The M777 is the leading ultra-lightweight towed artillery gun, with more then 1,250+ currently in operation with the U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, Canadian and Australian forces, as well as expanding its global footprint into the Indian Army and Armed Forces of Ukraine. The M777 155mm ultra-lightweight howitzer was developed to succeed the M198 howitzer […]
The post M777: Tactical Mobility and Operational Flexibility in Challenging Terrains appeared first on Asian Military Review.
Diplomatic relations between India and Canada remain tense after the murder of a Sikh leader in Canada, which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has blamed on India. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed outside a Sikh temple in Surrey in June 2023. He was an outspoken advocate for a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan. While a hero to Khalistani Sikhs, he was considered a terrorist in India…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is building and acquiring interests in ports throughout the world with an eye toward using them for commercial and military purposes. The dual-use harbors increase the nation’s influence along vital sea routes and at maritime passages. The highest concentrations of these foreign ports are in the western Indian Ocean […]
The post Dual-use ports give PRC proximity to vital shipping lanes appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
ISLAMABAD: Caretaker Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Murtaza Solangi said on Friday that no power on earth could crush the Kashmiris freedom movement, who were struggling for the right to self-determination promised by none other than the United Nations in its several resolutions, according to APP.
Addressing the participants of a rally organized here marking October 27, the black day to protest against Indian illegal occupation of the then princely state in 1947.
The minister said that the history of oppression of the Kashmiri people spanned over centuries.
He said that on this day in 1947, India landed its troops in the valley in violation of international law.
He lamented the champions of human rights and democracy, who raise their voice against any injustice across the world were silent over the Kashmiri genocide at the hands of Indian occupation forces.
Murtaza Solangi opined despite the increasing repression, the desire for freedom has increased among Kashmiris manifold.
With the increase in tyranny and repression, the spirit of freedom among Kashmiris has got more momentum, he maintained.
The minister said that India had not only grossly violated UN Security Council resolutions but also it violated its own constitution by refusing to grant the right to self-determination to the Kashmiri masses.
The minister said for durable peace in the world was imperative to ensure just solution of Kashmir disputes.
The post No power on earth can crush Kashmiris struggle for freedom: Solangi first appeared on VOSA.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
A new report by AgFunder – in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, venture capital fund Omnivore, and AgriFutures Australia – has revealed that downstream food tech funding in APAC has been hit by the global VC fallout from 2022. However, the financing of startups supporting farmers and primary production (upstream) has increased.
‘Upstream’ generally refers to agricultural biotech, farm management and robotics systems, as well as novel farming tech, while ‘downstream’ covers technologies removed from farms and primary production – i.e., food delivery, restaurant, meal kit startups, etc. The latter usually attracts much higher amounts of cash injections in the region, though that is no longer the case.
Meanwhile, companies working with midstream technologies – which connect farmers and food producers to retailers, agro-processors and other clients – raised $620M million in 2022, with India’s Waycool and China’s Mojia Biotech receiving big checks.
As for this year’s trends, the report found that total agrifood tech financing in the first half of 2023 ($2.6B) was down by nearly 50% from the same period last year, but the number of deals remains similar.
AgFunder’s analysis showed that agrifood tech startups received $6.5B in funding in 2022 – a 58% decline from the $15.2B they raised in 2021, which was a record-breaking year. A report published by AgFunder and Temasek earlier this year highlighted that the global agrifood tech sector saw record-breaking raises of $51.7B that year thanks to “cheap money” and “increasingly outlandish tech valuations”.
In terms of upstream startups, year-on-year funding grew by 24% from 2021-22, marking the first time in years that upstream funding ($3.2B) overtook downstream investment ($2.7B). This is a win for the over 450 million smallholder farmers who are responsible for 80% of APAC’s food production.
Within the downstream sector, e-groceries continue to be the largest category, attracting $1.6B in funding. Indian startup Blinkit – an app-based instant grocery delivery service – received an injection of $150M, before being acquired by restaurant aggregator and food delivery giant Zomato.
The decline in downstream deals mirrors global trends analysis by Pitchbook last month, which found that in Q2 this year, food tech VC funding dropped by 75.1% year-on-year, while the number of deals (1,207) was down by 39.3% annually. But while quarterly funding also dropped by 13.9%, the deal count grew to 268 in Q2.
Pitchbook suggested that this could indicate a “return of investment activity after a pause due to caution surrounding the closure of Silicon Valley Bank at the end of Q1”. However, the declining deal sizes “may reflect a new, more careful paradigm”.
According to the AgFunder-Temasek report, the global decline between 2021 and 2022 could be short-lived as many of the world’s macro challenges – including inflation, food insecurity and labour shortages – are driving interest in agri-food tech investments. “With more discipline from founders (and investors too!), the industry can capitalise on the growing interest in using technology to transform our food and agriculture system to be better for people and our planet,” read the report. “[2023] could be a vintage year to invest in agrifoodtech.”
Within APAC, upstream agtech companies attracted 1.6% more investment in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period the year before as well, reaching $1.7B.
In 2022, agricultural biotech startups received the largest share of upstream financing, commanding $813M of the total – that’s nearly half of the overall investment in this category globally. “While a couple of very large deals contributed to these totals, there was also greater deal activity in this segment, which includes on-farm inputs for crop and animal agriculture, confirming investors’ growing interest in this space,” AgFunder says. China’s Zhongxin Breeding – which provides breeding services for pigs – secured the year’s largest deal with its $327M seed round.
Meanwhile, Innovative Food – the segment that includes alternative protein – “bucked the global decline in funding to the segment”, with year-on-year investment increasing to $527M, albeit with a smaller deal count. This aligns with industry think tank the Good Food Institute APAC’s recent report that revealed that sector funding in the region grew by 43% from $293M to $562M – though the two largest funding rounds took place in Q1 2021.
Startups working with farm management software, sensing and IoT ($334m), farm robotics ($252m) and novel farming systems ($254m) – which include indoor farming, aquaculture and insect farming – brought in more investment across fewer deals as well.
Across APAC, India ($2.3B) surpassed China ($1.3B) as the country with the highest cash injection in this sector last year, largely due to the loss of downstream mega-deals that propelled China’s agrifood tech industry in 2021. These nations were followed by Indonesia ($716M) and South Korea ($461M).
But this looks to be short-lived, with China overtaking India to grab the top spot with $861M in investment in the first half of 2023. Indian startups have received $712M, followed by Hong Kong ($400M) and Australia ($146M).
Overall, Southeast Asian startups commanded $1.7B in funding in 2022, while Australian companies saw total investment reach $316M – a rate that was maintained in the first half of 2023 with $146M in financing. Meanwhile, agrifood tech startups in Japan brought in $212M in 2022.
Finally, while debt, early and growth-stage deals numbers have increased steadily since 2018, late-stage funding declined from 2021.
“Few readers will be surprised that funding for Asia-Pacific’s food and agriculture startups has fallen significantly over the past year and a half, much like the rest of the world,” said AgFunder Managing Editor & Head of Media & Research Louisa Burwood-Taylor. But she added: “Seeing the rise of categories like Ag Biotech, which haven’t typically been a strength across the region, as well as growing early-stage deal activity, is promising.”
Read AgTech’s full Asia-Pacific AgriFoodTech Investment Report 2023 here.
The post APAC AgriFood Report: Funding Hits A Low, But Farm Tech & Novel Foods Are On the Rise appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
On June 7, 2023, the Gujarat High Court cited the casteist and gender-biased Hindu text Manusmriti during a case involving a minor rape victim who was seven months pregnant. The court argued that historically, it was considered normal for girls to marry early and have children by the age of 17, while also asserting that girls tend to mature earlier than boys. This reference was made while considering a plea from the victim’s father to medically terminate her pregnancy.
What the above case demonstrates is the patriarchal logic of Hindutva, which uses the militarized vocabulary of religious nationalism to convert women into mere vessels for the reproduction of communitarian purity. The trope of the dutiful, self-sacrificing mother – encapsulated in the construct “Mother India” – objectifies the female body as a de-sexualized receptacle of “virtue” and “honor,” making it co-incident with the boundaries of family, community and the nation. The maternal figure symbolizes the distinctiveness of Indian culture from the West, evident in the Allahabad High Court’s observation that Indian youth, influenced by Western culture’s promotion of “free relationships with members of the opposite sex,” struggle to establish “genuine connections”.
The Myth of Primary Relationality
Given a political environment that is increasingly dominated by a maternal conception of nation, what adequate feminist responses can we conceive of? The global intellectual conjuncture is currently structured by the post-modernist rejection of rationality as Western metaphysics, giving rise to a search for alternative onto-epistemological coordinates for radical politics. Feminist strategies have been influenced by this theoretical turn, inflecting counter-hegemonic thinking with a gynocentric focus. Against the background of Hindutva fascism, cultural feminists’ valorization of motherhood as an oppositional node in the system of Western phallogocentrism needs to be evaluated for its political efficacy.
Alison Stone’s book “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity” provides a conceptually systematic and exhaustive defense of maternality as a valid mode of political subjectivity. Our early relations with our mothers are interpreted as the universal “relational and imaginative conditions” that make subjective capacities possible. Modernity develops these capacities in a distorted manner by repressing their relational background. Accordingly, the task consists in pitting the relationality of pre-subjective maternality against the narrowness of modern subjecthood.
Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s concept of chora, which refers to the affective, energetic, and bodily flows that the infant experiences in the earliest stages of its life, Stone posits the maternal body as both “the emerging other with whom the child is entwined…[and] the overall corporeal context of their entwinement”. The mother is divided between engaging in social life and providing intimate care to the child. This divide is bridged by the presence of “potential space,” a notion which Stone borrows from Donald Woods Winnicott to emphasize the transitional objects and creative fantasies that help the child to tolerate external constraints.
The potential space is co-created by the mother and the child, denoting a higher stage of the chora. In the words of Stone: “Potential space is maternal… because its qualities for the child are those with which… the maternal body was formerly suffused: qualities of containment, affect and its initial expression and inscription, rhythmic regulation, flows between two.” In the chora, the relation between the mother and the child was characterized by a weak form of differentiation, being confined to the driving influence of the former. The potential space expands the relationship beyond the mother by creating an ambiguous zone of “face-to-face interactions and reciprocal, mimetic play between mother and infant, in which they match, mirror, and rhythmically respond to one another’s gestures and expressions”.
The central thrust of Stone’s argumentations consists in portraying maternity as a de-totalizing totality, whose mobility lies in a wholly internal logic of differentiation and connection. As Stone puts it, “differentiation is only consolidated gradually through its successive cancellations and re-creations”. The maternal chora already contains the resources for a “continuous, unbroken evolution…towards two differentiated selves.” Since there are no gaps in the structure of maternity, the space of interaction between the mother and the child becomes “the ‘original third’, ‘nascent presymbolic thirdness’, ‘the energetic or primordial third”. The desire of the mother that relates to the socio-symbolic world is theoretically assimilated into the logic of the maternal space, whose primary relationality allows it to create “a space of its own which it reclaims from whatever larger space it is placed in”.
Due to the emphasis on primary relationality, Stone advances an evolutionist paradigm: in an evolution, things change and move somewhere else within the same space of change. To counter this perspective, we must emphasize the transformative power of revolution. While its original meaning referred to the planets’ circular motion returning to their starting point, revolution has come to carry a political significance. In this context, when entities return to their initial position, that place has undergone a profound and radical transformation. Two philosophical matrices correspond to evolution and revolution: 1) the scheme of idealist circularity wherein a simple terms unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to return to itself as a developed concept; and 2) a dialectical scheme of scission wherein every term is exposed to dis-unifying dynamics at the both the beginning and the end.
Stone remains stuck in idealist circularity because she counts the mother and the child as the sum, one plus one. The Two is counted as one by the Three, namely primordial relationality. If this form of relationality exists in a potential form in the pre-subjective capacities of the maternal space, what is it that forces its actual realization? If the child’s identification with the mother as subject of desire and member of social life is automatically incorporated into the internality of the maternal space, then we end up with the incomprehensible vitalism of the maternal body. Thus, we are presupposing the end goal of social relationality at the beginning.
To overcome the dilemma of idealist circularity, we must, as Alain Badiou suggests, conceive of “the pure passage from one sequence to the other, in an irreconcilable, unsuturable lag, where the truth of the first stage gives itself to begin with only as the condition of the second as fact, without leading back to anything other than the unfolding of this fact.” This “unsuturable lag” derives from the fact that the stable relationality of a term is always disrupted by the antagonism of a constitutive lack. Our being is marked by an organic chaos, a pre-maturational helplessness and lack of self-sufficiency that immanently tips over into the collective networks of socio-symbolic interaction. Adrian Johnston labels this bio-material fact as the “anorganicity” of the body, its “impotent, not-one, rotten and incomplete” character.
“Hilflosigkeit [helplessness] as a biological state of development of human infants lends support to the theme of humans as preprogrammed to be reprogrammed (as in genetic indeterminism, namely, a coded absence of coding).” Insofar as the immature, needy body of the human being functions as a natural lack propelling it into the denaturalizing trajectories of socio-symbolic structures, reality is always haunted by the specter of non-relationality. The anorganic discordance of human beings is a state of indeterminacy that prevents our arrival at a point of ultimate satisfaction where harmony can be achieved.
By focusing on primordial relationality, Stone freezes maternal space as an organic system, where, on the contrary, a lack of organic unity is present within the most intricate organic structures. This occurs because, once a certain level of complexity is reached a certain system, it tends to produce internal conflicts, flaws, errors, vulnerabilities, disruptions, and strains within its internal operations. That’s why the evolutionist harmony of the maternal space is a retroactive patriarchal fantasy. The initial bond with the mother, whether it be in the womb or during early infancy, does not supply an originary wholeness for the child. Even this supposedly complete bond is afflicted with the negativity of constitutive lack, which acts as the motor for further progress.
The Radicality of Non-Relationship
For Stone, “differentiation…arises within continuous connection”. The mother and the child differentiate themselves from each other within the chora, thus giving rise to the independent existence of the potential space in all its materiality. However, what is it that guarantees that the operation of mother-child differentiation is itself a unified term leading to the co-created harmony of the potential space? From which material point of articulation can we say that the dynamic of differentiation is always-already embedded in the connective space of maternity? In order to the make answer more convincing than an amorphous “primary relationality,” Stone concretizes negativity in “sexuate difference” – the “uterine history” of the infant means that its “primary orientation…[is] towards the maternal and female body”.
The recourse to the maternal uterine environment as the ground of primary relationality avoids facing the consequences of modernity. With the advent of Enlightenment rationality, the determinative power of both natural and cultural materiality is split by the recognition of the ontological incompleteness and inconsistency that lies at the base of our being. This inconsistency is covered by portraying differentiation as yet another constructible term in the discursive universe of the originary maternal womb. Negativity is stabilized as a “movement of the passing-beyond that unfolds inside the one: as the one’s own realization. The one produces its ‘presence’ as or through the ‘interiority of the negative’.” The localization of negativity in the presence of a positivity is possible only if we understand negation “from the internal perspective of its own realization (the having of a determination as the cancellation of any determination).”
Stone says that the “speaker is relationally autonomous, able to exercise speaking agency only out of ongoing dependence on the mother (and others to whom the speaker relates on the mother’s model)”. However, the relationality of the relation is undercut when it is tied to the stability of a “placental economy,” which ensures that all negations are reduced to the self-maintenance of a fixed multiplicity. One has to start with the inexistence of this fixed multiplicity to see the ontological unbinding, the pure multiplicity, at the root of all relations. All negations stumble upon the opacity of a non-relationship, whose externality functions as both the content and obstacle of the internal logic of totalities. When maternal subjectivity is situated in the physiognomy of the void, the conceptual schema of Stone can be accepted with a proviso. The chora, and the potential space do represent the “mutual attunement and responsiveness” of the mother-child relationship. But this reciprocity is a local result and not the totalizing movement of primary relationality. Maternal subjectivity can provide a foothold for universality. But this universality is the eruption of the open-ended dialectic of gaps in a singular discourse, and not the being-there of a seamless whole.
As per Stone, “men and fathers are the second figures for their children psychically, insofar as children inherently have a primary orientation to their maternal figures.” Consequently, the father can only carry out a socio-psychic deepening and differentiation of the original uterine connection that the child enjoyed. However, this teleological continuum is broken when we consider that the maternal body and the child don’t have an immutable meaning. We don’t have two totalized entities coming together in the complementary union of a clearly definable maternal space. Instead of any conjunctive totalization, we have a field of tensions and overlaps, which precedes the constitution of the Two. Both the maternal body and the child are non-all, not fully constituted, but glued together by their point of impossible connection. As Badiou notes, “no totality results from the assumption of a pairing of the two positions, which can be written as: there is at least one non-total term, which escapes the distribution of positions”.
The foregrounding of the negativity of the void enables us to practice a feminist politics that creates a space for a democratic discussion of maternal subjectivity. Instead of tethering the onto-epistemological structure of politics to the cultural substratum of motherhood, feminist modernity suspends all cultural discourses. Insofar as this suspension exposes the wholeness of every identity to the de-completing effects of abyssal negativity, it creates a non-hierarchical arena in which motherhood can be both optional and a legitimate modality of living the indeterminacy of existential projects.
The contours of a politics of feminist suspension can be delineated through a reference to the thought of the Indian social activist Periyar. He distinguished the liberatory goal of birth control from its strictly pragmatic ones, such as “women’s health, well-being of the children, the economy of the nation, the partitioning of ancestral property and so on.” The latter is confined to the slavery of “livelihood,” wherein the responsibilities of maintaining a family prevent the attainment of independence. Family serves as the driving force behind our motivation to work, the necessity to work, and the enabling factor that allows us to work. In opposition to this dull necessity, Periyar says that childbearing should be abolished. When confronted with the worry that humanity will not expand due to such a supposedly anti-natural act, Periyar says that the multiplication of the human race has not brought any benefits to women. In fact, maternity is connected to the illusion that a woman is biologically incapable of living without a man, even though a man can live without a woman.
Rather than seeing Periyar’s remarks as trans-historical statements about women, I suggest that we seem them as conjunctural remarks about a patriarchal-capitalist order based on the privatization of care. In this order, the capacity of women to bear child is naturalized as an inherent feature of their weak body, which consequently is seen as in need of male support. Against this fetishisation of patriarchal connection, Periyar posits feminist disconnection, wherein the possible extinction of humanity is accepted without hesitation. Humanity’s birth as a sexed being is coincident with the loss of eternal life, as only non-sexual reproduction carries the theoretical potential for indefinite existence, particularly in the case of single-celled organisms and clones. Patriarchal capitalism conceals the fragility of sexed life with the myth of non-sexual life, hegemonized by the harmonious relationality of the family and the commodity. Periyar drives a wedge in the reproductive eternity of status quoist fantasies by gesturing toward the absolute inconsistency of our being, by showing how the dominance of the social structure is ridden with the volatility of contradictions. This represents the transition of the subject from its passive alienation in the symbolic order to its active separation from it – an operation that installs the negativity of the void between the subject and the Other. Through a family abolitionist politics, Periyar is able to propagate an ethics of courage in which the subject is willing to lose its own self in the process of constructing something new.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The BJP-led government in India is seeking to extract revenge for the humiliating defeat it suffered at the hands of farmers whose one-year agitation led to the repeal of three farm laws in late 2021.
This claim was made during a recent press conference in Delhi held by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) (United Farmers Front).
The SKM was formed in November 2020 as a coalition of more than 40 Indian farmers’ unions to coordinate non-violent resistance against three farm acts initiated two months before.
Asserting that the laws violated the constitution and were anti-farmer and pro big business, the SKM announced renewed agitation and expressed grave concern about a crackdown by the government against the online media platform NewsClick, which supported the farmers throughout their one-year struggle.
Those present heard that there has been “baseless dishonest and false allegations in the Newsclick FIR against the historic farmers’ struggle” and that the “FIR accuses the farmers’ movement as anti-national, funded by foreign and terrorist forces”.
An FIR is a ‘first information report’: a document prepared by police in India when they receive information about the commission of a “cognisable” (serious) offence.
Delhi Police issued an FIR against NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha and the human resources head Amit Chakravarty, which infers that the farmers’ movement was aimed at stopping the supply of essential goods for citizens and creating law and order issues.
An article on The Hindu newspaper’s Frontline portal describes the nature of the FIR, which goes far beyond the farmers’ issue, and concludes police actions along with the FIR marks a major low point for media freedom in India.
According to Frontline, the police raids on the offices of NewsClick and the residences of virtually anyone associated with it; the indiscriminate seizure of the electronic devices of journalists and other employees; the sealing of the news portal’s main office; the arrest of its founder-editor and its administrative officer on terrorism-related charges; and the searches conducted at the premises of NewsClick and the home of its founder-editor mark the lowest point for media freedom in India since the Emergency of 1975-1977.
The withdrawal of the FIR against Newsclick was called for during the press conference. There was also a demand for the immediate release of NewsClick journalists.
The SKM said that farmers across the country will burn copies of the FIR on 6 November after a sustained campaign at village level against the government’s pro-corporate policies from 1-5 November.
The farmers’ coalition also pledged to campaign in five poll-going states with the slogan “Oppose Corporate, Punish BJP, Save Country.”
And a 72-hour sit-in will take place in front of the Raj Bhawans (official residences of state governors) in state capitals between 26 and 28 November.
The SKM states that the farmers’ movement was committed and patriotic and saw through the “nefarious plan” of the three farm laws to withdraw government support from agriculture and hand over farming, mandis (state-run wholesale agricultural markets) and public food distribution to corporations led by Adani, Ambani, Tata, Cargill, Pepsi, Walmart, Bayer, Amazon and others.
It added that the farmers exposed the corporate-backed plan of depriving the people of India of food security, pauperising farmers, changing cropping patterns to suit corporations and allowing the free penetration of foreign corporations into India’s food processing market.
Those in attendance also heard about the hardships experienced by farmers during the one-year agitation:
“In the process, the farmers braved water cannons, teargas shelling, roadblocks with huge containers, deep road cuts, lathi charge, cold and hot weather. Over 13 months, they sacrificed 732 martyrs … This was a patriotic movement of the highest quality in the face of repression by a fascist government serving interests of Imperialist exploiters.”
State investment in agriculture infrastructure was called for, along with the promotion of profitable farming, the facilitation and securing of modern food processing, marketing and consumer networks under the collective ownership and control of peasant-worker cooperatives.
Accusing the government of acting on behalf of corporate interests, one speaker said that it had targeted Newsclick because it only did what a genuine news media should have been doing — reporting on the truth, the problems of farmers and the nature of the struggle.
It was claimed that:
The BJP Government is using the farcical FIR to spread a canard that the farmers’ movement was anti-people, anti-national and backed by terrorist funding routed through Newsclick. This is factually wrong and mischievously inserted to portray the movement in bad light and seeking to extract revenge for the humiliating defeat they suffered at the hands of the farmers of our country.
The farmers’ coalition argued that the government is moving to falsely charge the farmers movement of being foreign funded and sponsored by terrorist forces, while it is “promoting FDI, Foreign MNCs, big corporations into agriculture”.
The coalition says it remains committed to saving the rural economy, preventing foreign looting and rejuvenating the village economy in order to build a strong India.
The author’s e-book, Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order, includes insight into the farm laws and farmers’ struggle mentioned above.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Bayer, which profits from various environmentally harmful and disease-causing chemicals like glyphosate, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) “to develop resource-efficient, climate-resilient solutions for crops, varieties, crop protection, weed and mechanization”.
The ICAR, an apex public sector institution, is responsible for co-ordinating agricultural education and research in India. Predatory corporations like Bayer attempt to co-opt government agencies that can provide access to extensive networks in order to wield influence and market products. It’s a key business strategy.
And this is not lost on the Peoples’ Commission on Public Sector and Services (PCPSS), which includes eminent academics, jurists, erstwhile administrators, trade unionists and social activists. In a recently released statement, it expressed concern that Bayer will exploit the ICAR’s vast infrastructure to pursue its own commercial plans within India.
And those commercial plans are clear: to boost sales of toxic proprietary products by opening up new markets in India as sales stagnate or plummet elsewhere.
For example, it was reported in July that German-based Bayer expects to take a €2.5bn ($2.8bn) hit due to slower demand for its glyphosate-based products. Penetrating the huge Indian market represents a massive cash cow for foreign corporations, especially if their genetically engineered (GE), herbicide-tolerant food crops get the go ahead. Proprietary GE seeds are designed to be used with agrochemicals like the herbicide glyphosate.
An analysis of a database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ revealed that the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as highly hazardous to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants Bayer, BASF, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.
This investigation was based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall.
Inadequate state funding is driving the ICAR to enter into agreements with companies like Bayer. However, the PCPSS says that such MoUs make a mockery of the stated government aim to boost self-reliance in India’s agricultural sector.
It argues that considering corporations like Bayer promote the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture, a partnership between the ICAR and Bayer of this kind is irreconcilable with the nationwide mission recently launched by Prime Minister Modi to propagate natural farming as a more sustainable alternative. In this respect, the ICAR’s MoU with Bayer is clearly counter-productive and out of place with the stated priority of the government.
The PCPSS notes that there are several ICAR-sponsored research institutions and state-level agricultural universities which are engaged in outstanding research relevant to Indian agriculture. A number of states have launched their own natural farming missions to free debt trapped farmers from the use of costly chemicals and other unsustainable practices. The PCPSS says it is therefore not clear as to why the ICAR should choose to promote Bayer in multiple areas of agricultural research.
Instead of Institutions promoting agrichemical products marketed by Bayer, the PCPSS asserts that the ICAR should shift its focus to agroecological approaches, biological inputs and integrated farming systems, which will help Indian agriculture in the long run.
Although the government revoked the three farm laws passed in 2021 that would have sounded a neoliberal death knell for Indian agriculture, it now seems to be accelerating the marketisation and corporatisation of the sector through other means. The year-long farmers’ agitation led to the government to revoke the farm laws, but these types of MoUs are one way of achieving what the farm laws failed to do.
The PCPSS wants the government to assure farmers a minimum support price for their produce on the lines recommended by the Swaminathan Committee so that farming may become a remunerative activity. It also urges the government to review the ICAR-Bayer MoU and similar agreements entered into by other official agencies with large corporates, not only in agriculture but also in other fields.
One such MoU was entered into by the Indian government in April 2021 with Microsoft, allowing its local partner, CropData, to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.
Microsoft is supposed to help farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices (data is the financially lucrative ‘new oil’ for those who own it). In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.
CropData is to be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profiles of land held, production information and financial details. Microsoft will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves.
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution. The unstated aims are to impose a certain model of farming, promote profitable corporate technologies and products, encourage market (corporate) dependency among farmers and create a land market by establishing a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.
The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture (and the massive health and environmental costs that it entails).
Indian agriculture has witnessed gross underinvestment over the years, whereby it is now wrongly depicted as a basket case and underperforming and ripe for a sell off to those very interests who had a stake in its underinvestment.
The PCPSS says it is not clear as to why the ICAR should choose to promote Bayer in multiple areas of agricultural research, especially given the government’s stated commitment to natural farming.
However, India has submitted itself to the regime of foreign finance, awaiting signals on how much it can spend, giving up any pretence of economic sovereignty and leaving the space open for private capital to move in and capture markets.
That much has been made clear by the Research Unit for Political Economy in the article ‘Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington DC’. The piece states that current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy.
A 1991 World Bank memorandum set out the programme for India. At the time, India was still in its foreign exchange crisis of 1990-91 and had just been subjected to an IMF-monitored ‘structural adjustment’ programme that involved shifting 400 million people from rural India to the cities and corporatising agriculture.
The current administration is attempting to dramatically accelerate the implementation of the above programme. The aim is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private (foreign) capital.
There has been an ongoing strategy to make farming financially non-viable for many of India’s farmers. The number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of cultivators was likely to decrease to around 127 million.
We have seen the running down of the sector for decades, spiralling input costs, withdrawal of government assistance and the impacts of cheap, subsidised imports which depress farmers’ incomes.
The PCPSS is not the first to express concern about the deepening penetration of large, profit-hungry corporations. In late November 2018, a charter was released by the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (an umbrella group of around 250 farmers’ organisations) expressing similar sentiments.
The charter also expressed alarm about the economic, ecological, social and existential crisis of Indian agriculture as well as the persistent state neglect of the sector and discrimination against farming communities.
The repeal of the three farm laws in late 2021 was little more than a tactical manoeuvre. The powerful global interests behind these laws did not simply disappear. As big tech giants team up with traditional agribusiness companies like Bayer, the goal to capture and radically restructure the sector remains and is gaining momentum. The farmers’ struggle in India is far from over.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
ANALYSIS: By Kalinga Seneviratne in Singapore
In the aftermath of Palestinian group Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel on October 7 and the Israeli state’s even more terrifying attacks on Palestinian urban neighbourhoods in Gaza, the media across many parts of Asia tend to take a more neutral stand in comparison with their Western counterparts.
A lot of sympathy is expressed for the plight of the Palestinians who have been under frequent attacks by Israeli forces for decades and have faced ever trauma since the Nakba in 1948 when Zionist militia forced some 750,000 refugees to leave their homeland.
Even India, which has been getting closer to Israel in recent years, and one of Israel’s closest Asian allies, Singapore, have taken a cautious attitude to the latest chapter in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Soon after the Hamas attacks in Israel, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks”.
He added: “We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.” But, soon after, his Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sought to strike a balance.
Addressing a media briefing on October 12, MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi reiterated New Delhi’s “long-standing and consistent” position on the issue, telling reporters that “India has always advocated the resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine” living in peace with Israel.
Singapore has also reiterated its support for a two-state solution, with Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam telling Today Daily that it was possible to deplore how Palestinians had been treated over the years while still unequivocally condemning the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel by Hamas.
“These atrocities cannot be justified by any rationale whatsoever, whether of fundamental problems or historical grievances,” he said.
“I think it’s fair to say that any response has to be consistent with international law and international rules of war”.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has blamed the rapidly worsening conflict in the Middle East on a lack of justice for the Palestinian people.
Lack of justice for Palestinians
“The crux of the issue lies in the fact that justice has not been done to the Palestinian people,” Beijing’s top diplomat said in a phone call with Brazil’s Celso Amorim, a special adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Japan’s Nikkei Asia.
The call came just ahead of an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on October 13 to discuss the Israel-Hamas war. Brazil, a non-permanent member, is chairing the council this month.
Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo called for an end to the region’s bloodletting cycle and pro-Palestinian protests have been held in Jakarta.
“Indonesia calls for the war and violence to be stopped immediately to avoid further human casualties and destruction of property because the escalation of the conflict can cause greater humanitarian impact,” he said.
“The root cause of the conflict, which is the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, must be resolved immediately in accordance with the parameters that have been agreed upon by the UN.”
Indonesia, which is home to the world’s largest Muslim population, has supported Palestinian self-determination for a long time and does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
But, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said 275 Indonesians were working in Israel and were making plans to evacuate them.
Sympathy for the Palestinians
Meanwhile, Thailand said that 18 of their citizens have been killed by the terror attacks and 11 abducted.
In the Philippines, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said on October 10 that the safety of thousands of Filipinos living and working in Israel remained a priority for the government.
There are approximately 40,000 Filipinos in Israel, but only 25,000 are legally documented, according to labour and migrant groups, says Benar News, a US-funded Asian news portal.
According to India’s MEA spokesperson Bagchi, there are 18,000 Indians in Israel and about a dozen in the Palestinian territories. India is trying to bring them home, and a first flight evacuating 230 Indians was expected to take place at the weekend, according to the Hindu newspaper.
It is unclear what such large numbers of Asians are doing in Israel. Yet, from media reports in the region, there is deep concern about the plight of civilians caught up in the clashes.
Benar News reported that Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict according to UN-agreed parameters.
Also this week, the Malaysian government announced it would allocate 1 million ringgit (US$211,423) in humanitarian aid for Palestinians.
Western view questioned
Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is reflected widely in the Asian media, both in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries. The Western unequivocal support for Israel, particularly by Anglo-American media, has been questioned across Asia.
Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post’s regular columnist Alex Lo challenged Hamas’ “unprovoked” terror attack in Israel, a narrative commonly used in Western media reporting of the latest flare-up.
“It must be pointed out that what Hamas has done is terrorism pure and simple,” notes Lo.
“But such horrors and atrocities are not being committed by Palestinian militants without a background and a context. They did not come out of nowhere as unadulterated and uncaused evil”.
Thus Lo argues, that to claim that the latest terror attacks were “unprovoked” is to whitewash the background and context that constitute the very history of this unending conflict in Palestine.
US media’s ‘morally reprehensible propaganda’
“It’s morally reprehensible propaganda of the worst kind that the mainstream Anglo-American media culture has been guilty of for decades,” he says.
“But the real problem with that is not only with morality but also with the very practical politics of searching for a viable peace settlement”.
He is concerned that “with their unconditional and uncritical support of Israel, the West and the United States in particular have essentially made such a peace impossible”.
Writing in India’s Hindu newspaper, Denmark-based Indian professor of literature Dr Tabish Khair points out that historically, Palestinians have had to indulge in drastic and violent acts to draw attention to their plight and the oppressive policies of Israel.
“The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, used such ‘terrorist’ acts to focus world attention on the Palestinian problem, and without such actions, the West would have looked the other way while the Palestinians were slowly airbrushed out of history,” he argues.
While the PLO fought a secular Palestinian battle for nationhood, which was largely ignored by Western powers, this lead to political Islam’s development in the later part of the 1970s, and Hamas is a product of that.
“Today, we live in a world where political Islam is associated almost entirely with Islam — and almost all Muslims,” he notes.
Palestinian cause still resonates
But, the Palestinian cause still resonates beyond the Muslim communities, as the reactions in Asia reflect.
Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad, writing in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, notes the savagery of the impending war against the Palestinian people will be noted by the global community.
He points out that Hamas was never allowed to function as a voice for the Palestinian people, even after they won a landslide democratic election in Gaza in January 2006.
“The victory of Hamas was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election result,” he points out.
“Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people”.
Prashad points out that when the Palestinians conducted a non-violent march in 2019 for their rights to nationhood, they were met with Israeli bombs that killed 200 people.
“When non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms,” he argues.
Prashad disputes the Western media’s argument that Israel has a “right to defend itself” because the Palestinians are people under occupation. Under the Geneva Convention, Israel has an obligation to protect them.
Under the Geneva Convention, Prashad argues that the Israeli government’s “collective punishment” strategy is a war crime.
“The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but it was not able to move forward even to collect information”.
Kalinga Seneviratne is a correspondent for IDN-InDepthNews, the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate (IPS). Republished under a Creative Commons licence.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?
At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.
During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:
1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.
2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.
3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.
4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.
5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).
6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.
7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.
8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.
9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.
10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.
11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.
12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.
The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.
Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In the bustling hot city of Siliguri in northeast India, Jitendar Kumar spends his days breaking up and shifting cinder pieces at a coal depot.
The 30-year-old has been working for half his life with coal, a legacy he inherited from his father, who spent 40 years in Ranigunj, India’s first coalfield that traces back to 1774, in West Bengal.
“I also started there but later chose the city over the mines,” Kumar said. “Like many here, coal puts food on our table. I don’t know what else to do.”
India, the world’s second-largest coal producer, has around 337,400 miners in its active mines. Labor activists estimate that this number could quadruple when accounting for informal workers in the sector.
This week, a new report said state-owned Coal India, the world’s largest government-owned coal producer, is facing the biggest potential layoffs of 73,800 direct workers by 2050.
Globally, close to a million coal mine jobs, or more than a third of the coalmining workforce, could vanish by 2050, with the vast majority of these losses expected in Asia, especially in China and India, the U.S.-based think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM) said.
That means, on average, 100 coal miners a day could face job cuts as the coal industry winds down due to a market shift towards cheaper renewables and planned mine closures, it said.
Nearly half a million workers may lose their jobs before 2035, GEM said. The drop in employment, the think-tank added, will likely occur irrespective of particular coal phase-out strategies or climate action since such shifts are probably inevitable due to the market’s inclination towards more economical wind and solar energy options.
In Asia, more than 2.2 million people work in coal mines, according to GEM, with China leading the way.
China is home to over 1.5 million coal miners, responsible for generating more than 85% of the nation’s coal. This represents half of the global coal production. It is followed by India and Indonesia.
GEM said Indonesia, with about 160,000 coal mine workers, is expected to boost production enough to rival India’s output for the first time next year.
The non-government research organization said that China’s Shanxi province alone will likely lose about a quarter million mine jobs by midcentury.
The projections are based on data from the Global Coal Mine Tracker, which offers live information about 4,300 active and proposed coal mines globally, accounting for over 90% of the world’s coal production.
“Coal mine closures are inevitable, but economic hardship and social strife for workers is not,” said Dorothy Mei, project manager for the Global Coal Mine Tracker at Global Energy Monitor.
“Viable transition planning is happening, like in Spain where the country regularly reviews the ongoing impacts of decarbonization,” she said, adding that governments should learn from its success to plan their own “just energy transition strategies.”
To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius under the Paris Agreement’s guidelines, GEM estimates that only 250,000 coal miners would be needed. This is less than 10% of the current workforce.
Economic impact
Coal mine jobs also greatly influence local economies. Mining towns often depend heavily on coal companies for wages, taxes, and even schools or hospitals.
Past job losses from the 1980s and 1990s bankruptcies had led to economic distress, and future job cuts could have similar effects.
The workers deserve a “just transition” to new employment sectors, particularly those offering well-compensated positions in the clean and renewable energy domain, GEM said.
In 2016, China’s Ministry of Finance introduced the Industrial Special Fund, designating US$14 billion for the reemployment of 1.8 million workers in the coal and steel industries.
However, with each person estimated to get just over US$6,887, GEM said the fund’s sufficiency is debatable.
China Energy, the nation’s leading mining and energy firm, is among the country’s top five renewable energy investors.
With renewables making up 28.5% of its capacity and coal at 72%, the company aims to boost clean energy to over 50% by 2025, aligning with government goals.
Chance for sustainable future
Following a year marked by devastating mining accidents, significant labor disputes, and public opposition to mining activities, it is essential that coal miners be provided the chance to seek a safer and more sustainable future, GEM said in the report.
Hundreds of workers died from underground blasts, tunnel collapses, and equipment mishaps in mines worldwide.
At least six people were killed when a significant section of the pit wall at the Axla League coal mine in China crumbled in February, with 47 others still missing.
The China Labor Bulletin, an NGO monitoring work-related accidents in China, recorded 69 coal mine-associated incidents and fatalities in 2022, with 23 reported in the current year.
“The coal industry, on the whole, has a notoriously bad reputation for its treatment of workers,” said Ryan Driskell Tate, GEM’s program director for coal.
“What we need is proactive planning for workers and coal communities … so industry and governments will remain accountable to those workers who have borne the brunt for so long.”
Edited by Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, has been charged, along with retired law professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain, for allegedly seditious comments supporting the separation of Kashmir from India. They were speaking at a 2010 Delhi conference, the same year right-wing activist Sushil Pandit filed the complaint on which these latest charges draw.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
India is making strong progress when it comes to the alt-protein sector – and this is crucial, given the South Asian country now has the largest population in the world, one which is predicted to continue growing over the next three decades.
It’s also the Asian country requiring the second-highest increase in alt-protein production, with 85% of its protein consumption needing to come from alternative and traditional plant sources (like beans, tofu, tempeh, etc.) if it is to carbonise.
So where does its ‘smart protein’ industry stand, and how far does it have to go? It’s these questions that GFI India addresses in its State of the Industry 2023 report – its first dedicated to the country. Here are seven key takeaways from the research, highlighting early adopters, government support, alt-protein regulation, labelling conventions, and more.
There are 113 companies working on plant-based, cultivated and fermentation-derived meat, dairy, seafood and eggs in India. Unsurprisingly – given the country has the largest dairy industry in the world – nearly two-thirds (65.8%) of plant-based businesses are focused on alt-dairy (with almond milk brands topping the list), and 30.1% on vegan eggs.
Meat alternatives only account for 4.1% of all vegan brands in India. There’s a large opportunity here, though, given that vegan chicken is the top product format across the sector (followed by alt-milk), and 77% of Indians consume meat daily, weekly or occasionally. Still, the current market landscape values plant-based dairy (₹250 crores/$30M) 2.5 times higher than meat alternatives (₹100 crores/$12M).
In terms of investment, alt-protein startups (across the three pillars) saw a modest investment of $17M between 2021-22, a small share of the $562M total that was injected into APAC companies in 2022. However, a survey of investors active in or entering the alt-protein sector by GFI showed that 99% of respondents are optimistic about the sector’s potential.
“I believe, with its world-class talent and proven track record of cost-efficient scale-up, India is uniquely positioned to be a smart protein innovation and manufacturing hub,” said Michal Klar, investor and funding partner at Better Bite Ventures. “This is especially relevant for technologies like precision fermentation that can benefit from talent and equipment currently used for biomedical research and production.”
While investment within India might not be too high, Indian alt-protein manufacturers are starting to make an international mark and contributing to the government’s $2T export goal by 2030.
Biotech firm Laurus Bio makes animal-origin-free growth factors, recombinant proteins, and cell-culture media supplements to cater to cultivated meat companies globally and help meet cost and scale requirements.
When it comes to plant-based, Greenest Foods shipped India’s first export consignment of plant-based meat from Gujarat to the US last year, while Wakao Foods shipped one of the largest-ever shipments (13 tons) of jackfruit-based products stateside earlier this year.
There were quite a few exports to Singapore, one of APAC’s alt-protein leaders. Blue Tribe Foods launched its line of burgers, tikkas and alt-meat products across Singapore supermarkets, while Shaka Harry will introduce plant-based meat products to the city-state’s Mustafa Centre. Evolved Foods, meanwhile, is exporting vegan meat alternatives to Singapore and Nepal.
More internationally, BVeg Foods supported Haldiram’s International’s launch of its Plant Perfect alt-protein range in the US, UK, EU and Australia, while shipping 22 tons of frozen vegan beef chunks to the UK in July. And as we reported last week, GoodDot – which has been exporting to Singapore, Canada, Nepal, the UAE, South Africa, Oman and Mauritius – entered the US market, with plans to move into the UK and Europe too.
Meanwhile, Kanpur-based Oatmlk became one of the first Indian plant-based dairy brands to export to the UAE and Singapore – which is significant as it isn’t based in one of the top three metro cities of New Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru. “New brands from tier-II and tier-III cities will play an important role in India’s export story in the coming decades,” says GFI India.
Since 2006, food and drink packaging in India has been labelled with green or red dots, signalling whether a product is vegetarian or non-vegetarian (which includes eggs in the country), respectively. But in 2021, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) introduced a new vegan symbol to help consumers differentiate and identify plant-based products.
GFI India carried out a consumer study to identify packaging cues to help identify vegan food, finding that there’s a gap between comprehension and nomenclature – especially for plant-based dairy, which carries labelling restrictions. But there are certain things brands can still do to make their offerings easily identifiable.
Consumers prefer bright and bold colours with elements of green on the packaging, which they expect to be shaped intuitively (tubs for ice cream, blocks for cheese, etc.). Product imagery on the label is crucial in signalling the nature and taste of the food while mentioning the type of protein helps too. And similarly to global trends, most Indians prefer the term ‘plant-based’ over ‘vegan’.
Like many of their global counterparts, Indians value health above most other criteria when considering smart proteins. In 2021, a Kerry study found that health was the top motivating factor for Indians switching to plant-based food. This is especially true for alt-milk, according to GFI India’s research, with claims like “no added sugar” or “no preservatives” appreciated by consumers.
However, when it comes to meat, taste cues resonated more with consumers. But for both product categories, “high protein” was an important factor. Interestingly, claims about animal cruelty didn’t significantly motivate consumers to eschew animal-based food for vegan alternatives, which are primarily considered substitutes during religious events or festivals when meat consumption is prohibited.
To identify the profile of the early adopters of vegan food in India, GFI looked at consumers who were likely to regularly purchase alt-meat, dairy and eggs, as well as pay more for these products.
The result? Young (aged 25-44), higher income (monthly household income of over ₹50,000/$600), well-educated (college graduates and above), living in urban areas, and flexitarians are the early adopters of plant-based foods in India. Vegan eggs and dairy count vegetarians and non-vegetarians as their target audiences too – and while people aged 18-24 are keen on alt-meat, they’re deterred by the price premium.
Of these early adopters, one in four say they’d consider giving up conventional meat, seafood, dairy or eggs in the future, citing issues like hygiene, smell, ease of cooking and heaviness on the stomach, as well as animal welfare and impact on the climate.
While half of these consumers are aware of plant-based milk, only 30% are familiar with alt-meat and 20% with vegan eggs. And of the households acquainted with these products, 23% have tried milk alternatives (with 43% intending to buy in the future), while only 10% have tried meat analogues (with 33% likely to purchase at some point). Meanwhile, 82% of Indians who have bought plant-based milk in the last six months say they’ll consider buying it again, with repeat purchases of alt-meat coming in at 72%.
Flexitarians are key here: 89% who have bought alt-milk buy conventional dairy as well, and 72% do the same for meat, with protein being a key reason for interest in both product categories (and health is equally important for milk).
Among the barriers to consumer adoption are resistance from family, a perceived ‘unnaturalness’, lack of clarity on health benefits, and taste and price. People over 45 feel these products are not relevant to them and possess a synthetic taste, while product availability is a key hurdle for many Indians.
There are strong signs of administrative support and examples of public funding to help propel India’s smart protein sector to the next stage. Within India’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the Science and Engineering Research Board included cultivated meat research under its Competitive Research Grant Programmes and announced a funding call centred on making millet-based meat, egg and dairy proteins.
The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, meanwhile, has invested in multiple smart protein startups in India via initiatives like the Biotechnology Ignition Grant Scheme.
In March 2022, India’s minister of food processing industries confirmed that smart protein is eligible for financial assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana, a central government scheme that provides monetary support to develop food processing and preservation infrastructure to set up food processing units.
A month earlier, a Ministry of Commerce department set up the Vegan Committee on Export Standards, Guidelines and Promotion for Vegan Food Products to aid the growth of the plant-based industry and set export guidelines. It’s part of the National Programme on Vegan Products, which aims to make India an export leader in the category.
As for state governments, Maharashtra (where Mumbai is located) included smart protein as a pillar to help each its $1T economy target by 2030. And its deputy chief minister signed a directive for manufacturing hubs that will focus on creating plant-based protein value chains.
“The potential for other state governments to chart a path for the smart protein sector is huge, especially since every state in India is uniquely positioned to benefit from various aspects of the innovation and production of smart protein food value chains,” reads the report.
In India, the FSSAI is the body responsible for the regulatory framework of foods, including plant-based, cultivated and fermented proteins. The latter two fall under the Food Safety and Standards Regulations set out in 2017, which rule that if a product or ingredient doesn’t have a history of human consumption – or is obtained using new tech with engineering processes that significantly alter its composition – it’s classed as a non-specified or novel food product.
In 2020, the FSSAI formed the Working Group on Cultured Meat with regulatory and scientific experts to study the possible regulatory pathways for cultivated meat in India. So far, it hasn’t received any applications for the approval of cultivated meat or proteins made from biomass fermentation.
However, there has been progress on the precision fermentation front, with Californian pioneer Perfect Day obtaining premarket approval from the FSSAI for its animal-free whey protein after it purchased Sterling Biotech last year. Additionally, the regulatory body has approved the use of mycoprotein derived from Fusarium venenatum (the fungi strain used by Quorn).
Like the EU, the FSSAI prohibits the use of terms like ‘milk’, ‘cheese’ and ‘yoghurt’ on the packaging of dairy alternatives. The regulator has specified that alt-dairy products can’t be considered as milk or milk products.
But in June last year, it finalised its Vegan Foods Regulations, a separate framework for plant-based food in India. Producers must comply with these rules and obtain approval to even label their products as vegan. And while the FSSAI published a list of FAQs for further clarity, it mentions that plant-based dairy and cheese analogues are not eligible for consideration as vegan food.
This makes things confusing for plant-based brands, as many alt-dairy products fall under the confines of the Vegan Foods Regulations and satisfy the definition of a dairy alternative. So it’s not clear whether these analogues can be classed as analogues, leaving companies in a neither-here-nor-there dilemma.
The FAQs also mention that the term ‘vegan’ can’t be clubbed with meat-related terms on product labels, with companies not allowed to make claims comparing alt-meats to their conventional counterparts in any sensory manner.
So while a lot of progress is being made, there are some key challenges for India’s alt-protein industry to overcome. “Building trust in these safe, sustainable, and scalable alternatives to conventional proteins is paramount,” Subhaprada Nishtala, director of ITCFSAN, the FSSAI’s training centre, told GFI India. “We envision a future where innovation, safety, and sustainability coexist harmoniously, enriching the dietary choices of the Indian public. Together, we can chart a path towards a more resilient and diversified protein ecosystem in India.”
Read the full State of the Industry 2023 report by GFI India here.
The post Smart Protein India: 7 Key Takeaways From GFI India’s First State of the Industry Report appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
Scrap-metal trader MD Alam was sleeping in his riverside cabin along the Teesta River in northeast India on Oct. 4 when he received an urgent phone call.
“It seems a dam in Sikkim has breached. A huge flood is coming down,” his friend warned.
The South Lhonak glacial lake in the Himalayan region of northern Sikkim near China and Nepal experienced a sudden and significant overflow last week for reasons still under investigation.
The breach caused a flash flood in the Teesta River, destroying a major dam in Chungthang, 60 kilometers (37 miles) downstream, and affecting parts of Sikkim and West Bengal.
The river water level rose by 8-18 meters, the Central Water Commission said. The 60-meter dam had a capacity equivalent to over 2,000 Olympic pools, but the exact water level at the time is unclear.
Hundreds of houses, roads and bridges were washed away. At least 75 people are confirmed dead, according to Indian authorities, while more than a hundred are still missing. Alam’s family was among those affected.
“I managed to save only my family. I could not take out a single thing,” Alam told Radio Free Asia on Tuesday.
He added that while all 12 of his family members were safe, three of their houses by the river were swept away, along with all their belongings.
A week after the flooding, debris from the surge still littered the roof of his recently constructed two-story house, the only standing building in the vicinity.
“Everything I have worked for and owned was gone within a minute,” the 55-year-old patriarch lamented.
A few minutes later, Alam received a call that his daughter’s father-in-law in another flood-hit village had died.
“I don’t know how to feel or express my feelings. The river increases yearly, but it was something else this time,” he said as he hurried off.
Triggered by glacial lake outburst
Originating from the Eastern Himalayan glaciers, the 414-kilometer-long Teesta River meanders through West Bengal and parts of Bangladesh before joining the grand Brahmaputra River.
South Lhonak, at 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), is one of the largest and fastest-growing glacial water reservoirs that feed into the Teesta.
The actual reason for the glacier lake outburst is unknown, but officials suspect the exceptional rainfall or a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that hit neighboring Nepal the preceding Tuesday to be the culprits.
The Sikkim government said this week that “a thorough inquiry by a multidisciplinary team of experts will be initiated by the State government once the situation stabilizes.”
India’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) blamed intense rainfall for the glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) – which happens when the icy reservoir’s natural barriers are compromised, likely due to the permafrost thaw.
Such breaches can be precipitated by landslides, earthquakes or extreme rainfall, leading to a high-altitude “tsunami.”
In recent years, researchers and government officials noted the increasing water levels in South Lhonak due to the melting glaciers caused by global warming, with experts singling it out as “high risk” and “critical.”
Studies have shown South Lhonak increased almost ten times from 17 hectares in 1977 to 167 hectares just before the burst. Last week, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released a satellite study saying about 105 hectares of water area was drained out after Oct. 4.
Since the floods, schools and universities have been closed as clean-up and relief operations continue, while land access and mobile connectivity in many areas remain cut off. State-established relief camps now house thousands of affected individuals.
Last year, the most senior science bureaucrat in Sikkim emphasized the need for an early warning system at glacier lakes like South Lhonak, where it was installed in September but was not fully operational when the floods hit.
Man-made disaster
Anit Thapa, chief executive of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, the highest local authority in West Bengal state, said this was “the first time Teesta has been this disastrous.”
“Many people had literally five seconds to leave their homes,” he told RFA in Teesta Bazaar. “In some areas, whole villages have been washed away … The damages are unsurmountable.”
Apart from dams, there were also encroachment of the riverbeds for roads and settlements, obstructing the water flow, he said, adding the disaster was “human induced.”
“Basically, Teesta River is taking its natural course. We built dams and other infrastructures and changed the natural flow of Teesta. Now it’s claiming it back,” Thapa said.
Sikkim’s chief minister told Indian media the disaster was due to sub-standard Chungthang dam construction for the 1200-megawatt hydroelectric project.
Locals and experts say the government knows well about the dangers of building hydropower dams in the Himalayan region with tectonic activity, melting glaciers and extreme rain.
In 2021, India’s Department of Water Resources warned of South Lhonak Lake’s threat to hydropower projects, with a 2020 NDMA report highlighting Sikkim as the most at risk.
“This disaster was foreseeable,” said Gyatso Lepcha, the general secretary of the indigenous group, Affected Citizens of Teesta, adding the damage was exacerbated by dam construction.Despite warnings, Sikkim and West Bengal governments continue developing hydropower dams on Teesta, with at least 47 projects in different development stages currently.
Vimal Khawas, a professor at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University, said hydropower has played a role in maximizing the disaster.
“Humans have heavily encroached upon the riverbed areas of upper Teesta basin,” he said. “When events like cloud burst, GLOF and dam burst happen, disaster is the only consequence. Even if cloud burst and GLOF are natural, the resultant disaster is 100% human made.”
GLOF, a severe threat
Between 2000 and 2016, Himalayan glaciers lost about 8 billion tons of ice annually, mainly due to climate change.
Last year, a report from India’s earth sciences ministry said the mean retreat rate of the Hindu Kush Himalayan glaciers was 14.9-15.1 meters per annum, with 20.2-19.7 meters per annum in the Brahmaputra river basins.
According to a report in June from Kathmandu-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, Himalayan glaciers could lose 80% of their volume by the end of this century.
“Tragically, the River Teesta is the latest in a series of devastating flash floods we’ve seen this monsoon that shows that the Hindu Kush Himalaya, on which a quarter of humanity relies for freshwater, food and energy, is a region on the brink,” Izabella Koziell, deputy director general of ICIMOD, told RFA on Thursday.
“Climate change is flipping the mountains and glaciers here from being reliable water sources into hotspots of hazard, with glaciers melting at unprecedented rates, snow and rainfall patterns becoming erratic and extreme and permafrost that provides stability to steep mountain slopes thawing.”
According to scientists, the mountain regions of Asia are warming at twice the global average.
“GLOF risks are set to rise—and we urgently need to think beyond one lake to ensure every dangerous lake in this region has early warning systems for those downstream,” said Koziell.
“But also, accelerated glacier melt means this region is set to reach ‘peak water’ in 2050. That is just 17 years away. After which water supplies will decline, driving huge uncertainty for communities here.
“It is clear that, as well as these hazards, we now stand on the cusp of systemic disruption to food, water and energy security in one of the most populous regions in the world,” she said.
Edited by Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 10, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Progressive writers and advocates around the world on Tuesday rallied behind acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy after a top New Delhi official reportedly approved her prosecution for allegedly advocating for the secession of the disputed and brutally occupied Kashmir region during a “provocative” 2010 speech.
Indian media reported that Delhi Lt. Gov. V.K. Saxena breathed new life into a 2010 criminal complaint accusing Roy—winner of the 1997 Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things—of sedition for asserting that Kashmir “has never been an integral part of India.”
Sources told The Hindu that a first information report (FIR)—a document prepared by law enforcement officials when they receive actionable information regarding alleged serious offenses—was registered in New Delhi’s Court of Metropolitan Magistrate under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. Two co-defendants in the case have since died.
Roy, who is 61 years old, has been an outspoken critic of what she calls India’s “descent… into full-blown fascism” under the ruling right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its “Hindu supremacism.”
Earlier this month, Roy spoke at a Delhi protest following coordinated police raids on the homes of prominent reporters, condemning what she and other human rights activists called government abuse of anti-terrorism laws to oppress critical writers, journalists, and activists.
“The timing of this is not coincidence. The Modi regime is finally set to prosecute Arundhati Roy,” wrote Arjun Sethi, an activist, lawyer, and adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.
The Modi government has closely aligned itself with Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestine. Sethi warned that far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “brutal war” on the Palestinian territory Gaza, “with the approval of global powers, will embolden authoritarians across the world.”
Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, wrote on social media that it is “interesting what Indian authorities consider ‘provocative speech.’”
“They protect government supporters that incite violence and hate, and appear keen to prosecute peaceful critics,” she added.
Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of the pan-European leftist political party DiEM25 Yanis Varoufakis posted a message to Modi: “Hands off Arundhati Roy, India’s, and perhaps the world’s, finest author.”
The international advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranks India 161st out of 180 nations in press freedom, noting in its 2023 country report that “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media, and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy.’”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Indians love a good piece of chocolate. I grew up in a world where ‘Kuch meetha ho jaaye’ (roughly: let’s have something sweet) was an omnipresent tagline thanks to Cadbury and its ultra-popular Dairy Milk brand, which I guarantee you tastes better in India than it does in its own home country of the UK.
Chocolate was also part and parcel of Indian festivals, which might seem counterintuitive given the country’s renown for local sweets. Maybe it was a demographic thing – I can’t count the number of chocolate boxes (containing assortments of Cadbury or Nestlé products) I was gifted after visiting people’s houses every Diwali. I can recall stacks of these boxes lying around in houses to give to visitors. It’s an entire industry in itself.
But somewhere along the way, as India and Indians became more globalized, so too did our tastes. The switch flipped from always buying the cheapest food to buying better – whether that’s higher quality or better for you. It coincided with a growing consciousness around what we eat and where it comes from, alongside climate-change-induced heatwaves and water shortages.
Within the chocolate world – which faces catastrophic climate losses and has been linked to deforestation (with the widespread use of palm oil playing no small part) and human rights abuses – legacy brands tried to adapt to the shift in consumer mindsets. Cadbury, for example, launched a 30% reduced sugar version of its Dairy Milk to appeal to Indians who wanted healthier chocolate.
But the real revolution came from the new, indie challenger brands promising good-for-you, good-for-the-planet, and better-tasting chocolates, all in one. Among them was Carra, a brand that launched six years ago with a range of chocolate that prioritised taste and health.
“We, at large, do not eat good quality chocolates here,” says Carra founder Komal Khosla. “[We] do not even know what it is.” But Indians do eat a lot of chocolate: a 2019 Mintel survey found that 61% of them said they eat it daily or at least once a week. For context, that figure equated to about 840 million people at the time – more than 2.5 USAs.
Khosla grew up fascinated with numbers and was sure she was destined to be an accountant, but six to seven years into a career with one of the Big Four, she realised she wanted to do something “bigger and more valuable”. “I thought of taking a break and figuring out what I felt strongly about doing in life,” she recalls. “It was a nervous big gamble back then.”
This was the path that led her to becoming one of India’s finest chocolatiers. The now-vegan brand didn’t start this way – it was, like Khosla, vegetarian. She has always been vegetarian, though her Punjabi family consumed meat and asked how she’d maintain her health if she didn’t eat chicken. But she never liked the smell or the mouthfeel of animal meat– and says she’s glad she never converted to eating meat.
She grew up in a joint family. “In bigger families, taking a stand and having everyone believe in what you believe is not absolutely possible, so I know that you need not revolt and adamantly say a point across –you give logic as to why and eventually everyone will get the point,” she says.
This seeped into how she approached Carra as a brand. “I knew we would have to create tasty products and give people a tasty option as a solution to make a switch towards vegan food consumption easy and more of a choice,” she recalls. “The narrative was always a logical solution and not take up a fight with anyone as to why it’s even needed.”
The brand came about at a time when veganism wasn’t a familiar concept to Indians. It is now, though. A report by the country’s Plant Based Foods Industry Association (PBFIA) in May found that veganism has become “increasingly popular” over the last five years in India, with “more than 2% of people actively identifying as vegan”.
Anecdotally, Khosla agrees with this shift: “I see restauranteurs have added ‘vegan’ as an option in the menus. Most high-end [or] good cafes have at least one vegan dish. With the way restauranteurs are cut-throat towards their businesses, adding a vegan option would have come from some demand – and that says [a lot].”
She explains: “There was a time not so long back that people considered vegan and vegetarian the same, and now we see most people aware of [it as] a separate term.”
And that Carra itself has now made that transition too, overhauling its lineup of premium chocolates to be fully vegan. The range includes a bunch of dark chocolates in different cocoa proportions and flavours, as well as vegan milk and white chocolates. Khosla says her team had previously not been able to crack the right formulation for plant-based versions of the latter two.
“Replicating the taste of dairy isn’t that easy, she tells me. “But when we aced the taste for them, we knew we had to launch them to the world… We are proud of the vegan milk and vegan white that we created. We were India’s first to have launched a vegan white chocolate bar.”
Carra experimented with an array of ingredients to figure out the best flavour combinations – and settled on a base of roasted cashews and oats to replicate the flavour of dairy-based chocolate. “India as a market has a higher consumption of milk chocolates than dark – the trend is changing now, but still at large, we [have] more of [a] sweet tooth and milk tooth,” Khosla explains. Her excitement and pride is palpable and endearing. “Changing that and introducing something in place of what we have been so habitual to consuming is a task – the taste had to be bang on. And I think we have achieved it!”
The brand has a sugar-free range too, which uses sweeteners like stevia and erythritol, two ingredients that have been questioned regarding their health credentials. But Khosla argues that these are natural sweeteners – stevia is a plant and erythritol is fermented corn – and she believes they are safe to use.
What do her customers think? “We haven’t faced any concerns on this as yet, and we source our sweeteners from very reliable places, so we are pretty confident that these won’t and don’t have ill-effects,” she outlines. “But we keep ourselves open towards any new norms/studies that people conduct on different sweeteners. So far, we feel this is the best alternative available without [requiring] any insulin or GI-level spike.”
This is especially important for her, as India has been named the ‘diabetes capital of the world’, with over 235 million people suffering from diabetes (mostly type 2) or prediabetes. “We hope to be able to bring some options for sweet indulgence for healthier and better indulgence,” she says. “We are working on bringing a lot more options in No Added Sugar varieties, and also working on a healthy sweet for kids.”
Health really is Carra’s R&D focus, with its factory in Delhi’s Okhla Industrial Area the centre of its new product development. For Diwali, Carra is releasing a sugar-free, date-sweetened chocolate fudge SKU. “Chocolates are naturally a superfood, but these are not completely considered healthy,” she explains. “We want to be able to break that notion, by actually making it completely healthy, and bringing better sweet indulgences.”
And it’s these kind of brands that Khosla finds inspiring as well. “We look up to brands that are talking of good indulgence, [whether] in the savoury or sweet category – we think this is a big category in the times to come.” She namechecks Mumbai-based The Whole Truth and Bangalore’s Yoga Bar as fellow trailblazers in India’s better-for-you sweet category.
While health is a big deal, Carra is deeply rooted in tradition too. Its India Culture Series celebrates beloved local ingredients like cardamom, cinnamon, saunf (fennel seeds) and meetha paan (sweet betel leaf), infusing them into 55% dark chocolate. “We haven’t glorified our Indian spices enough,” Khosla tells me.
She points out how fennel and betel are used as palate refreshers and mouth fresheners after meals in India. It’s akin to After Eights, the legendary mint chocolate widely used as a palate refresher too. With the same logic, she paired these ingredients with dark chocolate, which ended up having a “very interesting flavour”.
Carra also taps into local artisans for its packaging. For the new Diwali chocolate boxes, the brand worked with an artist whose work is inspired by Madhubani art, which originated in the namesake city in central India, and is widely practised in the Mithila region of India and Nepal. In a LinkedIn post, Khosla called it “a joyful and beautiful depiction”.
There’s a common thread running among all these chocolates: being planet-friendly is crucial to Carra’s ethos as a brand. While it sources some of its cocoa from Ghana (the world’s second-largest producer), its primary origin is Idukki, Kerala in the south of India. “We have started shifting towards Indian cocoa,” Khosla explains. “We wanted to be able to visit the cocoa farms and oversee the complete fermentation process. A chance visit to Kerala helped us get familiarised with Indian cocoa, and it is on par with cocoa from other regions – it has a very interesting and unique taste profile of its own.”
The chocolate bars are wrapped in paper packaging, and placed into printed paper boxes. And while that’s a start, she acknowledges there’s still some plastic in the pack to enable it to seal properly: “We are trying to figure [out] a completely biodegradable/compostable option for it.”
But despite this focus on sustainability, Khosla believes the best way to broach this topic with Indian consumers is to start talking about how it’s better for their health. “People care for themselves and for other humans,” she explains. “Care for the planet and for the later generations is a far-fetched concept for now. We need to speak the language which people will understand here and put across the point.”
Being a craft chocolate brand, Carra does fall into the premium category – a 50g bar can set you back ₹180 ($2.16). “We hear all kinds of comments on this,” reveals Khosla. “Some find them a bit high on cost, some understand the purity and taste, and the minimal and quality ingredients that go into making it, and understand the cost.”
This is backed up by data. A December 2021 survey by leading food company Kerry found that 63% of Indians would be willing to buy plant-based products regularly, with 60% not deterred by higher price tags.
“However, we are one of the lowest-priced when it comes to craft chocolates in India,” Khosla says. “We try to keep them as low as we can manage, the idea is to have more people try them.” She likens it to the rise of speciality coffee in India and changing attitudes towards the drink: “With speciality coffee and the roast profiles that people have started understanding about coffee and different coffee beans, that has helped too in people understanding some [of the] nitty-gritty about chocolates.”
And with time, Khosla hopes these evolving attitudes help Carra become the go-to brand for a healthier sweet. When asked where she sees the brand five years from now, she responds: “I hope Carra will be able to spread its wings wide across India and in the global market.”
Carra is changing the way Indians think about chocolate, offering a food fit for the future. “When dairy-based milk chocolates were introduced, that was a refreshing and very innovative creation for the chocolate industry,” she recalls. “I hope Carra brings another revolution with its vegan chocolates.”
The post India’s Future Food Changemakers: How Heritage Vegan Brand Carra Got Indians to Love Dark Chocolate appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
This week, the International Cricket Council’s One Day International tournament will commence in India. The man who will take centre stage during the occasion will be Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose earthly attributes are fast becoming, at least in a political sense, celestial in dimension.
Commentators are already noting that the tournament will usher in a pre-election campaign extravaganza for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), one lasting six weeks. Modi has positioned himself as all and everything, supreme self-referencing god head in a political strategy that eclipses rivals and dooms them to irrelevance. Like other authoritarians, he is keen to find solid footing in established popular rites and customs, appropriating the features he likes (Hinduism, good), and abandoning those he dislikes (Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, bad).
India’s national sport has not been spared the Modi touch. Nothing about the man speaks about the dash and panache of the Indian cricket team, but that hardly matters. Modi has previously run the Gujarat Cricket Association with his current Home Affairs minister Amit Shah. While India’s Board of Control for Cricket has a nominal presidential head in the form of the ineffectual Roger Binny, true power over the organisation lies with Shah’s son Jay, the body’s honorary secretary. With Ashish Shela as treasurer, the BJP stranglehold seems total.
The national team has become, in effect, an extension of the prime minister’s ambitions. All have come together, fused and meshed, none better illustrated than through the renaming of an enormous stadium – one of the world’s largest, in fact – after the PM himself. With a seating capacity over 130,000, the Narendra Modi stadium, based in the PM’s home state of Gujarat, will host the key events and matches of the World Cup.
Hard to miss in this dance is also the power of global cricket’s locus. Long straddling the England-Australia nexus, cricket’s hegemonic centre has moved with spectacular effect. The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) is unchallenged in its supremacy over purse strings and glitzy promotion, with the Indian Premier League being the game’s crowning, commercial glory. In its 2023 season, the IPL drew in over 500 million viewers, registering a growth rate of 32% from the previous season, while total revenues for the BCCI in 2021-22 came in at $771 million. As the Financial Times noted in July this year, the BCCI “dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined.”
Despite this, the governing body remains blighted. Overseas, it is accused of buying preferential treatment for the IPL over other cricketing schedules, seducing, if not strong-arming smaller nations into accepting its agenda.
The cricket body has repeatedly stifled such anti-corruption efforts as those mounted by the former Delhi commissioner of police, Neeraj Kumar. When Kumar’s A Cop in Cricket was published, it told an all too familiar story on spoliation wrought by wealth, fed by the lucre of the IPL, money laundering and rampant bookmakers. He also found that the enormous outlay of funds otherwise “meant for the promotion of cricket at the grassroots level is diverted and misappropriated by state association officials, who adopt every conceivable modus operandi of malfeasance to do so.” Little wonder that much of Modi’s own relations with the powerful agents of Indian public life reflect a broader, dark model of the Hindutva crony state, where funds are diverted in the name of special interests.
The sheer scope, exposure, and significance of cricket, and its dramatic modernisation by Indian sporting practice, has made it pure political capital. Salil Tripathi, author and board member of PEN International, explains the point. “The men’s cricket World Cup, to be staged in India from October 5, will put India, and Modi’s premiership, back on the global stage.”
Peter Oborne is none too happy with this. Having written extensively about cricket on the subcontinent, a keen student and admirer of its magical play and often tortuous politics, Oborne can only look at the Modi appropriation experiment with alarm. During Modi’s tenure, dissidents, Muslims and Christians have been targeted. In an article co-authored with Imran Mulla, some symptoms of this rule are mentioned. “Since May, Hindu nationalist militants have killed over 100 Christians in northeastern Manipur, destroying churches and displaying 50,000 people in a brutal campaign of terror.”
Oborne and his co-author do not shy away from warning that the Modi-Hindutva state is showing genocidal urges. “This is a moral emergency and thus far nobody seems to have noticed. US President Joe Biden, supposedly the leader of the free world, recently gave Modi a hero’s welcome in Washington.” Modi’s renaming of the stadium sent an ominous “message that the Indian cricket team represents his own political party – the Bharatiya Jana Party (BJP) – and not the nation as a whole.”
The authors pertinently contrast the tepid coverage leading up to the Cricket World Cup with the near surfeit of moral indignation expressed prior to the FIFA Men’s World Cup held in Qatar – albeit one eventually extinguished in the glow of the tournament. “The BBC decided not to broadcast the opening ceremony live, with its star presenter Gary Lineker lecturing TV viewers on Qatar’s human rights record and Labour leader Keir Starmer boycotting the event.”
Expect, on this occasion, no videos and clips of protest by any of the competing teams complaining about human rights violations, religious intolerance, barbaric practices or appalling working conditions. Ditto that of ingratiating British and Australian politicians. Modi’s Hindutva train of religious and ideological purity has gone unnoticed in most of the cricket world. The only question that will be asked of him at the tournament’s opening is simple: Will he be able to land the ball on the square?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
M.S. Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India, recently passed away (28 September) at the age of 98. An agronomist, agricultural scientist and plant geneticist, Swaminathan played a key role in introducing hybrid high yielding varieties of wheat and rice to India and in encouraging many farmers to adopt high-input, chemical-dependent practices.
The mainstream narrative is that Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug helped save India from famine in the 1960s. Following his death, tributes from high-ranking officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and commentators have poured in praising his part in (supposedly) saving India from Malthusian catastrophe.
However, there is another side to the story of the Green Revolution, which seldom emerges in the mainstream.
For example, farmer Bhaskar Save wrote an open letter to M.S. Swaminathan in 2006. He was scathing about the impact of the Green Revolution and Swaminathan’s role in it:
“You, M S Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.”
We will return to this letter later.
To his credit, though, Swaminathan came out against genetically modified organisms in Indian agriculture. In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, along with his colleague P C Kesavan, he provided a wide-ranging critique of genetically modified crops to date, questioning their efficacy and need. Perhaps he had become aware that the introduction of technology without proper economic, social, health and environmental impact assessments would produce a domino effect, like the Green Revolution. Of course, he came under attack from industry mouthpieces and industry-backed scientists in the media for his stance.
In the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” (2019), Professor Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity and saved India from famine. Indeed, although the media in the mid-1960s carried stories about a famine in India, Stone sees no evidence of famine or an impending famine. Stone argues that all the Green Revolution actually ‘succeeded’ in doing was put more wheat in the Indian diet (displacing other foodstuffs). He argues that food productivity per capita showed no increase or even actually decreased.
Renowned campaigner and environmentalist Vandana Shiva says that the Green Revolution saw 768,576 accessions of indigenous seeds taken from farmers in Mexico alone. She regards the Green Revolution as a form of colonisation:
The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.
This is one aspect of the Green Revolution that is too often overlooked: capitalist penetration of (intact, self-sufficient) peasant economies.
Stone says:
The legend of the Green Revolution in India has always been about more than wheat imports and short‐stalked grains. It is about Malthusianism, with post‐war India supposedly proving the dangers of population growth outpacing food production. It is also about the Neo-Malthusian conviction that technological innovation is our only hope, capable of saving a billion lives when conditions are right.
He says that beneficiaries of the legend have bolstered it and kept it alive and well in our historical imagination. According to recent studies and literature, however, a coherent reinterpretation is emerging that, Stone says, knocks out virtually all of the pillars of this narrative.
We must also consider counterfactual scenarios. What would have happened if India had taken a different route? Stone notes that the influential Planning Commission (PC) was trying simultaneously to create a functional state (after centuries of colonial rule), to avoid becoming a prized Cold War client, and to shape the country’s agricultural destiny. India had plenty of rural labour and organic manures and the PC wanted to capitalise on these resources.
The PC was not opposed to chemical fertilisers but regarded them as highly expensive both to the state and to the farmer. It also believed that concentrated fertiliser use had ecological problems too: chemicals should only be used in combination with bulky organic manures to preserve tilth. What if organic ways of farming had received the funding and research and had been prioritised to the extent the Green Revolution had been?
For instance, in the paper “Lessons From the Aftermaths of Green Revolution on Food System and Health” (in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021) agriculture techniques, such as intercropping, Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) – with essential principles involving the enhancement of nature’s processes – and the elimination of external inputs, can be practised with excellent results. The state government of Andhra Pradesh plans to convert six million farmers and eight million hectares of land under the initiative of Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) because of the impressive outputs obtained in the ZBNF impact assessments in the states of Karnataka and AP.
Moreover, the Green Revolution deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding and climate appropriate. Also, in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, the authors note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties.
Instead, we are left with a certain model of agriculture that was pushed for geopolitical and commercial reasons and are trying to deal with various deleterious aftermaths.
For example, according to Stone, post-war hand-to-mouth shipments of wheat from the US to India resulted not from Malthusian imbalance but from policy decisions. The ‘triumphs’ of the Green Revolution came from financial incentives, irrigation and the return of the rains after periods of drought, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long‐term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change in India. Stone concludes that the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.
Much more can be said and has been written about the wider politics of the Green Revolution and how it became and remains enmeshed in modern geopolitics: the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have facilitated the structural adjustment of national economies and agrarian systems, intentionally creating food insecure areas and dependency for the benefit of Western financial, agricultural trade, seed, fertiliser and agrochemical interests.
For instance, many countries have been placed on commodity crop export-oriented production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars – boosting the strength of and demand for the dollar and US hegemony) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.
In effect, what we have seen emerge is a model of agriculture that requires hundreds of billions of taxpayer subsidies annually to sustain the bottom line of big agribusiness. One of the not-so-hidden costs of the Green Revolution, of which there are many: degraded soils, polluted water, rising rates of illness, micro-nutrient deficiencies, less nutrient-dense food crops, unnecessary food insecurity, the sidelining of more appropriate indigenous seeds, the narrower range of crops that humanity now depends on due to changed cropping systems, the corporate commodification and pirating of seeds and knowledge, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the devastation of rural communities, farmers’ debt, corporate-market dependency, etc.
So, with the passing of M.S. Swaminathan, let us return to Bhaskar Save (1922-2015) and his open letter, which touches on many of these issues. Save was not a scholar or an academic. He was a farmer, and his letter was a heartfelt call to action.
M.S. Swaminathan was at the time the chair of the National Commission on Farmers at the Ministry of Agriculture. Save wanted to bring attention to the devastating impacts of the Green Revolution and to encourage policy makers to abandon their policies of importing and promoting the use of toxic chemicals that the Green Revolution had encouraged.
Below is an abridged version of Bhaskar Save’s open letter.
To: Shri M.S. Swaminathan,
The Chairperson, National Commission on Farmers,
Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India
I am an 84-year-old natural/organic farmer with more than six decades of personal experience in growing a wide range of food crops. I have, over the years, practised several systems of farming, including the chemical method in the fifties – until I soon saw its pitfalls. I say with conviction that it is only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, that India can sustainably provide her people abundant, wholesome food.
You, M.S. Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.
I am sad that our (now greyed) generation of Indian farmers, allowed itself to be duped into adopting the short-sighted and ecologically devastating way of farming, imported into this country. By those like you, with virtually zero farming experience!
For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical ‘fertilizers’, pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy ‘biotech’ inputs that you now seem to champion. The fertility of our land remained unaffected.
In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind) yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne – year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. There is no gaping hole in the ground!
From where do the trees – including those on rocky mountains – get their water, their NPK, etc? Though stationary, Nature provides their needs right where they stand. But ‘scientists’ and technocrats like you – with a blinkered, meddling itch – seem blind to this. On what basis do you prescribe what a tree or plant requires, and how much, and when.?
It is said: where there is lack of knowledge, ignorance masquerades as ‘science’! Such is the ‘science’ you have espoused, leading our farmers astray – down the pits of misery.
This country has more than 150 agricultural universities. But every year, each churns out several hundred ‘educated’ unemployables, trained only in misguiding farmers and spreading ecological degradation.
Trying to increase Nature’s ‘productivity,’ is the fundamental blunder that highlights the ignorance of ‘agricultural scientists’ like you. When a grain of rice can reproduce a thousand-fold within months, where arises the need to increase its productivity?
The mindset of servitude to ‘commerce and industry,’ ignoring all else, is the root of the problem.
Modern technology, wedded to commerce… has proved disastrous at all levels… We have despoiled and polluted the soil, water and air. We have wiped out most of our forests and killed its creatures. And relentlessly, modern farmers spray deadly poisons on their fields. These massacre Nature’s jeev srushti – the unpretentious but tireless little workers that maintain the ventilated quality of the soil and recycle all life-ebbed biomass into nourishment for plants. The noxious chemicals also inevitably poison the water, and Nature’s prani srushti, which includes humans.
Is it not a stark fact that the chemical-intensive and irrigation-intensive way of growing monoculture cash-crops has been primarily responsible for spreading ecological devastation far and wide in this country? Within the lifetime of a single generation!
This country boasted an immense diversity of crops, adapted over millennia to local conditions and needs. Our numerous tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains. But in the guise of increasing crop production, exotic dwarf varieties were introduced and promoted through your efforts. This led to more vigorous growth of weeds, which were now able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight. The farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding, or spraying herbicides.
The straw growth with the dwarf grain crops fell drastically to one-third of that with most native species! In Punjab and Haryana, even this was burned, as it was said to harbour ‘pathogens’. (It was too toxic to feed farm cattle that were progressively displaced by tractors.) Consequently, much less organic matter was locally available to recycle the fertility of the soil, leading to an artificial need for externally procured inputs. Inevitably, the farmers resorted to use more chemicals, and relentlessly, soil degradation and erosion set in.
The exotic varieties, grown with chemical ‘fertiliser’, were more susceptible to ‘pests and diseases’, leading to yet more poison (insecticides, etc.) being poured. But the attacked insect species developed resistance and reproduced prolifically. Their predators – spiders, frogs, etc. – that fed on these insects and ‘biologically controlled’ their population, were exterminated. So were many beneficial species like the earthworms and bees.
Agribusiness and technocrats recommended stronger doses, and newer, more toxic (and more expensive) chemicals. But the problems of ‘pests’ and ‘diseases’ only worsened. The spiral of ecological, financial and human costs mounted!
With the use of synthetic fertilizer and increased cash-cropping, irrigation needs rose enormously. In 1952, the Bhakra dam was built in Punjab, a water-rich state fed by 5 Himalayan rivers. Several thousand more big and medium dams followed all over the country, culminating in the massive Sardar Sarovar.
India, next to South America, receives the highest rainfall in the world. The annual average is almost 4 feet. Where thick vegetation covers the ground, and the soil is alive and porous, at least half of this rain is soaked and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata. A good amount then percolates deeper to recharge aquifers, or ‘groundwater tables’.
The living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as gigantic, ready-made reservoirs gifted free by Nature. Particularly efficient in soaking rain are the lands under forests and trees. And so, half a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all-round the year, long after the rains had stopped and gone. But clear the forests, and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically. Streams and wells run dry. It has happened in too many places already.
While the recharge of groundwater has greatly reduced, its extraction has been mounting. India is presently mining over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950. Much of this is mindless wastage by a minority. But most of India’s people – living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water per person, as they did generations ago.
More than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops. Maharashtra, for example, has the maximum number of big and medium dams in this country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters!
One acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize. The sugar factories too consume huge quantities. From cultivation to processing, each kilo of refined sugar needs 2 to 3 tonnes of water. This could be used to grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious jowar or bajra (native millets).
While rice is suitable for rain-fed farming, its extensive multiple cropping with irrigation in winter and summer as well, is similarly hogging our water resources, and depleting aquifers. As with sugarcane, it is also irreversibly ruining the land through salinisation.
Soil salinisation is the greatest scourge of irrigation-intensive agriculture, as a progressively thicker crust of salts is formed on the land. Many million hectares of cropland have been ruined by it. The most serious problems are caused where water-guzzling crops like sugarcane or basmati rice are grown round the year, abandoning the traditional mixed-cropping and rotation systems of the past, which required minimal or no watering.
Efficient organic farming requires very little irrigation – much less than what is commonly used in modern agriculture. The yields of the crops are best when the soil is just damp. Rice is the only exception that grows even where water accumulates and is thus preferred as a monsoon crop in low-lying areas naturally prone to inundation. Excess irrigation in the case of all other crops expels the air contained in the soil’s inter-particulate spaces – vitally needed for root respiration – and prolonged flooding causes root rot.
The irrigation on my farm is a small fraction of that provided in most modern farms today. Moreover, the porous soil under the thick vegetation of the orchard is like a sponge that soaks and percolates to the aquifer, or ground-water table, an enormous quantity of rain each monsoon. The amount of water thus stored in the ground at Kalpavruksha, is far more than the total amount withdrawn from the well for irrigation in the months when there is no rain.
Clearly, the way to ensure the water security and food security of this nation, is by organically growing mixed, locally suitable crops, plants and trees, following the laws of Nature.
We should restore at least 30% ground cover of mixed, indigenous trees and forests within the next decade or two. This is the core task of ecological water harvesting – the key to restoring the natural abundance of groundwater. Outstanding benefits can be achieved within a decade at comparatively little cost. We sadly fail to realise that the potential for natural water storage in the ground is many times greater than the combined capacity of all the major and medium irrigation projects in India – complete, incomplete, or still on paper! Such decentralized underground storage is more efficient, as it is protected from the high evaporation of surface storage. The planting of trees will also make available a variety of useful produce to enhance the well-being of a larger number of people.
Even barren wastelands can be restored to health in less than a decade. By inter-planting short lifespan, medium life-span, and long life-span crops and trees, it is possible to have planned continuity of food yield to sustain a farmer through the transition period till the long-life fruit trees mature and yield. The higher availability of biomass and complete ground cover round the year will also hasten the regeneration of soil fertility.
The actual reason for pushing the ‘Green Revolution’ was the much narrower goal of increasing marketable surplus of a few relatively fewer perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government.
The new, parasitical way of farming you vigorously promoted, benefited only the industrialists, traders and the powers-that-be. The farmers’ costs rose massively and margins dipped. Combined with the eroding natural fertility of their land, they were left with little in their hands, if not mounting debts and dead soils. Many gave up farming. Many more want to do so, squeezed by the ever-rising costs. Nature has generously gifted us with all that is needed for organic farming – which also produces wholesome, rather than poisoned food!
The maximum number of people can become self-reliant through farming only if the necessary inputs are a bare minimum. Thus, farming should require a minimum of financial capital and purchased inputs, minimum farming equipment (plough, tools, etc.), minimum necessary labour, and minimum external technology. Then, agricultural production will increase, without costs increasing. Poverty will decline, and the rise in population will be spontaneously checked.
Self-reliant farming – with minimal or zero external inputs – was the way we actually farmed, very successfully, in the past. Our farmers were largely self-sufficient, and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items. These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets. And so, the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In their series “Activists Up Close” the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) focuses on Samreen, who grew up in Lucknow, India, in a household where her mother wasn’t allowed to do anything without her father’s permission. But when her father passed away, Samreen began to question the patriarchal norms that ruled her family. When she connected with AJWS partner Sadbhavna Trust, her world opened entirely.
Sadbhavna Trust runs leadership workshops and job training for women and girls in Lucknow, creating a world in which early marriage is not their only option. Today, Samreen is one of the organization’s leaders, inspiring others to follow in her footsteps.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive public diplomacy op launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on 9 September.
Players include the US, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, with a special role for the latter’s top three powers Germany, France, and Italy. It’s a multimodal railway project, coupled with trans-shipments and with ancillary digital and electricity roads extending to Jordan and Israel.
If this walks and talks like the collective west’s very late response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and celebrating a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next month, that’s because it is. And yes, it is, above all, yet another American project to bypass China, to be claimed for crude electoral purposes as a meager foreign policy “success.”
No one among the Global Majority remembers that the Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan way back in 2010. The concept came from the State Department’s Kurt Campbell and was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, it came down to nought.
And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan peddled by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the early 2010s, complete with four troublesome trans-shipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, this too came down to nought.
In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the $40 trillion US-sponsored Build Back Better World (BBBW, or B3W) global plan rolled out with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality.”
A year later, at a G7 meeting, B3W had already shrunk to a $600 billion infrastructure-and-investment project. Of course, nothing was built. History really is implacable, it came down to nought.
The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.
Pivoting to a black void
The whole IMEC rationale rests on what writer and former Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar deliciously described as “conjuring up the Abraham Accords by the incantation of a Saudi-Israeli tango.”
This tango is Dead On Arrival; even the ghost of Piazzolla can’t revive it. For starters, one of the principals – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – has made it clear that Riyadh’s priorities are a new, energized Chinese-brokered relationship with Iran, with Turkiye, and with Syria after its return to the Arab League.
Moreover, both Riyadh and its Emirati IMEC partner share immense trade, commerce, and energy interests with China, so they’re not going to do anything to upset Beijing.
At face value, IMEC proposes a joint drive by G7 and BRICS 11 nations. That’s the western method of seducing eternally-hedging India under Modi and US-allied Saudi Arabia and the UAE to its agenda.
Its real intention, however, is not only to undermine BRI, but also the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), in which India is a major player alongside Russia and Iran.
The game is quite crude and really quite obvious: a transportation corridor conceived to bypass the top three vectors of real Eurasia integration – and BRICS members China, Russia, and Iran – by dangling an enticing Divide and Rule carrot that promises Things That Cannot Be Delivered.
The American neoliberal obsession at this stage of the New Great Game is, as always, all about Israel. Their goal is to make Haifa port viable and turn it into a key transportation hub between West Asia and Europe. Everything else is subordinated to this Israeli imperative.
IMEC, in principle, will transit across West Asia to link India to Eastern and Western Europe – selling the fiction that India is a Global Pivot state and a Convergence of Civilizations.
Nonsense. While India’s great dream is to become a pivot state, its best shot would be via the already up-and-running INTSC, which could open markets to New Delhi from Central Asia to the Caucasus. Otherwise, as a Global Pivot state, Russia is way ahead of India diplomatically, and China is way ahead in trade and connectivity.
Comparisons between IMEC and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are futile. IMEC is a joke compared to this BRI flagship project: the $57.7 billion plan to build a railway over 3,000 km long linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea, which will connect to other overland BRI corridors heading toward Iran and Turkiye.
This is a matter of national security for China. So bets can be made that the leadership in Beijing will have some discreet and serious conversations with the current fifth-columnists in power in Islamabad, before or during the Belt and Road Forum, to remind them of the relevant geostrategic, geoeconomic, and investment Facts.
So, what’s left for Indian trade in all of this? Not much. They already use the Suez Canal, a direct, tested route. There’s no incentive to even start contemplating being stuck in black voids across the vast desert expanses surrounding the Persian Gulf.
One glaring problem, for example, is that almost 1,100 km of tracks are “missing” from the railway from Fujairah in the UAE to Haifa, 745 km “missing” from Jebel Ali in Dubai to Haifa, and 630 km “missing” from the railway from Abu Dhabi to Haifa.
When all the missing links are added up, there’s over 3,000 km of railway still to be built. The Chinese, of course, can do this for breakfast and on a dime, but they are not part of this game. And there’s no evidence the IMEC gang plans to invite them.
All eyes on Syunik
In the War of Transportation Corridors charted in detail for The Cradle in June 2022, it becomes clear that intentions rarely meet reality. These grand projects are all about logistics, logistics, logistics – of course, intertwined with the three other key pillars: energy and energy resources, labor and manufacturing, and market/trade rules.
Let’s examine a Central Asian example. Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are launching a multimodal Southern Transportation Corridor which will bypass Kazakhstan.
Why? After all, Kazakhstan, alongside Russia, is a key member of both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The reason is because this new corridor solves two key problems for Russia that arose with the west’s sanctions hysteria. It bypasses the Kazakh border, where everything going to Russia is scrutinized in excruciating detail. And a significant part of the cargo may now be transferred to the Russian port of Astrakhan in the Caspian.
So Astana, which under western pressure has played a risky hedging game on Russia, may end up losing the status of a full-fledged transport hub in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan is also part of BRI; the Chinese are already very much interested in the potential of this new corridor.
In the Caucasus, the story is even more complex, and once again, it’s all about Divide and Rule.
Two months ago, Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan committed to building a single railway from Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf through Azerbaijan, to be linked to the Russian-Eastern Europe railway system.
This is a railway project on the scale of the Trans-Siberian – to connect Eastern Europe with Eastern Africa and South Asia, bypassing the Suez Canal and European ports. The INSTC on steroids, in fact.
Guess what happened next? A provocation in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the deadly potential of involving not only Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Iran and Turkiye.
Tehran has been crystal clear on its red lines: it will never allow a defeat of Armenia, with direct participation from Turkiye, which fully supports Azerbaijan.
Add to the incendiary mix are joint military exercises with the US in Armenia – which happens to be a member of the Russian-led CSTO – cast, for public consumption, as one of those seemingly innocent “partnership” NATO programs.
This all spells out an IMEC subplot bound to undermine INTSC. Both Russia and Iran are fully aware of the former’s endemic weaknesses: political trouble between several participants, those “missing links” of track, and all important infrastructure still to be built.
Turkish Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, will never give up the Zangezur corridor across Syunik, the south Armenian province, which was envisaged by the 2020 armistice, linking Azerbaijan to Turkiye via the Azeri enclave of Nakhitchevan – that will run through Armenian territory.
Baku did threaten to attack southern Armenia if the Zangezur corridor was not facilitated by Yerevan. So Syunik is the next big unresolved deal in this riddle. Tehran, it must be noted, will go no holds barred to prevent a Turkish-Israeli-NATO corridor cutting Iran off from Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea, and Russia. That would be the reality if this NATO-tinted coalition grabs Syunik.
Today, Erdogan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev meet in the Nakhchivan enclave between Turkiye, Armenia, and Iran to start a gas pipeline and open a military production complex.
The Sultan knows that Zangezur may finally allow Turkiye to be linked to China via a corridor that will transit the Turkic world, in Azerbaijan and the Caspian. This would also allow the collective west to go even bolder on Divide and Rule against Russia and Iran.
Is the IMEC another far-fetched western fantasy? The place to watch is Syunik.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New York: Kashmiris and Sikh community members staged a protest demonstration outside the UN headquarters against human rights violations in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK), amid the Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s speech at the 78th annual session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
Despite the heavy rain and freezing winds, a large number of people participated in the demonstration and exposed India’s extremist face to the global media and international community.
On this occasion, senior Kashmiri leaders Ghulam Nabi Fai and Sardar Sawar Khan said that the United Nations has not fulfilled its promise it made in its resolutions to the Kashmiris.
On this occasion, the protesters chanted slogans against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his oppressive army.
The protestors said that for the past seventy-five years, India has been inflicting atrocities on the oppressed Kashmiris.
On this occasion, the Sikh community also strongly protested against the extreme policies of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Protesters also raised slogans in favor of freedom for Khalistan and against the recent killing of a Sikh leader in Canada.
On this occasion, the Sikh protesters said that the extremist face of India has been exposed to the whole world by the killing of the Sikh leader in Canada.
The Indian Prime Minister and his secret agency RAW are involved in this murder, they alleged.
The protesters demanded the international community to take serious notice of Indian atrocities and its terrorist policies and pressure them to resolve the Kashmir issue.
The post Kashmiris, Sikhs hold demo outside UN Hq, against HR violations in IOK, amid Indian EAM’s speech in UNGA first appeared on VOSA.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
New York: VOSA News Desk: Indian medical graduates will now be able to pursue postgraduate training and practice in countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The change comes after the National Medical Commission (NMC) was granted the coveted World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) Recognition Status for a tenure of 10 years.
Owing to the new recognition, all of the 706 existing medical colleges will become WFME accredited while the new medical colleges which will be set up in the next 10 years will automatically become WFME accredited.
According to a release by the Union Health Ministry, the accreditation will “increase the international recognition and reputation of Indian medical schools and professionals, facilitate academic collaborations and exchanges and promote continuous improvement and innovation in medical education, and foster a culture of quality assurance among medical educators and institutions.”
Meanwhile, Member of the Ethics and Medical Registration Board and Head Media Division at NMC, Dr. Yogender Malik said “WFME’s recognition underscores that the quality of medical education in India adheres to global standards. This accolade empowers our students with the opportunity to pursue their careers anywhere in the world, while also making India an attractive destination for international students due to our globally recognized standards.”
WFME is an international organization dedicated to enhancing the quality of medical education worldwide. The WFME accreditation programme helps play an important role in ensuring that the medical institutes meet and uphold the ‘highest standards of education and training’, a release by the Union Health Ministry noted.
Meanwhile, NMC is India’s premier regulatory body for overseeing medical education and practice in India and is responsible for delivering quality medical education and training across the country.
The post Indian medical graduates can now practice in countries like US, Canada and Australia, here’s what has changed first appeared on VOSA.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
Launched in 2021, Seaspire made waves last year after piloting its bio-printed whole-cut vegan snapper at foodservice locations in India and New Zealand. The company claimed its product was the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, and after positive consumer feedback in the trials, it’s now launching in e-commerce channels to present vegan seafood for home cooking applications.
But the products Seaspire has launched on the D2C channel don’t include the whole-cut snapper, which the company expects to continue exclusively in foodservice. “These outlets are highly niche, and we are doing these trials to validate the product use cases in food service,” Gadodia told Green Queen, adding that the snapper’s retail journey still has a few ways to go.
The D2C offerings are plant-based fish fingers, a fish burger and fish mince. The base of the innovations is made from eight ingredients, combining pea and rice protein (which also appears in powdered form) with water, sunflower oil, salt, psyllium husk and algal extracts. The burger and fingers have an additional crumb coating made from wheat flour, spices and condiments.
Gadodia said these ingredients come from multiple sources – “some through leading ingredients houses, and some are proprietary ingredients”. “We are currently outsourcing manufacturing of our commercial products to a leading food manufacturer in India,” he added. “Going forward, we will be looking at decentralising manufacturing based on target markets.”
Seaspire decided to launch into retail after realising that “the early adopters are looking to get these products easily available at their doorsteps”. Gadodia said the company figured this out via some pop-up events. “Essentially, these three products will be still part of the foodservice channel, as we aim to establish multiple use-case applications in regional and continental cuisines,” he confirmed.
But the new products are limited to online stores. “Physical retail is yet not a promising channel in India, what we have learned observing other brands,” explained Gadodia. “There is a huge inventory cost in the supply chain for physical distribution, and [it] is not viable corresponding to market adoption.”
He added that Seaspire’s increased market presence will help it establish commercial bandwidth and introduce further whole-cut plant-based seafood products, which are set to be launched in Q1 2024: “We are already testing our cold-cut fillets of plant-based fish with leading foodservice in business, and hoping to follow [the] pilot exercise for [a] few months until their launch next year.” Moreover, he confirmed that the startup is working on vegan shrimp as it is “in high demand in foodservice” (it may not launch in retail, however).
Seaspire describes the Asia-Pacific region as an “untapped opportunity” for vegan seafood, and while the company has already been operating in India, New Zealand has expanded its B2B presence to Australia and the UAE, it has earmarked Singapore as a potential market for its products too.
Gadodia alluded to a challenging fundraising market and said that while Seaspire hasn’t raised funds from an institutional round, it has been supported by accelerator financing and grants in India and New Zealand. “In a tough funding environment like today, we feel we are fortunate that we are able to optimise [our] business to a great extent, and still deliver good products and access markets,” he explained.
When asked if Seaspire planned to fundraise, he added: “It takes a lot to work with very limited capital. However, it’s very important to stay true to the fundamentals of business and improve cash flows for a better and sustainable business model.”
In terms of its home market, Gadodia noted that India has seen a modest rise in vegan consumption post-pandemic. A report by the country’s Plant Based Foods Industry Association (PBFIA) in May found that veganism has become “increasingly popular” over the last five years in India, with “more than 2% of people actively identifying as vegan”. A December 2021 survey by leading food company Kerry found that 63% of Indians would be willing to buy plant-based products regularly, with 60% not deterred by higher price tags.
However, Gadodia said that higher consumption of vegan food is restricted to “tier one” cities, which would include metropolises like New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. “Tier two” cities are witnessing a rise in traditional plant proteins, he added. “We have also observed that positioning ‘plant-based’ or ‘vegetarian’ protein is much more acceptable in the consumer space than ‘vegan’. Vegan connotations are seemingly turning off a potential audience.”
It aligns with previous research in other markets that highlights what term consumers prefer. A July 2022 ProVeg International survey covering the UK found that respondents were most likely to pick products labelled ‘plant-based’ or ‘veggie’, and least likely to do so with labels that read ‘vegan’ or ‘meatless’. In the US, too, the Plant Based Foods Association found that there’s a stronger preference for the terms ‘plant-based’ and ‘dairy-free’ compared to ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’.
“More than vegan consumption, consumers tend to follow vegetarian diets,” Gadodia added. While there are conflicting figures about the number of vegetarians in India, estimates put it between 20-40%. Even at the lower end, that figure is about 280 million – that’s more than double the entire population of the second-highest on the list, Mexico.
Moreover, eight in 10 Indians say they are reducing meat. Gadodia said targeting just vegans and flexitarians is “only scratching the surface”: “The bigger opportunity is inclusive of all consumers such as vegetarians who are looking for healthy and tasty foods.”
He added: “The Indian consumer space is very complex, and there’s no straight pattern as regional diversity and economics play a huge role in food choices. In general, the demand for protein sources is steadily growing, and many consumers are looking for alternative options to supplement their protein needs. As a thumb rule, India is still a traditional market and consumers rely on regional food preparations. Thus taste, local flavours in preparation and cost parity are crucial [for growth].”
While India’s per capita consumption of fish is below the global average – which makes sense given its large vegetarian population – it still ranks among the largest seafood exporters in the world. The PBFIA report explains that as plant-based meat consumption in India “continues to grow, demand for alternative seafood is also expected to increase”. Apart from Seaspire, other brands offering plant-based seafood products in India include Mister Veg, VegetaGold, Veggie Champ and The Mighty Food.
Alternative seafood, Gadodia said, is imperative to cope with the rising demand, as well as tackle climate change: “We aim to leverage traditional channels to supplement with alternative seafood products. Seafood in general is a highly fragmented category, and testing alternative seafood in a traditional market like India will provide us with a strong footing to establish product market fit.”
So far, he noted that consumer response has been positive: “We have definitely managed to outgrow the consumer perception of plant-based products still not [being] quite there. Moreover, consumers have seen a lot of plant-based chicken or deli meats, but seafood is still scarce and that adds [to] the curiosity too.”
Seaspire hopes to “trail the path of technology innovation that can promote growth and adoption of alternative seafood”, said Gadodia. He also hinted that the key to success for alt-seafood in India could be in the confluence of plant-based and cultivated proteins. “More specifically, we believe the category will be unleashed by the rise of biotech-driven solutions – [like] cell-based and synthetic biology – and aim to develop enabling technologies or solutions for hybrid seafood alternatives.”
It involves mixing plant-based proteins with cell-cultured ones to produce a hybrid alternative to meat and seafood. So far, the only company working with cultivated seafood in India is Klevermeat. But as a whole, Asia has a number of food tech firms making strides in this space.
The post ‘Hybrid Could Unleash Alt-Seafood’: Vegan Fish Startup Seaspire on Indian Consumers, Launching in Foodservice and Why Retail Isn’t Viable Yet appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
Indian Navy’s P-8I fleet maintains exceptional mission readiness with more than 40,000 flight hours. Boeing projects a potential $3.2 billion economic impact by 2032. Boeing highlighted the substantial indigenization achieved in the manufacturing and sustainment of its P-8I maritime surveillance aircraft and briefed media on the outlook for the platform, suggesting an increase in investment […]
The post Boeing Outlines Aatmanirbhar Bharat Future for P-8I appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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The Green Tuesday Initiative helps corporations and educational institutions tackle climate change by offering more plant-based food at their dining premises. Over the last five years, the campaign has helped prevent over 3.3 million lbs of animal products from being served at more than 40 institutions in India. Now, it hopes to extend this impact to Vietnam, one of the world’s top five most vulnerable countries to climate change.
The Southeast Asian country’s two biggest cities, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, are among the 15 most polluted cities in the region. And its dependence on fossil fuels for energy use – which are already responsible for 60% of its total greenhouse gas emissions – is set to triple by 2030. Meanwhile, higher temperatures, rising sea levels and more extreme weather events can cut the nation’s economic growth by 10%, and adversely affect 12% of its population.
On top of that, Vietnamese people are eating too much meat – twice as much as the recommended amount. In fact, a report published in July found that the country will need to switch to 40% of alternative proteins in its diet by 2060 if it is to decarbonise.
And with meat consumption intrinsically linked to climate change – a landmark study earlier this year found that vegan diets can cut emissions, land use and water pollution by 75% compared to a meat-rich one – the Green Tuesday Initiative is aiming to reduce the presence on animal products in the country’s eating habits, and add more plant-based options to institution menus.
“Vietnam and many other Asian countries are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Choosing to serve more climate-friendly food would be the first step in understanding and reducing the impact of food on the planet and people’s health,” says Bhavya Vatrapu, senior campaigns manager for Green Tuesday Initiative.
“The Initiative delivers on seven UN Sustainable Development Goals, and aligns with Vietnam’s methane reduction goals and Climate and Clean Air Coalition commitments. We look forward to working with corporate organisations and educational institutions in Vietnam towards building a green and abundant future for all.
“Vietnam, like India, is extremely vulnerable to the threats of climate change, and has committed to reducing its methane emissions on priority,” says Samarth Amarnani, communications coordinator at Vegan Outreach. “Also, we’ve witnessed great excitement for our flagship 10 Weeks to Vegan programme amongst youth in Vietnam. This means that there is a passionate and growing community of people inclined to shift towards a plant-based diet.”
Amarnani says the initiative has reached out to 100 institutions, and confirms that many have expressed interest in the campaign. “While we do have some potential institutions in the pipeline, we do not have any official partners there currently,” he adds.
Climate activism has been a major point of contention in Vietnam. The country has a history of arresting environmental campaigns on what many have described as bogus claims. The June arrest of Hoang Thi Minh Honh, former CEO of the non-profit Change, prompted a further outcry. Two others, Mai Phan Loi and Bach Hung Duong, have also been imprisoned, while another activist, Hoang Thi Minh Hong, is awaiting sentencing.
So while the country has committed to reducing its methane emissions and net-zero by 2050, there are questions over the government’s motivations, given the growing list of political prisoners. Asked if Green Tuesday had been in touch with officials, Amarnani says: “We have just started our campaign in Vietnam. So far, we have not yet had any interaction with the Vietnamese government.” (He also confirms that the campaign in India hasn’t “faced any resistance or restriction from the government”.)
The campaign aims to replace about 44,000 lbs of animal products with plant-based food by the end of 2023, and it will do so via a combination of participating institutions going completely vegan, or reducing their meat options every Tuesday. “Our partnership with institutions is based on a long-term vision of progressive diet change,” notes Amarnani. “We have had great success in India with institutions renewing and deepening their commitment by serving more healthy plant-based meals each year. The institutions define their own food sustainability goals, and we help them achieve those.”
While Vietnam’s poverty rate was at 4.2% last year, without mitigation measures, up to one million of its population could be in extreme poverty by 2030. Are there any concerns about the price of vegan food for this initiative to work? “We have observed that in many major Asian countries, several traditional dishes happen to be plant-based, which makes implementing our campaign cost-effective,” explains Amarnani. “We have helped our partners in India achieve their food sustainability objectives without any additional costs to the institution. Our approach for Vietnam is the same.”
Vegan Outreach hopes to expand to even more countries in the future. “We have long-term expansion goals for Green Tuesday Initiative,” says Amarnani, adding: “For now, however, we are focusing our energy and resources on establishing ourselves as a successful food sustainability campaign in Vietnam.”
The post Can the Green Tuesday Cafeteria Campaign Help Vietnam Lower Its Meat Emissions? appeared first on Green Queen.
New York: The South Asian community in New York staged a protest demonstration seeking justice to Jaahnavi Kandula, an Indian-origin student who was allegedly killed by a police vehicle in the American state of Seattle.
Ms Kandula, 23, was allegedly hit by a police vehicle driven by an officer when she was crossing a street on January 23. He was driving at 74 mph (more than 119 kmh) on the way to a report of a drug overdose call, as per a report that appeared on NDTV.
The protest was held at the Diversity Plaza in New York.
The participants held a candlelight vigil and raised slogans in memory of Jaahnavi Kandula.
The protesters demanded the government to bring those responsible for Jaahnavi’s death to justice.
The South Asian community living in New York is saddened and depressed over the alleged death of Indian-origin student Jaahnavi Kandula. after being hit by a speeding police vehicle.
Not only Indian Hindu Sikhs participated in this demonstration, but Pakistani, Nepali and other community members also participated and recorded their protest.
The speakers said that this incident cannot be ignored by declaring it as an accident, the police officer involved in illegal speeding should be dealt with according to the law.
The protestors were carrying banners, placards and pictures of Jaahnavi in their hands. The speakers said that Jaahnavi was a bright and capable student, the government is demanded to fulfill the requirements of justice in this case.
The protesters further said that if legal action is not taken against the police officer involved in this incident, then we should understand that the justice system has died in this society.
The post Demo held as probe continues into death of Indian-origin student in NYC first appeared on VOSA.
New York: The South Asian community in New York staged a protest demonstration seeking justice to Jaahnavi Kandula, an Indian-origin student who was allegedly killed by a police vehicle in the American state of Seattle.
Ms Kandula, 23, was allegedly hit by a police vehicle driven by an officer when she was crossing a street on January 23. He was driving at 74 mph (more than 119 kmh) on the way to a report of a drug overdose call, as per a report that appeared on NDTV.
The protest was held at the Diversity Plaza in New York.
The participants held a candlelight vigil and raised slogans in memory of Jaahnavi Kandula.
The protesters demanded the government to bring those responsible for Jaahnavi’s death to justice.
The South Asian community living in New York is saddened and depressed over the alleged death of Indian-origin student Jaahnavi Kandula. after being hit by a speeding police vehicle.
Not only Indian Hindu Sikhs participated in this demonstration, but Pakistani, Nepali and other community members also participated and recorded their protest.
The speakers said that this incident cannot be ignored by declaring it as an accident, the police officer involved in illegal speeding should be dealt with according to the law.
The protestors were carrying banners, placards and pictures of Jaahnavi in their hands. The speakers said that Jaahnavi was a bright and capable student, the government is demanded to fulfill the requirements of justice in this case.
The protesters further said that if legal action is not taken against the police officer involved in this incident, then we should understand that the justice system has died in this society.
The post Demo held as probe continues into death of Indian-origin student in NYC first appeared on VOSA.
Airbus Defence and Space has officially handed over in fly-away condition the first of 56 C295 aircraft to the Indian Air Force (IAF) to begin replacing its ageing Avros-748 fleet. The C295, in transport configuration and with an indigenous electronic warfare suite, will leave Airbus’ production site in Seville, Spain, for Delhi, India, in the […]
The post Airbus delivers first C295 to India appeared first on Asian Military Review.
In December 1954, the African American novelist Richard Wright, then living in Paris, happened to idly pick up a newspaper. He later wrote in his book The Color Curtain that what he saw in that newspaper so “baffled” him that he had to read the news item twice: 29 free and independent nations of Asia and Africa were planning to meet in Bandung, Indonesia, “to discuss racialism and colonialism.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.