Land is life. It is the basis of livelihoods for peasants and indigenous people across the Third World and is also becoming the most vital asset in the global economy. As the resource demands of globalisation increase, land has emerged as a key site of conflict. In India, 65 per cent of the people are dependent on land. At the same time a global economy, driven by speculative finance and limitless consumerism, needs land for mining and industry, for towns and highways, and bio-fuel plantations. The speculative economy of global finance, several hundred times larger than the value of real goods and services produced in the world, is hungry for investments and returns on its investments. It must commodify everything on the planet — land and water, plants and genes, microbes and mammals. The commodification of land is fuelling the corporate land-grab in India, both through the creation of special economic zones (SEZs) and through foreign direct investment in real estate.
Further, the global economy based on limitless consumerism has a rapacious appetite for natural resources. With trade liberalisation, the global economy has been increasingly turning to countries of the South and, within the South, to indigenous and peasant land. As globalisation increases luxury consumption by the rich, the demand for cars, for example, grows. More cars mean more automobile factories, more iron and bauxite mining for manufacturing more steel and aluminium.
The land-grab for mining and industry has triggered major conflicts in India, including those in Orissa’s bauxite and iron-ore mines, at Ford’s plants in Tamil Nadu and at the Tata’s Nano factory in West Bengal. Corporate profits have grown by grabbing land through brute force from the poorest farmers and tribals. Mining profits have jumped from Rs 50 per tonne to Rs 5,000 per tonne in the last 10 years (according to Arun Agrawal’s letter to home minister P. Chidambaram).
For the tribals and peasants, land is their mother. She is not a property. She is not a commodity. That is why peasants of Singur, Nandigram and Dadri refused to be separated from their land. And that is why farmers in Jagatsinghpur and Kalinga Nagar in Orissa are refusing to leave their land for Posco and Tata and are facing a police assault.

Land-grab is being justified on two false arguments. First, that agriculture has become unviable and, therefore, farmers should abandon the land. For farmers, soil is not a prison from which they need to escape to an industrial job. It is their support, their means of livelihood, their security, their identity. The perilous state farmers find themselves in is a result of the corporatisation of agriculture — high costs of inputs like seeds and agrochemicals push up production costs while trade liberalisation is pushing down crop prices. The result is a negative economy with costs higher than returns, leaving farmers facing debt and suicide (200,000 since 1997). However, there are alternatives to this negative economy — lowering the cost of production through seed sovereignty and ecological farming and increasing returns to the farmers through fair and just trade.
The second argument used to justify land-grab is that India must “industrialise” to have economic growth. However, today’s economic growth is jobless growth; it is not labour-intensive and employment-generating. India will not be a “superpower” with millions rendered destitute through land-grabs. Furthermore, SEZs, a favoured tool of industrialisation, are for real estate companies, developers, and for the IT sector, which are already growing industries and do not cater to basic needs. No society can become a post-food society. If India destroys her fertile farmlands for concrete jungles and uproots her small farmers for a speculative economy, there is not enough land in other countries to provide food for India’s one billion people. Land is inelastic. Fertile land is a very precious, very scarce resource. It needs to be protected and conserved as an asset of the farmers and as a national heritage to be passed on to future generations.
The Indian Constitution gives the tribals rights to defend their resources. The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, grants legal recognition to the village community (gram sabha) with specific powers, including management of community resources, resolution of disputes, approval of plans and programmes and mandatory consultation with them before the acquisition of land.
In 2006, India passed the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act to correct the historic wrong of violation of the rights of the tribals.
But as tribals exercise their constitutional, democratic, resource and human rights, they are being met with violence. And now, in fact, the tribals are being hunted down in their homelands by paramilitary forces to clear the way for mines and factories. This war against India’s “green” capital — the forest regions which have India’s original inhabitants — is being called “Operation Green Hunt”.
The justification of Operation Green Hunt is to hunt out the Maoists but the reality of Operation Green Hunt is that it is treating every tribal as a Maoist so that they leave their homes in the forest, and the mining corporations and steel and aluminium giants can have direct, uninterrupted access to the minerals that lie under tribal homes.

Dr Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust