Hunger, by design

Why is every fourth Indian hungry? Why is every third woman in India anaemic and malnourished? Why is every second child underweight and stunted? Why has the hunger and malnutrition crisis deepened even as India has nine per cent growth? Why is “Shining India” a “Starving India”?

In my view, hunger is a structural part of the design of the industrialised, globalised food system. Hunger is an intrinsic part of the design of capital-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures of industrial agriculture, also called the “Green Revolution”. India’s Green Revolution from 1940s to 1970s was neither green, nor revolutionary. It merely created a market for corporations by transforming war chemicals into agrichemicals and breeding crops to respond to high chemical inputs. It increased production of a few commodities — rice and wheat — at the cost of the production of pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fruits and millets. It focused on one region, Punjab, and pushed the agriculture of other regions into neglect.
This is a design for scarcity.
Hunger is also designed into a non-sustainable production system in which costs of inputs are higher than the price of outputs. The farmer gets trapped into a negative economy with debt, and suicide is an inevitable consequence. The 2,00,000 farmer suicides since 1997 are part of the genocidal design of corporate-driven high-cost agriculture.
There is now talk of a second Green Revolution in India. This one is based on genetic engineering, which is being introduced into agriculture largely to allow corporations to claim intellectual property rights and patents on seeds. The floodgate of patenting seeds was opened through the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of World Trade Organisation (WTO).
When seed is transformed from a source of life into “intellectual property” which becomes a source of super profits through royalty collections, both biodiversity and small farmers disappear. We have seen this happen with Bt. Cotton.
The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) of the WTO was designed to allow Cargill and other agribusiness corporations access to world markets. This was done by forcing countries to remove import restrictions (quantitative restrictions) and using $400 billion to subsidise and dump artificial cheap food commodities on the Third World. The case of dumping of soya and destruction of India’s domestic edible oil production and distribution is an example of how the global reach of multinational corporations creates hunger, driving down farm prices and destroying local livelihoods. Indian farmers are losing $25 billion every year to falling prices. While farm prices fall, food prices continue to rise, creating a double burden of hunger for rural communities. This is why half of the hungry people in India and the world are farmers.
Globalised forced trade in food, falsely called free trade, has aggravated the hunger crisis by undermining food sovereignty and food democracy. With the deadlock in the Doha round of WTO, forced trade is being driven by bilateral agreements such as the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture on the board of which sit corporations like Monsanto, Cargill/ADM and Walmart.
Sadly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is trying to use the food crisis his trade liberalisation policies have been created to hand over India’s seed supply to Monsanto, food supply to Cargill and other corporations and retail to Walmart, in line with the US-India AoA signed with President Bush in 2005. Speaking at a conference on food crisis and food inflation on February 4, 2011, Dr Singh said, “India needs to shore up farm supply claims by bringing in organised retail players” (read Walmart). Research shows that globalised, industrialised retail is destroying farmers’ livelihoods and leading to wastage of 50 per cent food. This too is hunger by design.
Both the US and Indian governments are supporting US agri-business corporations to expand markets and profits. The common citizen is politically orphaned in a world shaped by corporate rules. Farmers’ rights and people’s right to food are extinguished as corporate rights to limitless profits design “the market”. Instead of the right to food being sacred, “the market” becomes sacred. When the Supreme Court of India told the government to distribute the food grain that was rotting in godowns, Dr Singh said that giving food away free will kill the farmer’s incentive to produce and adversely affect prices and wages. When the National Advisory Committee (NAC), headed by Sonia Gandhi, drafted a Food Security Act, the Prime Minister-appointed Rangarajan Committee said that stepped-up procurements could “distort” open market food prices. In other words, corporate rights to profit through creation of hunger must be protected even as people die.
Planning Commission vice-chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia invited Gulf countries to farm in India and export food to their countries during a visit to Muscat. A Bahrain firm, Nader and Ebrahim Group, recently tied up with Pune-based Sanghar to grow bananas on 400 acres. Indian laws do not allow foreigners to buy land. So the Planning Commission chief is encouraging foreign corporations to partner with Indian companies for contract farming.
Diverting land from food for local communities to cash crops for the rich in US, Europe and the Gulf countries is not a solution for hunger; this will aggravate the food crisis. This is not investment in agriculture, it is land grab and food grab. To get rid of hunger we need a paradigm shift in the design of our food systems. We need to shift from monocultures to diversity, from chemical intensive to ecological, biodiversity-intensive, from capital-intensive to low-cost farming systems. We need to shift from centralised, globalised food supply controlled by a handful of corporations to decentralised, localised food systems that are resilient in the context of climate vulnerability and price volatility. Such system could feed India’s population.
Industrial monocultures produce less food and nutrition per acre than biodiverse ecological farms. Biodiversity organic farming, if adopted nationally, could provide enough calories for 2.4 billion, enough protein for 2.5 billion, enough carotene for 1.5 billion, and enough folic acid for 1.7 billion pregnant women. We must end hunger by building food democracy, by reclaiming our seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and land sovereignty.

Dr Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust