[Marxism] Food and South Asia's Future

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 www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041108E.shtml

 Food and South Asia's Future
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Friday 11 April 2008

    The way to the political future of three major
 South Asian countries now lies through the stomachs of
 their poor millions. Escalating food prices may have
 far-reaching consequences for India, Pakistan and
 Bangladesh, each of which is currently passing through
 a crucial political phase.
    The region might have been spared food riots of
 the kind to have rocked some African and Latin
 American nations in recent days. South Asia, however,
 is still a victim of the global food crisis hitting
 the headlines everywhere.
    Especially distressing for developing countries
 have been the consequences of a shift in the farming
 paradigm dictated by the advanced world's quest for
 alternative fuels. Billed originally as a boon for the
 hungry of the earth, biofuels have actually spelled
 crop preferences that have proven cruel to the
 intended or imaginary beneficiaries.
    The switch by tens of thousands of farmers in the
 US over the past two years from food to fuel
 production (on eight million hectares that provided
 mainly wheat, maize and soya crops earlier), with
 Europe and other regions following suit, has not meant
 fuller stomachs in either South America or far-off
 African and Asian areas. Experts agree climate change,
 entailing erratic rainfall, has compounded the crisis.
    International agencies insist they are acutely
 conscious of the crisis, and the United Nations
 proposes conferences and promises concerted measures
 on the energy and environmental issues involved. The
 South Asians, however, can hardly afford to wait for
 such efforts to bear fruit. For them, the shortage of
 food and the spiral of its prices can have a political
 fallout of fundamental importance.
    In India, a sudden and sharp spurt in food prices
 pushed up a long-contained rate of inflation from 5
 percent to 7 percent over weeks after the country's
 annual budget was presented at the end of March.
 Grains, constituting the staple food of Indians, are
 threatening to go out of the common man's reach. The
 government has had to impose a ban on the export of
 wheat, consumed especially in the country's
 northwestern states. The price of rice, on which about
 65 percent of the population subsists, has gone up by
 about 33 percent on average.
    Even in New Delhi, the seat of power and the city
 of subsidies, edible oils cost 40 percent more, and
 milk is dearer by 11 percent. Vegetables and fruit
 have also recorded a whopping rise in prices across
 the country. What makes the figures significant is the
 fact, despite all talk of India's economic miracle, 75
 percent of Indians earn less than two US dollars a
 day.
    In Pakistan, the prices of "atta" (wheat flour,
 the ingredient of the poor Pakistani's daily bread)
 have been increasing rapidly, with no measures to halt
 the rise announced even in Prime Minister Yousaf Raza
 Gillani's "100-day program." In January, the
 government had to reintroduce a ration-card system,
 abandoned earlier as part of avowed economic reforms.
 The situation today is such that government agencies
 have, reportedly, to keep a strict eye on food trucks.
    In Bangladesh, prices of rice and other essential
 food items have nearly doubled over the last year. The
 average family is today constrained to spend about 80
 percent of its monthly budget on food. According to
 one report, the poor families make do with a single
 meal a day. The situation might have gotten worse but
 for New Delhi agreeing, possibly for non-humanitarian
 reasons, to keep India's commitment, despite its own
 distress, to export rice to Bangladesh.
    Critics in all the three countries have dismissed
 the claim about the crisis as an entirely
 international phenomenon and drawn attention to the
 internal factors behind it. They have a point. In
 India, while the government boasts about the economy's
 growth at a rate of about 8.5 percent, agriculture has
 grown by no more than 2.5 percent over the past five
 years. Given that farming still supports the majority
 of India's workforce, this shows a gross imbalance in
 the country's development strategy.
    Similarly, in Pakistan, the otherwise inconclusive
 debate on the issue reveals a large degree of
 agreement that the crisis is also a legacy of former
 Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, with his background as a
 top Citibank executive and his baggage of elitist
 economics. Besides the floods and the cyclone that hit
 Bangladesh last year, the unconcern of the army-backed
 government in Dhaka has aggravated the problem. The
 famous anti-corruption campaign by the caretaker
 regime has made it worse, by most accounts, leading to
 the closure of many unofficial rice supply outlets
 without providing legal substitutes.
    Popular protests were inevitable in all three
 countries. In India, the price spiral has elicited
 calls for agitations not only from the main opposition
 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but also from the left
 that has lent support to Prime Minister Manmohan
 Singh's government from outside. The price rise would
 appear to have largely offset the political gain for
 the government from the waiver of 15 billion-dollar
 bank loans to farmers announced in the March budget.
    In Pakistan, the movement of lawyers against
 Pervez Musharaff might not have acquired mass support
 but for the Mundane issue of "atta" prices. Insightful
 reports have pointed out the prices issue influenced
 Pakistan's electorate as much as the question of
 democracy and dictatorship. The Gillani government
 cannot afford to forget the issue retains grave
 importance for the people. In Bangladesh, too, food
 prices carried further the pro-democracy protests of
 August 2007, in Dhaka University, with the city's poor
 joining the students and teachers, and with the unrest
 spreading to other urban centers as well.
    At stake in the food crisis is the political
 future of each country. Food prices have dislodged
 political parties and fronts from power in the states
 as well as the federal level, more than once in the
 past. History can be repeated in this regard only as a
 tragedy. The BJP today represents a far-right that is
 straining to move farther right (as we have seen in
 these columns before) ...
    Unchecked "atta" prices will pose a serious danger
 to the democratic experiment in Pakistan. Drawing
 attention to the danger, the Lahore-based Daily Times
 notes the fall in this year's farm output and warns,
 "... we could be looking at an even bigger shortage of
 flour in the country once again. Therefore, given our
 inability to deploy a system of special distribution
 for sections of population directly affected by this
 shortage, one can say that the masses are likely to
 become quickly disenchanted with the new government."
    In Bangladesh. too, the current food crisis,
 considered the worst after the famine of 1974, cannot
 continue without serious political consequences. The
 two major political parties, the Awami League and the
 Bangladesh Nationalist Party, have threatened to
 launch protest actions against the continued detention
 of the leaders Sheikh Hasina Wajed and Begum Khaleda
 Zia. Food prices can provide popular fuel to such
 protests. It is hard to see how the military-backed
 regime - which has just given Army Chief Moeen U Ahmed
 a one-year extension until June 15, 2009, to ensure
 his august presence at the helm at the due time of
 elections in December 2008 - will handle such
 protests.
    There is no easy or early solution to the problem
 of food prices in sight, of course. But the growth of
 hunger may bring no happy tidings for those who wish
 democracy and peace for South Asia.

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A freelance journalist and a peace activist in
 India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint"
 (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular
 contributor to Truthout.

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