Food Sovereignty is the first freedom

Food is fundamental right. It is the basis of the Right to Life enshrined in Art 21 of our constitution.

Food Sovereignty is being sovereign in our food – as individuals, as communities, as countries.

Food is a system. Food Sovereignty is a systemic sovereignty that is rooted in every dimension of life and every aspect of governance and law.

It is based on Land Sovereignty, Seed Sovereignty, Knowledge Sovereignty, Economic Sovereignty.

It includes regulatory systems that protect the land and land rights, biodiversity and seed rights, knowledge and knowledge rights, and production and distribution systems that protect the rights of farmers and producers, and the rights of citizens to adequate, affordable, culturally appropriate, safe and healthy food. It includes growing food that is nutritionally rich and culturally appropriate.

Destruction of Food Sovereignty was central to colonialism. Food continues to be central to contemporary empires.

Food Imperialism

Kissinger had said “Food is a Weapon”. Creating food dependence by destroying food sovereignty is the ultimate war.

Colonialism was based on land grab, extractivism through lagaan (rents/taxes), the destruction of peasant livelihoods, and a legacy of famine.

Before colonialism, in India and indigenous cultures across the world, land was a commons, not private property. As Dharampal has reported, the village community had supremacy over land and its use. The local community was the highest competent authority which made decisions on land use. The right to use land was permanent and hereditary as decided by custom and practice.

The British violently destroyed our diverse, decentralised, democratic, self governance community structures governing customary practice of land rights and land use rights and imposed private property rights by institutionalising Zamindari, or landlordism.

As Sir WW Hunter wrote in the Imperial Gazetteer,

“The Indian Government is not a mere tax collecting agency, charged with the single duty of protecting person and property. Its system of administration is based upon the view that the British power is a paternal despotism, which owns, in a certain sense, the entire soil of the country.”

In one stroke of a pen in 1793, Lord Cornwallis through the permanent settlement, dispossessed the peasantry, tied 20 million small and marginal farmers and peasants into bondage to Zamindars / landlords created by the British to extract genocidal lagaan (taxes/rents).[1]

A piece of paper issued in England allowed India’s rich economy and culture to be grabbed by a few merchant adventurers. The East India company,through violence, took over the flourishing trade in spices and textiles which made India 25% of the global economy. By the time the British left we had been reduced to 2%, and a land riddled by famines and poverty

According to Utsa Patnaik, “the scars of colonisation remain despite Britain leaving India over 70 years ago. Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to 9.2 trillion pounds ($45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest.”

Patnaik said while people of India died due to malnutrition and several other diseases just like “flies”, the Britishers kept taking away hard-earned money of poor Indians. “Indian expectation of life at birth was just 22 years in 1911”, said Utsa. She said Britain exported foodgrains and imposed high taxes, which spread famine in India and reduced its purchasing power. As per the economist, per capita annual consumption of food, which was 200 kg in 1900, went down to 137 kg during World War II in 1946.[2]

$ 45 trillion had been transferred from India to England during British Colonialism. Between 40-60 million people died of famine in India during colonial rule.

Colonial extraction went hand in hand with extinguishing the rights of indigenous peoples to their land and resources, to their cultures and life itself.

When we became independent our policies were focussed on Food Sovereignty and Food Self Reliance. We got rid of zamindari and reestablished the preminence of Small Farmers. We ended hoarding and speculation for profits by creating the Essential Commodities Act which I would refer to as “Freedom from Famine” Act. We created fair price shops to guarantee food to all and fair prices for farmers by regulating the Mandis and Markets.

We reclaimed our food sovereignty, providing livelihood security for our small farmers, and food security for Indian citizens.

To build a post colonial, independent, hunger free India food security was identified as a key area for policy and programme intervention within the overall focus on poverty alleviation, gender equity and sustainable development. Food security would be meaningful in terms of adequate production and distribution of food to all both during normal times and in times of crisis.

Corporate Globalisation and Dysregulation as Recolonisation

The attempts at recolonisation began in 1991 with the Structural Adjustment of the World Bank and IMF, and the Dunkel Draft Text of the GATT, which became the WTO in 1995.

In the mid 1960s the World Bank and US government imposed the high cost chemical based Green Revolution, which is based on industrial chemical inputs. By the 1990s, India had a 90 billion debt, with one third of the debt related to loans for the Green Revolution infrastructure.

In 1991, the World Bank imposed a structural adjustment package on India.

Structural Adjustment and Corporate Free Trade are systems of Dysregulation – they use the coercive power of International Financial Institutions and Big Corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Pepsi to dismantle the regulations sovereign countries have put in place to uphold their Food Sovereignty. The destruction of democratic, public regulations translates into corporate rule. I have always referred to Corporate Globalisation as Recolonisation and return of “Company Raj”.

India is the oldest living agrarian civilisation. Every fourth farmer of the world is Indian. Every freedom struggle of India has been peasant led, from the 1857 uprising against the India Company to the Champaran satyagraha against forced cultivation of Indigo. The World Bank conditionalities and WTO rules have undermined our civilisation ethic of ‘Annadata Sukhi Bhava’. Neoliberal reforms focussing on corporate profits alone have not just led to a deep existential crisis for the farmers by threatening their lives and livelihoods, a crisis of the food and farming system has also created a hunger emergency with every fourth Indian driven to hunger, and every second child suffering from severe malnutrition. The dismantling of the Essential Commodities Act allows traders to hoard foodgrains and speculate on food prices. Hoarding allows corporate monopolies to emerge. Farmers are exploited through low prices of purchase of farmers produce. Citizens are exploited by rising food prices.

Dysregulation was imposed on India through the 1991 Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) to dismantle India’s regulatory framework which protects our Food Security and Food Soveregnty, and makes India truly Atma Nirbhar. Deregulation allows corporate take over of the food system.

The elements of deregulation introduced in the 1991 conditionalities included

• Liberalising fertilizer imports, and deregulating domestic manufacturing and the distribution of fertilisers.
• Removing land ceiling regulation.
• Removing subsidies on irrigating electricity and credit thereby creating conditions to facilitate the trading to canal irrigation water rights.
• Deregulating the wheat, rice, sugarcane, cotton, edible oil and oilseed industries.
• Dismantling the food security system.
• Removing controls on markets, traders, and processors, and subsidies to cooperatives.
• Abolishing the Essential Commodities Act.
• Abolishing the general ban on future trading.
• Abolishing inventory controls.
• Abolishing selective credit controls on inventory financing.
• Treating farmers’ cooperatives on an equal footing with the private sector.

The above elements of SAP are recipes for dismantling government regulations over food and agriculture that India put in place after Independence to protect our food Sovereignty, Food Self Reliance and the Right to Food of all people.

Monsanto has been trying to establish seed monopoly but we have defended our Seed Sovereignty by excluding Seeds from patentability. Art 3j of the Patent Act excludes from patentability “Plants and animals in whole or in any part thereof other than microorganisms, but including seeds, varieties and species and essential biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animals”.

We also implemented a Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights Act to recognise farmers as breeders and defend their inalienable right to save, exchange, breed and sell their seeds. This law protected Indian farmers from being sued by Pepsi for saving potato seeds.

For 3 decades, parliament and farmers movements have prevented the global corporate interests from achieving their goal of destroying our Seed Sovereignty, Food sovereignty and Self Reliance.

In 2020, the Essential Commodity Act for regulating stock piling of food and preventing speculation was amended to exclude food through Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020 in accordance with the pressures of Global Powers which began in 1991.

The state laws for regulating markets and traders were done away with through Farming Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020.

A Contract Farming law titled The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020 opens the door for global agribusiness giants, e-commerce corporations and food processing corporations to lock farmers into new corporate slavery to agribusiness Transnational Corporations (TNCs) such as Bayer and Monsanto, Cargill and PepsiCo, Amazon and Walmart and the partnerships they forge with India Corporations to capture the Indian market with ease – they are emerging as the new Zamindars controlling not just our food and land use, but also water use and seeds. They trap farmers into buying costly inputs, growing monocultures of commodities as raw materials which they buy cheap.

An agrarian crisis and a crisis of Farmers livelihoods

A model based on increasing costs of production and falling farm prices is trapping farmers in debt and driving them to suicide.

Inspite of the fact that small farmers, specially women, feed the world, small farmers are disappearing worldwide with the assault of industrialised, globalised agriculture.[3]

Most farmers are trapped in debt because agribusiness has locked them in dependency on high cost seeds, chemicals and machinery. The debt trap is based on the false argument that buying costly inputs will increase productivity. But a production system that excludes the high costs of ecological destruction, destruction of health, and externalises social and ecological costs has negative productivity when true cost accounting is done, and the full costs are taken into account. More than 400,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1995.

Based on official data, we have assessed the social and ecological costs of industrial agriculture in India to be $1.3 trillion per year.[4]

Rising food prices and hunger

Every minute 11 people are dying of hunger.

The hunger emergency has intensified as a result of COVID and the lockdown.

The World Food Programme has warned the world community of the looming “hunger pandemic,” which has the potential to engulf over a quarter of a billion people whose lives and livelihoods will be plunged into immediate danger.

According to the world food programme more than a million people are on the verge of starvation, and 300,000 could starve to death every single day for the next three months.The Oxfam report on the “Hunger Virus” reveals that more people could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, than from the disease itself. While people went hungry in both rich and poor nations, the Big Food and Big Agriculture corporations made additional profits.

“The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers. Meanwhile, those at the top are continuing to make a profit: eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out over $18 billion to shareholders since January even as the pandemic was spreading across the globe – ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry.”[5]

Nearly a billion people are structurally hungry in the dominant model of agriculture. And this hunger is by design. [6]

• In the 2018 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 103 out of 119 qualifying countries with a score of 31.1.
• In 2020 it was at 102 out of 117 countries, behind Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal
• In India every fourth Indian is hungry, every second child is malnourished.[7]

People are hungry for the same reasons that are driving farmers to suicide – the hijack of agriculture by global corporations who put profits before people. Their profits grow as farmers incomes fall and food prices rise.

Farmers prices are falling while consumer prices are rising. Globally, the food price index has jumped by nearly 40% since 2020. Prices of essential commodities like dal and edible oils are rising in India. Edible oils have risen as much as 62 percent in the last year.

The Right to Food is a universal human right

The World Bank Began with dismantling our food security system based on public procurement and a Universal PDS system.

Public Distribution system (PDS) has been one of the most crucial elements on food policy and food security system in the country. It started as a rationing system in the backdrop of Bengal famine in 1943, as well as a wartime measure during the Second World War. Over the years, the system expanded enormously emerging as a poverty alleviation measure to become a permanent feature in Indian food economy.

With a network of about 4,51,000 Fair Price Shops (FPS) for the distribution of commodities worth over Rs. 150 billion to about 180 million households through out the country, the PDS in India is perhaps the largest distribution network of its type in the world. PDS is a rationing mechanism, entitles households to essential commodities such as rice, wheat, sugar, Kerosene and edible oils at subsidized rates through PDS. The responsibility of operating them is shared by Central and State governments. The Central government procures stocks and supplies the grain and absorbs the cost of these operations, while the state governments ‘lift’ the grains’ and distribute these to retail PDS outlets.

A PDS system needs public procurement of grain and price regulation. Speculation and hoarding by a few powerful agribusiness interests is not just a threat to the livelihood of small farmers, it is a threat to the PDS system, the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty of 1.36 billion Indians.

We have a National Food Security Act (Right to Food Act), but without farmers growing food and public procurement, the Act is vacuous.

The US which has used Food as a weapon has sued India in WTO over the public procurement and public stockholding in the Food Security Act.[8]

Big Tech and Big Ag plans for One empire over our Seed, Food and Land

The Big Tech Barons are now eyeing our Seed, Food and land through Digital Agriculture. Their dystopic vision is “farming without farmers” and “farm free food” to sqeeze and extract profits out of every acre of land and every morsel of food we eat.

Gates wants to control global agriculture through One Ag, and the Global Seed Supply through One CGIAR to take control of the world’s seeds. He is pushing digital genomic mapping to take patents on Seeds in Gene banks.[9]

He is trying to take control over food through Digital Agriculture and Fake Lab Food. While attacking rice cultivation in India, where we evolved 200,000 varieties of rice, he is promoting “GMO Golden Rice” which has 80 patents associated with it.

The Green Revolution and Industrial Agriculture have contributed to nutritionally empty food. Through the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) which he supports, he is pushing for mandatory fortification. I call this food facism- destroying people’s alternatives for food sovereignty and forcing unsafe, unhealthy food on people, just to maximise profits and control over food.

The imitation fake meat Impossible Burger which I call “Fake Food” has 14 patents. Fake food is a gold rush. It is not about feeding people or saving the planet.[10]

Gates and Microsoft are involved in the Digitalisation of land records, soil data, insurance data, credit data in the hands of those who are seeking to become the Global Zamindars. Gates is planning One Agriculture of the world as Gates Ag One. Gates is already the largest farmland owner in America. Microsoft has been handed control over the land records of India Farmers.[11]

Even the UN Food systems Summit has been hijacked to push the corporate agenda.[12]

In the context of a new Food Imperialism, we need a new Food Freedom and Food Sovereignty movement to defend our Rights guaranteed by the constitution and avoid famine and food slavery.

Food Sovereignty is our birthright.

Notes

1. Vandana Shiva, Radha Holla Bhar “An Ecological History of Food and farming in India” vol 2 “Sharing the Earth’s Harvest : Creating Abundance or Scarcity “Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology”, 2005.

2. “How much money did Britain take away from India? About $45 trillion in 173 years, says top economist”, Nov 19, 2018, https://www.businesstoday.in.

3. “Agribusiness Is Devastating to Family Farmers, Rural Communities, and the Environment”, https://www.actionaidusa.org.

4. Vandana Shiva, Vaibhav Singh, Wealth per Acre, Natraj Publishers. “Farm debt crisis: 70% of agricultural families spend more than they earn”, 27 June, 2017, https://www.business-standard.com.

5. “The hunger virus: how COVID-19 is fuelling hunger in a hungry world”, 9 July 2020, https://www.oxfam.org.

6. Hunger by Design in Vandana Shiva, Making Peace with the Earth, Women Unlimited.

7. Vandana Shiva, Kunwar Jalees, “Why is every fourth Indian hungry?”, Navdanya, 2009.

8. Prof. Ganesh Hingmire, Mr. Paresh Chinchole “Position Paper on Public Stockholding, Food Security And India”, https://www.wto.org.

9. “Reclaim The Seed”, The Vandana Shiva blog, https://www.navdanya.org.

10. “Lab Made Breast Milk And Lab Made Meat”, https://navdanyainternational.org.

11. “Revealed: Ministry of Agriculture’s MOU with Microsoft on the Agristack. Urgent need for transparency and consultation!”, https://internetfreedom.in.

12. “UNFSS – Where Multinationals Continue to Design our Food Systems and Control our Diets”, https://navdanyainternational.org.

(Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and alter-globalisation author, based in Delhi.)