India’s Cities & Farms: A Bewildering Contrast
Feb 4th, 2007 | 4 responses
With investment banks predicting that India will become the world’s third largest economy within two decades and a CIA report forecasting that the 21st century will be India’s, this national self-confidence is spreading fast, says Amelia Gentleman in
The Observer.
“Beneath the headline ‘Empire Strikes Back’, one paper reminded readers that British colonial administrators had repeatedly tried to stifle the growth of the Tata family business in the early 20th century. ‘Corus, the erstwhile British Steel and one of the icons of Her Majesty’s Empire will now fly the [Indian] Tricolour,’ the paper said. ‘It’s the first step towards what we call the Global Indian Takeover,’ a front-page headline promised.
“Travel a few miles outside the bubble of prosperity in Delhi or the financial capital, Mumbai, and this superpower mania can seem bewildering. Beyond the sleek glass-tower blocks that house call-centre offices on the outskirts of the city, and the extravagant, Florida-style apartment complexes (titled with imaginative dishonesty ‘Bayview Heights’ or ‘Heritage Luxury’), the new India suddenly disappears.
“Instead there is a vision of a more troubled India, where around 700 million people scratch a living out of agriculture and some 300 million battle to survive beneath the poverty line. Horse-drawn carts dodge trucks as they drive the wrong way down the national highway, overloaded with leaking sacks of grain. Visibly weak infant children break stones in the central reservation, helping to repair the road surface.
“Health Minister Ambumani Ramadoss highlighted these paradoxes in a speech he made recently: ‘India is on its way to becoming a superpower, but unfortunately 50 to 60 per cent of children under three years are undernourished,’ he said. ‘We have the IT revolution, but then we have this pitiful infant mortality’.”
In India there is yet another major crisis on the agricultural front. Many farmers are committing suicide. Says ZNet: “The Indian Ministry of Agriculture admits to the following figures: there were 100,000 suicides by farmers between 1993 and 2003. And between 2003 and October 2006, there have been some 16,000 suicides by farmers each year.
“In total, between 1993 and 2006, there were around 150,000 suicide by farmers, 30 a day for 13 years! The Maharashtra (state) government itself accepts the figure of 1,920 farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha between January 2001 and August 2006. Farmers’ organisations of the district state that there were 782 suicides by agricultural producers. Data for the past three months indicate that on average there was a suicide every eight hours.
“What conditions give rise to a suicide rate of about 30 farmers a day? It is said that the reason for this is indebtedness, but the ultimate reason is the imposition of a completely unsuitable agricultural technology, as much from the economic as from the environmental viewpoint.”
In India there is a major controversy over the introduction of genetically modified crops to “help the poor farmers escape poverty” and to resolve the “problem of hungerâ€?.
Devinder Sharma, India’s leading journalist and policy analyst who has addressed many parliaments and forums in the world on this issue, is leading a campaign at the grassroots level. He states: “At a time when genetically modified crops/foods remains shrouded in controversy, nearly 10,000 farmers from 250 villages (on the Uttar Pradesh side of Chitrakoot) are assembling for a conference on organic agriculture at Chitrakoot.
“These 250 villages are already following organic agriculture as a result of which they remain untouched by the sad spectacle of farmer suicides. These villages have also decided to keep out GM crops/food. They will be taking a pledge with me on February 7 swearing in the name of humanity and sustainable development to keep the GM crops/food out of the villages.
“In my understanding, this is a a very important development and will have serious repercussion for the future of Indian agriculture. By joining the pledge, 250 villages will be making a commitment to remain GM free!”
An article by Devinder Sharma can be read here.
Sharma also wrote on “Genetic Engineering, Globalisation and Food Security”.
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4 Responses to “India’s Cities & Farms: A Bewildering Contrast”
And what evil, terrible thing are they planning on keeping out of their country? A form of rice developed to address Vitamin A deficiency. After reading the criticisms of those who never want GM foods to be available I have to say that I find their arguments weak. Often they seem to be a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think the problem isn’t really genetic modification per se, it’s what the genetically modified plants can do.
So-called “terminator” plants, for example, aren’t dangerous despite their scary name. What they do is become sterile when the plants they grow are ready for harvest. This protects the interests of the seed-producing companies. Though perhaps, over a long enough time period, these types of plants would take over and plants able to reproduce themselves would go extinct. But in the shorter run, this is a question about patent law.
I know nothing about patent law. But as a guy who likes to read, I know a little about copyrights. Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy–all the great 19th century contributors to human culture (and, for that matter, all the not-so greats as well) are in the public domain, easily available. But the greats of the early 20th century–Hemingway, Faulkner, pick your favorite–are locked up by laws that protects the Disney Company’s ownership of Mickey Mouse. I realize that there are lines that need to be fairly drawn to promote scientific as well as cultural innovation. But should the interests of Disney–or Monsanto–trump the interests of the larger culture?
There are also scientific problems. Any genetic innovation that improves the defenses of a prey species is going to put selection pressure on the predator species to produce offspring capable of overcoming those defenses. This is not to suggest we give up, but we have the benefit of experience in this matter that previous generations lacked. For example, there’s been a war on headlice for 100 years. Every time we cooked up a better way to kill them, they overcame it. Current treatment is to slather the hair with mayonaise and then cover it with swimming cap–to pin them down and cut off their oxygen. The day headlice become anaerobic, life as we have known it is over.
I am actually in favor of genetic modifications that make food more nutritious. Probably there is no nation on Earth that has benefitted more than India from scientific improvements to agriculture. And fiddling with agriculure to improve flavor, hardiness, yield and our own wealth is an ancient human tradition. But greed and shortsightedness are also ancient human traditions.
But golden rice isn’t a “terminator plant”. I can understand the objections to those.
If you can’t reproduce on your own, you will never really take over other species. These plants cannot grow in the wild, so they actually have LESS of a chance of becoming invasive species. You are right however in identifying profit as the main motive behind these strain’s development. Luckily, patent laws are pretty hard capped at 20 years, so they can’t stay proprietary for that long.
I think your right though about the TYPE of GM which is used. Many GM product attempt to simply return naturally occuring genes found in other varieties of the plant which have been removed due to the old human method of GM called selective breeding. This seems to me to by benign because we can already demonstrate that these are biological modes which can co-exist perfectly fine within an ecosystem.
What seems to be a bit more controversial in my mind is when GM is used to create arbitary compounds, such as pesticides. These plants certainly need more study, but even they can be a good thing, as smart placement and control of pesticides can actually reduce the ammount of pesticides which are used in the processes, lowering contamination of runoff.