The market and the monsoon - India

New Internationalist, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Katharine Ainger

Which is rather bad news for Vision 2020. You can't build export agriculture with small farms. You need large plantations and processing plants. How do you persuade India's fiercely independent farmers into this kind of farming?

Even if small farmers are left out of the contract-farming system entirely, there are related pressures to leave the land. According to a health worker in Kuppam, in a survey of the eight villages which have been taken over by BHC, 'there has been a huge decline in the ownership of livestock and cattle. People sold them because there is no land to graze them on.' Many of the lowest-caste workers look after livestock. 'All that land has been occupied by this company and none of the crops which are grown on that land are useful as fodder for livestock. So there's been a huge migration of people out to Bangalore because there is no work.'

'In my opinion,' he continues, 'this is also a way of displacing agricultural labour... Part of the technical assistance includes tractors, mechanization -- and you can carry out agriculture without having to hire any labour. At least 60 per cent of people in my villages are surviving because of agricultural labour. So if something like this comes in it really hits our livelihoods.'

The people's verdict

It's not that they are opposed to technological assistance per se -- as long as it enhances rather than destroys livelihoods.

Ramana is a shepherd from Chitoor. When I ask him whether he wouldn't be better off getting a job in the city, he replies: 'We have a saying here. The city is like a lover, and the countryside is like a mother. The city just takes -- the country always gives.'

Grand political visions, from Stalin's Five Year Plans for the glorious production of pig-iron to the World Bank's Structural Adjustment models of efficient economic liberalism, worry me. Any plan that doesn't take people -- where they live, what they know, what they need or want -- as its starting point is doomed never to deliver.

J Savitsiri is a forceful woman from an indigenous peoples' organization, Adivasi Adeka. She's clear who will be the losers from the project. 'This Vision 2020 may benefit some very lucky individuals amongst a whole class of adivasis. For the bulk of us, if we do come to cities, what work will we get except for washing someone else's cups and plates or domestic labour? This is not our vision, we have never been consulted. Let us develop our own vision, on our own terms!'

If there is to be an alternative vision it will have to come from the opposite direction -- that is, not from the top down but from the ground up.

Satheesh has been mobilizing with the Andhra Pradesh Coalition in Defence of Diversity, a group of over 100 NGOs and popular organizations. He says: 'Andhra Pradesh has a tradition of referenda, particularly in rural areas. We spoke to people in over 80 villages and we got up a petition of 100,000 people against Vision 2020. We gave it to the Government, but there was no response.'

In July 2001 a prajateerpu (literally, 'people's verdict') or citizen's jury of 24 predominantly dalit, female farmers heard evidence from a variety of witnesses -- from the Syngenta corporation to government officials to local NGOs -- in an attempt at democratic intervention.