GMW: Terrorism, Agriculture and U.S India Cooperation

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GMW: Terrorism, Agriculture and U.S India Cooperation

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Tue, 8 Aug 2006 09:25:57 +0100

 

 

 

 

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EXCERPTS: The MOU on Science and Technology signed between U.S and

India on 20th July, 2005 has made it clear that teaching and research

would

focus on Biotechnology or genetic engineering, also often referred to

as the second green revolution...

 

This is not the first time a U.S driven agriculture agenda is being

imposed on India. The so-called green revolution was introduced forty

years ago. And it fuelled terrorism and extremism in the 1980's in Punjab.

 

While the two leaders resolve, " to combat terrorism relentlessly " they

are promoting the technologies, and trade models, which serve the US

corporate interests and destroy farmers' livelihood security thus

becoming the breeding ground for terrorism...

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Terrorism, Agriculture and U.S India Cooperation

By Vandana Shiva

August 10 2005

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-08/10shiva.cfm

 

Terrorism and Agriculture are among the issues raised in the Joint

India - U.S statement issued on 18th July 200 5 during Prime Minister Man

Mohan Singh's meeting with President Bush. As the statement declares,

the two leaders resolved -

 

- to create an international environment conductive to promotion

of democratic values, and to strengthen democratic practices in

societies which wish to become open and pluralistic.

 

- To combat terrorism relentlessly.

The leaders also agreed to -

 

- launch a U.S - India knowledge initiative on agriculture

focused on promoting teaching, research, service and commercial linkages.

 

The MOU on Science and Technology signed between U.S and India on 20th

July, 2005 has made it clear that teaching and research would focus on

Biotechnology or genetic engineering, also often referred to as the

second green revolution. The Science Technology Agreement cites the green

revolution in the 1960s as the beginning of U.S - India cooperation in

India. To assess the impact of the new agreement we need to do an

honest appraisal of the impact of the green revolut ion.

 

This is not the first time a U.S driven agriculture agenda is being

imposed on India. The so-called green revolution was introduced forty

years ago. And it fuelled terrorism and extremism in the 1980's in Punjab.

 

While the two leaders resolv e, " to combat terrorism relentlessly " they

are promoting the technologies, and trade models, which serve the US

corporate interests and destroy farmers' livelihood security thus

becoming the breeding ground for terrorism as I have shown in my book

" The

Violence of the Green Revolution " (Zed Books).

 

When we became independent, our agriculture was in crisis due to

neglect and exploitation. The Agriculture Minister, K.M. Munshi put

priority

to repairing natures hydrological cycle and nutritional cycle. These

are the principles followed in sustainable, ecological farming.

 

However, while Indian scientists and policy makers were working out

self-reliant and ecological alternatives for the regeneration of

agriculture in India, another vision of agricu ltural development was

taking

shape in American foundations and aid agencies. This vision was based not

on cooperation with nature, but on its conquest.

 

It was based not on the intensification of nature's processes, but on

the intensification of cred it and purchased inputs like chemical

fertilizers and pesticides. It was based not on self-reliance, but

dependence. It was based not on diversity but uniformity. Advisors and

experts

came from America to shift India's agricultural research and agricultur

al policy from an indigenous and ecological model to an exogenous, and

high input one, finding, of course, partners in sections of the elite,

because the new model suited their political priorities and interests.

 

There were three groups of international agencies involved in

transferring the American model of agriculture to India - the private

American

Foundations, the American Government and the World Bank. The Ford

Foundation had been involved in training and agricultural extension since

1952. The Rockefeller Foundation had been involved in remodeling the

agricultural research system in India since 1953. In 1958, the Indian

Agricultural Research Institute, which had been set up in 1905, was

reorganized, and Ralph Cummings, the field director of the Rockefeller

Foundation, became its first dean. In 1960, he was succeeded by A.B.

Joshi, and

in 1965 by M.S. Swaminathan <P>

Besides reorganizing Indian research institutes on American lines, the

Rockefeller Foundation also financed the trips of Indian s to American

institutions. Between 1956 and 1970, 90 short-term travel grants were

awarded to Indian leaders to see the American agricultural institutes

and experimental stations. One hundred and fifteen trainees finished

studies under the Foundation. Another 2000 Indians were financed by USAID

to visit the US for agricultural education during the period.

 

The work of the Rokefeller and Ford Foundations was facilitated by

agencies like the World Bank, which provided the credit to introduce a

capital-intensive agricultural model in a poor country. In the mid 1960s

India was forced to devalue its currency to the extent of 37.5%. The

World Bank and USAID also exerted pressure for favourable conditions for

foreign investment in India's fertilizer industr y, import

liberalization, and elimination of domestic controls.

 

The World Bank provided credit for the foreign exchange needed to

implement these policies. The foreign exchange component of the Green

Revolution strategy, over the five year plan period (1966 - 71) was

projected

to be Rs. 1114 crores, which converted to about $ 2.8 billion at the

then official rate. This was a little over six times the total amount

allocated to agriculture during the preceding third plan (Rs. 191

crores).

Most of the foreign exchange was needed for the import of fertilizers,

seeds and pesticides, the new input in a chemically intensive strategy.

 

The World Bank and USAID stepped in to provide the financial input for

a technology package that the Ford ad Rockefell er Foundations had

evolved and transferred.

 

The occurrence of drought in 1966 caused a severe drop in food

production in India, and an unprecedented increase in food grain

supply from

the US. Food dependency was used to set new policy conditions on I ndia.

The US President, Lyndon Johnson, put wheat supplies on a short tether.

He refused to commit food aid beyond one month in advance until an

agreement to adopt the green revolution package was signed between the

Indian agriculture minister, C.S. Subramanian and the US Secretary of

agriculture, Orville Freeman.

 

The combination of science and politics in creating the green

revolution goes back to the period in the 1940s when Daniels, the US

Ambassador

to the Government of Mexico, and Henry Wallace, Vice President of the

United States set up a scientific mission to assist in the development

of agricultural technology in Mexico. The office of the Special Studies

was set up in Mexico in 1943 within the agricultural ministry as a

cooperation venture between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican

Government.

 

In 1944, Dr. J. George Harrar, head of the new Mexican research

programme and Dr. Frank Hanson, an official of the Rockefeller

Foundation in

New York invited Norman Borlaug to shift from his classified wartime

laboratory job in Dupont to the plant breeding programme in Mexico. By

1954, Borlaug's 'miracle seeds' of dwarf varieties of wheat had been

bred.

In 1970, Borlaug had been awarded the 'Nobel Peace Prize' for his

'great contributions tow ards creating a new world situation with

regard to

nutrition'.

 

However, the green revolution did not bring peace to Punjab, it brought

terrorism.

 

The Green Revolution, awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970, has

contributed to two social and en vironmental disasters in India. One was

the extremist movement and terrorism in Punjab, which led to the military

assault on the Golden Temple and finally the assassination of Indira

Gandhi in 1984. The other was the gas leak from the Union Carbide

pesticides plant in Bhopal, which killed 3,000 people on that tragic

night of

December 1984. In the two decades since that tragedy, 30,000 people

have died in Bhopal due to the leak of these toxic gases. The Punjab

violence also took the lives of 30,000 people in the years following 1984.

 

Why did a 'Revolution' awarded a Nobel Peace Prize lead to so much

violence? The Green Revolution came with a promise of peace. But its

crude

linearity - Technology -> Prosperity -> Peace - failed. The reason for

this f ailure was because the technologies of the Green Revolution,

like technologies of war, leave nature and society impoverished. To

expect

prosperity to grow out of violent technologies that destroy the earth,

erode biodiversity, deplete and pollute water an d leave peasants

indebted and in ruins was a false assumption made during the launch of

Green

Revolution. This false assumption is being repeated in the launch of

the Second Green Revolution based on biotechnology and genetic

engineering, which are at the core of the US - India agreement.

 

The 'terrorism' and 'extremism' in Punjab was born out of the

experience of injustice of the Green Revolution as a development

model, which

centralized power and appropriated resources and earth from the people.

In the words of Gurmata from the All Sikh Convention (quoted in my book,

The Violence of the Green Revolution), on 13th April 1986,

 

" If the hard-earned income of the people or the natural resources of

any nation or the region are forcibly plundered; if the goods produced by

them are paid for at arbitrarily determined prices while the goods

bought are sold at higher prices and if, in order to carry this

process of

economic exploitation to its logical conclusion, the human rights of a

nation, region or people are lost then the people will be like the

Sikhs today - shackled by the chains of slavery. "

 

The peasants and people of Punjab were clearly not experiencing the

Green Revolution as a source of prosperity and freedom. For them it was

slavery. The Green Revolution, the social and ecological impacts it had,

and the responses it created among an angry and disillusioned

peasantry, has many lessons for our times, both for understanding the

roots of

terrorism and searching for solutions to violence.

 

These are connections our leaders fail to make. The more they fight

terrorism, the more they create it with their policies that create

economic insecurity. The more they talk democracy, the more they destroy

freedom by imposing trade rules and policies that deny people freedom and

work against farmers and citizens. The Agreement on Agriculture of the

WTO was drafted by a Cargill official. TheTrade Related Intellectual

Property Rights Agreement was drafted by a group of US corporations

including Monsanto. Monsanto's seed monopolies have already pushed

thousands

of farmers in India to suicide. Promoting commerce for Monsanto and

Cargill through the US India Agreement on Agriculture will kill more

farmers, and ultimately destroy India's food security, sovere ignty and

democracy, fuelling more terrorism and extremism.

 

The Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement between US and India

establishes intellectual property protocols of research by passing

consultation with Indian scientists and the Indian public which has been

resisting the US style IPR regimes which force countries to patent life,

and create monopolies on seeds, medicine and software. For us, these

agreements are instruments of corporate dictatorship; they are not

instruments of democracy. And as dictatorship, they will fuel more

anger, more

discontent, more frustration.

 

Terrorism is a child of economically unjust and anti-democratic

policies, as became clear in Punjab in India and Oklahoma in the US.

As Joel

Dyer says in the Harvest of Rage, an investigation on the Oklahoma

bombing and its roots in the US farm crisis, farmers losing their

farms and

livelihoods are victims of long-term stress. If they are not helped,

they get violent. If they blame themselves, they direct violence in wards

and commit suicide. If they blame others, they turn their violence

outwards.

 

This is the violence of terrorism and extremism. The only lasting

solution to dealing with terror is to increase people's freedom and

security

by protecting their livelihoods, their cultures, their rights to

resources, and their democratic choices in how their society and lives

are

organized.

 

The India - US Agreement on Agriculture and Science and Technology will

do the opposite. It will breed more insecurity and erode people's

capacity to make choices. It will therefore fail in its two prime

objectives

of promoting democracy and ending terrorism.

 

 

 

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