AGAINST THE GRAIN
The new shifting agriculture: Shopping for fields overseas ………BY BIRAJ PATNAIK
The new shifting agriculture: Shopping for fields overseas ………BY BIRAJ PATNAIK
In the wake of runaway inflation and the ensuing food crisis, the prime minister constituted three high-powered committees of chief ministers and central ministers to recommend ways of containing inflation, improving PDS and boosting agricultural production. The Working Group on agricultural production was chaired by Haryana chief minister B S Hooda, with CMs of West Bengal, Punjab and Bihar as members.
Tucked away, largely unnoticed by the Indian media, as recommendation number 33, the Hooda Committee suggested that like many other countries who have shopped for land abroad for growing crops to meet consumption needs, Indian companies could also be encouraged to buy lands in other countries for producing pulses and edible oils. The countries listed included Argentina, Myanmar and ASEAN countries where the government could possibly facilitate land acquisitions. We should seriously consider these options, the Hooda Committee says in earnest, for at least 2 million tonnes of pulses and 5 million tonnes of edible oil for 15-20 years.
Bizarre though it may sound for a committee appointed to look at ways of boosting agriculture production in India, to make such a suggestion, the Hooda Committee is in fact merely following a recent global trend, legitimized in UN lingo as large scale land acquisitions, which in NGO-speak is being simply and perhaps, more appropriately, called land-grabbing.
Following the food crisis in 2008, many countries (China is the undisputed leader of this pack), driven by speculative capital and a growing interest of investment funds in agriculture, have been at the centre of a mad scramble to acquire very large tracts of lands in Africa, Asia and other parts of the developing world. An estimate by FIAN, the international organization that works on the Right to Food, of these land grabs puts the area acquired so far to be approximately the size of France. In 2009 alone, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) put the total money involved at $10-20 billion.
While much of the land grab led by Chinese companies and other global investors like Goldman Sachs started in Africa, it is now a truly global phenomena. The Saudis, in deals that have been facilitated by the International Rice Research Institute, for instance, have already acquired 700,000 hectares of land in desperately poor countries like Senegal and Mali. China has reportedly acquired close to 3 million hectares of land in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone for palm oil cultivation. Closer home, private equity investors from the UAE have already acquired close to 800,000 hectares of farmland in Pakistan and South Korea has acquired 465,000 hectares in Madagascar. Should India then be joining this global trend?
Land grabbing abroad to meet domestic food needs is a solution that is worse than the problem. It further impoverishes poor farmers in countries where these lands are being acquired even as dictatorial regimes there are willing to sell their most valuable assets for a song to private capital. Foreign investors have little stake in protecting the ecological interests of the countries where these lands are being acquired and leased and are likely to leave them degraded permanently and move on elsewhere once the productivity in these areas decline.
They also come in the way of the obligation of the countries where these lands are being acquired to their own citizens on the right to food. Most of the land acquisitions are happening in countries that have some of the highest rates of child malnutrition and are hunger hotspots. It is also a myopic solution, fraught with many risks, including displacing local labour and destabilizing local governments. In the case of India, it is an open admission of failure to increase productivity domestically by investing in agriculture.
(The author is principal adviser to commissioners of the Supreme Court in the Right to Food case)
* Acquiring land elsewhere for cultivation impoverishes farmers there and degrades soil