WHAT DEVELOPMENT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? WHO'S DEVELOPMENT?

AS U READ THIS, PLEASE ASK TWO QUESTIONS- WHO REAPS THE BENEFITS AND WHO PAYS THE PRICE.
BY PRICE, I DONT MEAN MONEY. I MEAN, WHO IS GOING TO GIVE UP THEIR LAND, LIVELIHOODS, CULTURE. YES, THE VILLAGERS WILL GET COMPENSATION FROM THE GOVT. BUT HOW LONG WILL THAT LAST THEM? BY PRICEE, I MEAN, WHO IS GOING TO FACE PROBLEMS OF AIR AND WATER POLLUTION, WATER SHORTAGE, HEALTH PROBLEMS? WHO IS GOING TO PAY THE PRICE FOR THESE PROBLEMS?

BY BENEFITS I MEAN MONEY, BECAUSE THE PCPIR WILL GENERATE HUGE REVENUE. AGAIN, ASK- WHO IS GOING TO GET THESE PROFITS?

As of today, the central govt has approved of the Petroleum Chemical Petrochemical Investment Region being set up in Mangalore. The PCPIR will cover an area of 300 sq km (Mangalore covers an area of 132 sq km www.mangalorecity.gov.in) and four taluks BANTWAL, KARKALA, MANGALORE, UDUPI. The project will cost Rs 35,000 crore.

the pcpir is planned in three phases
1. phase I-msez 2008-14
2. phase II- 2015-20 pertochemical, and chemical cluster and pharma and fertiliser sectors
3. phase III- industries for fine chemicalssynthetic textiles, r & d hub etc.

A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) called MSEZ Ltd has been set up for developing this SEZ. ONGC, which owns Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL), is the anchor co-promoter of this SEZ. The other equity holders of the SPV are the Govt Of Karnataka, Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI 2% stake) and Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd. (IL&FS) with 49% stake.

The PCPIR project is in violation of several laws not to mention completely devoid of ethics in several aspects.
1. National Environmental Engineering Research Institute has not conducted a thorough EIA study of the PCPIR project. It has failed to provide the figures regarding the release of hydrocarbons like Benzene, Butadiene, Toluene etc. Tanks storing Pyrolysis Gasoline pose a great risk as they contain about 20- 56 % Benzene. Fugitive emissions from the petrochemical complex will release about 905 kg of Pyrolysis Gasoline, which means that about 180-500 kg of Benzene would be released into the atmosphere everyday. Benzene and Butadiene are extremely carcinogenic substances, which expose high health risks to the people of the four affected taluks (Bantwal, Karkala, Mangalore, and Udupi).

2. Apart from the discharge of carcinogenic substances into the atmosphere, the PCPIR will release several pollutants into the atmosphere, which will have a direct impact on the climate in this region. It will contribute to the already rising temperature, thus contributing to global warming. The effects of global warming have been felt directly this summer by way of the unseasonable rainfall that occurred towards the end of March. This unseasonable rain has caused damage to several crops such as arecanut and coffee.

Inflation is at about 8 % today. India has 836 million people who cannot afford food today. This PCPIR will uproot more farmers who produce the food that we eat. If the PCPIR comes up, this food will be irreplaceably lost. The PCPIR will affect every resident of Mangalore and the surrounding taluks directly and indirectly.

3. According to the final pre-feasibility report, PCPIR will discharge 4 tonnes of hazardous waste and 55 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day. It also admits that Mangalore at present does not have a facility for common hazardous waste disposal. MSEZ will release 76 mld of effluent and 13 mld of sewage. The existing industries do not treat the waste before it is disposed.

4. The SEZ will require 641 million litres per day (mld), which it proposes to obtain from Gurpur and Mulky rivers. It also recommends that the Tumbe dam be upgraded. This will lead to salinity of estuaries due to over usage of water. Mangalore city requires a supply of 102 mld. Karkala, Mangalore, and Udupi face water shortage during the summer.

5. The KIADB has on behalf of MSEZL notified the villagers of four villages- Permude, Kuthethoor, Thenka Yekkaru, and Delanthabettu; when the rules state that the government (here, KIADB) cannot step in to acquire land unless it is dry non-agricultural land. Land for the SEZ must be acquired by the company on its own by buying the land from the residents at commercial rates.

The land of the above mentioned villages is fertile agricultural land, and its residents are mostly farmers, farm labourers and daily wage earners. They also include people of Kudubi tribes and Adi Dravida tribals, whose interests need to be protected. All these people earn their livelihood in agriculture and horticulture. They are equipped with no other skill that can enable them to earn their living. The R & R packages offered by MSEZL are grossly inadequate, and cannot sustain them for long, as is evident from the case of MRPL. Agricultural output from these villages will also cease to exist, putting to risk the food security of five lakh people driving up prices of fresh vegetables in and around Mangalore (Deccan Herald July 22, 2007)

6. The SEZ Rules and the Income Tax Act provide several tax breaks to the SEZs, including exemption from State Sales Tax, Octroi, Mandi Tax, Turnover tax, duty, cess, levied on supply of goods from Domestic Tariff Area to SEZ units; full exemption in electricity duty and tax on sale of electricity for self-generated and purchased power.

The government has a direct monetary stake in the PCPIR (MRPL 26% stake, IL&FS with 49% stake). Therefore, the GOVERNMENT DIRECTLY STANDS TO BENEFIT FROM THE PCPIR. However, ALL the people who live here will be affected by the PCPIR which is against the interests of the people and the region. Ultimately it is us ordinary people who will lose out- lose out on our health, our land, our water, our electricity, and livelihoods. The government is pursuing a policy of creating problems and then finding solutions to those problems. But let’s ask ourselves: why create the problems in the first place.

The government has rarely come to the aid of the common people. The villagers displaced by MRPL have been waiting for the government to help them for the last 12 years, and help has still not arrived. WE’LL BE NEXT.
The state of Goa has successfully opposed the SEZ s proposed there. PLEASE, SPEAK UP AGAINST INJUSTICE AND WRONG DOING.
OPPOSE A PROJECT THAT IS AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE OF MANGALORE AND DAKSHINA KANNADA.

PLEASE DO REMEMBER THAT SUCH A MASSIVE PROJECT THAT INVOLVES DIVERTING SO MUCH AGRICULTURAL LAND TO INDUSTRY WILL AFFECT AGRICULTURE, CLIMATE, FOOD SECURITY, HEALTH, WATER, RAINFALL, AND GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE.



ALL OVER INDIA, MASSIVE PROJECTS LIKE THESE ARE BEING PROPOSED AND APPROVED BY THE GOVT
1. ARUNACHAL PRADESH- 104 DAMS PROPOSED FOR HYDEL POWER
2. INDISCRIMINATE MINING THE STATES OF JHARKHAND, CHHATISGARH, ORISSA, ANDHRA, BY TAKING AWAY THE HOMES OF FEOPLE
3. THE NARMADA VALLEY PROJECT WHICH MADE ABOUT 85,000 FAMILIES HOMELESS

MANGALORE IS NOW BEING ADDED TO THIS LONG LIST.
CAN WE NOT HAVE DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT MAKING SO MANY PEOPLE HOMELESS. DOES DEVELOPMENT MEAN TAKING ONE PERSON'S HOME AWAY SO THAT ANOTHER CAN HAVE ELECTRICITY OR WATER. IS IT RIGHT TO DO THAT?
THERE ARE ABOUT 836 MILLION INDIANS WHO EARN LESS THAN 20 RUPEES PER DAY. IF WE GO AHEAD WITH THIS PCPIR, WE WILL ADD TO THAT NUMBER. THIS PCPIR WILL MAKE PPLE FROM 70 VILLAGES HOMELESS.
A RECENT ISSUE OF FRONTLINE CARRIED AN ARTICLE ON WOMEN'S RESERVATION BILL. IN THE PANCHAYAT ELECTIONS WOMEN HAVE 33% RESERVATION. ALMOST EVERY PANCHAYAT THAT HAD A WOMAN SARPANCH SAW IMPROVEMENT IN HEALTH, EDUCATION, ROADS; REDUCED WATER PROBLEMS. THESE WOMEN HAVE MADE LIVES BETTER FOR THEIR WOMEN, MEN, AND CHILDREN OF THEIR VILLAGES. LOOK WHAT WE ARE DOING TO THE PEOPLE OF OUR VILLAGES.

NOW LETS ASK THE QUESTION: WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?

(THERE ARE MANY HIGHLY RESPECTED JOURNALS THAT TALK ABOUT THESE THINGS- ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY, FRONTLINE, DOWN TO EARTH. )

vandana shiva on biopiracy

The turmeric patent is just the first step in stopping biopiracy

Two recent decisions, one by the World Trade Organisation on a party's obligations under the TRIPs Agreement and the other, by the US Patent Office on the validity of a patent on turmeric have revived the whole debate on the patent regime imposed by the WTO.

by Vandana Shiva



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TWO major decisions have revived the intensity of the patent debates that came to the centre stage of national politics during the finalisation of the Dunkel Draft Text of the GATT agreement and the subsequent coming into force of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The first is the WTO ruling against India in the US-India dispute on TRIPs. In July, the WTO ruled that India had not fulfilled its obligations under the TRIPs Agreement for interim measures to receive and protect new product patents applications in pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals (so-called 'mailbox' applications), and to provide under stipulated conditions exclusive marketing rights (EMRs) for such products.

The second is the decision of the US Patent Office to revoke the turmeric patent on the basis of a challenge filed by the New Delhi-based Council for Agriculture Research (CSIR). The patent had been granted in March 1995 to two non-resident Indians associated with the University of Mississipi Medical Centre, Jackson, USA. As turmeric has been used for thousands of years for healing wounds and rashes, CSIR challenged the patent on the ground that it lacked novelty. The US Patent Office upheld the objection and cancelled the patent.

The WTO dispute ruling is an attempt to put pressure on India to adopt US-style patent laws. However, as the turmeric patent case makes it evident, the US patent system has its own weaknesses which allow biopi-racy to be practised as a rule. The withdrawal of the turmeric patent is only a first step in reversing biopiracy.

Patents on Neem, Amla, Jar Amla, Anar, Salai, Dudhi, Gulmendhi, Bagbherenda, Karela, Rangoon-ki-bel, Erand, Vilayetishisham, Chamkura all need to be revoked.

The US needs to revoke all the above patents based on Indian indigenous knowledge and 'prior art'. In addition, the US also needs to change its patent laws which sanction biopiracy by its non-recognition of foreign 'prior art'. Patents are supposed to satisfy three criteria of: Novelty, Non-obviousness, and Utility.

Novelty implies that the innovation must be new. It cannot be part of 'prior art' or existing knowledge. Non-obviousness implies that someone familiar in the art should not be able to achieve the same step. Most patents based on indigenous knowledge appropriation violate the criteria of novelty combined with non-obviousness because they range from direct piracy to minor tinkering involving steps obvious to anyone trained in the techniques and disciplines involved.

Many distortions

In the US, many distortions in law exist facilitating the patenting process for companies such as those in the pharmaceutical industry. One such distortion is the interpretation of 'prior art'. It permits patents to be filed on discoveries in the US, despite the fact that identical ones may already be existing and in use in other parts of the world.

Section 102 of the US Patent Act does not provide a general definition of 'prior art', but a very narrow rule-bound method to be used by low-level patent examiners for determining which materials will defeat a patent application by violation of the novelty and non-obviousness criteria. Prior foreign activity anticipates a US patent only when the foreign activity is in a tangible, accessible form such as a published document or a patent. However, prior foreign knowledge, use and invention are all excluded when the question of prior art is considered in relation to a US patent application.

Unless Section 102 of the US Patent Law is changed, new examples of biopiracy will continue to occur.

The phenomenon of biopiracy makes clear that it is not just Indian patent laws that need changing. The US laws also need to be changed to fit into a fair and honest global Intellectual Property Right (IPR) system. The WTO, which has been established to set up a multilateral rule-based system, has a role in ensuring that the inequity and injustice that biopiracy exhibits is removed from the IPR regimes of all member countries.

India needs to make a submission to the WTO to initiate proceedings to change US patent laws to give India adequate protection against biopiracy. This will serve India in two ways. If India gets a ruling in its favour, the world will have solved the problem of piracy of indigenous knowledge of the South. If India's submission is not accepted, and a panel is not set up to investigate the inherent weaknesses and inadequacies of the US patent system, the bias of the WTO towards the powerful countries will have been rendered transparent.

The haste with which the WTO has given a ruling on the US-India TRIPs dispute is an example of the built in bias of the WTO.

The first submission of the US to WTO against India's 'patent protection for pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical products' was made on 6 March 1997. The submission referred to Article 5 of the Indian Patent Act which excludes from the scope of patentable subject matter pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical products.

Article 5 of the Patent Act provides

'In the case of inventions-

(a) claiming substances intended for use, or capable of being used, as food or as medicine or drug, or

(b) relating to substances prepared or produced by chemical processes (including alloys, optical glass, semiconductors and intermetallic compounds), no patent shall be granted in respect of claims for the substances themselves, but claims for the methods or processes of manufacture shall be patentable.'

In particular, the US submission averred that:

'India has not yet made available product patent protection for pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals, and thus has chosen to take advantage of at least part of the exclusive marketing rights. Thus, India has violated its obligations under Article 70, paragraphs 8 and 9, of the TRIPs Agreement to (1) establish a mailbox system in its law, and ensure that no applicants are denied eligibility for patent protection because of the delay in establishing the mailbox system, and (2) establish a system for the grant of exclusive marketing rights.'

India has until 1 January 2005 to make available product patent protection for pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals. We need to utilise this transition period to the fullest to ensure that our patent laws do not violate the ordre public or have a negative impact on animal and human health or the environment.

Article 27.2 of TRIPs allows exclusions on grounds of public morality.

'Members may exclude from patentability inventions, the prevention within their territory of commercial exploitation of which is necessary to protect ordre public or morality, including to protect human, animal or plant life or health or to avoid serious prejudice to the environment, provided that such exclusion is not made merely because the exploitation is prohibited by their domestic law.'

Quite clearly, EMRs cannot be granted for products which would violate our public morality, our environment, our public health and nutrition, and our socio-economic and technological development. Clauses 70.8 and 70.9 of TRIPs which required an instant creation of a mail box arrangement and granting of EMRs when the WTO agreement came into force thus in effect negated the transition period available to countries to evolve legislation appropriate to their contexts. This is further complicated by the fact that without changes in US patent laws many patents will be based on biopiracy.

Should India give an EMR to a corporation which has a pharmaceutical patent or an agrichemical patent based on indigenous knowledge systems of India or should the system to prevent biopiracy be put in place first?

Suppose a corporation like W R Grace applies for an EMR for neem- based pesticides in India, will India grant it? Suppose a corporation asked for EMRs for hepatitis drugs derived from Phyllanthus Niruri, is it in our interests to give such EMRs?

Unless we have a system in place which prevents the granting of EMRs on the basis of patents obtained through biopiracy, EMRs will basically become an instrument of destruction of our economy.

Real test

We have a legitimate method under our international legal obligations to stop biopiracy and protect our indigenous innovations. We need to evolve legislation to first protect our own innovations. Foreign claims to innovation should be protected after our own systems have been put in place.

The Convention on Biological Diversity does allow us mechanisms to frame laws to prevent biopiracy. In particular Article 8 (j) recognises that each contracting party shall

'... subject to its national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of such knowledge, innovations and practices'.

It is in India's interest to implement our national biodiversity legislation before granting EMRs or changing the Indian Patent Act. The determination and will to defend our national interest and our public interest and protect our innovation should be stronger than the determination and will to defend US interest and protect US biopiracy. This is a real test of our freedom and sovereignty. We need to do a rapid stock-taking of the scale and extent of our biodiversity-based economy which, in my assessment accounts for two-thirds of our productive economy but is invisible because it is the economy of people our centralised planning has rendered invisible. We need to show how much the potential loss to India is in the form of both global markets and domestic markets due to biopiracy by countries like the US. We need to go through this exercise to protect our sovereignty and make our rightful claims with trading partners. The exercise of the potential loss due to biopiracy also needs to be done to avoid unnecessary and illegitimate trade action by the US due to the TRIPs dispute ruling.

When the US introduced IPRs in the Uruguay Round as a new issue, it accused the Third World of 'piracy'. The estimates provided for royalties lost in agricultural chemicals are US$202 million and US$2,545 million for pharmaceuticals. However, as the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), in Canada has shown, if the contribution of Third World peasants and tribals is taken into account, the roles are dramatically reversed: the US owes US$302 million in royalties for agriculture and $5,097 million for pharmaceuticals to Third World countries, according to these latter estimates. In other words, in these two biological industry sectors alone, the US owes $2.7 billion to the Third World. This debt will not be paid by the US unless we have our biodiversity legislation in place.

India needs to take stock of her biodiversity-based economy for both ecological survival and economic and political survival in the 50th year of her independence.

It is not the US submission, or the ruling of the WTO Dispute Panel, which will determine whether we will act as a sovereign country. It is the parliament and people in whose hands the exercise of our sovereignty lies. (TWR No. 86, October 1997)

Vandana Shiva is a scientist and activist. She is also a contributing editor for Third World Resurgence.

source: http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tur-cn.htm

noam chomsky on India, GATT, and pharmaceutical patents and the third world

The following is a series of question addressed to professor Noam Chomsky following a lecture he delivered at the University of Illinois at Chicago on October 17, 1994. (This is an excerpt from http://www.lumpen.com/magazine/bestof/chomsky.txt)

Could you comment on the current policies of GATT, the whole notion of intellectual property rights, and the effect of these policies on food production in the Third World?
A. That's a really important topic and in fact it was one I had hoped to talk about but didn't have time for. GATT is called a free trade agreement, just as NAFTA was, but that's nonsense. These things are not about free trade and they're certainly not agreements. In fact most of the people in the world are opposed to them. What you mentioned is an extreme case of that. Intellectual property rights have to do with protectionism. The U.S., and in fact the rich countries generally, have led the insistence that the GATT agreement, like NAFTA, include strong intellectual property rights. That's protectionism. That means increasing the power of patents. Patents are protectionist devices. They are designed to insure that the technology of the future is in the hands of transnational corporations, most of which, incidentally, you guys pay for. Remember they don't believe in a free market. They want to be publicly subsidized in research and development and controlled markets and so on. The strength of intellectual property rights means longer patents.
Take India for instance. India has a big pharmaceutical industry. They can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of what Merck wants to sell them for. In fact drug prices are way lower in India than in Pakistan next door because India happened to develop its own pharmaceutical industry. The American corporations don't like that. They want more children to die in India. It's not whether they care whether children die. They want more profit, which means more children die in India. They want to make sure India doesn't produce drugs at less than the cost of American drugs. Now this is done in two ways under GATT. One way is to increase the length of patents. The other is to change their character from process patents to product patents. That's very crucial. In the past patents were process patents. Like if Merck, thanks to your taxes, designed a way to produce a certain drug, and then say some smart guy in India figured out a cheaper way to produce that drug, that was allowed. We don't want that. We want to cut down technological innovation, cut back economic process, economic progress, and economic efficiency and increase profit. So now they are product patents. If Merck figures out a certain way to produce a drug they can hold that for twenty years because it's a product, and they can hold the process for another twenty years. They get forty years of holding on to that drug. By that time everybody's forgotten about it. There's some history about this. The developed countries like us never accepted anything like that. Even weak patents on technological development weren't accepted by the rich countries until just a few years ago. There was one time that I know of that product patents were actually tried, namely in France in the early part of the century that had such patents. That destroyed the French chemical industry. It moved to Switzerland. So Switzerland has a big chemical industry and not France. It's not a big secret. This is straight history and the people who are planning GATT understand it. They want to make sure that they destroy the Indian or Argentinean pharmaceutical industries the same way that France's dumb choices destroyed the French chemical industry. The New York Times a couple of weeks ago had a tiny ten line item stating that India (with a gun pointed at its head) agreed finally to liberalize their pharmaceutical industry, meaning sell it to western corporations. So drug prices will shoot sky high in India and children will die but there will be more profits. Now this has nothing to do with free trade. This is a high level of protectionism. In fact it is specifically designed even to be contrary to the narrow definitions of efficiency that they teach at the University of Chicago Economics Department. So it's going to cut down on technological innovations, efficiency and so on, but it will happen to increase profits by accident. Well, that's intellectual property rights. I gave one example but there are plenty of others like it. If you look over the whole GATT Agreement this is sort of a complicated array of protectionist and liberalizing devices very carefully geared to the interests of transnationals.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the way of measuring the efficiency of agricultural production, which like most of these measures are just tax-based ideology that don't have anything to do with science, is to look at certain inputs and outputs and you do some calculations to figure out what the efficiency is. Some things are left out. If you do the calculations their way the cost of environmental pollution doesn't count. That's called an externality, which means they worry about it in some other department. There's another one you don't count.
It usually turns out to be the case that heavily subsidized western agri- business tend to produce corn more efficiently than, say, Mexican peasants. If you do a narrow measure of the highly ideological type that they teach you about in economics departments it will turn out to be more efficient for the world if American agri-business produces corn with big petroleum inputs than if Mexican peasants do it, but there's a few things left out of that calculation. One thing that's left out is that ten to fifteen million Mexican peasants will be driven off the land. They're going to be driven into cities where they're going to starve. There's a lot of costs associated with that. Put aside the human cost which nobody cares about. Just take the straight economic costs like taking care of them somehow. Well, that's somebody else's department. We don't count that one in.
Put all this stuff together and you get particular choices. This is a game of class warfare masked in big words so it sounds like science and mathematical formulas. If you ask common sense questions you see all kinds of things are left out. If you're sending corn to Mexico you've got to put it in trucks. What about transit costs? The purpose of these agreements is to ensure that agricultural production is monopolized by transnationals and that the third world gets nothing. If you read the Indian press you may have noticed that Indian customs officials stopped some alleged German scientists at the border who were leaving India with some funny stuff in their bags, namely a couple hundred thousand bugs. They didn't know what the hell they're doing with these things but we know. That's the gene pool that western pharmaceutical companies are trying to steal from the south. Those are their resources but we get them for free. For thousands of years people in the south have been developing crops. They don't own them. They don't get any rights from that. We just go in and steal them. So they have the rich gene pool and the thousands of years of experience in creating hybrids and figuring out what herb works. Then western corporations go in and take it for nothing, just check if they've got a piece of paper anywhere that says they own it, stamped by the authorities. Therefore we steal it from them and it appears in some biology lab. We minimally modify it and sell it to them. We patent it. It's a scam designed to rob the poor and enrich the rich, like most social policy. That shouldn't surprise you. After all, who made social policy? This was a truism of Adam Smith. The people who make social policy make it in their interest. They wouldn't be in a position to make social policy if they weren't rich and privileged. People suffer.



source: http://www.cptech.org/pharm/noam.html

the suicide economy of corporate globalisation

The Indian peasantry, the largest body of surviving small farmers in the world, today faces a crisis of extinction.

Two thirds of India makes its living from the land. The earth is the most generous employer in this country of a billion, that has farmed this land for more than 5000 years.

However, as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil, the biodiversity, and the climate, and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations, the viability of small farmers and small farms is destroyed. Farmers suicides are the most tragic and dramatic symptom of the crisis of survival faced by Indian peasants.

1997 witnessed the first emergence of farm suicides in India. A rapid increase in indebtedness, was at the root of farmers taking their lives. Debt is a reflection of a negative economy, a loosing economy. Two factors have transformed the positive economy of agriculture into a negative economy for peasants - the rising costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalisation.

In 1998, the World Bank's structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.

As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness.

As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalisation pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life.

The shift from farm saved seed to corporate monopolies of the seed supply is also a shift from biodiversity to monocultures in agriculture. The District of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh used to grow diverse legumes, millets, and oilseeds. Seed monopolies created crop monocultures of cotton, leading to disappearance of millions of products of nature's evolution and farmer's breeding.

Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.

In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto's hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and increased poverty for already desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies.

And the crisis of suicides shows how the survival of small farmers is incompatible with the seed monopolies of global corporations.

The second pressure Indian farmers are facing is the dramatic fall in prices of farm produce as a result of free trade policies of the W.T.O. The WTO rules for trade in agriculture are essentially rules for dumping. They have allowed an increase in agribusiness subsidies while preventing countries from protecting their farmers from the dumping of artificially cheap produce.

High subsidies of $ 400 billion combined with forced removal of import restrictions is a ready-made recipe for farmer suicides. Global prices have dropped from $ 216 / ton in 1995 to $ 133 / ton in 2001 for wheat, $ 98.2 / ton in 1995 to $ 49.1 / ton in 2001 for cotton, $ 273 / ton in 1995 to $ 178 / ton for soyabean. This reduction to half the price is not due to a doubling in productivity but due to an increase in subsidies and an increase in market monopolies controlled by a handful of agribusiness corporations.

Thus the U.S government pays $ 193 per ton to US Soya farmers, which artificially lowers the rice of soya. Due to removal of Quantitative Restrictions and lowering of tariffs, cheap soya has destroyed the livelihoods of coconut growers, mustard farmers, producers of sesame, groundnut and soya.

Similarly, 25000 cotton producers in the U.S are given a subsidy of $ 4 billion annually. This has brought cotton prices down artificially, allowing the U.S to capture world markets which were earlier accessible to poor African countries such as Burkina, Faso, Benin, Mali. The subsidy of $ 230 per acre in the U.S is genocidal for the African farmers. African cotton farmers are loosing $ 250 million every year. That is why small African countries walked out of the Cancun negotiations, leading to the collapse of the W.T.O ministerial.

The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities are stealing incomes from poor peasants of the south. Analysis carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are loosing $ 26 billion or Rs. 1.2 trillion annually. This is a burden their poverty does not allow them to bear. Hence the epidemic of farmer suicides.

India was among the countries that questioned the unfair rules of W.T.O in agriculture and led the G-22 alliance along with with Brazil and China. India with other southern countries addressed the need to safeguard the livelihoods of small farmers from the injustice of free trade based on high subsidies and dumping. Yet at the domestic level, official agencies in India are in deep denial of any links between free trade and farmers survival.

An example of this denial is a Government of Karnataka report on "Farmers suicide in Karnataka - A scientific analysis". The report while claiming to be "scientific", makes unscientific reductionist claims that the farm suicides have only psychological causes, not economic ones, and identifies alcoholism as the root cause of suicides. Therefore, instead of proposing changes in agricultural policy, the report recommends that farmers be required to boost up their self respect (swabhiman) and self-reliance (swavalambam).

And ironically, its recommendations for farmer self-reliance are changes in the Karnataka Land Reforms Act to allow larger land holdings and leasing. These are steps towards the further decimation of small farmers who have been protected by land "ceilings" (an upper limit on land ownership) and policies that only allow peasants and agriculturalists to own agricultural land (part of the land to the tiller policies of the Devraj Urs government).

While the "expert committee" report identified "alcoholism" as the main cause for suicides, the figures of this "scientific" claim are inconsistent and do not reflect the survey. On page 10, the report states in one place that 68 percent of the suicide victims were alcoholics. Five lines later it states that 17 percent were "alcohol and illicit drinkers".

It also states that the majority of suicide victims were small and marginal farmers and the majority had high levels of indebtedness. Yet debt is not identified as a factor leading to suicide. On page 32 of the report it is stated that of the 105 cases studied among the 3544 suicides which had occurred in five districts during 2000 - 2001, 93 had debts, 54 percent had borrowed from private sources and money lenders.

More than 90% of suicide victims were in debt. Yet a table on page 63 has mysteriously reduced debt as a reason for suicide to 2.6%, and equally mysteriously, "suicide victims having a bad habit" has emerged as the primary cause of farmers suicides.

The government is desperate to delink farm suicides from economic processes linked to globalisation such as rise in indebtedness and increased frequency of crop failure due to higher ecologic vulnerability arising from climate change and drought and higher economic risks due to introduction of untested, unadopted seeds.

This is evident in recommendation no. 4.3.24.3 "The government should launch prosecution on the responsible persons involved in misleading the public and government by providing false information about farmers suicide as crop failure or indebtedness" (page 113 of expert committee report).

However, farmers suicides cannot be delinked from indebtedness and the economic distress small farmers are facing. Indebtedness is not new. Farmers have always organised for freedom from debt.

In the nineteenth century the so call "Deccan Riots" were farmers protests against the debt trap into which they had been pushed to supply cheap cotton to the textile mills in Britain. In the eighties they formed peasant organisations to fight for debt relief from public debt linked to Green Revolution inputs.

However, under globalisation, the farmer is loosing her / his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a "consumer" of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.

This combination is leading to corporate feudalism, the most inhumane, brutal and exploitative convergence of global corporate capitalism and local feudalism, in the face of which the farmer as an individual victim feels helpless. The bureaucratic and technocratic systems of the state are coming to the rescue of the dominant economic interests by blaming the victim.

It is necessary to stop this war against small farmers. It is necessary to re-write the rules of trade in agriculture. It is necessary to change our paradigms of food production. Feeding humanity should not depend on the extinction of farmers and extinction of species. Another agriculture is possible and necessary - an agriculture that protects farmers livelihoods, the earth and its biodiversity and public health.

By Vandana Shiva

05 April, 2004
Znet

source: http://www.countercurrents.org/glo-shiva050404.htm

biopiracy

The Global Campaign Against Biopiracy
and Changing the Paradigm of Agriculture
by Vandana Shiva
Director Research Foundation for Science,
Technology and Ecology - India

Seattle IFG Teach-In, November 26, 1999 at the International Forum on Globalization

I have a very simple thesis about globalization. That it's come in three waves: the first time it lasted 500 years, the next time, as "development" or maldevelopment, it lasted fifty years, and this phase has lasted just five. And it couldn't have lasted longer because it was not about free trade. When the WTO was institutionalized -- and they keep calling it a natural phenomena -- it was only after having to bully and bully and bully for seven years culminating in the Uruguay Round, the WTO is about forced trade, and we live it every day.

It's forced trade rules written in the area of Agriculture by Cargill and in the area of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) by Monsanto and its fellow corporations. They even admitted -- a Monsanto spokesman said after the Uruguay Round was completed -- "We've achieved something unprecedented in history. We defined the problem. We took it to our government. We then took it to the Secretariats in Geneva" -- which then pushed it on other governments -- "We were the patient, the diagnostician and the physician all-in-one." And that's the reason the rules of WTO keep ruling against people and the environment and always ruling for corporations and for commerce.

The costs to us have been huge in these five years. We were forced to open our seed supply to the global seed business, the global seed merchants. They're not seed producers -- they make the farmers produce seed. They just package it and patent it. And in five years we have seen Indian peasants, the most resilient of people in the world, pushed into suicides because of debts caused by purchasing hybrid seeds every year, the pesticides that are linked to them, and credit that comes from the same companies that sell the seeds and the pesticides.

It's also often said that the WTO is about "competitiveness." [Listener far away from the podium bursts out with laughter.] We can laugh even louder. Because it seems to be a strange kind of competition in which the biggest corporations of the world want to compete-out the smallest peasant, every butterfly and every bee and every element of biodiversity. And I'm not joking about this. In 1992, when we had protests against the entry of Cargill in India, John Hamilton who used to head Cargill-India said, "These Indians are foolish. They don't understand. We are preventing the bees from usurping the pollen."

In the many many years of negotiations that have gone on during the Biosafety Protocol (in which Tewolde of course has played such a leading role) Monsanto put out a document in which it said, "The reason the world needs Roundup-Ready crops is because herbicide tolerance prevents the weeds" -- which for us is biodiversity -- "from stealing the sunshine."

They are building a world in which every diversity of life is a thief from some source of making profit for them. Biodiversity "steals" the sunshine, the bees "usurp" the pollen and the farmers "steal" when they save seed.

There's a letter that's going around among your farmers. We've had protests for five years. I'm waiting for the year 2000 when similar protests will start in this country. Because we would never allow a corporation to send letters like this to our farmers. It says `Dear Mr. So-and-so Farmer somewhere in the U.S., You may have heard about recent investigation in your area concerning farmers, or others helping farmers, to illegally save and re-plant seed. Saving and replant seed is seed piracy.' In India, to not save seed, and to not replant seed, is sin. To save seed is our highest moral duty. And it has been for every agricultural society.

Monsanto's letter goes on to say, `We recognize the vast majority of farmers, retailers, and other agriculture professionals, are honest business people.' They wouldn't be able to apply that categorization to themselves because we know how they function. It says, `However in an effort to maintain a level playing field we invite you' basically, `to tell on your neighbors. Ring up 1-800-Roundup.'

And then they give a list, including a grower in Iowa who was fined $16,000 for saving seed, two Indiana growers, a David Shanie (sp?). And just yesterday I met Percy Schmyser (sp?), a Saskatchewan farmer who hadn't even bought seed from Monsanto. Monsanto's herbicide-resistant genes had invaded his field as a pollutant. Monsanto came to him and said, `You're a thief, you're stealing our genes.' He said, `No, you're the polluters. I'll sue you back.'

Everything in globalization and trade liberalization could have been achieved by the kind of coercion that's built into the IMF and the World Bank. I believe the one aspect that the IMF and World Bank could never have achieved is establishing this new form of empire-over-life through genetic engineering and patenting.

The Chief of Dupont recently said that `In the 20th century chemical companies made most of their products with non-living systems. In the next century we will make many of them with living systems.' That doesn't mean they'll stop using chemicals. It just means they'll make the chemicals and they'll start manipulating living systems.

The possibility to turn this into a monopoly started with an error in 1980. An error that has been quoted by the United States in trying to kill the review of the Aspects of the World Trade Organization Treaty on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) that India, Africa and the Central American countries are saying should be totally reformed. TRIPs should be totally reformed to exclude patents on life forms and to stop biopiracy. The patenting of the Neem, that gives pesticide, Aromatic Rice, Basmati, and if I started to read out the names of our pirated plants and the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers, I'd make you drop off to sleep.

In 1980 the first patent on life was given and it's been quoted as a "momentous decision" in changing the understanding of what is patentable and what is not. When a scientist at General Electric put genes from four bacteria together he said he just "shuffled genes around". The first time around the U.S. Patent Office turned that application down. But the Supreme Court ruled that this could be treated as a new manufacture and a new constitution of matter.

The economies of the 21st century were being built on a metaphysics that has died in the 17th: That matter is dead, and life forms are merely atomistic constitutions of dead matter. It is not an accident that there is constant regression in this period where the one reference, where the one phrase that is constantly used in debates on genetic engineering, particularly from the U.S., is the need for "Sound Science".

Their sound science is imagining that life forms are machines and dead matter; imagining that when you put scorpion genes into cabbage, or you make Roundup-Ready crops, or you put Bt toxin into crops that start to kill the Monarch butterfly, that you are making absolutely natural products.

This of course, to me is very, very basic and very fundamental ontological schizophrenia. Because when it comes to taking a patent claim on that same entity, they say, `Absolutely novel, never existed before, not like nature, nature couldn't have made it.' And when it comes to taking responsibility and owning the pollution and the hazards that result from that manipulation, they say, `Exactly like nature made it.'

This week in Seattle we're going to see every one of these contradictions played out. I think our strength is the fact that we have truth on our side, we have science on our side, we have other beings on our side and we have our selves on our side.

The other great myth about the World Trade Organization is that it's supposed to end protectionism. For me, the rules of WTO are the highest form of protectionism because they are giving protection to activities and entities that should not exist. In fact the one thing that has been achieved through the WTO is the protection of the biotech corporations, which now call themselves the "life sciences" corporations -- though every thing they do is anti-life. The entire empire over life that the life sciences corporations are building is based on a protectionism in the form of monopoly rights of ownership through patenting and intellectual property rights over life. It's also protectionism in the form of protecting the corporations from bearing the responsibility and liability of the costs they generate for people and the environment.

Americans citizens have always taken pride in being the most informed and having the right to information laws and having a democracy, but for the last decade you've really been had. Because they've managed to plant 60% of your acreage with genetically-engineered crops and you didn't even know. They managed to feed you GMOs that the Europeans are refusing to eat, and you didn't know.

You didn't know because in 1992 after years of work, when we were finalizing elements in the Convention on Biological Diversity that would ensure that the biotechnology industry would be made accountable, President Bush refused to sign this convention, came back and introduced this fascinating policy that said, Treat genetically-engineered foods exactly like normal, natural foods.

This policy of not looking for ecological hazards and health hazards generated wonderful ignorance. Then that ignorance was used to say, There's no hazard. It was treated as proof of safety. That is now being called the "sound science" which the rest of the world is supposed to follow. In fact I read in the newspapers that President Clinton was giving a speech in Arkansas where he said, `We're going to convince those Europeans that they should practice sound science and then this GMO thing will go away.' Well, we'd like to inform President Clinton -- who is absolutely identical in terms of his decisions to President Bush before him -- that this GMO thing isn't going to go away. It's not going to go away until the GMOs go away from our farms and our food-chains.

In small villages across the length and breadth of India now you see little placards, placards that the WTO negotiators will never get to see, which say "This village is a GE-free, patent-free, chemical-free zone." And in fact those are the kinds of villages where aren't committing suicide.

We also have a tremendous movement for the reclamation of democracy in terms of a Living Democracy. Embracing all life forms based on our everyday life in the situations where we live. Not on the basis of decisions made by invisible bureaucrats whose names you never know, whose decisions are made only on the logic of how to help the corporations expand their markets.

This movement for Living Democracy -- the last count I had when I was home was 2,500 villages -- they've been sending letters to all the companies that have engaged in biopiracy. To Grace that patented Neem, to RiceTec that patented Basmati, to Monsanto which has brought species patents on crops that it didn't evolve though it claims to have created them. We also sent letters to Mike Moore.

Mike Moore actually started to send letters back to the villagers. They're very interesting because these letters were written on 28th October -- very soon after the negotiation on the TRIPs review (the review of the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement). Mr Moore was basically saying, `You know I'm really a nobody in this game because 125 countries decided to adopt TRIPs, democratically.' I know, because every one of our negotiators who resisted the Intellectual Property Rights enforcement on the U.S. model was basically removed through pressure.

It was not even a U.S. administration decision. It was the decision of the Intellectual Property Rights committee, that coalition of corporations, who then imposed it on the U.S. government which then imposed it down the chain. That is not a collective, democratic decision. It was corporate dictatorship. And it's corporate dictatorship which is now trying to enclose the very freedom-of-life on this planet. In generating scarcity, it sees growth. In making it impossible for peasants to save seed, for farmers to save seed, it sees the $750 billion additional markets in seed-supply.

This is not an economy based on growth. It's an economy based on theft; theft from nature, theft from the poor, theft from women, theft from indigenous people, theft from ordinary people around the world. And we have to stop this theft.

While Mr. Mike Moore was writing to us and telling us WTO was a member-driven, democratic organization, he was having a Green-room discussion with the U.S. and Europe to try and block the demands of the African region, India and Central America, to exclude patents on life and to stop biopiracy.

The U.S. submission on this issue within the WTO is fascinating. The United States basically says, We don't agree that there should be exclusion of patents on life because we've made lots of money through this and other countries should learn. It goes on to refer to that very very fallacious step in 1980 when the first patent on life was given on the basis of gene shuffling.

Now that's like, tomorrow when you go away for your panel discussion at the Seattle Arts Museum you carry a chair with you. And then you claim that carrying the chair made you the architect of the building, and therefore the owner. We don't allow movers to be treated as architects and owners of property. But in the case of the most fundamental dimensions of life, we have allowed those fallacious steps. Nobody in this country reacted with the scale in which we could have stopped it before the Uruguay Round was completed. But it is time for us now to start the work.

On the issue of stopping biopiracy the United States says, This idea that every time there's a patent claim that we should provide information of where the genetic material came from or where the knowledge came from is going to be very very difficult. For them to create rules and police individual farmers for seed-saving, that is not difficult. But to just to acknowledge prior innovation is a very difficult process.

Then the U.S. government continues to suggest that the best thing to do for Third World countries to sign contracts with those who take their material. To me it's like, your house is being burgled and you ring up the police and the police says, Just write a contract with the burgler. Let him take 90% -- let him give you 1% of what he burgled. That's good benefit sharing!

Or even worse, it's like a woman who's been raped being told, Write a contract with the rapist. Biopiracy is the rape of our biodiversity, our intellectual and cultural heritage. It is a rape of a very very fundamental kind that goes back into the past, exists in the present and goes into the future. The WTO rules legitimize this rape. And the current negotiations, standing where they are, protect that rape. They're protecting the rapist.

The present rules are basically high-tech rules for slavery. It's just new kinds of slavery. But it is worse than the slavery on which this nation's prosperity was built. It is worse because this time it is enslaving all life -- not just human.

We have to put an end to this slavery like we put an end to that last one. For the liberation of all species, for the liberation of all producers, for all the liberation of all consumers, rich and poor, who are being force-fed foods they don't know production processes of, we need to start changing fundamentally both the rules and the structure of this institution that meets here and that has brought us together here. We need to liberate food and agriculture from the Agreement on Agriculture. We need to liberate life-forms from the Intellectual Property Rights Agreement.

That is why this wonderful team that has come together through the IFG has taken on the challenge through the International Forum on Agriculture to start, not just changing the rules within the WTO, but starting to change the paradigm of agriculture. Because our actions have taught us, it is the extent to which we are effective in our everyday lives we are effective in changing the rules of the game.

This is why we must also start to change the laws of this country that are the model laws for the WTO and are being forced on the rest of us. In this week we will together launch the Global Campaign Against Biopiracy. I invite everyone of you to be an active citizen to change the U.S. patent laws, particularly Article 102 that allows that piracy. For you to dismantle Special 301 of your Trade Act that allows your government to constantly threaten our governments to force us to implement laws that are still under negotiation.

Even while the fate of TRIPs is being negotiated through the review, every one of our countries is being forced by the United States government to ensure that the TRIPs, that should be changed and reformed, is implemented by the end of December 1999.

Our call during this week should be for a freeze on any liberalization of agriculture while we work on methods to reclaim our control over our food and agriculture systems. We should have a freeze on all commercialization of GMOs and if you can begin your work here we will all be saved.

We need a freeze on the implementation of TRIPs even while we get rid of the deep perversions in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement that is claiming that corporations that steal are the new creators of this beautiful planet and its beautiful richness. Thank you.

source: http://gos.sbc.edu/s/shiva3.html

'the brown city'

mangalore to manipal. 2008.the highway near Kottara Chowki and Suratkal is witnessing the construction of flyovers. forget the inconvenience of a bumpy ride and the backaches for regular commuters; they are temporary and in the interest of the 'greater common good'.

as you leave mangalore, you pass Baikampady Industrial Area, and also, the Kudremukh Iron Ore Company Limited (KIOCL)-which is thankfully, closed now-, the timber yard at Panambur, and the port area. KIOCL is brown. there s no other word to describe the utter deserted atmosphere of the place as seen from the road. the road again, is competing for that very look. the road that leads to Panambur beach is totally brown. all the trees on that road are covered with such a thick layer of dust from the iron in port, that they are only recognisable by their structure.

seems the in thing now. brown.

dont mistake it for a chocolatey brown though. it isnt half as nice as that. this brown is a blanket of filth that simply cannot be cleansed. a brown blanket that covers all, including the green of the trees, making me think of a world that is dying a slow painful and silent death. and is dying, before my very eyes.

Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL )and Mangalore Fertilizers Limited (MCF) also are a part of this industrial area. soon, if things go according to plan, there will be more such industrial ventures along that road, in that area. by about 2014, there will be more, somewhere around 2020, some more, and by 2026 we could call Mangalore 'the Brown City' of India.

but it will be a hard won title, if we do get it. wondering why? well, the competition is tough you know. out of 439 SEZs proposed, 195 have been notified. but wait! i see a ray of hope! talking about rays, it will indeed become an extict phenomenon, to see a ray of light through the coulds (natural ones i mean, not the clouds of smog that will inevitably appear with the monstrosity called a PCPIR). hmmm, ray seems to be somewhat inappropriate. lets just call it hope. i see some hope for Mangalore bagging the title. Mangalore has a slight edge over the others because while all the other projects ens at being SEZs, the one in Mangalore is just phase I in the grand scheme of things. it is called a Petroleum Chemical Petrochemical Investment Region. this means that by 2026, this region will have 300 sq kms of polluting factories in the petrochemical, chemical, fertilizer and pharmaceutical, synthetic textiles, sectors, and god knows what else.

the reason Mangalore is the privileged to be setting up this PCPIR (not that it should be set up elsewhere, im dead against it) is because
(1) its location on the West Coast close to the West Asian oilfields
(2) the New Mangalore Port
(3) the presence of MRPL
(4) its connectivity with the rest of the country by road, rail and air.

so you see? our chances of winning that title are not so bad after all. whew! what a relief!

farmers' crisis not reflected in the media

‘Farmers’ crisis not reflected in media’
Staff Reporter
‘There is growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality’
Bangalore: Regretting that the crisis of farmers is not reflected in the mass media, Magsaysay winner P. Sainath, on Thursday, said that there is growing disconnect between the mass media and mass reality.
Participating in a function organised to launch the website of “Janashakthi”, the Kannada weekly in Bangalore, Mr. Sainath pointed out that the voice of 70 per cent of the population, including farmers “do not make news” as the mass media is giving importance only for the “elite” section of the society.
He wondered how the television channels and newspapers, except one channel and one newspaper, did not think that it was news when Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar admitted in Parliament that about 1.6 lakh farmers committed suicide in the country between 1997 and 2007.
Mr. Sainath said that the Budget announcement of waiving of farm loans of over Rs. 50,000 crore has been described as “unprecedented” in the mass media, when such concessions were being given to the corporate sector every year.Missed reportage
The mass media even failed to report the outcome of a house-to-house survey of farmers, conducted by the Maharashtra government, which revealed that 2 million farming families were in a highly distressed state, he said.
Mr. Sainath also ridiculed the media by pointing out that as many as 512 media representatives cover a week-long fashion show held every year in Mumbai, while six representatives of the national media do not wish to stay in villages to study and report the causes of farmers’ suicide in the Vidharabha region.
Litterateur Baraguru Ramchandrappa felt that the existence of “common man” becomes relevant for politicians only during elections. At all other times they sail with the needs of the corporate sector. He also alleged that the rulers of late have allowed multi-national companies to violate the provisions of the Constitution. He urged the mass media to highlight these issues

page 3, the hindu, 28 march, 2008

oh! what a lovely waiver

Oh! What a lovely waiver

P. Sainath

The UPA government’s waiver is no solution to even the immediate crisis let alone long-term agrarian problems. Nothing in this budget will raise farm incomes.

It was around the distress in regions like Vidharbha and Anantapur that the present ‘farm loan waiver’ was conceived. Growing knowledge of that distress, breaking through even the filters of a media unmoved by the crisis in the countryside, made the waiver both thinkable and acceptable. Odd then, that in its present form, it excludes the very regions whose pain brought it into existence.
Millions do indeed get relief from what is a positive step. (Though not quite as ‘unprecedented’ as some believe). Even the colonial raj went in for loan waivers or ‘karza maafi’ more than once. And those waivers addressed private moneylender debt. (There were no nationalised banks in those days.) That’s something the present waiver does not touch — even though usury accounts for the overwhelming share of farm loans. In Vidharbha, money owed to private lenders would account for between two-thirds and three-fourths of all debt. In short, we haven’t begun to resolve the debt crisis of these and millions of other farmers. Unproductive holdings
The failure to touch moneylender debt is just the first problem. In Vidharbha, the average landholding size is 7.5 acres or 3.03 hectares. Way above the two-hectare cut-off mark for the bank loan waiver. Up to 50 per cent of Vidharbha’s farmers are above this limit. Not because they are big landlords. They tend to have larger holdings as their land is unproductive and unirrigated. Poor adivasis in Yavatmal, for instance, often own over ten acres but get very little from their land. In Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, too, many farmers will be left out by size or other norms. By contrast the farmers of Western Maharashtra, the Union Agriculture Minister’s stronghold, will benefit greatly. Their holdings are smaller, well-irrigated and more productive.
For those with over two hectares, there is the old deal of “one-time settlement” of their bank loans. In this case, if they repay 75 per cent of the loan, they will be given a rebate of 25 per cent. Only very large farmers will gain from this. If the rest, drowning in debt, could pay 75 per cent of their dues, they wouldn’t be committing suicide. They would pay hundred per cent.
Then, of those farmers falling within the two-hectare limit, only a small group have access to bank credit. So the gainers in this crisis-hit region will be a small percentage of the total number of farmers. It doesn’t end there, though. The few who do qualify, gain much less than farmers in, say, Western Maharashtra. The average crop loan in sugarcane territory is Rs. 13,000 per acre. Apart from which farmers there get up to Rs. 18,000 per acre for drip irrigation. In Vidharbha’s cotton regions, they get loans of just Rs. 4,400 per acre. So the scale of the write-off will be far greater for the relatively better off farmers. In political terms, this benefits Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s base. At the same time, it undermines the farm base of the Congress in Vidharbha. Indeed, the average loan for the grape growers (outside of Vidharbha) is Rs. 80,000 per acre.
The cut-off date of March 31, 2007 works against even the small group of Vidharbha farmers who do benefit. Loans in the cotton regions are taken between April and June. In the cane growing regions, they are taken between January and March. This means the Vidharbha farmer has one less year of loans waived than the others.
Since no distinction has been made between dryland farmers and others, anomalies abound. West Bengal and even the non-crisis regions of Kerala have large numbers of farmers below the two-hectare limit. With agriculture in bad shape, don’t grudge them the windfall the waiver brings. But it is odd the same does not happen for farmers in dryland regions who need it most. What’s more, the farmers of Bengal and Kerala have far more access to bank credit than those in Vidharbha do.
The State government itself reckons that Rs. 9,310 crore of the waiver comes to Maharashtra. That is, almost a sixth of the total. Of this, a fraction goes to Vidharbha, the rest being collared by better off farmers. And what of other dryland farmers across the nation? Those in, say, Rayalaseema or Bundelkhand? What do they get?
Is the waiver ‘unprecedented’? Each year, nationalised banks write off thousands of crores of rupees as bad debt. Mostly money owed by small numbers of rich businessmen. And theirs is not a ‘one-time waiver.’ It is a write-off that recurs every year
Between 2000-04, banks wrote off over Rs. 44,000 crores. Mostly, this favoured a tiny number of wealthy people. One ‘beneficiary’ was a Ketan Parekh group company that saw Rs. 60 crore knocked off. (The Indian Express, May 12, 2005). However, those ‘waivers’ are done quietly. In 2004, last year of the NDA, such write-offs went up by 16 per cent. Such ‘waivers’ have not slowed down since 2004.Staggering giveaway
And all this is apart from the annual Rs. 40,000 crore ‘giveaway’ to the rich, mainly corporate India. That has been the average in the budget every single year for over a decade. Then there are the straight handouts. No one knows how many thousands of crores are lost by handing out spectrum the way it’s being done. But we know it’s a staggering amount. Tot up the ‘tax holidays,’ exemptions and the rest of it and you’re looking at sums that make the ‘unprecedented’ one-time farm loan waiver look like loose change.
But let us look, for instance, at the millions of farmers owning less than one hectare — the largest group. Some 7.2 million of them have accounts in scheduled commercial banks. And the total outstandings against these accounts is Rs. 20,499 crores. (Reserve Bank of India: Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy 2006-07.) As Devidas Tuljapurkar of the All-India Bank Employees Association points out, that’s about the same amount the nationalised banking sector writes off each year as bad debt. Mainly for industry. Those farmers with between one and two hectares hold 5.9 million accounts and owe Rs. 20,758 crores. That is: these 13 million account holders owe less than the Rs. 44,000 crore written off by the banks during just the NDA period for a tiny number of rich people.
The waiver does bring great relief to large numbers of farmers. But it is no solution to even the immediate crisis let alone long-term agrarian problems. Nothing in this budget will raise farm incomes. Which means farmers will be back in debt within two years. Their incomes have long been much lower on average than those in other sectors. And they fall further behind each year. Worse, fresh credit will not come cheap. Pleas for ‘low-interest or no-interest loans’ have been ignored. There is no mention of a price stabilisation fund to shield farmers from the volatility of corporate-rigged global prices. Besides, the idea of a five-year repayment cycle has not been touched. And the highly unjust crop insurance rules that dog regions like Anantapur remain unchanged.
However, there is still a long way to go in the budget session. So these problems can be set right if the government is sincere about helping those worst-hit by the crisis. It could work all these measures into the final document and also adjust the terms for dryland regions.
One funny outcome of the budget is that the media are now talking about farmers. Of course, the ‘analysis’ of what is ‘pro-farmer’ comes from the elite. From CEOs, stockbrokers, business editors, corporate lobbyists and touts in three-piece suits. On budget eve one anchor posed a question to his panel in words to this effect: “Will it be a pro-poor, aam aadmi budget or will Mr. Chidambaram use the opportunity to do something good [for the country] in terms of reforms.”
When the budget rolled out, one anchor said: “And now for the budget bad news. India Inc.’s plea for a cut in corporate tax rates went unheeded.” Isn’t that cute? If a budget is pro-poor, it cannot be good for the country. If it does not give the corporate world more goodies, it is bad. And of course, the elite panellists mostly rued this “gigantic giveaway.”
While gasping at the size of the “write-off” it’s worth asking why the loan waiver comes up now. Why not in 2005, when the demand was already being made? Or in 2006 when the Prime Minister visited Vidharbha and was shaken by the widespread distress. Mr. Pawar has outsmarted his rivals. Had the step been taken then, the credit would have gone entirely to the Congress. No prizes for guessing who opposed it then (when it would have cost much less).
For three years, while the misery and suicides mounted in Vidharbha, there was not even the admission that a loan waiver was possible. Indeed, it was shot down by those now taking out full page ads claiming credit for it. As they complain in Vidharbha, this is not about karza maafi. It is about seeking voter maafi (voters’ forgiveness) in election year.

page 11, the hindu, march 10, 2008

jokes apart...

an inconvenient truth. a documentary about global warming. a lot of people believe that the use of the frog and ice cream was necessary to break "the seriousness of the movie, not the issue". they said it was necessary so that people would not be overloaded with too much factual information and statistical details, and that it helps to bring home the message of the fil.

the point of such a documentary i believe, is to show that all the people of the earth are ultimately responsible for global warming, simply by because they exist. some, of course, are more responsible than others, while it is also true, that some times, you cant pinpoint and say who's to blame. but that requires a whole seperate debate altogther.

the focus of the debate should have been more on why and how people contribute to global warming, and the possible remedies to tackle it. the very fact that the debate focused more on how effective the frog and ice cream were as a medium of communication shows how we missed the point. of course, the effectiveness of the presentation of the content is relevant, but one needs to decide which of the two is more important: the form or the content.

however important any debate on form vs content might be as students of environment and development communication, as human beings who inhabit planet earth, what we do with the experience of watching the documentary should bother us at least a little bit. at least more than frogs and ice creams.

if the frog and the ice cream is all we can debate about in spite of all the arguments, statistics, details, facts, presented in the documentary, then i believe that our extinction willl be just sooner rather than later.

anand patwardhan's interview

Just-so stories

Fiery documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan tells S. VISHNU an alternative model of development is the need of the hour

CONCRETE REALITIES Anand Patwardhan: ‘Our priorities are determined by amoral seekers of profit who occupy high office in both government and corporations’

Anand Patwardhan, one of the most eminent documentary filmmakers in India, and film-activist, was in town as a guest for the Anand Patwardhan Film Festival organized by Manipal Institute of Communication. The maker of one of the most controversial tr ilogies on communalism in India, spoke to MetroPlus.

What made you turn filmmaker?
I was 21 years old studying in America on a scholarship. The anti-Vietnam War movement consumed my fellow students and me. The ethos of the 60’s have, in a sense, impacted my thinking forever.

‘Ram ke Naam’ on majority communalism made in 1991 gave a strong warning of horrors to follow. What more do you think was necessary to change the horrific circumstances that we have witnessed in the last 20 years?
The film was made before the demolition of Babri Masjid. If it had been shown on Doordarshan to a mass audience it may have had some effect on the popular thinking of people. Communalisation back in those days hadn’t reached the peak it has today. Even the Kar-sevaks themselves may have realised that those propagating the ideology of hate are primarily power-hungry and corrupt and have nothing much to do with religion.

Your anti nuclear film ‘War and Peace’ extensively documents vulgar forms of nationalism. Must an anti-nuclear stand necessarily oppose the ideals of nationalism or patriotism?
In a way yes, at least one must oppose the jingoism that normally passes for nationalism and patriotism because it’s bad for the planet. The world has enough arms to destroy this planet 50 times over. The world has no idea what to do with the enormous nuclear waste it’s producing. You cannot destroy your home like that. And you cannot spend millions on this destruction. In fact, anybody who loves his or her nation should, especially in the sub-continent, be sane enough to use these same funds for the poorest of the poor.
For example the cost of one nuclear missile production facility can provide drinking water for more than 37,000 villages; one nuclear submarine costs 30 times the annual national budget for primary education!
Ordinary people are capable of seeing through this immorality. They take an anti-nuclear stand when the truth of what an atom bomb can do is explained to them.
It’s the elite who rant about “national security”. They are the real anti-nationals for their idea of security is to sacrifice the future of a vast majority of this nation.

“Father, Son and Holy War”, the last of your trilogy on communalism draws a connection between masculinity and violence. It has a horrifying scene of a burnt corpse lying in the middle of the road and people moving on with their normal life. Why such coldness?
It symbolizes what is happening to our country. Mass murder takes place in front of our eyes and we look the other way as if nothing has happened.
That is what we did in Delhi in 1984, in Bombay in 1993 and in Gujarat in 2002. There’s a clear distinction in people’s minds of ‘them’ and ‘us’. What you get in the end is an indifference to suffering.

You have made documentaries like ‘Hamaara Sheher’ and ‘A Narmada Diary’ which point towards a collaboration between the nation state and corporations.
Our free market economists argue that even non-essential, wasteful industrial growth generates employment and brings about prosperity.
But what is a true indicator of development and prosperity? Somebody sneezes in New York; the market tumbles globally.
Does the market reflect whether the crops or the monsoons were good this year?
Does it represent in the slightest the concrete realities of our people? Our priorities are determined by amoral seekers of profit who occupy high office in both government and corporations. And we have an urban youth unwilling to come out of the cosy niche of blogs and malls they have created for themselves. An alternative model of development is the need of the hour, before social unrest of an unprecedented kind erupts in this country. The signs are already here.

the hindu, metro plus mangalore, march 8, 2008

shri prakash's interview in the hindu

Truth be told
Film maker Shriprakash Prakash says as a film activist, one has to maintain a distance from the subjects one is working with

Reality bites Shriprakash Prakash: ‘The day you find that nobody is truly innocent, you’ll be disillusioned for a second’

Shriprakash Prakash, is a film-activist and independent documentary filmmaker. Shriprakash has directed and produced many documentary films during the last 15 years, the most powerful ones being ‘Kiski raksha’, ‘The Fire Within’ and ‘Buddha weeps in Jadugoda’. He is also the chief co-ordinator of Kritika, a group working in the Jharkhand region since 1990 in the areas of culture and communication. His maiden feature, “Baaha” is about an Adivasi boy, who aspires to be a singer. In town for a seminar and interaction with the students at the Manipal Institute of Communication, Shriprakash shared his thoughts of filmmaking and activism. Excerpts.

Tell us something about the beginning.
I haven’t studied in any film school. I started off with a VHS camera, bought on a loan. My friends and I used to shoot marriage videos to make some money which we then thought was enough capital to make documentaries.It didn’t work out for long though.

How challenging is it to convince the opinion makers of the ground realities of your subjects?
Every society has its sensibilities. You can create awareness in a society which is unaware, but you can’t do anything when the society chooses to ignore an issue. Our sensibilities today are a little too accustomed to consumerism. People have to realise that they enjoy development at the cost of displacement of millions of people. And yet, I have a medium in hand, a technology which is pro-people. I can afford it and create my own space. The technology isn’t just for the ruling class anymore. So yes, even the challenges of convincing are a bit less complicated given the reach of the medium that I have adopted.

Your documentary ‘Buddha weeps in Jadugoda’ on uranium mining is considered one of the most powerful in it’s genre. How is Jadugoda today?
One of my Australian friends, who was doing a project in Jadugoda complains on how nothing has changed, since I made the documentary eight years ago. I keep denying that. Things have changed. Even though nothing on the grass-root level, at least people have been educated. People’s concern and opposition to uranium mining has increased. There’s a foundation even in Japan against uranium mining called ‘Buddha weeps foundation’.

How has the transition from documentary to feature been?
Both documentary and feature film making are different mediums. The grammars are miles apart. Feature film-making has proved to be immensely challenging. It may be because I’m new to the grammar. While I was shooting documentaries I never had to direct my subjects.
Directing my actors is entirely new and communication becomes a little challenging. Many times I feel I didn’t get financial support and that I couldn’t quite enjoy the economic independence that is crucial sometimes. But yes, I wanted to reach out to the masses. Plus, I didn’t quite have the required equipment.
I shot the film entirely with a PD-170 camera, which is not of expected standards. The cassette industry is a major sector which shapes dreams of the youth.
And in this world ruled by the market, the market fundamentals have even ventured into a town like Ranchi. Since I’ve always been experimental, thought I’d try this out.

How have you been dealt with the death threats and opposition? What keeps you going?
I grew up in Jharkhand. I don’t have to go anybody else’s neighbourhood to tell the truth. I talk about my people. I have always felt the need to tell the truth and pursue justice. Yes, middle-class people do have choices — to take the path which brings us more comfort. I can’t help but go with my convictions. It is not for anybody else we are fighting. We are fighting for ourselves, our own community. And as for hurdles, they are always there.
As a film-activist you have to maintain a distance from the subjects you are working with. You cannot afford to get too close. You will be victim of a lot of things and there will be incomprehensible culture shocks awaiting you. All your constructs will be tattered and delusions will dwindle by the day. You’ll realise that there are innumerable number of realities and perspectives on various levels. The day you find that nobody is truly innocent, you’ll be disillusioned for a second, just to realise that it’s just a tip of an iceberg.
Cynicism does settle in at times. But yes, after working so much with these people, especially for three years in Jadugoda, I’ve seen unimaginable miseries and have been shocked enough that all my middle-class aspirations and needs seem meaningless. People keep me going. One understands humanity a bit more.
G. VISHNU

the hindu, metro plus mangalore, february 28, 2008

invisible women

Invisible women

We usually wake up to their existence when they don't turn up for work. And the first response is annoyance, because of the inconvenience caused to us. Films like Lakshmi and Me open our eyes to the plight of people who hold up our homes, writes Kalpana Sharma.

20 January 2008 - They flit in and out of our homes like ghosts in the night. They sweep and swab, wash and cook, look after our children, care for the elderly. Yet we know little about them. Most of us just about know their first names. We don't know where they're from, where they live, whether they are married, how many children they have, how many other homes they work in, what they earn — how they survive. They are virtually invisible.

We usually wake up to their existence when they don't turn up for work. And the first response is annoyance, because of the inconvenience caused to us. Many professional women don the title of being superwomen because they manage jobs and homes — work life balance. But in fact the real superwomen are these silent workers, without whom few professional women in India would be able to function. Yet, while those in formal employment get sick leave, casual leave, privileged leave and weekends, our domestic help is not entitled to any of this. If she rests too long, she’s lazy. If she doesn't turn up for work, she's a shirker. It would appear that these women don't have the right to relax, to fall sick, to have some fun. And of course, no one acknowledges that when they're done with our homes, they still have their own homes where they have to do the very same jobs, sweep and swab, wash clothes, cook and take care of children and elderly.

Nishtha Jain, a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker has done what all of us need to do. She has not just acknowledged that this silent worker in her home has a name, but she's followed her life so that we see the person behind the name — a person just like any of us. And instead of viewing the woman from a distance, the filmmaker has bravely placed herself in the frame, honestly dissecting her own relationship as an employer. Lakshmi and Me is a remarkably honest documentary about 21-year-old Lakshmi and the filmmaker, Nishtha.
Demanding day
Lakshmi is typical of the domestics in Mumbai who work in several houses. They arrive at fixed time, rapidly complete the assigned tasks and move on to the next house. The only conversation with the employer is about the work — rarely anything personal.
But Lakshmi found that one of her employers was actually interested in her as a person, wanted to know her views, her dreams and ambitions. She wanted to understand why Lakshmi felt it was a curse to be born a woman. She wanted to know about romance in her life, about her family, her home, the traditions she followed. And to her credit, Lakshmi allowed the filmmaker into her life.

The film follows Lakshmi's life, her daily routine of working in different homes, takes us to her own home, introduces us to her family and her perennially drunk father. We watch her fall in love and ultimately marry a young man from a lower caste. Her family disowns her. We feel Lakshmi's sorrow when this happens as well as her happiness with the man she loves. And then illness strikes. We see her getting weaker and thinner. And yet she continues working. We witness the first months of her pregnancy. And yet she works. And we watch her struggle with illness and pregnancy in hospital.

What is most interesting about this film is the relationship between the two women, Lakshmi and Nishtha. The latter tries hard to overcome the class divide and the employer-employee relationship. She invites Lakshmi to join the crew for lunch and sit at the table. Lakshmi is embarrassed and amused. Later she tells Nishtha that she laughed because she thought it so funny that a 'black' woman like her should be sitting with 'white' people! And we claim colour is not an issue.

So, can gestures like asking our domestic help to sit at the table with us really bridge the chasm that exists between classes? Such gestures can have meaning only if they are backed with a genuine interest and concern in the person and recognition that they are human and have the same rights and needs as we do. And even then, we cannot be sure that decency and magnanimity on our part as employers will necessarily result in a comfort level where our domestic help feels at ease sitting at the same table as us. For, the divisions in our society, the place that each presumes they have in it, are so deep that it will take much more than such gestures to change things. But they could be a beginning and they could set a trend where we recognise and acknowledge those who provide us with such vital support.

Vicious circle

Another important aspect of domestic work that the film brings out is the crisis that befalls these women when they fall ill. Most of them continue to work until it is virtually impossible for them to do so. By then, their sickness has advanced to a point where they need urgent care. Yet the reason they don't take even a day off to deal with health problems is because they fear that someone else will take their place. The reason they don't demand a higher wage, or some additional amount for medical contingencies, is the same. Ask for more money, and you are guaranteed to lose your job. And there are plenty of others waiting to take your place.
Films like Lakshmi and Me ought to be shown on prime time television, in housing societies in a city like Mumbai, in schools and colleges (www.lakshmiandme.com / www.raintreeefilms.net). As a society, we are becoming increasingly blind and indifferent to the existence of people who hold up our homes, our lives, our cities. Such films should help open our eyes and our minds. ⊕

Kalpana Sharma 20 Jan 2008

Kalpana Sharma has been Chief of the Mumbai Bureau and Deputy Editor with The Hindu. Her opinions, which appear in a regular column with The Hindu, are concurrently published on India Together with permission. 'Lakshmi and Me' is written and directed by Nistha Jain, and produced by Raintree Films.