The Coming Cancun Summit And Agriculture

 Suneet Chopra

THERE is misconception, largely propagated by global vested interests that markets reflect economic objectivity. They do not. Nor have they reflected any such thing in the past. They reflect the interests that control them. The rules according to which they function further the interests of those who control them. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is no exception to this. It reflects the interest of global capital, which is largely in the hands of multinationals that are concentrated in a handful of wealthy countries.

One has only to look at the way in which the three pillars of present day globalisation are effectively implemented to understand their bias. Take liberalisation: all commodities are supposed to be free to move all over the world without any hindrance. And in agriculture they do, with disastrous effects so far. But perhaps the largest commodity of all, labour power is restricted by stringent immigration laws. Large populations of illegal immigrants have to do dirtiest jobs, have no trade union rights and end up weakening the bargaining power of local labour. Moreover, workers in the special export production zones have all but lost their trade union protection as well and have to work in conditions akin to slavery.

When we speak of globalisation, we are told we must export our produce at ‘world prices’, but it is curious that the same does not hold good for the price of labour-power. The minimum wage per hour of a US worker is about Rs 360 per hour, the average Indian worker officially gets some Rs 7.50, but in actual fact earns close to Rs 4 per hour.

It is the same with privatisation: Indian agriculture, despite the fact that a handful of 1.6 per cent landowners own 17.3 per cent of the land, while some 60 per cent own only 15 per cent, is an ocean of petty private enterprise. This vast privatised haven emerged out of the disintegration of large estates held by intermediaries who became landlords under colonial rule, while the peasants were reduced to tenants. After independence, the abolition of intermediaries restored proprietorship to a limited extent. But today, in the name of private enterprise, even those limited land reforms are being reversed and corporate agriculture is being promoted. This is being done in the face of the success of West Bengal’s small farmers in bringing the rice production of the state to being the highest in the country, ahead of Punjab. Also, the crisis of the Green Revolution in Punjab, and the crisis in the tea industry, both reflect a failure of corporates and landlords to cope with adversity as peasants do.

It is evident that the WTO semantics imply the global control, liberal movement and private profit for finance capital and multinationals. For petty producers and the working people it spells insecurity, ruin and oppressive conditions of work as contract labour. As such the global dispensation defined in this way, cannot be acceptable to them.

With regard to Indian agriculture, based as it is on petty production with a large section of producers (from a third to over half, according to different estimates) being below the poverty line, we cannot expect benefits for them under the present dispensation.

On the other hand, the negative features are already visible. The most obvious of these is the rising costs of inputs with electricity, fertilizers and water being shorn of government subsidies and being privatised. Coupled with this, the opening up of the agrarian market steadily since 1999 has led to prices of cash crops declining dangerously, ruining hundreds of thousands of farmers, thousands of whom have committed suicide. In fact, the landless rural population increased from 7.46 crore in 1991 to 10.74 crore in 2001, reflecting increasing pauperization. Also the issue of biodiversity and agricultural products evolved by traditional communities, as well as seeds developed from these, must be discussed more thoroughly from the angle of the intellectual property rights of traditional communities and of countries where such biodiversity exists.

The rural poor and agriculture labour face new hardships. The number of days of work available in agriculture have gone down from 122 days a year two decades back to 72 a couple of years ago, to as little as 40 a year now. Two factors have contributed to this. Firstly, duties on agricultural machinery have been removed and those who can afford combine harvesters, costing up to Rs 15 lakh, are pushing hundreds of poor people in their area out of a job. Worse, even work under the food-for-work programme is being mechanised. As a result, in 2002-03, only 57 out of 100 got work in the rural areas when in 2001-02 the figure was 60.

Secondly, government investment in agriculture came down from 33 per cent in 1993-94 to 24.2 per cent in 2000-01. Rural employment schemes which gave 12320 lakh man days employment in 1995-96, came down to 4860 lakh man days in 2000-01, hitting squarely at the buying power of over 30 per cent of India’s rural population.

To make matters worse, the government of India encouraged the abandonment of food security in the name of commercialising agriculture. The growth of yield per acre per year of food grains went down to 1.58 per cent in 1990-91 to 2001-01, from 2.9 per cent earlier. Now compounded with drought condition, we have a decline this year of 13.6 per cent for grain production and 11.4 per cent for oil seeds. The per capita availability grain is now 1.41 kg per person per month, which is lower than during the Bengal famine of the mid 1940s.

The Vajpayee government also tightened the belts of the rural poor by raising the prices of food grains sold through the Public Distribution System (PDS) in 1998-99 to 2000-2001. The price of wheat was raised by 85 per cent and of rice by 61 per cent for those above the poverty line, while the price rise for those below the poverty line was of the order of 66 per cent for wheat and 62 per cent for rice. The irony is that these prices are higher than the price at which grain is shipped from India to feed US pigs and cattle, at Rs 4.30 per kg. So, the implementation of the mandate of the WTO had led widespread starvation, with a starvation death reported even from the agriculturally rich Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Over 3000 people died in Andhra Pradesh. The pro-WTO chief minister of Andhra put it down as deaths from the heat. But what were half a million people doing at gruel kitchens set up by Left parties and various other organisations to deal with famine conditions? In fact, the destruction of the PDS in accordance with the dictates of the WTO has led to a situation where some 4.4 crore tonnes of grain are food for rats in FCI godowns while people starve because they cannot buy it. In the open market, the prices of grain, edible oils and pulses have almost doubled in the last decade while job opportunities have dried up. And, wages have remained stagnant or gone down.

It is on the verge of this disaster that India will send its representatives to Cancun, because the whole exercise is based on the faulty premise that trade and tariffs can redress the plight of producers. Also, we cannot expect much from the delegation of the government of India if its last minute let down at Doha is anything to go by. It has persistently refused to use escape clauses that the rich countries have used to subsidise their agriculture. On the other hand, instead of fighting for a broader context to determine labour standards, it sees the despondency, near starvation and lack of bargaining strength of our rural poor as “competitive”. Moreover, while it could have waited till 2003 to implement the removal of quantitative restrictions, it began the process in 1999 under US pressure. So, one cannot hope for anything other than a betrayal by the government of India at Cancun too, despite the deceptive noises it is making.

Therefore, there is no other alternative but to put up as fierce a resistance as one can to the destruction of our rural economy that has, since independence, freed us from depending on imports of grain to feed our people. It has allowed us to bring education, health centers, electricity, tube-wells and cheap fertilizers to villages. It has allowed the life expectancy to increase. Now all that is threatened.

So, to put it in a nutshell, the battle for more government investment in agriculture; subsidies for electricity, fertilizers and government purchase of food grains; a functioning PDS; increased funding for rural development, more work through food for work and similar programmes; re-imposition of quantitative restrictions to save our agrarian market; protection of our biodiversity and seed production from plundering multinationals; speeding up land reforms to the exclusion of multinationals and landlords in agriculture and an end to discriminatory immigration laws of the developed countries, are on the agenda. We must have our own definitions. We must now evolve our own rules of the game. They need not be the ones the WTO wishes to impose.

(This is the text of paper presented by Suneet Chopra, joint secretary of the AIAWU, at the Oxfam seminar on ‘Road to Cancun: India’s Stakes’ held on July 19 at New Delhi)