January 4, 2003

The corporate hijack of our food and agriculture

Hundreds of children have fallen sick after consuming Mid-day Meals. This tragedy occurred when the Chief Minister and the governor of Andhra Pradesh were inaugurating the Mid-day Meal Scheme through high-profile media events.

The Mid-day Meal tragedy is a double tragedy. Children in healthy societies which ensure food security and food sovereignty to their citizens, should be getting their nutritional security at household level. The mid day Meal Scheme in which children get one meal in the school assumes that they will continue to go hungry at night and household food insecurity, malnutrition and starvation will continue for the family, especially the infants and the old whose food insecurity cannot be solved through school feeding programmes.

Last year, after 8000 children were reported to have died of starvation in Maharashtra, the Tribal Research and Training Centre of the government carried out a study which revealed that since globalisation started, starvation deaths of infants below six years of age has increased from 0% in 1993 to 46% in 2001. For these infants, the Mid-day Meal Scheme is no solution.

In any case, the Mid-day Meal Scheme can either be used for a transition to sustainable agriculture and food security for the entire community and all households, or it can be used to accelerate nonsustainability and deepen food insecurity by creating increased dependency on food aid from World Bank, the World Food Programme and other aid agencies.

The projects for emergency feeding under the ICDS has increased from 2,426 in 1990 to 5,171 in 2001. The expenditure has increased from Rs. 254.64 crores in 1990-91 to Rs. 1000 crores in 2000-01. This four-fold increase is a measure of growing food insecurity at the household level. And this is being used by global agribusiness as a market opportunity to dump their unwanted genetically engineered corn and soya that
citizens with free choice and the right to information, as in Europe and Japan and even many African countries, are rejecting worldwide.

In fact, the current Mid-day Meal tragedy in Andhra Pradesh is already leading to voices suggesting that processed packaged food from big multinationals should be the primary meal supplied through mid day Meal Schemes. In other words, the public expenditure in
India should be turned into a subsidy for global corporations and their genetically engineered unhealthy packaged foods. The Mid-day Meal tragedy and the solutions being offered mimic the engineering of the dropsy drama which led to the dismantling of the
oilseed economy and opened up the market for genetically engineered soya oil, As a result our dependency on edible oil imports has increased from 0% to 70%.

Pseudo hygiene measures such as centralized industrial processing and packaging are being offered as a solution even though they produce health hazards and unhealthy foods, destroying decentralized women-centered food production and agro processing at
household and community levels. State control over the Mid-day Meal Scheme and the centralized structures of control are leading to the corruption and contamination of our food system. Corporate hijack of the Mid-day Meal Scheme through even more centralized and corrupt systems is no solution to the crisis of hunger and starvation that Indian children are increasingly facing.

Nutritional rights of vulnerable groups cannot be left in the hands of agribusiness corporations whose only objective is super profits. They need to be defended by households and communities empowered with the right to food as a fundamental right. Women have always ensured children get the best possible nutrition within their means. Giving power to women to feed the children is the only long-term solution for food and nutritional security. The Mid-day Meal tragedy should be used to hand over nutritional and food entitlement schemes to women-centered organization and not to corporations.