{"id":34734,"date":"2021-02-11T03:26:40","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T03:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=161008"},"modified":"2021-02-11T03:26:40","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T03:26:40","slug":"farmers-protest-in-india-price-of-failure-will-be-immense-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/11\/farmers-protest-in-india-price-of-failure-will-be-immense-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmers\u2019 Protest in India: Price of Failure Will Be immense"},"content":{"rendered":"
Globally, there is an ongoing trend of a handful of big companies determining what food is grown, how it is grown, what is in it and who sells it. This model involves highly processed food adulterated with chemical inputs ending up in large near-monopoly supermarket chains or fast-food outlets that rely on industrial-scale farming.<\/p>\n
While the brands lining the shelves of giant retail outlets seem vast, a handful of food companies own these brands which, in turn, rely on a relatively narrow range of produce for ingredients. At the same time, this illusion of choice often comes at the expense of food security in poorer countries that were compelled to restructure their agriculture to facilitate agro-exports courtesy of the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and global agribusiness interests.<\/p>\n
In Mexico, transnational food retail and processing companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.<\/p>\n
Mexico\u2019s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition in 2012. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of overweight women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 25 to 35 per cent and the number of obese women in this age group increased from 9 to 37 per cent. Some 29 per cent of Mexican children between the ages of 5 and 11 were found to be overweight, as were 35 per cent of the youngsters between 11 and 19, while one in ten school age children experienced anaemia.<\/p>\n
Former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, concludes that trade policies had favoured a greater reliance on heavily processed and refined foods with a long shelf life rather than on the consumption of fresh and more perishable foods, particularly fruit and vegetables. He added that the overweight and obesity emergency that Mexico faces could have been avoided.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the non-profit organisation GRAIN reported<\/a> that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to the direct investment in food processing and a change in Mexico\u2019s retail structure (towards supermarkets and convenience stores) as well as the emergence of global agribusiness and transnational food companies in the country.<\/p>\n NAFTA eliminated rules preventing foreign investors from owning more than 49 per cent of a company. It also prohibited minimum amounts of domestic content in production and increased rights for foreign investors to retain profits and returns from initial investments. By 1999, US companies had invested 5.3 billion dollars in Mexico\u2019s food processing industry, a 25-fold increase in just 12 years.<\/p>\n US food corporations began to colonise the dominant food distribution networks of small-scale vendors, known as tiendas (corner shops). This helped spread nutritionally poor food as they allowed these corporations to sell and promote their foods to poorer populations in small towns and communities. By 2012, retail chains had displaced tiendas as Mexico\u2019s main source of food sales.<\/p>\n In Mexico, the loss of food sovereignty induced catastrophic changes to the nation\u2019s diet and many small-scale farmers lost their livelihoods, which was accelerated by the dumping of surplus commodities<\/a> (produced at below the cost of production due to subsidies) from the US. NAFTA rapidly drove millions of Mexican farmers, ranchers and small business people into bankruptcy, leading to the flight of millions of immigrant workers.<\/p>\n Warning for India<\/strong><\/p>\n What happened in Mexico should serve as a warning as Indian farmers continue their protest against three recent farm bills that are designed to fully corporatize the agrifood sector through contract farming, the massive roll-back of public sector support systems, a reliance on imports (boosted by a future US trade deal) and the acceleration of large-scale (online) retail.<\/p>\n If you want to know the eventual fate of India\u2019s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019<\/a>. He stated that Amazon had \u201cdestroyed the retail industry across the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n And if you want to know the eventual fate of India\u2019s farmers, look no further than the 1990s when the IMF and World Bank advised India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture in return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time.<\/p>\n India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops for export to earn foreign exchange. Part of the strategy would also involve changing land laws so that land could be sold and amalgamated for industrial-scale farming.<\/p>\n The plan was for foreign corporations to capture the sector, with the aforementioned policies having effectively weakened or displaced independent cultivators.<\/p>\n To date, this process has been slow but the recent legislation could finally deliver a knock-out blow to tens of millions of farmers and give what the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midlands, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and the global agritech, seed and agrochemical corporations have wanted all along. It will also serve the retail\/agribusiness\/logistics interests of India\u2019s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, and its sixth richest, Gautam Adani.<\/p>\n