Articles by Dr. Shiva

INDIA'S FOOD WARS

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

WTO, FTA'S AND FOOD RETAIL

WTO was bad. It has caused much harm over the past decade, including forcing small farmers off the land, or into debt and suicide. Now that WTO has been used to allow corporations to enter local and domestic economies, it can be allowed to go into intensive care.

The collapse of W.T.O. talks could be intentional to make way for bilaterals for "free trade", which increase and accelerate the market access for corporations of the North to markets of the South. This is clearly what is happening in the food and retail sector.

After the Hong Kong Ministerial, the Doha round has not made any progress. This has given the U.S. and Europe opportunity to negotiate bilaterally with India, and get better market access deals than they can multilaterally.

The U.S. India Agriculture Agreement has helped U.S. corporations get increased market access to India In fact corporations such as Monsanto, Con Agra, and Walmart sit on the board of the bilateral agreement.

Since the agreement was made, the push for deregulation of biotechnology has increased. The dismantling of Biosafety has so far been prevented because of Public Interest Litigation filed by citizens groups in the Supreme Court of India.

The agreement has also led to increased imports of wheat, at higher prices and lower standards even though India is producing 73 million tones of wheat at lower prices.

And Walmart which has been seeking direct entry through Foreign Direct Investment in retail has, for the time being, settled for a partnership with Bharti, the telecommunication company.

The failure of the recent W.T.O. talks of the Quad - U.S., Europe, Brazil and India is now being used by Europe to get access to India's huge retail market which employs more than 40 million to provide for the basic needs of more than a billion.

On June 28-29, 2007 India and EU will be holding formal talks on for trade in goods, services and investment. India's retail sector is the top priority for Europe.

As the Financial Express reports "European retail majors like TESCO and Carrefour may still find a way out for three plans, with New Delhi embarking on an ambitious broad-based bilateral trade and investment agreement with the European Union." (Arun S "Trade Talks hold out hope for TESCO, Financial Express, 28 Jun 07).

Agriculture Commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, at a meeting with European Agricultural Trade Experts, said:

"The Indian middle class is hungry for exciting food and drink experiences that go beyond Indian cuisine. And this class is growing at the rate of 35 million people per year, or in other words, by the population of a medium-sized European country."

She also said that when so many foreign companies are getting into strong position to increase their sales in India, the European food-processing firms would also "need a piece of the action."

Food retail in India has clearly became an important part of global trade wars. But this is about more than trade. For the people of India it is about culture and ecology, about employment and food security.

The cultural assault is exemplified in an India Today article in which described the local vegetable shopping in a small market as "90% perspiration, 10% inspiration" and shopping at a supermarket store as "90% inspiration and 1-% perspiration". The attempt is to present the low cost, human scale neighbourhood market or vendor as "primitive" and the airconditioned supermarket as "sophisticated".

The Time Magazine of June 11, 2007 in an article titled "Supply Chains Food Fight" also tries to project the picture of primitiveness.

"As the early morning light slowly illuminates the mishmash of streets around the Krishnarajendra market in central Bangalore, pushcart vendors made through ankle-deep mud and cow manure and past heaping piles of cabbage leaves and rotting tomatoes. Skinny porters doubled over beneath burlap sacks full of vegetables shuffle through the quagmire, trying to avoid the trucks that belch blue clouds of diesel exhaust and the sacred but occasionally cantankerous cows munching on piles of trash. Women squat behind piles of vegetables they will carry to distant neighborhoods for a tiny profit. The grocery business in India is choreographed chaos, a commercial dance honed over decades, fascinating and charming in its own way but also corrupt, unhygienic and highly inefficient.
Across town, in an eight-month-old processing warehouse run by India's largest company, Reliance industries, half a dozen women wearing balaclavas, woolen trousers and bulky jackets work inside a room kept at a constant 3oC, peeling and chopping vegetables, spinning them dry and then heaping them in small plastic packets before placing them in plastic transport crates. At the other end of the 5,600-sq-m warehouse, men unload crates of grapes from a truck pulled up to a spotless loading dock. A quality-control expert samples every tenth crate; if the grapes are good a team will ready them for delivery within hours to Reliance fresh stores around Bangalore and as far away as Hyderabad and even Mumbai (formerly Bombay). If they are not, workers will inspect the entire shipment and discard anything below standard. Uniformed men spray lemons with water, cover crates of coriander with moistened burlap to stop the greens wilting and scan bar codes on the end of each crate. Reliance will soon install air-conditioners to keep the warehouse at 18oC even when the outside temperature hits 400C. "Its a luxury that not many people can afford", jokes one worker.

What this presentation hides is the millions whose dignity and livelihoods get snatched when a Reliance or Walmart sets up a store or the billions of units of energy used and millions tones of carbon dioxide emitted to run airconditioned warehouses and long distance supply chains.

The Walmart model of long distance supply chains is energy intensive and hence greenhouse gas intensive.

As the huge retail chains claim to provide every vegetable, and fruit in any part of the country at any time, the average distance traveled by the food will increase. Traffic congestion is already a real problem for many towns and cities, so stores generating thousands of new car journeys will significantly add to local problems. Recent work for DEFRA the U.K. Environmental and Food Agency suggests that car use for food shopping results in costs to society of more than £3.5 billion per year, from traffic emissions, noise, accidents and congestion. Traffic congestion occurs on a larger scale too - the distribution systems used by supermarkets generate large amounts of traffic, both in this country and overseas. This will lead to high level of carbon-di-oxide emission and global warming as a long term result.

Walmart has emerged as one of the largest corporations in the world, and definitely the largest in retail. It started only fifteen years ago. In 1990, Walmart had only nine supercentres. By the end of 2000, it had 888 supercentres in USA, and had become the number one retailer in the country. Today it has become the biggest grocery seller in the world. In the U.S. it controls 16% of the grocery market. In some cities its share is 30%. Walmart now has 3,811 stores in the USA. It has become the largest retailer in Mexico and Canada, the second largest grocery seller in U.K - all in a few years.

A typical Walmart store sells 60,000 different items, a supercentre sells 120,000 items. And 80% are sourced from China. Walmart is one of the best beneficiaries of corporate led globalization, and has made communities dependent on supplies from thousands of miles away for everyday items - including the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Yet Walmart is spreading myths about its corporate reach and its predatory growth. These myths have been totally exposed in the best seller "Walmart effect" by Charles Fishman.

Myth I "Localisation"

In an article Walmart's vision of India published in the Financial Express, 1st June 2007, Raj Jain, President, emerging markets, Wal-Mart has stated:

"One key reason for Walmart's success is localization. We carry local products from local suppliers that appeal to local tastes, needs and fashions."

If Walmart was our local neighbourhood store, carrying only locally produced items, it would be different in every region of every country and it would not be a supercentre. It would be a separate shop for different things-a sari shop, a bangle shop, a shop for electrical goods, a shop for vegetables.

The Walmart model is based on the opposite principles to localisation. It is based on principles of globalization. The reality has been identified by Charles Fishman in "Walmart Effect".

"One key reason for Walmart's success is globalization. They carry global products from global supplies that create global tastes, needs and fashions."

By being the biggest buyer in most commodities, Walmart determines the fate of producers - whether they will continue to produce and what price they will sell their products at.

As Sherrie Ford, a factory owner and long time manufacturing management expert has stated:

"Every time you see the Walmart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there is a factory worker being kicked in the stomach."

An example is a gallon jar of cucumber pickles from Vlassic. It was sold in every one of Walmart's stores for $2.97. This was not local food based on local taste. In fact the supplier says, "It started cannibalizing our non-Walmart business. We saw consumers who used to buy the spears and chips in supermarkets buying the Walmart gallons. They'd eat a quarter of a jar and throw the thing away.. The price - a number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers and competitors about the state of the pickle market - the price was a lie. It was unrelated to either the supply of cucumbers or the demand of pickles. The price was a fiction" (Page 82, Fishman)

Blue jeans stitched in China on the basis of super exploited labour is not localization. It is the worst form of globalization.

Myth II: An ally of small retailers

Walmart is presenting itself as an ally of the small retailers it will destroy.

"The Joint Venture will sell quality merchandise directly to retailers - big and small, including 'mom and pop' or kirana stores. The purpose is to establish an efficient supply chain linking farmers and small manufacturers - who have limited infrastructure or distribution strength."

One would imagine that there are no wholesale markets or mandis in India which get farmers produce to the retailers. Our trade network is more sophisticated - more complex, more multilayered, more efficient than any system that Walmart can introduce itself as a giant wholesaler. This will destroy millions of livelihoods in mandis and wholesale markets. In the mandis the retailer can choose to buy from hundreds of traders. With Walmart farmers will have only one buyer and consumers will have only one seller. There is no reason to imagine that Walmart will not destroy India's small, independent retail as it has done in the USA. A study in the US shows that in the first year of a Walmart store opening, 50 people who had a retail job in the county (locality) had lost their jobs. Three retailers closed within two years of Walmart's arrival, four closed within five years. A county (nearby locality) lost twenty wholesale jobs after five years. Another study found that Walmart took away 15-30% sales from other supermarkets.

Indians are buying their vegetables from sabjiwallas and hawkers. Reliance and Walmart take business away from existing retailers, as one study on the impact of "Reliance Fresh" has shown.

Myth III:

"Provide quality jobs to India's unskilled workforce."

"We expect to provide direct and indirect jobs to thousands of Indians."

India has 40 million people in retail. A few thousand jobs will not compensate for the millions of livelihoods destroyed by Walmart. And a person at a Walmart cash register might be unskilled, India's small trader is highly skilled. They are their own purchasers and marketing managers. They know finance and supply management. Just as the colonies used the concept of "Terra Nullius" (Empty Earth) to colonise land that belonged to others, Walmart is using the concept of "Trade Nullius" to hijack our retail - as if there is no trade, no skill, and no knowledge, before Walmart's arrival.

Myth 4: Help develop and grow local suppliers

Walmart's profits are based on destroying local production and local retail. In 2004 Walmart bought products from fifty three hundred factories in sixty countries around the world. This is not local supply. Walmart pushes prices so low that local producers cannot supply. In 1991, Ridlen Adhesives was abandoned by Walmart because they could not lower the prices further. As Nancy Ridlen the owner reports, Walmart said: "We don't want to pay 50 cents for these glue sticks. We'll pay 45 cents. Either you take it or we'll go elsewhere."

This is what has happened to every product, from locks to lawn movers from shirts to jeans.

And every producer who was destroyed had been tempted by Walmart's large volumes. As Jim Wier, who said no to Walmart states:

"They had the lure of the Walmart volume. Once they get hooked on the volume, it's like getting hooked on cocaine. You've created a monster for yourself."

Let us not fall into the trap of Walmart's myths. Let us not create a monster for India's small producers and retailers.

With Walmart and TESCO targeting the Indian middle class, a war around food culture is being unleashed. The Indian fresh food culture must be made to look inferior to make the packaged and processed food on supermarket shelves look superior. And this cultural war over food also uses pseudo science as a weapon. Food safety and pseudo hygiene standards are an example of instruments based on pseudo science being used to shut down street foods and small scale processing. While India will focus on EU's non-tariff trade barriers like labeling norms and sanitary and phyto-sanitary requirements in the free trade negotiations which are to be completed by the end of 2008, domestically India has already changed its own Food Safety lens through the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006 to mimic EU laws on pseudo-hygiene, which reduces safety to the size of cucumber and the ownership of a refrigerator. When the Food Safety laws were passed, the Food Minister openly stated that this would help supermarket sales grow by 30%. Street food vendors in Delhi have already been banned even though study after study has shown that hot street foods are safe. The small cold press "ghanis" were banned in 1998 to facilitate GMO soya oil.

At a time when movements like Slow Food are growing worldwide to promote and protect local food cultures and economies, the Indian elite and middle classes are rushing, headlong into an industrial food culture. At a time when the west is recognizing that the Walmart - TESCO model degrades food, culture and employment, and farmers markets are growing everywhere, India with the largest and richest "bazaar" culture in the world is being manipulated by corporations and their friends in the governments of the U.S., E.U. and India to become part of the "clone" culture of supermarket chains that Andrew Simms describes so well in his "Tescopoly".

He has called supermarket chains an invasive species (like Lantana and Parthenium) which destroy local ecosystems and local cultures.

Just as we need to protect ourselves from invasive species to protect our biological diversity, we need to protect our food cultures and livelihoods from the invasion of supermarket chains. "Free trade" for Walmart and TESCO is the end of freedom for farmers, hawkers and vendors who constitute a population of more than 800 million in India. W.T.O. might be dying, but corporate hijack of our livelihoods in food and farming is more intensive than ever. And governments have become instruments and facilitators in the promotion of corporate farming and corporate retail.

Citizens must take the lead in shaping societies that protect the earth, give work to all hands and enrich our communities and societies. Our slogan "Our world is not for sale" must move to every farm and every street in every society. Our freedoms and our very lives are at stake.

HOW THE WORLD BANK IS PROMOTING CORPORATE RETAIL IN FOOD

A World Bank report by Aaditya Mattoo, Deepak Mishra and Ashish Narain titled "From competition at Home to competing Abroad" is a recipe for destroying India's retail democracy and promoting corporate retail.

In 1991, the World Bank's Structural Adjustment programme began the dismantling of India's food sovereignty and food security systems.

On 26 April 2007, Aaditya Mattoo, Deepak Mishra and Ashish Narain of the Work Bank wrote an op-ed in Times of India titled, "Produce and Perish: How India is failing its farmers."

The farmers of India are definitely facing a deep crisis. 150,000 have committed suicide in the last decade of trade liberalization. And even where they are not committing suicide their incomes are falling. India is failing her farmers, but the anti-farmer policies are heavily influenced by the World Bank. It is in fact the World Bank's policies that have created India's agrarian crisis and robbed farmers of their income. The Indian farmer works hard but is poorly rewarded because the Bank's recipes transfer his incomes to agribusiness and the agrichemical industry. Corporate profits grow while farmers' incomes shrink.

The crisis of farmers failing incomes has evolved in two phases. The first phase was the Green Revolution phase from 1965-1990, the second phase is the structural adjustment and trade liberalization phase. In the first phase, the Bank pushed India on a monoculture path of chemical addiction. The World Bank provided the credit to introduce a capital intensive agricultural model in a country of poor farmers. The World Bank and USAID also exerted pressure for favourable conditions for foreign investment in India's fertilizer industry, import liberalization and elimination of domestic controls. The World Bank provided credit for the foreign exchange needed to implement these policies. The foreign exchange component of the Green Revolution strategy, over the five year plan period (1966-71) was projected to be Rs. 1,114 crores, which converted to about $2.8 billion at the then official rate. This was a little over six times the total amount allocated to agriculture during the preceding third plan (Rs. 191 crores). Most of the foreign exchange was needed for the import of fertilizers, seeds and pesticides, the new inputs in a chemically intensive strategy.

The short term economic viability of high profits for the "progressive" farmer if Punjab was to be eventually be a high political cost for Punjab's farmers with the phasing of subsidies, cost of production rose, leading to falling incomes and debt. As I have shown in my book, "The Violence of the Green Revolution", the unrest among Punjab farmers in the 1980s was largely fuelled by the false prosperity of the Green Revolution.

In the 1990s, the World Bank applied new conditionalities to force the State out of the role it had made it play in the Green Revolution period.

The World Bank finances were an important element in the spread of the vast network that was needed for distribution of Green Revolution varieties. In 1963, the National Seed Corporation was established. In 1969, the Terai Seed Corporation was started with a World Bank loan of US$13 million. This was followed by two National Seeds Project (NSP) loans. NSP I of US$25 million was given in 1976 and NSP II of US$16 million was given in 1978 to support the National Seed Program. The overall objective of the projects was to develop state institutions and create a new infrastructure for increasing the production of certified seeds. In 1988, the World Bank gave India a fourth loan for the seed sector to make India's seed industry more 'market responsive'.

The involvement of the private sector, including multinational corporations, in seed production is a special objective of NSP III (US$150 million). This was viewed as necessary because as the project document notes, 'sustained demand for seeds did not expand as expected, constraining the development of the fledgling industry. In the self-pollinated crops, especially wheat and rice, farmer retention and farmer-to-farmer transfer accounted for much of the seed used.

The Bank pressure enabled the entry of seed corporations like Monsanto. Today, the worst farmers suicides are precisely in those areas where Monsanto's seeds have spread.

The Bank imposed trade liberalization has robbed farmers of their incomes both by allowing seed monopolies and market monopolies to emerge. Monsanto has been taken to the Court for its monopolistic practices. The hoarding and monopolistic practices of corporations like Cargill, Lever and ITC have pushed up the price of wheat. Farmers are earning less and the poor are paying more for food. The universal Public Distribution System was dismantled under World Bank pressure. The APMC acts have been dismantled under World Bank pressure. India's food security and food sovereignty is being severely undermined by every policy intervention of the World Bank. Trade liberalization and structural adjustment have added to the burden of Indian farmers. Liberalisation under the structural adjustment programme of World Bank consists of the following elements.

Liberalising fertilizer imports and deregulating domestic manufacturing and the distribution of fertilizers;

· Removing land ceiling regulation;
· Removing subsidies on irrigation, electricity and credit and creating conditions to facilitate the trading of canal irrigation water rights;
· Deregulating the wheat, rice, sugarcane, cotton and edible oil and oilseed industries;
· Dismantling the food security system;
· Removing controls on markets, traders, and processors, and subsidies to cooperatives;

· Abolishing the Essential Commodities Act;
· Abolishing the general ban on futures trading;
· Abolishing inventory controls;
· Abolishing selective credit controls on inventory financing;
· Treating farmers' cooperatives on an equal footing with the private sector.

The foregoing elements of SAP are not recipes for removing centralized control over agriculture but concentrating it now even further in the hands of Agribusiness TNCs such as Monsanto, Cargill, Pepsico etc who are emerging as the new Zamindars.

The Bank is recommending that India stops focusing on food grains instead focus on export crop such as vegetables, shrimps and flowers. The World bank's recent report only addresses horticulture for exports. This will not improve farmers' incomes, it will rob them of land and livelihoods. Export crops are at the root of the land conflicts in Barnala, Punjab.

A recently released report of Action Aid has shown how giant corporations drive down prices of agricultural produce. Hooking India's agricultural to Walmart and TESCO is a recipe for the dispossession and deprivation of Indian farmers

Our recent report on 'Corporate Hijack of Retail' also shows how the model of corporate industrial globalised agriculture that the World Bank is promoting leads to falling prices for farmers and rising prices for consumers. N fact, Morisset, an official of the World Bank had stated in 1991:

Behind the polarization of domestic consumer prices and world prices is the presence of large trading companies in international commodity markets. The strategic position of these companies between buyers and sellers allows them to influence the transmission of world prices. These companies generally provide information, define the terms of transactions, manage the payments and record keeping for transactions, and also figure out ways for clearing the market. However, without competition they may follow a pricing strategy that will maximize their profits and not those of producers and consumers.

Indian farmers and consumers need food freedom and food sovereignty, not the corporate controlled system the Bank and the W.T.O. is imposing on us.

The Bank is pushing India to focus on fruits and vegetables for exports, at the cost of food stapes for local consumption.

Exports, not local food needs, are made the objective. Thus while the supply chain for local markets is highly evolved and sophisticated, in the context of exports, it is perceived as deficient. The Bank has called this a "logistical tax".

Three factors explain India's high logistical tax: (a) geography, which is important but not decisive; (b) poor transport and storage infrastructure, as well as policies that have led to the uneven utilization of existing infrastructure, and the slow creation of new infrastructure; and (c) high marketing costs due to the fragmentation of the supply chain.

The Bank has identified laws such as the Essential Commodities Act (1955) the Agricultural Produce and marketing Act (APMA 1972) and the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential Commodities Act (1980) which have defended the rights of farmers to a just price and the rights of the poor to a fair price for food, as having "prevented the free mobility of agricultural produce and thus segmented the Indian domestic market into many smaller markets. The government has also imposed restrictions on foreign investment in the retail of agricultural commodities, and on both foreign and domestic private investment in wholesale. These restrictions have collectively discouraged and/or prevented the private sector from undertaking large-scale investment in agricultural storage, marketing, or processing activities - an example of horizontal fragmentation preventing desirable vertical integration. The result is that today there is no large, organized, efficient pan-Indian supply chain in the agricultural sector, including in horticulture.

What the Bank defines as "fragmentation" is in fact self-organized local systems of production and trade which are not controlled by a centralized store or by centralized, monopolistic corporations.

And the repeated attack on India's "geography" shows how anti-nature World Bank's basic economic thinking is. Not only the World Bank like to wish away India's diversity and geography, it would like to destroy India's food sovereignty.

Thus, the Bank takes apples grown in Himachal and says it would be cheaper to import them for Chennai. This was exactly the argument the trade liberalisers had used to justify wheat imports. However, the imported wheat turned out to be twice as costly as domestic wheat. Navdanya has filed a case in the Supreme Court against wheat imports.

The Indian laws created for food sovereignty and food security have created a decentralized and democratic framework for food distribution and marketing. Decentralisation and democracy is defined as "horizontal fragmentation" in the World Bank vocabulary. Monopoly control of a single corporate player is defined as "vertical integration". Diversity, democracy and decentralization are problems for the World Bank. For us, these are the strengths of Indian agriculture. Look at the Bank's explanation for diversity of our ecosystems or the cultural diversity of our food systems.

"The heterogeneity has persisted because low productivity regions have been shielded from competition by policy restrictions on and the high transport costs of, the internal movement of agricultural produce."

The World bank would like to see fossil fuel costs reduced and subsidized commodities destroy local diversified production as we have witnessed in Vidharbha in Maharashtra and Wynad in Kerala.

In place of the mosaic of biodiverse farms which produce more food, more incomes, more employment for rural communities, the Bank would like to see monocultures of export oriented crops. As the Bank puts it, the strategy would require identification of crops and regions that are inherently uncompetitive, where farmers would have to switch to alternative crops or alternative occupations in the post-liberalisation period.

Destruction of India's biodiversity and small farmers is hence a policy design of the World Bank. The creation of Agricultural Export Zones is part of the design.

The World Bank is puzzled that India is one of the largest and lowest cost producers of high value agricultural commodities and yet has a minuscule share in global trade. It produces nearly 11 per cent of all vegetables and 15 per cent of all fruits in the world. The unit values of its exports (free on board, FOB) are nearly half the corresponding world unit values. Yet its share in global exports of vegetable is only 1.7 per cent and in fruits a meager 0.5 per cent.

The Bank forgets the food rights and food needs of the 1.2 billion Indians. For the World Bank, fruits and vegetables are just for export to rich countries, not for consumption in poor countries or by poor people. What impedes exports?" is there main question, not "What feeds the poor in India?"

The World Bank analysis is disastrous from every perspective. It is disastrous for farmers who are being asked to give up their occupation.

It is disastrous for the poor who are being denied their right to food, with a singular focus on exports.

It is disastrous for the environment, both by recommending the destruction of India's rich biodiversity and by recommending the increase in CO2 emissions for refrigeration of fruits and vegetables and are freight to transport perishables across the world.

It is also disastrous for communities in the North trying to create local markets to reduce their carbon footprint and ecological footprint on the planet.

The appropriate title of the study would have been "From destroying farmers and biodiversity, to destroying the climate". "It would clearly be efficient" according to the World Bank "to allow consumers in all regions and at all times to buy from the cheapest domestic or foreign source."

What about domestic producers? What about ecological costs of importing what can be produced locally? What about the value of local and season foods for health, taste, quality?

"Current high tariffs penalize the consumers in regions located far from production sources and in seasons far from the harvest season" states the Bank. This is not an issue of tariffs, it is a result of diverse climates and seasons. Products from afar should have a higher price to cover carbon costs. Unseasonal products should have a higher price to cover the costs of atmospheric pollution due to increased use of electricity for refrigeration. Local and seasonal must be rewarded in the market place. To reward the non-local and non-seasonal with manipulated neoliberal economies is bad for the planet, bad for consumers, bad for farmers.

Where movements call for reducing "food miles", the World Bank calls for "breaking the distance barrier". Chile exports 80% of its fruits and vegetables to markets more than 1000km away. The corresponding figure for India is 1%. This is good. India's fruits and vegetables are being eaten by Indian people and India is not contributing to carbon emissions through exporting to Europe and U.S. what they can grow domestically and or in neighbouring connections.

The Bank would like to increase food miles by making "effective distance" to shrink through cold chains and long distance transport, thus "diminishing, dampening the influence of remoteness on exports". Climate change demands or take remoteness into account, both to reduce food miles and to reduce energy use in transporting fresh vegetables.

Local food is an imperative in times of climate chaos. Protecting farmers livelihoods and markets is an imperative in times of farmers suicides. Ecologically for the planet, economically for farmers, the Bank's prescriptions for India are a prescription for a suicidal economy.

We need a policy for protecting farmers and the planet, not a policy for killing our farmers and destroying the planet. Once more the Bank has got it wrong.