In a short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated like “gods”, but when they ask for their rights, they are smeared and labelled as “terrorists”.
He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against three important pieces of farm legislation that were recently forced through parliament. To all intents and purposes, these laws sound a neoliberal death knell for most of India’s cultivators and its small farms, the backbone of the nation’s food production.
The farmer says:
“Corporates invested in Modi before the election and brought him to power. He has sold out and is an agent of Ambani and Adani. He is unable to repeal the bills because his owners will scold him. He is trapped. But we are not backing down either.”
He then asks whether ministers know how many seeds are needed to grow wheat on an acre of land:
“We farmers know. They made these farm laws sitting in air-conditioned rooms. And they are teaching us the benefits!”
While the corporations that will move in on the sector due to the legislation will initially pay good money for crops, once the public sector markets (mandis) are gone, the farmer says they will become the only buyers and will beat prices down.
He asks why, in other sectors, do sellers get to put price tags on their products but not farmers:
“Why can’t farmers put minimum prices on the crops we produce? A law must be brought to guarantee MSP [minimum support prices]. Whoever buys below MSP must be punished by law.”
The recent agriculture legislation represents the final pieces of a 30-year-old plan which will benefit a handful of billionaires in the US and in India. It means the livelihoods of hundreds of millions (the majority of the population) who still (directly or indirectly) rely on agriculture for a living are to be sacrificed at the behest of these elite interests.
Consider that much of the UK’s wealth came from sucking $45 trillion from India alone according to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik. Britain grew rich by underdeveloping India. What amount to little more than modern-day East India-type corporations are now in the process of helping themselves to the country’s most valuable asset – agriculture.
According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. The World Bank thus exerts a certain hold over India: on the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture.
In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The plan involves shifting at least 400 million from the countryside into cities.
The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Research Unit for Political Economy, ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington DC’. The piece says that the current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy:
“Indian business giants such as Reliance and Adani are major recipients of foreign investment, as we have seen in sectors such as telecom, retail, and energy. At the same time, multinational corporations and other financial investors in the sectors of agriculture, logistics and retail are also setting up their own operations in India. Multinational trading corporations dominate global trade in agricultural commodities. For all these reasons, international capital has a major stake in the restructuring of India’s agriculture… The opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses is a longstanding project of the imperialist countries.”
The article provides details of a 1991 World Bank memorandum which set out the programme for India. It adds:
“At the time, India was still in its foreign exchange crisis of 1990-91 and had just submitted itself to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme. Thus, India’s July 1991 budget marked the fateful start of India’s neoliberal era.”
It states that now the Modi government is dramatically advancing the implementation of the above programme, using the Covid-19 crisis as cover: the dismantling of the public procurement and distribution of food is to be implemented by the three agriculture-related acts passed by parliament.
The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms. The norm will be industrial (GMO) commodity-crop agriculture suited to the needs of the likes of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and India’s retail and agribusiness giants as well as the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations. It could result in hundreds of millions of former rural dwellers without any work given that India is heading (has already reached) jobless growth.
As a result of the ongoing programme, more than 300,000 farmers in India 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 cash crops and economic liberalisation. The number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.
We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.
Take the cultivation of pulses, for instance. According to a report in the Indian Express (September 2017), pulses production increased by 40% during the previous 12 months (a year of record production). At the same time, however, imports also rose resulting in black gram selling at 4,000 rupees per quintal (much less than during the previous 12 months). This effectively pushed down prices thereby reducing farmers already meagre incomes.
We have already witnessed a running down of the indigenous edible oils sector thanks to Indonesian palm oil imports (which benefits Cargill) on the back of World Bank pressure to reduce tariffs (India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils in the 1990s but now faces increasing import costs).
The pressure from the richer nations for the Indian government to further reduce support given to farmers and open up to imports and export-oriented ‘free market’ trade is based on nothing but hypocrisy.
On the ‘Down to Earth’ website in late 2017, it was stated some 3.2 million people were engaged in agriculture in the US in 2015. The US goverment provided them each with a subsidy of $7,860 on average. Japan provides a subsidy of $14,136 and New Zealand $2,623 to its farmers. In 2015, a British farmer earned $2,800 and $37,000 was added through subsidies. The Indian government provides on average a subsidy of $873 to farmers. However, between 2012 and 2014, India reduced the subsidy on agriculture and food security by $3 billion.
According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma subsidies provided to US wheat and rice farmers are more than the market worth of these two crops. He also notes that, per day, each cow in Europe receives subsidy worth more than an Indian farmer’s daily income.
The Indian farmer simply cannot compete with this. The World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the IMF have effectively served to undermine the indigenous farm sector in India. The long-term goal has been to displace the peasantry and consolidate a corporate-controlled model.
And now, by reducing public sector buffer stocks and introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture.
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In Europe we are not accustomed to seeing images on the television of thousands of Americans—right-wingers to boot—breaking the law, overrunning government buildings and violently attacking the police.
By rushing the Capitol, the heart of American democracy, President Trump’s supporters demonstrated that they are ready for a fight. Many of these fanatics would love to use their weapons beyond the firing range.
The students at the high school in Athens where I teach history asked me if civil war will break out in the United States. Their grim scenario goes something like this: Disappointing many of his critics, Donald Trump will not commit suicide (the American President is not made of the same stuff as the Capitol Police officer who took his own life on January 9.) Instead, he will create his own version of Twitter and rally his supporters and a segment of the armed forces and police. In a declining American economy, Donald Trump will galvanize support and grow his America First party into a force of the first magnitude that will hold power where it counts—in the streets.
Thankfully, this dire scenario is unrealistic and highly improbable. For all his swagger and tough posturing, Donald Trump does not have the stomach for the rough-and-tumble crowd that stormed the Capitol. The owner of Mar-a-Lago was repelled and embarrassed by the real time television footage he watched of these people in action. Some were graphic in their weirdness and many looked “cheap and poor” to him. After initially goading them on, Trump turned his back on them, even saying they deserved to be punished for breaking the law.
For an honest-to-goodness civil war to break out, you need a struggle to the death between mutually incompatible systems—as was the case in the American, Russian and Chinese civil wars. This will not happen now. Despite right-wing clamor to the contrary, the left in the United States does not pose an existential threat to the system. It is nowhere near the Rubicon of private property and free market capitalism, and has no plans to cross it. The left in the United States today is actually part of the system. This even applies to antifa, which is keen on fighting fascism but does not really challenge capitalism.
Racism is not the main reason so many more armed guards defended the Capitol during the summer’s BLM protests. There were black USCP officers present. More importantly, the BLM crowd and their white, Hispanic and Asian supporters include a lot of people who hate the system in a fundamentally different way than Trump’s radical supporters do. Many of these people have grown tired of trying to fix the system’s most egregious symptoms, including racism and sexism. They are convinced the system cannot be cured or reformed. Law enforcement understands this about them. In their minds, these crowds represent a potentially far more dangerous threat than Trump supporters.
Passions are running high in the land of the free and home of the brave. Looking ahead, it is likely there will be sporadic violence between disappointed Trump supporters and the police and/or left-wing groups like antifa. But there will be no civil war. Big business does not feel sufficiently threatened to condone any sort of coup by Donald Trump’s supporters. Big business does not need Trump the way the German elite needed Hitler in the early thirties to protect them from the communists. Any attempt by Trump’s supporters to challenge the establishment will be met effectively. This will not be difficult. One by one, the ringleaders will be arrested and the movement will cease to be a major problem for the authorities.
In the end, it wasn’t the left that stopped Donald Trump but big business. And Trump himself, of course.
Evel Economakis : I received a PhD in history from Columbia University in 1993. I have published numerous academic articles and my political commentary has appeared in various magazines, including The New Statesman and Dissent. An American citizen, I currently live with my family in Greece, and I teach IB history at Ionios Lyceum in Athens.
Prerogative of your privacy with the tech giants like WHATSAPP, TWITTER, FACEBOOK,INSTAGRAM,and like many others is being largely brought into questions and judicial overview as to what it actually constitutes in the strictest sense and what modalities need to be adopted to design the much-needed safeguards and framework of its judicial redressal in cases of brazen and conflagrant infringement, violations and exploitation for commercial gains that all social media platforms are vying for in this ever expanding digitized world.
With WhatsApp’s new privacy policy has triggered an outcry worldwide with around fifty crores(500 million active users in India alone) about their unauthorized breach of personal data collection to be used by the third parties to target potential clientele and the users’ buying and shopping preferential trend researches for making bigger and wider inroads into the online shopping domains.
As usual WhatsApp’s implausible and perhaps inexplicable and standard response remains the same that you have agreed to the terms and conditions reading all the clauses for using the app and those who are willing to quit are welcome to do so brushing aside its moral obligation of safeguarding the users’ personal information and protecting them from any of their misuse or leakage through recurrent breaches, not uncommon these days in the hands of the seasoned hackers and mercenaries involved.
It is worthwhile to mention that even Zuckerberg, Facebook C.E.O when called before the US congress regarding fixing professional accountability and giving assurance about setting higher standards of practices of running these doyens of social media houses Zuckerberg had to confess and admit that there has been rampant breaches in costumers’ data protection and somehow accidentally the collected information reached the third party companies which in turn misused them for their marketing and commercial gains.
Although Zuckerberg left the core committee assured that they are committed and trying hard to stop this menace because any breach of personal information can damage an individual’s fundamental rights and freedom, including the risk of identity theft and many other fraudulent mischiefs that hackers or third parties involved may wantonly resort to without letting the principal, the first part’s knowledge and consent.
The need of the hour is not just an eye wash to the entire conundrum by certain companies and individuals agreeing to one another but the right intervention of the government which can intervene time to time and on occasions of disputes as the sole arbitrator because the issue is not just restricted to the individual rights of freedom and companies’ rights of business operations but also the social and national security of any sovereign state.
Recent blanket ban and suspension of Trumps’ Twitter account permanently is a case in point suggesting how powerful these social media platforms have become and it is no wonder that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and U.K parliamentarians along with some others have voiced their legitimate concerns over the sweeping powers being entrusted to these giant tech companies which can hold anyone on ransom. let alone the common individual who has got hardly any say in bringing them to book in case of the infringement of personal freedom and right to speech.
These social platforms should be seen as a double-edged sword and its non-judicious use might prove deadly for not just persons but the society at large, so it is imperative that there should be a fine balance between how much of leverage can be accorded to them in stipulating their binding terms and conditions, to be met by the gullible users and provisioning strictest penalties in case of their gross violations and irresponsible conducts or data breaches which has been witnessed so invariably lately .
Although it is never in the interest of any organisation to fail in ensuring data privacy protection because of the reputational risk involved and its core values definitely get eroded as they might lose the customers’ trust gained over the years, there still flagrant breaches of huge scales are being reported primarily because of unscrupulous tech giants have become a formidable force to reckon with and they have the audacity to lock horns with the governments also.
The companies or the tech giants and social networks need to ensure that their co-partner companies like suppliers, retailers or service providers don’t resort to such nefarious acts of stealing data and are well-equipped to handle them transparently, incorporating agreements about data breach notification obligations and cooperation in fulfilling data subject requests and such commitments.
In future newer regulations coupled with stricter requirements and steeper penalty provisions will be paramount to all the successes that these tech houses are aspiring for and these have to be imbed in the core competencies of all successful business models.
Mohammad Haseen Ahmed, King Abdulaziz University, English Language Institute, Jeddah,K.S.A mdhsnahmad@gmail.com
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