[PEN-L:2435] Shiva is immaterial to this list

[Gina Neff <ginasue@xxxxxxxxx>]

While I'll leave to others to scuffle over the
"cultural/religious resonance" of Vandana Shiva, I must otherwise
take issue with prolix post of Colin Danby, and S. Charusheela.

Rural credit markets in India are characterized by the
exploitation of power relationships  -- particularly at the
"village" level, i.e. between peasants with larger land holdings
and peasants who are sharecroppers or have smaller holdings.
Rural credit tends to be linked to exploitation in other markets
(also known as interlinked credit markets) but changing the mode
of production from capitalist to a quasi-feudal or subsistence
one will not will not eliminate this kind of usary.  That,
simply, was my point, which I made poorly in my first post.
Pranab Bardhan and Ashok Rudra make the point better than I:  See
_Agrarian Relations in West Bengal_ and _On the Interlinkage of
Land, Labour, and Credit Relations in Agriculture_.

Productive credit -- defined in the literature as credit for
engaging in the production of agricultural goods-- has been
targeted by microenterprise and government lending programs
(albeit with mixed effectiveness).  What I find interesting is
that "unproductive credit" (and, by that, I *only* mean credit
for activities which don't produce agricultural goods) still
remains a problem in many villages. Rather than revive either the
colonial argument (undoubtedly the only half of the argument that
Polly Hill refers to) of prosperity and consumption as the roots
of indebtedness or the Indian nationalist argument of state revenue
demand as the source of peasant indebtedness, I merely would want
to point out that credit for "unproductive" activities is still
problematic for peasants in interlinked credit markets. If S.
Charusheela and Colin Danby think that the 21% per annum US
consumers plop down for the privilege of Visa Credit is
"extortionate" then what would they call 20% or 50% *per month*
(240% - 600% per annum) which is commonplace in many villages?

My reference to "backward" agriculture was a tip of the hat to
Amit Bhaduri and his book _The Economic Structure of Backward
Agriculture_, considered a classic in the rural economic
development literature.  Forgive me for not placing the quotation
marks of irony around the word and for making an obscure
reference.

"Subsistence" used to be a dirty word. The localist
anti-globalization gang bore me with their apolitics.
Instinctively, I find something revolting about privileged people
preaching simplicity as the way to economic salvation and I
would much rather have the work of Bina Agarwal (_Structures of
Patriarch: State, Community, and Household in Modernising Asia_
and the paper with Amartya Sen on intrahousehold resource
allocation, Cambridge Journal of Economics?) or Utsa Patnaik
(_The agrarian question and the development of capitalism in
India_  and _Chains of Servitude: bondage and slavery in India_)
discussed here.


Gina Neff
ginasue@xxxxxxxxx