Books
STUFFED AND STARVED: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System
by Raj Patel. Portobello Books, London, 2007.THE witty dust-jacket sets the tone. Its hessian look references those familiar post-consumer brown paper bags you find next to the bulk bins of wild rice and fig newtons in the food co-ops of London and San Francisco. The back matter dares you to forgo the promise of answers to these questions: ‘Why is there still global hunger? Why does everything contain soy? Is there an obesity epidemic? Who invented supermarkets? Who profits from the world’s crops? How do all these questions connect?’
The packaging may be ironic, but the fare inside is the real thing, an eight-course feast – if that’s the word – prepared by the organic intellectual of the food sovereignty movement. Stuffed and Starved delivers on its promise to connect the dots, from ‘field to fork’. This is the book for anyone trying to get a handle on the global food system, its contours and complexities, how we arrived at the current crisis and why market-led solutions and biotech fixes can’t possibly get us out of it.
Patel approaches the question from an explicitly populist perspective, and the book’s dedication – ‘For the everyday heroines and heroes’ – foreshadows the spirit of the enterprise. ‘The view that informs this book,’ Patel announces in the introduction, is ‘a common understanding of the international food system’ shared by ‘a fistful of organizations not only fighting against this food system, and sometimes dying in protest, but building alternatives to it, and living in dignity.’ The small farmers, that is, of the global South – from the KRRS in India to the landless peasants of the MST in South America and all the millions who belong to what must be the largest social movement on the planet, La Via Campesina.
Given this allegiance, it might seem surprising that Raj Patel, in the time since the book was first launched, has managed something that very few declared enemies of the present order have done. He is getting a hearing in the halls of power, in the opinion pages of the mainstream press, and on prime time TV and radio in Britain and the US. Only a few get past the gatekeepers of the tweedledum-tweedledee, if-you-hate-Pepsi-you’ll-love-Coke, bipartisan consensus of the US political class and its licensed stenographers. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has not been heard on the US public broadcasting network in forty years. So what is it that accounts for the wide reception of a book that fundamentally challenges capitalist agriculture and calls for ‘a radically new food system’?
For a start, the book is blessed by its timing. That there is a systemic crisis in agriculture, linked in complex ways to the climatic and financial meltdowns, is now impossible to deny. The capitalists themselves insist on it, indeed are depending on it. The current reality is powerfully conveyed in the opening chapter entitled ‘A Rural Autopsy’, where the author’s skills – an impressive combination of literary flair and analytic chops – are on display. The plight of the world’s rural poor in the age of neoliberalism is vividly presented through the symptomatic lens of farmer suicide. The awful statistics are made flesh in the poignant story of a widow from Andhra Pradesh who struggles on in the aftermath of her husband’s death. She is among the myriads of poor women who are bearing the main load in this unfolding disaster. Burdened by drought and debt, her husband had poisoned himself with pesticide bought on borrowed money. It’s an account that rips the mask off the mythos of ‘Shining India’, but Patel at once disabuses those who imagine that farmers in the northern heartland are somehow winners in this modern food system.
Stuffed and Starved reveals how the globalized market has meant that control of farming has passed almost completely out of the hands of farmers themselves, all over the planet. Moreover, the idea of the ‘market’ itself is in large part a fiction. We would do well to recall Fernand Braudel’s conclusion, after a lifetime of studying the history of exchange, that what we have been taught to call ‘the market’ (how did the Chicago boys pull this off?) should in truth be named the ‘anti-market’. Its essence is monopoly, monopsony and the cartel; it has almost nothing in common with the glories of the old agora and suk.
Patel goes on, rightly, to also insist on the violence at the heart of the business. He enlists Thomas Friedman, the New York Times pundit, who for once spoke accurately – almost – when he wrote: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.’ Hidden fist? Maybe in Friedman’s neighbourhood, but in the global South the fist of the hegemon and its proxies is mostly out in the open. The architects of the international food system would no doubt be reluctant to acknowledge the full reality about the actual foodscapes where what we eat is grown, processed and packaged for consumption at home, in the car, in the work cubicle. The rural idyll is long past its sell-by date; the reality has little bucolic about it. More Bosch than Blake.
By way of vivid cameos and short case studies, Raj Patel walks us the length of the food chain. Along the way we get illuminating lessons on the history of NAFTA and popular resistance to neoliberal trade agreements; on colonial policy, famine and food aid; on banana republics and high fructose corn syrup; on Green Revolutions old and new; on Monsanto, GMOs and the commodification of germplasm; on soybeans and slave labour; on Wal-Mart versus community supported agriculture (CSA); on hunger and obesity being two faces of the same coin; on the Black Panthers and the People’s Grocery of Oakland.
Patel hitches his wagon to the programme of the Via Campesina, the landless of the Mato Grosso and the dispossessed in the favelas and jhuggies of the global South. He pitches their case – the demand for the right to food, support for agro-ecological farming, fishing and pastoralism, recognition of the need to nurture soil fertility and encourage carbon sequestration, comprehensive agrarian reform to protect the various means of food production, and resistance to agrofuels – to a northern audience, whom he seeks to convince ultimately that they share a common interest in transforming the system. It is significant that he forbears from using the idiom of the Left, or what passes for the Left in the grim dawn of the new century, in favour of the humanitarian language of rights and opportunities. ‘I have cleaved,’ says Patel, ‘to ideas and principles in which people from across the political spectrum might believe; in terms of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity.’
Raj Patel has made this rhetorical wager, it seems, in an ambitious attempt at a practical intervention in global food policy. A tall order for a scholarship boy from Balliol College who, although he interned at the IMF, went to work for the World Bank and UNCTAD, then turned to bite the hands that fed him, if not others. He may just pull it off.
In some ways, recent developments, since the book was published, have helped him by further undermining the neoliberal agenda of IMF and the World Bank. On the other hand, the struggle now involves a fresh round of genetic enclosures to which Obama committed himself in his inaugural speech: ‘We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.’ This is confirmed by his appointments of Lawrence ‘the Third World is grossly underpolluted’ Summers, and Steven Chu, the atomic physicist, now Secretary of Energy, who helped to coordinate the half billion dollar greenwashing deal between British Petroleum and UC Berkeley to develop agrofuels. This is dispiriting to those who have kept up with recent research concerning the claims and consequences of biofuels; for example, the findings that agrofuel policy was responsible for up to a third of last year’s price hikes, not to mention the food riots following the speculative bubble in maize, that biomass-based fuel will not in fact reduce the amount of CO
2 emitted, and that agrofuels take more energy to grow and process than they release.What the regressive Obama agriculture and energy appointments make clear is that only a serious increase in pressure from below has any chance of bringing about the essential changes so eloquently presented in Stuffed and Starved. In summary, sweeping land reform, a jubilee (cancellation of debts), reparations for historic injustices, the revoking of cash and carbon subsidies to agribusiness, and a broad implementation of the Via Campesina programme that would allow regional food systems to flourish without fetishizing the local or insisting ‘Everyone to their own watershed’. One might add, the defunding of ‘synthetic biology’ (biotech rebranded), a putative science based on the notion of ‘biobricks’ and a reductionist view of life that may already have done wanton and irretrievable damage, though no one except a small crew of scientists associated with Genøk in the Norwegian Arctic has yet cared enough to measure the dispersal of agricultural transgenes in the biosphere.
And finally, if this reviewer had his way, a five-year moratorium on gastroporn in our local Bay Area newspapers, assuming they last that long.
Iain Boal
THE CRISIS IN INDIAN AGRICULTURE: A Critical Study by Mohan Guruswamy, Uma Natarajan and Shagun Khare. Hope India Publications, Gurgaon, 2008.
HARVESTING DESPAIR: Agrarian Crisis in India by Perspectives. New Delhi, 2008.
TWO books published in the last few months on the same topic: agrarian crisis. The first by Guruswamy, Natrajan and Khare, an ex-advisor to the Finance Minister of the Government of India and a couple of students of economics; the second by a Delhi-based group – Perspectives – comprising of students and teachers. While the former relies on crunching numbers to highlight the magnitude of the crisis, the latter does that and more; they go down to the actual battleground to critically examine the fallout of adverse policies that have brought about this crisis. The difference of approach to comprehend and analyse the problem is therefore quite interesting.
The first book offers a broad overview of the agriculture sector with useful macroeconomic indicators on different dimensions such as investment, workforce, production, irrigation, and so on. While using a more recent dataset would have been desirable, it is still able to present the grim reality of the farm sector in crisis. Falling investments, shrinking production and underemployment are some issues that have been analyzed by the authors.
The authors correctly point out that indirect subsidies have gone up and benefit a few farmers, primarily those who are better off. As is well-known, subsidies in agriculture are more for keeping food prices (and thereby tempers of the Great Indian Middle Class) under control rather than helping farmers reduce their cost of production and profit from farming. The authors feel that these subsidies are unsustainable and must be scaled down. Instead, the money should be used to develop better rural infrastructure.
This is exactly what the World Bank has been recommending for some years and is in my view a dangerous strategy. On one hand the government is pushing a farm exit policy for marginal and small farmers, while on the other private companies are waiting in the wings to replace them. Scaling down subsidies at this stage will only accelerate this process. The use of public funds to develop rural infrastructure that would ultimately benefit the private sector, if the above scenario unfolds, instead of the poor, thus appears unwarranted.
Instead what is required is redeploying certain subsidies, especially those for fertilizer, which form the bulk of subsidies in agriculture, directly to farmers so that they can make an informed choice of whether to go in for chemical intensive farming or shun them to reduce the cost of cultivation and preserve soil health. There are various alternative approaches on the ground today that demonstrate the robustness of non-chemical sustainable agriculture.
Also, the assertion of the authors that agriculture subsidies are huge and a burden on the nation’s economy does not stand scrutiny. A government that can spend billions to bail out the non-agricultural sectors of the economy on account of the current financial crisis can certainly spend more on the sector that provides employment to the bulk of the population. Money is not the constraint, political will is.
Public investment in agriculture has indeed been scaled down over the last two decades and has contributed to the present agrarian crisis. However, the crisis also provides the right opportunity to debate on the kind of activities that ought to be funded. The authors, however, fall back on the oft-repeated assertion that technology ought to drive agriculture. The meaningful question is whether the time-tested indigenous knowledge of farming communities qualifies as ‘technology’ or not. Since these are better suited to combat the crisis, the need to push modern technologies that have caused this crisis is uncalled for. For instance, the case of low numbers of tractors in Indian agriculture has been put forth by the authors as an example of how farm mechanization is lagging. This completely ignores the fact that more than 80 per cent of farms are marginal and small holdings where tractors are more of a burden than a utility.
Perhaps the weakest argument in the book is that farmers’ suicides are not linked to their economic wellbeing. The authors contend that richer states have a higher rate of suicides than the poorer states whereas it should have been the other way round. This is where the authors have failed to correctly interpret the data: states with the highest rates of suicides are also the ones where farmers are growing cash crops. The National Sample Survey Organisation’s study on the state of indebtedness of farmers also points out higher rates of indebtedness in the states where the incidence of suicides is higher.
Despite these flaws, the book is a good resource on select dimensions of Indian agriculture. Issues that have been missed out in this book have been tackled deftly in the second book by Perspectives. The group, comprising of students from the Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University travelled to Punjab and Vidarbha to get a first hand impression of the crisis in agriculture. The output is, therefore, not only a clear account of what farmers are enduring (the human angle), but also carries a detailed analysis of various policies that have caused this crisis.
The first instance of farmers’ suicides was reported from Andhra Pradesh in 1987-88 when 37 cotton farmers in Guntur and Prakasham districts committed suicide. Suicides by tobacco farmers in other areas of the state followed. The rate of suicides abated and resurged a decade later in 1997-98. The cause was the same – crop failure and consequent huge losses. Clearly, most of the suicides have been committed by farmers growing monocultures of non-food cash crops.
This should have woken up policy-makers to the fact that all is not well on the farm front. The already beleaguered sector was instead subjected to a process of reforms and liberalization. Metaphorically speaking, the agrarian crisis was already doing college courses when reforms were initiated in 1991. These reforms and liberalization of the agriculture and allied sectors further exacerbated the problems of farmers who were with some difficulty coming to terms with a flawed set of technological interventions. As their resilience collapsed farmers began killing themselves by the hundreds.
The authors use datasets that are similar to what Guruswamy et al. have used, but fortunately have not applied them uncritically. The text leads the reader through a series of carefully drawn out blueprints that have ensured that underdevelopment of agriculture became as much a form of identity as a material condition. It traces the impact of economic policy reforms, flawed credit policy, trade liberalization in agriculture and the technology dimension in plain but passionate words. The politics of making agriculture unviable for marginal and small farmers while opening the doors for corporate control of virtually every aspect of the supply system has been carefully examined. The dismal state of rural infrastructure, lack of land reforms, over-exploitation of natural resources, lack of public investment, and so on have been dealt with precision and clarity. Some chapters have appendices with useful information, though an index at the end of the book would have been useful.
This is a treatise by a group of young students belonging to an urban generation detached from the reality of the flaming fields. At a time when college textbooks are stuffed with the economic miracle that India has turned into, this book is an important contribution that speaks the truth. The nation is poised at a stage when the agrarian crisis seems to be moving towards a point of no return and this book offers plenty of sobering experiences.
Bhaskar Goswami
AGRARIAN CRISIS IN INDIA edited by D. Narasimha Reddy and Srijit Mishra. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2009.
IT is both instructive and depressing that it has to take a spate of farmer suicides, close to 200,000 in the last few years, for our analysts and policy-makers to finally realize that Indian agriculture, and by association rural India, is in deep distress. Depressing because the signs have been evident for well over fifteen years. Despite relatively high GDP growth, agricultural growth has remained low. Worse, the numbers dependant for their livelihood on farming have not substantially declined. As R. Radhakrishnan points out in his perceptive foreword to this book: ‘Low growth of farm productivity, low agricultural prices, slowdown of demand for agricultural products due to stagnation of per capita food consumption during 1993-2005, and inadequate employment opportunities outside agriculture are the proximate causes that underlie the current slow pace of agricultural transformation.’
Even more important, though much less commented upon, is the reduced developmental role of the state in investment in irrigation, flood control, research, extension and institution building in the context of liberalizing agriculture. ‘This has not only affected the externalities that induce private investment and provide an environment conducive for innovation by farmers, but also the generation of agricultural technology in public institutions and extension as well.’ Not only have we failed to address long standing concerns like land degradation, depleting water-table levels and so on, we have been equally tardy in evolving institutional mechanisms for a farm economy that is far more deeply integrated into commercial markets, both local and global. The dismantling of quantitative restrictions and reduced tariffs on agricultural products has greatly exposed our farming community to the volatility in global prices. And while a small section may have gained, a vast number of the small and poor farmers, already at the margin, have been deeply hurt.
Fortunately, the recent vote on account budget presented to Parliament in mid-February 2009 does indicate that the government may have realized the gravity of the situation. But then, all it has done is increase expenditures in rural areas and write-off loans to farmers in the hope that this might stave off the worst forms of current distress. To begin the process of re-fixing and revitalizing our farm sector and rural economy will demand that our politicians and policy-makers rethink their strategy of corporatizing agriculture and further integrating our farmers and farm products into what is a deeply distorted and inequitous global market. Hopefully, the book under review will provide some clues towards a revised strategy.
Basically, the book, a collection of ten articles by some of our leading agricultural economists, provides both a macro and a micro view of the agrarian crisis. At the macro level, articles by the two editors Narasimha Reddy and Srijit Mishra, and Ramesh Chand, S.L. Shetty and Suresh Pal together bring out the supply side factors affecting our agriculture – the slowing down in growth of irrigation; low expenditures on research and extension such that we have been unable to evolve region and crop-specific technologies, particularly in dryland farming; the sluggish growth of institutional credit resulting in over half the farmers (and a much higher proportion of smaller farmers) still forced to rely on moneylenders and traders, not to forget the distorted character of bank lending which primarily goes to the more capital intensive sectors of mechanization, storage, biotechnology and so on rather than land development and minor irrigation.
It is worth noting that none of the writers talk of land reforms, the favourite theme of left-wing theorists. Nor do they highlight institutional changes needed in the land market – be it consolidation of fragmented holdings, cleaning up land ownership records, or evolving systems that would help maintain a healthy balance between farm, pasture and forest land without which no sustainable agriculture is possible. Nevertheless, even the limited analysis advanced makes it clear that for a vast majority of farmers, farm business income continues to experience sharp variations with, particularly in recent years, a downward pressure on prices and incomes.
All this has, expectedly, deepened agrarian distress. The latter half of the book presents case material on distress and suicides in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Punjab – all states which have experienced a greater shift towards commercial farming in both food and non-food crops. A combination of declining productivity and increasing risks associated with a commercialization of agriculture – particularly among farmers whose capacity to withstand shocks is low – can easily prove to be fatal.
One may wonder why farmer suicides have been far less reported from the less developed eastern states of the country, more so since no one claims that the agrarian distress is lower in these states. For some years now Utsa Patnaik has been pointing to the declining levels of food intake and nutrition to levels prevalent in the early 1950s in the country, incidentally affecting the poorer eastern states more. The paradox is in part explained by what one may call a ‘reporting’ bias – continued malnutrition and slow death is less newsworthy than suicides. Equally, it is true that those less integrated in the commercial market are less affected by sudden shifts in crop prices, a decline in income and an escalation of debt incurred to support a more resource intensive farming. Possibly that is why farmers specializing in internationally traded crops like cotton, coffee, oilseeds, palm oil, vanilla, flowers and so on have faced greater shocks than those cultivating coarse cereals like jowar and bajra.
Nevertheless, despite some obvious gaps, the book makes a useful distinction between agricultural distress as reflected in low growth and declining productivity, and agrarian crisis reflected in growing landlessness and casualization of labour, proliferation of small and marginal holdings, fragmentation and a widening gap between the rural and urban areas. We also realize that our agriculture cannot continue to support the numbers currently dependant on farming and allied activities, and that, in line with global trends, we need to urgently facilitate a migration of the labour force to alternate meaningful employment, one that ensures a better life. However, even as we try and spur non-farm rural employment, or a shift to the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, policy-makers need to be specially sensitive to those forced to survive on what little they have. We can only hope that contributions such as in this collection, nudge our policy-makers into a rethink of both policy and strategy.
Harsh Sethi