.g.: labour repression and control, lack of democracy, suppression of civil liberties, poor R&D in certain high knowledge sectors, glaring gender inequality after initial levels, marginalisation of minority groups, political cronyism and corruption etc.

So much for the problems but where are the solutions? Well some are already being proposed none of which really is credible. The liberalisers in most metropolises who encourage further reform and withdrawal by the state as a panacea for growth are unrealistic in their political calculus of electoral politics and also about the nature of how markets work. Simply to abandon large sections of society to the vagaries of the market in rural India would be a complete abdication of responsibility on behalf of the state and would lead to severe negative welfare and distributive effects. The other extreme also has its problems, I don’t think it is any coincidence that extremist activity by leftist groups committed to armed struggle is strongest in the most backward regions – the strength of the People’s War Group (PWG) in Telegana is a good example as is the resurgence of Naxalism in Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. Too many vulnerable sections have been left out of the growth process: even the supposedly leftist regimes in Kerala and West Bengal are no exception to this: just note the recent struggles over Tribal land rights in Kerala and the writings of Maheswati Devi on the situation of tribals in West Bengal. If the situation is not remedied we may see a Brasilianisation of society in India (sic: the separation and ranking of ethnic groups on a class basis) looking at the problems this has caused in the US and other countries, which have seen rapid growth (e.g. Mexico) this is something to be avoided. But I am getting diverted again, in terms of solutions here would be some of the basic steps that are in my wish-list: increase of directed credit to small/vulnerable farmers and the replacement of mercantile capital with public sector investment, expansion of co-operative associations for credit, inputs and sharing of best practices (and I mean real co-operatives not the elite networks like the Sugar Co-ops in Maharashtra), implementation of minimum wage legislation (every state has them, none except Kerala use them), improvement and coverage of the PDS (right to food essential to human life and dignity the southern states do well in this regard) to provide cheap and accessible food, proper government agricultural extension services to provide real knowledge of new agricultural techniques and their dissemination, the canalisation and regulation of agricultural inputs through public sector channels to reduce abuses and adulteration, heavy investment in rural infrastructure that is not environmentally unsound, large expansion of primary and secondary schooling in the villages, provision of social security to target groups such as pensioners and widows in the countryside – this will have a positive effect on the quality of life and hasten the demographic transition (it is feasible Tamil Nadu has had such a scheme in place for some time now), improve women’s access to resources, land rights and education (female literacy is a far better way of reducing fertility rates than punitive measures and also improves the life chances of the next generation of children) and rapid introduction of decentralised government through Panchayati Raj (this will work though it will need time, the initial results will always be disappointing but then democracy has a inverted “U” curve effect in putting down its roots and functioning effectively). This is just a starting list but as you can already see the problem lies not in finding solutions but implementing them effectively and in a politcally feasible manner.

:: Conrad Barwa 4:57 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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