Wednesday 6th December 2006: Udaipur

Yes, but who is that 9% growth benefiting? Today my reading has taken an economic turn and I have primarily been tackling some of the work of Vandana Shiva. According to Ellen, she is famous primarly for being a raging eco-feminist, although the books I’ve been looking at – Stolen Harvest and a book she co-edited called Sustainable Agriculture, Food Security and Globalisation – deal more with agriculture and its relationship with global market economics.
   Her focus and, by and large, that of her co-authors, is passionate anti-globalisation. She argues that the “neo-liberal” policies of free trade, open borders and unregulated market economy are ruining people’s livelihoods and destroying the environment. The main culprits she names are the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), large corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill and, in a sense, Western governments themselves. No! Not “Western”, but “Northern”, which in today’s lingo means the rich end of the world, as opposed to the poor, tropical, developing world of rural economies and banana republics called the “South”.
   The IMF she blames for imposing “Structural Adjustment Policies” (SAPs) on developing countries as the condition attached to monetary loans. These SAPs tend to promote agriculture for exports, so India is now being pushed into turning swaths of land over to the production of meat, flowers and shrimps, squeezing farmers off their land, often with only the sketchiest attempt at seeking their agreement. In return, farmers are given lump sum financial compensations, which hardly constitute food security, however that controversial term is interpreted. Ironically, in many cases the costs incurred by these large-scale shifts in land use are not recovered by the miracle export industry that replaces traditional farming. For example, the returns on the Indian shrimp industry recently were only a quarter of the costs incurred, although I must confess here to being very vague about how these costs and returns are calculated, or even what they mean in terms of money and ownership.
   Northern governments are accused of exploiting loopholes in the partly drafted WTO Agreement on Agriculture, so that while they are cutting their subsidies overall, they are actually increasing subsidies for some crops. So we still have situations such as that of Ghana, which despite having one of the best tomato-growing climates in the world ends up importing heavily subsidised Italian tomatoes that sell dirt cheap in the Ghanaian market, outcompeting Ghanaian tomatoes and pushing local tomato growers into poverty. Or that of EU maize that is imported to Kenya, selling far cheaper than local maize. This is the much-maligned practice of crop dumping which the WTO is supposedly trying to target, but ironically seems to be indirectly promoting!
   As for Monsanto, Calgene, RiceTec and the rest of the carnival of the agribusiness giants, this is where Shiva really grinds her axe. As a result of so-called TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) which stem in part from the Uruguay Round of talks that led to the formation of the WTO, these corporations have patented seeds and plants as their own, thus forcing farmers to depend on them for life itself!
  There’s much, much more. The overarching message of Shiva’s writings is that economic “growth” is a myth because it is always a result of theft. Theft of small farmer’s livelihoods or theft from nature. Kristen Dawkins, who wrote a good chapter in Sustainable Agriculture, Food Security and Globalisation also talks about the “externalisation of costs” other than basic monetary costs when making these calculations that reveal “growth”. Meaning that cost in terms of the environment and human development are ignored, so what looks like growth on paper may have a huge “invisible” cost, turning the idea of growth into a mockery.
   My knowledge of economy, ecology and agriculture is far too limited to make a really balanced judgement about all this, much less a dispassionate, scholarly report. So far I haven’t read much from the other camp except a brief browse on the WTO website and a few World Bank publications, where strong commitments to human development and environmental protection are, of course, championed.
  I had an interesting argument about this with Prakash, who is very much on the side of trade liberalisation and has little truck with the likes of Vandana Shiva.  I enjoy our arguments, as they can get very heated but always remain good-natured and stimulating, and I learn a lot from his world view. He a passionate advocate of globalisation and insists that if it is embraced fully, economic growth in a country will always eventually reach the bottom rungs of society. It is only when a country like India tries to leap onto the globalist bandwagon while maintaining a cautious grasp on the gateposts of protectionism and state intervention that problems arise. Supposing, for argument’s sake, that the “trickle down effect” (a country’s economic gains passing down to the lowest strata of society) does work, I want to know what we are supposed to do with the poorest communities until they feel its effects? Is there any way of promoting localisation – often presented rather vaguely as a panacaea e.g. by Helena Norberg-Hodge – and resisting the worst excesses of the corporate neo-liberal economy, so as to tide over the vast underbelly of the world’s poor until the fruits of the free market reach them? Here my lack of concrete knowledge prevents this debate from becoming anything more than a bit of hand-waving and hot air.

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I’ve just had an interruption from Priya. Since our near-row, our friendship has developed and we regard each other with a new respect. She has just been telling me that her diary is her sole confidante. She talks to people but does not “share” with them. She made the comparison with Amir, who now thinks they are great friends because he confides in her a lot. In reality he is annoying her with his constant phone calls and endless personal questions. Hence she is starting to avoid him. A sad playing-out of the fears he earlier described to me.

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I made three attempts to speak to Sumita today, the first of which was unsuccessful simply because  she was not in her office. The second was skin-crawlingly embarassing. Coming out of the guesthouse, I saw Sumita and Zelda having chai with another woman in the canteen. With reckless abandon I walked over to them and said hello, accompanying it with an unnecessarily cheesy smile. Zelda smiled awkwardly, the mystery woman looked slightly shocked, and Sumita stared straight through me. None of them said a word to me, and as they resumed their conversation I realised that theirs was strictly a business chai. Meanwhile, I was left cringing in much the same way as you would on crossing the dance floor to chat up the hottie in the corner, losing your nerve and walking straight past, trying your best to pretend that you had only ever been interested in examining the fire exit. But I was at a dead end and had already gone too far to turn back, and in my confusion had no option but to buy a chai, and sit uncomfortably close to the power troika, ignoring them as studiously as I was being ignored. On the final attempt I managed to catch her alone at her desk, but she brushed me off with a curt comment that she was very busy and would be speaking to the education department in due course. The whole thing is frustrating, but at the same time I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to read more widely than I might otherwise have done, and the material is relevant enough to my work here for it not to feel too much like a guilty pleasure. Nevertheless, I have decided to go first thing tomorrow and speak to the head of the education department myself. I am a little worried that Sumita might regard this as insubordination and cause problems, but the spirits of the Cambridge Careers Advisors are haunting me with their urgent motto: “Be resourceful!”


Next Post - Friday 8th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 8th December 2011)