3 January 2003

Farmers' Suicides, Hunger Deaths and Globalisation.

The corporate hijack of our food and agriculture

Globalisation is killing the people of India. Farmers are being pushed to suicides with rising debts due to deregulation of inputs such as seeds and chemicals and imports by the removal of quantitative restrictions. The poor are facing starvation. Reports of hunger deaths have become routine even as 65 million tonnes of foodgrain are rotting in godowns.

At a seminar on Food Sovereignty organised by Sustainable Agriculture Movement - Navdanya, as part of the Asian Social Forum, farmer leaders and food right activists presented analyses and testimonies on why are farmers committing suicide and why are the people being starved to death.

* Over 8000 children have died of malnutrition in Maharashtra since globalisation
* Nearly 2000 farmers have committed suicide in Rajasthan in the last 3 years
* More than 100 farmers from three villages - Rentachintala, Khambhampadu, and Macherla in East Andhra Pradesh have sold kidneys to avoid starvation.
* Between 1997 and 2000 in just one district - Anantpur - in Andhra Pradesh, 1826 people, mainly marginal farmers, committed suicide.
* Wheat is being exported at Rs. 3.96 a kilo even while the BPL price is Rs. 4.20 and the economic cost to FC I is Rs. 8.30
* The Supreme Court's Commissioners on Food found that almost 70% of the food offtake by Rajasthan government was for exports.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, the founder of Navdanya, and a leading figure of the anti-globalisation movement, said these glaring facts show that under globalisation, the Indian food system is being hijacked for super profits of MNCs and is no longer designed to serve either peasants or the poor. She gave an overview of the impact of a decade of globalisation on the food sovereignty of the country and the food entitlement of the people of India. She also laid out the strategies for fighting WTO and agribusiness at the national and international levels, especially in the context of the upcoming Ministerial
meeting of WTO in Cancun and the total collapse of the negotiations on agriculture.

Arun Bhatia, the Director of the Tribal Research and Training Institute Pune, who was asked by the central government to study the tribal deaths in Maharashtra, presented his data showing that the percentage of hunger deaths among 0-6 year olds in Nandubar district has gone up from 0% in 1993 to 46.20 percent in 2001.

Prafulla Samantra of Orissa who broke the news of the hunger deaths of Kashipur last year, shared with the participants details of the continuing crisis of hunger in the state.

Other eminent food rights activists who spoke about hunger deaths at the Seminar included P. Sainath and Colin Gonsalves.

The food sovereignty of the country and the food system that gave food security to the poor has been hijacked by global corporations using WTO and the World Bank.

* Farm prices of agricultural produce are collapsing. Coconut prices in 2000 were less than half their price in 1996. In just two year, between 1998-99 and 2000-2001 Kerala farmers lost a staggering Rs. 17,000 crore.
* The Conoor tea industry lost Rs. 86 crore in 2002.
* The price of rice has fallen to lows of Rs. 320 in many places; wheat prices have fallen by more than a 100 rupees per quintal in many mandis of UP and Punjab.
* As a result of unfair trade practices legalised by the WTO, the import figures for India has dramatically increased from Rs. 50,000 million in 1995 to Rs.
200,000 million in 2001.

Farmer leaders Sunilam, Atul Kumar Anjan, Suneet Chopra, G.S. Dittupur, G. Nammalvar, K.R. Chowdry, and Gopal Iyer, gave reports from different parts of the country on the survival crisis being faced by farmers as a result of globalisation.

WTO was sold to the Indian people as a means of creating a level playing field and for removing northern subsidies. Subsidies in the US and Europe have however increased after the WTO came into force. While the US used the WTO to force India to remove
quantitative restrictions, it has enacted the new US Farm Bill which increases subsidies to agriculture by 73.5 billion dollars to $180 billion over the next 6 years. Most of these subsides go to agribusiness like Cargill, ADM and Conagra for dumping artificially
cheap agricultural products on our markets. Removal of import regulation in the face of these unjust and high subsidies is a death knell to Indian farmers.

Cargill has cornered the oilseed trade in the country, and is now building a new edible oil refinery in Paradeep. Conagra, which has tied up with ITC's Agro Tech, and has taken over Rath vanaspathi, has now also taken a broad-based patent on Indian "atta" chakkis to
cover almost any type of grinding and milling at all levels - from the household and cottage industry to large flour mills.

Participants called for an immediate re-introduction of quantitative restrictions on imports in agriculture and a ban on patents on indigenous technologies in the food sector. They also called for fair prices to farmers for their produce based on MSP as a floor price as recommended by the Long term Grain Policy Committee of the government.

They declared food as a human right and food sovereignty as the basis of economic democracy. This requires an expansion of the public distribution system rather than its shrinkage as is being imposed by the World Bank and implemented by the government.
It also requires that food and agriculture be moved out of the WTO, and be governed by principles of food sovereignty, not by principles of "free-trade".

Navdanya, which has been at the cutting edge of research, action and campaigns on WTO and food issues, also released its two new reports related to Globalisation and Food sovereignty - Corporate Hijack of Agriculture: How trade liberalisation and market access rules of WTO are killing farmers and Corporate Hijack of Food: How World Bank and WTO are pushing the poor to starvation..