Colin Todhunter’s insightful writings have frequently been
cited by the SOYMB blog. Albeit we may not agree with every detail of his
analysis but on many issues we share similar viewpoints. The following areextracts from an article he wrote on India where lived and worked and where there
exists a companion party, the World Socialist Party (India)
India was the richest country in the world and had
controlled a third of global wealth until the 17th century. Political unity and
military security helped evolve a uniform economic system, increased trade and
enhanced agriculture productivity. India was an exporter of spices, food
grains, handicrafts, handloom products, wootz steel, musk, camphor, sandalwood
and ivory items, among other things. The village was the centre of a rural
economy that was an economic powerhouse. the economic fabric of the village was
once enshrined in a performing eco-system and a healthy social life based on
fellow feelings and mutual co-operation. However, the British Raj almost dismantled
this system by introducing mono crop activities and mill made products, and
post independent India failed to repair the economic fabric.
Eradicating poverty in that country requires every person
having access to safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, nutrition, health
and education. Out of its 1.2 billion-plus population, India is home to over
340 million destitute people and is the second poorest country in South Asia
after war-torn Afghanistan. Some 640
million poor people live in India (40% of the world's poor).
20 years ago, India
had the second-best social indicators among the six South Asian countries ( India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka , Nepal and
Bhutan ). Now it has the second worst position, ahead only of Pakistan.
Bangladesh has less than half of India's per-capita GDP but has infant and
child mortality rates lower than that of India. In Bangladesh, 82% of children
are fully immunised, 88% get vitamin A supplements and 89% are breastfed within
an hour of birth. The corresponding figures for Indian children are below 50%
in all case and as low as 25% for vitamin A supplementation. Moreover, over
half of the population in India practices open defecation, a major health
hazard, compared with less than 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has overtaken
India in terms of a wide range of basic social indicators, including life
expectancy, child survival, enhanced immunisation rates, reduced fertility
rates and particular schooling indicators.
“We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost
of the welfare of the downtrodden and the environment. We don't think how our
farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how
the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports,
IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world
to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of
even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran
CV
The poverty alleviation rate in India remain around the same
as it was back in 1991 or even in pre-independence India (0.8 percent), while
the ratio between the top and bottom ten percent of the population has doubled
during this period. Amartya Sen and the World Bank's chief economist Kaushik
Basu have argued that the bulk of India
's aggregate growth is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes
at the upper end of the income ladder . To use Arundhati Roy's term, the poor
in India are the ‘ghosts of capitalism': the ‘invisible' and shoved-aside
victims of a now rampant neoliberalism. India's social development has been
sacrificed on the altar of greed and corruption for bulging Swiss accounts, and
it has been stolen and put in the pockets of the country's ruling class ‘wealth
creators' and the multinational vultures who long ago stopped circling and are
now swooping.
According to the Organisation for Co-operation and Economic
Development, this doubling of income inequality has made India one of the worst performers in the category
of emerging economies. It is being driven through by what Vandana Shiva says is
the biggest forced removal of people from their lands in history and involves
one of the biggest illegal land grabs since Columbus, according to a 2009
report commissioned by the rural development ministry. Almost 300,000 farmers
have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic
distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and
economic liberalisation. And yet the
corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads
to bad food, bad soil, poor quality or no water, bad health, poor or falling
yields and an impending agrarian crisis. In addition to displacing people to
facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, unconstitutional land
grabs for Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other projects have
additionally forced many others from the land. In ‘The Greater Common Good',
Arundhati Roy writes about the thousands of tribal people displaced by the
Narmada Sarovar Dam. Moreover, it has been a case of massive tax breaks for
industry and corporations and underinvestment in rural infrastructure and
farming. It's not difficult to see where policy makers' priorities lie.
In the West, the route to capitalism or urbanisation was not
‘natural' and involved the unforeseen outcomes of conflicts and struggles
between serfs, lords, peasants, landowners, the emerging bourgousie and class
of industrialists and the state. The outcomes of these struggles resulted in
different routes to modernity (communism, fascism, capitalism) and levels of
urbanisation. Unsurprisingly, struggles (both violent and non-violent) are now
taking place in India . The naxalites
and Maoists are referred to by the dominant class as left wing extremists who
are exploiting the situation of the poor. But how easy it is to ignore the true
nature of the poor's exploitation. How easy it is to lump all protesters
together and create an ‘enemy within'. How easy it is to ignore the
state-corporate extremism across the world that results in the central state
abdicating its responsibilities by submitting to the tenets of the Wall
Street-backed ‘structural adjustment' pro-privatisation policies, free capital
flows and unaccountable cartels. That's the real nature of extremism. It is the
type of extremism that is regarded as anything but by the mainstream media.
With GDP growth slowing and automation replacing human
labour the world over in order to decrease labour costs and boost profit, where
are the jobs going to come from to cater for hundreds of millions of former
agricultural workers or those whose livelihoods will be destroyed as
corporations move in and seek to capitalise and mechanise industries (eg wheat
processing) that currently employ tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions)?
It is clear that farmers (and others) represent a ‘problem': a problem while on
the land and a problem to be somehow dealt with once displaced. But food
producers, the genuine wealth producers of a nation, only became a problem when
Western agribusiness was given the green light to take power away from farmers
and uproot traditional agriculture in
India and recast it in its own
corporate-controlled image. This is who is really setting the ‘development'
agenda.
India is acquiescing
to foreign corporations. Take a look at the free trade agreement being hammered
out behind closed doors between the EU and India. It all adds up to powerful trans-national corporations trying to
by-pass legislation that was implemented to safeguard the public's rights. We
could see the Indian government being sued by multinational companies for
billions of dollars in private arbitration panels outside of Indian courts if
national laws, policies, court decisions or other actions are perceived to
interfere with their investments. This is already a reality in many parts of
the world whereby legislation is shelved due to even the threat of legal action
by corporations. Such free trade agreements cement the corporate ability to
raid taxpayers' coffers even further via unaccountable legal tribunals, or to
wholly dictate national policies and legislation. This agreement could see
rural Indian society being restructured and devastated in favour of Western
corporate interests and adversely impacting hundreds of millions and their
livelihoods and traditional ways of living. The bedrock of any society is its
agriculture. Without food there can be no life. Without food security, there
can be no genuine independence. Nowhere is this the case than in India
where 64% of the population derives its sustenance from the agricultural
sector. To control Indian agriculture is to exert control over the country. One
needs to control only seeds, agro-chemicals and resultant debt and
infrastructure loans. The World Bank, the IMF and the US State Department are
well aware of this fact. US foreign policy is about power and control: the
power to control food, states and entire populations.
In an attempt to control agriculture and despite evidence
that suggests otherwise, agritech corporations promote the notion that they
have the answers to feeding the world. People are generally hungry not because
of insufficient agricultural production but because they do not have money to
buy food, access to land to grow food or because of complex problems like food
spoilage, poor food distribution systems and a lack of reliable water and
infrastructure for irrigation, storage, transport and financing. If these
deeper problems are not addressed and as long as food is not reaching those who
are hungry and poor, increased agricultural production will not help reduce
food insecurity. We already produce enough food to feed the world's population
and did so even at the peak of the world food crisis in 2008. Moreover, India
can already feed itself and arguably
doesn't need modern technology of poisonous pesticides, destructive
fertilizers and patented GE seeds that can't match 1890 or even 1760 AD yields
in India. By shifting towards a commercialised system that would also give the
poor cash to buy food in the market place, rather than the almost half a
million ‘ration shops' that currently exist, the result will be what the WTO/
World Bank/IMF have been telling India to for a long time: to displace the farming
population so that agribusiness can find a stronghold in India (aided by the
free trade agreement, which could see land in the hand of foreign entities who
prioritise cash crops for export).
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