8. KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
Democracy Now! December 13, 2006
Title: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the US-India Nuclear
Deal, Wal-Mart in India”
Author: Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229
Global Research, October 9, 2006
Title: “Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India Take on Monsanto”
Author: Arun Shrivastava
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427
SciDev.Net
Title: “Sowing Trouble: India’s ‘Second Green Revolution’”
Author: Suman Sahai
http://www.scidev.net/content/opinions/eng/sowing-trouble-indias-second-green-revolution.cfm
Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.
Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s
food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal
invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian
farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt
incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops,
yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in
March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US
Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer
Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of
India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness
ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.
Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior
Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it
is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s
agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field.
In one of very few public statements by a US government official regarding
KIA, Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs,
states, “While the civilian nuclear initiative has garnered the
most attention, our first priority is to continue giving governmental
support to the huge growth in business between the Indian and American
private sectors. Singh has also challenged the United States to help
launch a second green revolution in India’s vast agricultural heartland
by enlisting the help of America’s great land-grant institutions.”
Vandana Shiva translates, “These are twin programs about a market
grab and a security alignment.” Burns announced that while the
nuclear deal is the cutting edge, what the US is really seeking is agricultural
markets and real estate markets, “to take over the land of people,
not through a market mechanism, but using the state and an old colonial
law of land acquisition to grab the land by force.”
Through KIA, Monsanto and the US have asked for unhindered access to
India’s gene banks, along with a change in India’s intellectual
property laws to allow patents on seeds and genes, and to dilute provisions
that protect farmers’ rights. A combination of physical access
to India’s gene banks and a possible new intellectual property
law that allows seed patents will in essence deliver India’s genetic
wealth into US hands. This would be a severe blow to India’s food
security and self-sufficiency.
At the same time KIA has paved the way for Wal-Mart’s plans to
open five hundred stores in India, starting in August 2007, which will
compound the outsourcing of India’s food supply and threaten 14
million small family venders with loss of livelihood.
“This is not about ‘free trade,’” Shiva explains,
“Today’s trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest,
and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It’s become a
genocide.”
Farmers are, however, organizing to protect themselves against this
economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed banks and setting
up exemplary systems of community agrarian support. In response to the
flood of debilitating debt tied to GM/hybrid seeds and the toxic petroleum
based fertilizers and pesticides these crops depend on, one woman in
the small village of Palarum says, “We do not buy seeds from the
market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically
engineered or terminator seeds.” Instead village women save and
trade hardy traditional seeds that have evolved over centuries to produce
low-maintenance, nutritious “crops of truth.”
Each village in this rural area of India has formed its own community-based
organization called a sangham. Seventy-two sanghams are part of a regional
federation. These sanghams form an informal social security network
that, through the maintenance of seed banks, will come to the rescue
of individuals or entire villages in times of crop failure. Every member
of the community has access to food and is assured of some work even
if landless. The federation furthermore trains students in skills such
as carpentry, computing, pottery, bookbinding, veterinary science, herbal
medicine, sewing, farming, waste management, and agro-forestry.
Author Arun Shrivastava comments that, “These seventy-two villages
were once horizontally and vertically stratified along caste, class,
and religious lines. Food scarcity was endemic, people were malnourished,
the majority worked as unskilled day wagers. Today they are cohesive,
interdependent. I did not see one malnourished person. Rarely do people
go to urban centers to seek work.” Shrivastava continues, “The
community is the most important entity that can help us ensure food
and nutrition security. The right of access to natural resources—land,
rivers, forests, air, and everything that Nature has given us, including
seeds, is the fundamental right of the communities, not of the corporations
or the state or the individual. No corporation has the right to expropriate
what Nature gave us.”
Professor of genetics Suman Sahai concludes, “India must be cautious
that it does not become the dumping ground for a technology and its
controversial products that have been rejected in many parts of the
world and whose safety and usefulness remain questionable. Food security
is an integral part of national security. All India’s efforts in
the nuclear arena to shore up its national security goals will be undermined
if it allows itself to become insecure in the matter of food.”
Citation:
1. Nicholas Burns, “‘Heady Times’ For India And the
US,” Washington Post, April 29, 2007.
UPDATE BY Arun Shrivastava
Nature has given us seeds and ‘crops of truth’ that do not
require any tending but give us nutrition at no or low-cost. This knowledge
needs to be rapidly disseminated; soon our lives may depend on it.
With current farming and food distribution systems it takes ten calories
of fossil fuel energy to transport one calorie of food from farm to
fork. That is unsustainable now; the era of cheap oil is effectively
finished. Since we are already past peak oil, we all must learn to ensure
food and nutrition security for our family and community. We will have
to learn basic skills like conserving seeds, growing nutritious food,
and medicinal crops without chemicals and machines. We will need more
cohesive and interdependent local communities, like the women of Zaheerabad
have shown.
The women of Zaheerabad save seeds in community-held seed banks and
grow nutrition-dense food through a system that ensures health and livelihood
for all. They have established how self-sufficient, sustainable communities
might live in a post-carbon world.
A handful of multi-national corporations are patenting seeds. These
genetically modified (GM) seeds neither increase yield nor reduce costs
nor enhance nutritive content of foods, nor reduce dependence on oil.
The seeds of deception have destroyed farmers in India, the US, and
elsewhere.
Patenting ensures monopoly control while subverting farmers’ right
to save seeds; it is antithetical to natural rights of local communities.
The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture covertly seeks to gain
access and control over community-held seeds.
Since publication of the article, Deccan Development Society (DDS)
has extended the model to twenty-six more villages but the community
FM radio station remains silent.
At People’s SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation)
summit in Kathmandu (March 2007) participants voted for a “GM-free
South Asia,” community control over seeds and protection of South-Asian
biodiversity. Over six million farmers requested the Supreme Court of
India (April 2007) to ban open field trials of GM seeds because of the
dangers of irreversible contamination of community-held seeds and adverse
impact on health.
The mainstream media is silent. They don’t have space for disseminating
information that will save us from disease and starvation. These are
unglamorous issues.
For more information on growing crops of truth and the need for a new
social order, the following are ideal sources:
1. The Web site of Deccan Development Society (DDS), initiator and
facilitator of the sanghams, is http://www.ddsindia.com/www/default.asp.
Contact PV Satheesh, Director of Zaheerabad Project.
2. Beej Bachao Andolan (BBA, Save the Seeds Movement) is a well-known
movement of farmers who save traditional seeds of the Himalayan region.
Contact Biju Negi, negi.biju@gmail.com.
3. For information on growing food for health and personal freedom,
go to www.soilandhealth.org.
4. For information on threats posed by multinational seeds firms, go
to www.gmwatch.org and www.mindfully.org.
5. The Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith discusses how GM foods,
introduced in the US in 1993 without proper biosafety assessment, endanger
our health. It is available at www.seedsofdeception.com.
See also the research of Dr. Irina Ermakova at http://irina-ermakova.by.ru/eng/articles.html/,
and of Dr. Arpad Pusztai: http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai/.
6. “Heartless in the Heartland” is the ghastly story of how
Monsanto blackmailed US farmers not to save their seeds. See www.mindfully.org.
7. For an excellent summary, watch The Future of Food, a documentary
by Deborah Koons Garcia, downloadable from www.mindfully.org.
8. For discussions on peak oil and food security, see Richard Heinberg’s
Fifty Million Farmers, published on November 17, 2006, available at
http://www.energybulletin.net/22584.html.
Also visit the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, managed by Dr.
Colin Campbell, one of world’s leading oil experts, at http://www.peakoil.net.
9. My two recent papers also shed light on the subject: “The attack
on our seeds,” a related article published by Farmer’s Forum
in India (contact the editor at bksnd@airtelbroadband.in), and “The
Silent War on the People of India,” which can be found at http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/03/22/the_silent
_war_on_the_people_of_india.
UPDATE BY Vandana Shiva
The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture impacts 650 million
farmers of India and 40 million small retailers and it is redefining
the relationships between people in the two biggest democracies in the
world.
A new movement on retail democracy has begun in India that is bringing
together small shopkeepers, street hawkers, trade unions and farmers
unions. On August 9, 2007, which is Quit India Day, the movement will
be organizing actions across the country telling Wal-Mart to leave India.
For more information, visit our website at www.navdanya.org.