India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
June 2022 marks 60 years since the publication of Rachel Carson’s iconic book ‘Silent Spring’, that documented the adverse impact of indiscriminate use of pesticides on the environment. Since then, Monsanto has mounted a deceitful defence of its health- and environment-damaging pesticides and orchestrated toxic smear campaigns against Carson and other scientist campaigners.
The vast majority of ‘COVID deaths’ are people with serious, ongoing health conditions. And a lot of these health-related problems can be traced back to modern farming methods and how food is cultivated, not least the toxic agrochemicals used.
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.
The UN Food Systems Summit, including a ‘pre-summit’, is facilitating global corporatisation of agriculture. To mobilise against it, more than 300 global organisations of small-scale food producers, researchers and indigenous peoples are organising a protest pre-summit.
In Mexico, as transnational companies have seized control of the country’s agriculture, the loss of food sovereignty has induced catastrophic changes to the nation’s diet and many small-scale farmers lost their livelihoods. It should serve as a warning to India, as that is what the three farm laws will lead to.
The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
In April, the Indian government signed a MoU with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. It seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which is going to displace farmers from their lands and enable corporations to gain control over Indian agriculture.
On 8 January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.
If you want to know the consequences of the three farm bills, look no further than Mexico, where similar policies have driven millions of farmers and small retailers into bankruptcy, and the country has lost its food sovereignty.
The recent farm bills will impose the neoliberal shock therapy of dispossession and dependency, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector. The massive inequalities and injustices that have resulted from the COVID-related lockdowns are a mere taste of what is to come.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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