Frontline, Volume 19 - Issue 13, Jun. 22 - Jul. 5, 2002.
Profits Over People: How
the World Food Summit in Rome last fortnight buried food
rights, and clearly laid the contours of the future the
powerful of the world are designing.
VANDANA SHIVA
THE "World Food Summit: 5 years later" which concluded in
Rome on June 13 was supposed to address the most important
human rights violation of our time - the denial of the right
to food to millions. Many of the delegates found football
more important than hunger. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian
leader, wrapped up the so-called "Summit" two hours ahead of
schedule so that everyone could watch the World Cup of
football. Nero fiddled while Rome burnt. Leaders watch
football while their people starve. In any case, while
serious commitments were being made, no serious analysis was
attempted to address the growing crisis of hunger and
malnutrition.
While the Summit was a total failure in addressing the
hunger issue, it did become a launching pad for the
biotechnology industry. The hunger for food was neglected.
The hunger for profit was fully attended to. It was used to
put the stamp of approval on genetically engineered seeds
and crops which have been at the centre of controversy over
the past decade.
As is becoming the trend, the World Food Summit was not
negotiated. A text was ready before the leaders arrived. The
leaders came only came from the countries of the South. Rich
country leaders were absent. The United States government
was conspicuous by its influence. U.S. Agriculture Secretary
Ann M. Veneman, who used to be with Calgene, now a company
under Monsanto, held a press conference to announce how
biotechnology would save people and the rainforests. (A U.S.
journalist who interviewed this writer commented that the
current U.S. government is in fact a "Monsanto
administration". Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to
be president of Searle, which merged with Monsanto. And
Attorney-General John Ashcroft had received campaign funds
from Monsanto.)
While no financial commitment was made on the hunger front,
the head of United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) announced biotechnology aid of $100
million to Third World countries over the next ten years for
transfer of biotechnology. With and tied to trade and
commercial interests, it is possible that poor countries
which have been resisting genetic engineering will now open
their doors to it.
The Summit seemed to have moved from addressing the problem
of hunger of the poor to hunger for profits and control of
corporations. It conveyed the impression of being more a
sale-show for the biotechnology industry than a serious
gathering of leaders seeking to find collective ways and
make collective commitments to address the biggest human
rights disaster of our times - more than a billion people
going hungry in a world with abundant food and wealth.
The Summit was to have been organised before the Doha
Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
However, because of protests in Genoa at the time of the G-7
summit when the police killed a youth, the Italian
government had made Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
postpone the Summit since it was worried about protests. A
peaceful protest by more than 20,000 people did take place
on June 8, an indication that for citizens food and
agriculture is a major concern. In countries of the Third
World it is a concern because most people of the South are
peasants and farmers, because most people who are growing
hungry are in rural areas and could be producing enough food
for their needs had they not been displaced and had not
their resources and assets been alienated, and had not their
food sovereignty been destroyed by non-sustainable
capital-intensive technologies and unfair terms of trade
between rural and urban areas, between agriculture and
industry, and between North and South. Reform of the global
agriculture system was the most important issue for debate
and negotiation at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Doha. The
most significant failing of Rome was that it made no effort
to contribute to reform of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture
with people's food rights as the defining imperative for
reform.
Starvation is the inevitable result of policies of
globalisation which are transforming food from a basic need,
to which everyone has a right, to a globally-traded
commodity. Most hungry people are rural producers who are
hungry either because their resources have been ecologically
degraded or alienated, or because they are too deeply in
debt to buy costly inputs for Green Revolution-style
industrial agriculture. They cannot consume the food they
grow. This is the story of Kalahandi and Kashipur in Orissa.
People starve because of erosion of entitlements, not lack
of food. And entitlements are being eroded by globalisation
in four ways.
First, capital-intensive systems of agriculture rob peasants
of incomes and push them into debt and penury. The epidemic
of farmers' suicides is a reflection of this growing crisis
of increasing costs of production.
Secondly, as markets get integrated globally and import
restrictions (quantitative restrictions or QRs) are removed,
the artificial prices set by the monopoly control of
agribusiness and the $400 billion-worth subsidies in rich
countries depress domestic prices, robbing farmers of
markets and incomes.
The recently announced U.S. Farm Bill increases U.S.
subsidies to $18 billion over the next few years. This will
depress further the prices farmers receive worldwide, making
agriculture non-viable for small and marginal producers. It
also throws to the world the oft-quoted justification for
globalisation and WTO rules - that it would create a level
playing field and force rich countries to reduce subsidies.
The WTO is clearly helpless in disciplining rich countries
like the U.S. Its discipline seems to be imposed only on
countries like India which has been forced to change its
patent laws under the Trade Related Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) regime and to remove QRs for agricultural
imports.
The third level at which food entitlements of the poor are
eroded is by the shift from "food first to export first"
policies. India's new agriculture policy as well as the last
two Union Budgets made this shift evident. Export-oriented
agriculture policies divert scarce land and water from
meeting local food needs to providing for export markets
thus creating hunger and conditions for famine for the most
vulnerable and marginal communities. This is what happened
during colonialism and is happening under the recolonisation
of globalisation.
The inverse relation between increasing exports and
declining food consumption locally and nationally has been
exhibited under export-led strategies of World Bank
Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). In Nigeria,
Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Zaire, which account
for 60 per cent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa,
there has been a 33 per cent decline in cereal output per
head and 20 per cent decline in overall food output per head
in less than a decade. All the countries saw rising
agricultural exports per head along with declining food
output or food consumption per head.
Finally, hunger is a result of policies linked to structural
adjustment and globalisation which promote sudden withdrawal
of the state and reckless dependence on markets. The
dismantling of the public distribution system (PDS) has
destroyed India's food security.
The 1943 Bengal famine forced intervention by government to
ensure the supply of food to people facing famine. A
rationing system was introduced. The first Foodgrains Policy
Committee appointed in 1943 recommended procurement of
foodgrains from surplus areas, rationing for equitable
distribution and statutory price control to check price
rise.
The Foodgrains Policy Commission, appointed to draft a
foodgrains policy for independent India, recommended the
abolition of food controls, rationing and the necessity of
imports to maintain central reserves. Between 1957-58 and
1966-67, the PDS was dominated by imports from the U.S.
under the PL 480 scheme.
The creation of artificial profitability for the production
of Green Revolution wheat and rice was based on the creation
of centralised institutions for the control of farm
economies. Two central bodies related to food production,
procurement and distribution were established in 1965 on
World Bank advice. One was the Food Corporation of India (FCI),
which was responsible for procurement, import, distribution,
storage and the sale of foodgrain. The other was the
Agricultural Prices Commission (APC) which determined
minimum support prices for foodgrains, and through it,
controlled cropping patterns, land use and profitability.
Through food price and procurement, the Central government
now controlled the economics of food grain production and
distribution. The profitability of foodgrain production in
this centralised, subsidised and enclavised form could not
be maintained over time. In the 1980s, subsidies became a
drain on the government budget.
In 1991, the World Bank, which had earlier designed the
centralised system, called for its dismantling through its
SAPs. The Bank demanded the dismantling of the PDS, the
removal of the Essential Commodities Act, the removal of
price and inventory control and deregulation of agricultural
trade. It recommended the corporatisation of agriculture and
a shift from a state-centred to a corporate-centred food
system.
RADICAL restructuring of the PDS and withdrawal of food
subsidies was an important aspect of India's structural
adjustment. The revamped PDS (RPDS) was supposed to target
vulnerable regions better and reduce public expenditure.
However, all that it did was to increase hunger while adding
to government expenditure. In 1997, the RPDS was replaced by
the Targeted PDS (TPDS). It provided 10 kg of wheat or rice
a month to families below poverty line (BPL) at highly
subsidised prices and withdrew all subsidies for families
above poverty line (APL). As a result, food prices
increased, off-take fell, and stocks grew.
The TPDS artificially divided the population into BPL and
APL categories. Those who access food from fair price shops
are those who cannot buy it from the market. The APL
category has been defined as those earning above Rs.1,500 a
month, which is barely enough to meet basic needs. Those in
the APL category have also to bear 100 per cent of the
procurement and distribution costs, which places foodgrains
far above their reach. In fact, the government committee
formulating the long-term grain policy has recommended that
the price of grain for the APL category be slashed by 25 per
cent.
There were major problems with the TPDS. First, the BPL/APL
categories were arbitrary and the BPL beneficiaries who were
to be targeted were artificially reduced. The whole exercise
of targeting BPL families was exposed as a farce when 12
States informed the Supreme Court that they could not
identify people in the BPL category. Instead of targeting
the poor, the World Bank-driven policies made the poor and
their food entitlements disappear.
Further, the quantum of allotment of 10 kg of wheat or rice
for a family at best meets only 12 per cent of the
nutritional requirement, forcing the poor to depend on high
markets for 88 per cent of their requirements and consume
less, thus reducing off-take from the PDS.
The decline in off-take is the main reason for the growing
stocks. Fifty million tonnes of foodgrains are rotting while
people cannot afford to buy food. Stocks of rice have
increased from 13 million tonnes to 22 million tonnes, while
wheat stocks have gone up from 872 million tonnes to 2,411
million tonnes. While the conditionalities set by global
trade and financial institutions prevent the government from
supporting the poor to have access to adequate and
nutritious food, they promote the diversion of subsidies
from people to corporations. While people have been forced
to buy wheat and rice at Rs.11.30 a kg following the
withdrawal of subsidies, corporations get wheat and rice at
subsidised prices.
It is trading giants such as Pepsi and Cargill that have
benefited from the withdrawal of food subsidies to the poor
and redirection of subsidies for exports. Trade
liberalisation is a recipe to starve the poor and feed the
corporations.
WHILE the World Food Summit totally failed to address the
crisis of hunger and the increase in hunger due to
globalisation, or find effective solutions to the problem of
starvation, movements and non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) gathered at the Forum parallel to the Food Summit
presented exciting experiences and research. The theme of
the NGO Forum was "Food Sovereignty" and it had a
broad-based participation of peasants, women, seed saver
movements and ecological and organic movements.
Studies show that organic/ecological agriculture produces
more food, while protecting livelihoods and the environment.
At a session organised by Bread for the World at which this
writer spoke, the results of a study of 89 projects
worldwide showed that sustainable agriculture can lead to
substantial increases in per hectare food production. The
proportional yield increases are generally 50 per cent to
100 per cent for rainfed crops and 5 per cent to 10 per cent
for irrigated crops.
At the same session, Greenpeace presented a study that
showed that in Argentina, the country in the South with the
highest acreage of genetically engineered crops, farm
incomes had declined, chemical use had increased and yields
of GM crops had decreased.
However, none of the studies which showed that neither GMOs
nor chemicals are necessary to produce more food informed
the official Summit. It blindly promoted biotechnology. The
declaration states: "We call on the FAO, in conjunction with
the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research) and other international research institutes, to
advance agricultural research and research into new
technologies, including biotechnology... We are committed to
study, share and facilitate the responsible use of
biotechnology in addressing development needs."
At a major session on Women and Agriculture in the FAO which
this writer was asked to address, links were made between
the Food Summit in Rome and the Earth Summit in
Johannesburg, organised 10 years after Rio. The challenge
from Rome to Johannesburg is to make sustainable agriculture
the cornerstone of food and agriculture policy. The evidence
and practices are there to prove that the sustainable
solutions are also the solutions that promote equity and
justice. However, one can already predict that the World
Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will be another
non-negotiated declaration promoting the interests of global
corporations.
The trends are clear - a redefinition of globalisation as
sustainable development and biotechnology as sustainable
agriculture; the replacement of legally binding (Type I)
agreements with voluntary partnerships between corporations
and governments (Type II) agreements; and the relaunch of
the biotechnology agenda through the new economic
partnership for Africa (NEPAD).
One could ignore these global circuses. However, they
redefine our rights and restructure governance to transform
our democracies into corporate rule. The Food Summit buried
food rights. The WSSD will try to bury people's right to
resources.
However, the right to food and sustenance is a natural
right. Governments can be blind to them. They cannot
extinguish them. And people will find new ways to liberate
their food systems from corporate control and liberate the
poor from hunger. The Rome Summit has clearly laid the
contours of the future the powerful are designing. However,
history shows us that the future does not always unfold on
the design of the powerful. No regime that rests on denying
people their right to food lasts. The fall of the Roman
Empire is a lesson from the past. The rise of movements like
Tebhaga after the Great Bengal Famine is a more recent
reminder from history. In spite of millions facing
starvation, all that the World Food Summit could offer those
who faced hunger and starvation was an "invitation" to FAO
"to elaborate, in a period of two years, a set of voluntary
guidelines to support members-states' efforts to achieve the
progressive realisation of the right to adequate food in the
context of national food security".
The legally binding obligations of states have been replaced
by "voluntary guidelines". At a time when globalisation has
more to do with whether people get food or die of hunger,
instead of focussing on global trade issues and WTO rules,
"national contexts" are all that is addressed.
It is clear that it is not the World Food Summit of June
2002 but the struggle of people for their food rights and
food sovereignty which will determine the future.
Vandana Shiva is Executive Director, Research Foundation for
Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi. |