[PEN-L:30081] Support for Vandana Shiva

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood says that he heard that she has no support in India from
anti-globalization activists. I find this highly unlikely since she is an
iconic figure for exactly this movement. He does accurately cite
Ulhas,  but his political agenda is utterly hostile to traditional farming.
(I myself would have looked to a more impartial authority.) In any case,
this article should give you a better idea about the strength of the
peasant resistance movement in India and what Vandana Shiva means to it.

The Guardian (London), March 11, 1994

SEEDS OF DISCONTENT; Why is Prof M.D. Najundaswami, left, leading a
10-million strong peasants' revolt? As the Gatt deal on world trade nears
its formal signing, protests against it are intensifying. Rural farmers in
developing nations say their very survival is at stake

BY WALTER SCHWARZ

A GAUNT, Gandhi-like figure has emerged in South India as leader of a
mighty peasants' revolt. He sees himself as fighting for the survival of
rural peoples threatened by the industrialisation and globalisation of
agriculture, and his voice is being heard throughout the sub-continent and
other developing countries.

The immediate grievance of Professor M.D. Najundaswami and the 10 million
members of his Karnataka Farmers Union is the powers just given to
multinational seed merchants in the latest round of Gatt, the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. When the Uruguay Round of the Gatt is
finally signed next month, the companies will be able to enforce copyright
on scientifically improved seeds.

In theory, this means farmers will no longer be allowed to gather seeds
from these crops, but will have to buy them each year from seed companies.
Many of these seeds depend on chemicals for growth. All this, Najundaswami
says, will lead to a monopoly for agribusiness, requiring farmers to spend
heavily on chemical fertilisers and pesticides (usually sold by the same
companies). It could, he says, threaten the livelihoods of all but rich
farmers. And India is made up of small farmers. "Our farms are our last
refuge," says Najundaswami. "If we are driven off them we suffer
extermination. What is happening in sub-Saharan Africa will happen here."

Najundaswami, a former professor of law, won a seat in the Karnataka State
Assembly last year and hopes his movement will dominate state politics
after elections in November. It will, he says, be bigger than Gandhi's
independence freedom struggle ' 'when the fight against cultural
imperialism eventually spreads from the rural to the urban areas."

His 14-year-old union is run as a grassroots movement and is setting the
political pace in 12 of Karnataka state's 19 districts. Members pay dues
only to local branches; there are no central funds. Members belong to all
castes and religions. At demonstrations, illiterate farmers mingle with
academics and researchers.

The farmers have shown impressive muscle. On Gandhi's birthday, October 2,
over 500,000 assembled in Bangalore to hear protests from across the
developing world. Najundaswami has been feted in Paris by anti-Gatt French
farmers and has addressed a rally in Geneva.

The action burst into a rare episode of violence when members ransacked the
Bangalore offices of Cargill, the world's largest seed company and food
merchant, in which they see the main threat. Next week, the farmers will
join unions from other Indian states in a mass lobby of Parliament in Delhi
against ratification of the Gatt agreement.

Their central target is the "intellectual property rights" awarded to
companies by the new Gatt rules, which threaten to stop them trading in
seeds among themselves. Defying Gatt in their "seed satyagraha"
(non-violent Gandhian struggle) the farmers are setting up co-operatives to
develop, store and exchange their own seeds.

The seed merchants and government officials promise the real effects of
Gatt will be less drastic and there is much confusion about what the rules
will mean in practice. Legislation has still to be drafted and protestors
claim growing sympathy among officials and MPs who cannot ignore the rural
vote.

Nobody denies the Gatt text forces every country to introduce a patent law
or an "effective" substitute to protect plant breeders' rights. John
Hamilton, the Cargill manager in Bangalore, says his company has no
intention of taking out patents on seeds because these were costly and
ineffective. But he confirmed the companies will "not tolerate" rival sales
of seed varieties they claim to have originated.

Hybrid seeds sold by companies are sterile, cannot be resown after the
first harvest and must therefore be repurchased every year. Rather than
becoming perpetual clients of monopolistic companies, the farmers plan to
produce their own hybrids.

But non-hybrids can be replanted and farmers say their time-honoured
methods of trading such seeds after each harvest are now under threat.
Under the new GATT rules, companies can sue farmers for selling seeds from
their own fields when these are claimed as derivatives of protected seeds.
Astonishingly, the rules place the onus of proof in case of dispute on the
farmers, a provision going against normal rules of justice which has caused
particular anger. Such seeds are not primitive, the farmers insist. They
represent centuries of improvement and adaptation to local conditions and
have been developed for mixed, sustainable agriculture.

Imported "miracle seeds", by contrast, have a waning reputation in India.
"People bought them under pressure of salesmanship but they are
disillusioned," Najundaswami says. "They require very costly inputs, yields
are often much lower than advertised and very often lower than our own seeds."

Traditional farming is cost-effective, he says, because it needs fewer
inputs and less water and provides its own organic manure without cost, on
fields where a variety of food and fodder crops can share the same space.

Behind this grievance is deeper disillusion with the famed "Green
Revolution" which brought India from chronic food deficit to surplus in the
sixties. Shivaram Hutchaia, a union member in Mandia district, said yields
of Cargill sunflower seeds had been "a disaster", while organic production
of rice, sorghum, wheat and sugar cane had broken records.

Second thoughts on the Green Revolution are now official. At an Asian
regional conference of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation last year,
senior officials admitted reliance on inputs of inorganic fertiliser and
pesticide was not sustainable ecologically or economically, due to rising
costs, falling yields, soil deterioration and resistance to insecticides.

Yields were falling by up to 3 per cent a year in some green revolution
areas, a situation described as "a recipe for disaster in one generation"
by the FAO's pest control officer, Peter Kenmore. The regional
representative for Asia, Obaidullah Khan, admitted the apparent benefits of
monocrop agriculture had been overestimated and the productivity of
traditionally grown varieties understated.

Najundaswami's fear of "extermination" is heightened by the experience in
the Punjab and other green-revolution states, where only richer farmers
could afford irrigation and other inputs. The result was that millions of
poor peasants and labourers were shifted off the land into city slums.

He is convinced India would have fared better under Gandhi's village-based
development model than Nehru's ambitious, state-planned industrialisation
which meant "building a superstructure without a foundation," he says. "We
now have the final stage of the process: the current craze for trade
liberalisation and globalisation. This is not right for India; we have not
solved the problems of our own people."

The farmers' union has a powerful international voice in Vandana Shiva,
India's best-known ecologist, a physicist who conducts a crusade against
destructive industrial farming (see below).

From her research centres in Bangalore and Dehra Dun in the Himalayan
foothills north of Delhi, she co-ordinates the movement in different states
and advises the Indian government in drafting its Gatt legislation, urging
as much leniency as is compatible with the agreement.

A change in official thinking could still be forced by the spread of the
farmers' movement to the vast state of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous
and the most politically sensitive, she says. She feels that she is winning
her case and in the waning of the Green Revolution she sees hope for the
return of sound farming.

She hopes that argument will soon sound like good political sense. "After
all, the states of India can only survive if the farming communities
survive. The seed protest will look like Gandhi's salt marches, against an
outrageous tax on something that should be free.

"We are asking, for the first time in jurisprudence, that traditional
communities' innovation will be recognised in law. If we don't suceed we'll
call all the 700 million farmers to defy the Gatt ruling, just like the
salt march."

Her favourite symbol for the West's commercialisation of traditional wisdom
is the humble neem tree (one grows on her lawn), which for centuries has
been used for its medicinal and insecticidal properties. Neem products are
to be extracted by a multinational company in a factory near Bangalore -
protected by patents under Gatt rules.

Vandana Shiva sees Gatt attacking "the free domain, where abundance gets
created in nature. You plant one seed and you get a tree which will produce
millions of seeds. But if the seed is a commodity and it is patented, then
there is no free regeneration. Such new technology is creating a system of
scarcity, it is blocking the multiplying and regenerating powers of nature.
So we are creating a system of poverty which will destitute farmers."

Yet the farmers' protest is being heard by officials and government
experts. Resistance to multinationals has a nationalist resonance which
appeals to them, and agriculture officials have long been worried about the
unstainability of the green revolution and have shown a new interest in
organic farming.

Karnataka's Agriculture Secretary, BS Patel, agreed that yields on paper
could no longer be the criterion of success. "A farmer needs food for his
own consumption, even if his crops do not show the highest yields. Existing
varieties of seeds are often as productive, or more so, than commercially
improved seeds."

At Bangalore's Agricultural University the chief Extension Officer, HS
Hannumanthappa, called for a compromise. "We cannot do away with artificial
fertiliser and go all organic but the biomass must be built up again
through organic methods. We have to stop overdoing the tillage through
mechanisation that pulverises the soil.

"Three quarters of our land is dry and must be farmed as such, and small
farmers are 70 per cent of the total: we need to see things their way. A
beautiful seed from the companies' point of view can be very unattractive
for the farmer."

The Gatt lobby counters that India's still-rising population condemns
traditional agriculture because it does not produce a big enough surplus.
But Najundaswami points out that excessively large families are only a
defence against poverty, a problem that could be addressed by "real
development, with means of production not concentrated in the hands of the
few and technology that uses the available manpower."

At the union's research centre in Bangalore, native seeds are grown for
storage, development and distribution. Vanaja Ram-Prasad, who runs it, said
farmers' movements used to be concerned with demonstrating against
inadequate subsidies. "Now they are looking beyond subsidies to the real
problems. We probably won't be able to reverse the trends in the short run
but we can slow the momentum and hope for better times."

Meanwhile the Gatt momentum gathers pace. There are reports of a Dutch plan
"to help organic agriculture" and boost trade at the same time - by
exporting cow dung to India. Farmers' Union supporters in Delhi point out
that India's 200 million cows and buffaloes produce quite enough for the
sub-continent.

But no-one, thanks to the Gatt, can stop the cowdung being imported


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org