The threat of global food shortages - part two

Punjab’s farmers, like farmers across India, have borrowed money for inputs they must use to increase production on the industrial model. Price of these inputs - more expensive hybrid or genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, tube wells, tractors - relentlessly increase.

Like the more than 100,000 indebted farmers across India who have killed themselves in the past decade, some Punjabi farmers see no way out other than suicide. Drug addition ravages the youth of Punjab, disenchanted with farming and hard-pressed to find other work. The government of Punjab estimates that an astonishing 40 per cent of the state’s youth and 48 per cent of its farmers and laborers are addicts.

India has been receptive to the argument of transnational corporations - that opening up agriculture to more private investment and allowing corporations to establish cold chains and vertically integrated production and distribution systems could solve India’s agricultural crisis.

The IAASTDT report notes the “considerable influence” of transnational corporations in encouraging more intensive industrial agriculture. Large transnationals, including Cargill, Monsanto, Syngenta, Wal-Mart and Carrefour as well as cash-rich Indian giants such as Reliance, Bharti and Tata are eager to reap the potential bonanza of bringing large-scale industrial agriculture to India.

If the findings of the IAASTD report are given any credence, this is precisely the wrong direction for Indian agriculture. India would do better to look towards successful ventures in community-based natural farming, such as those undertaken by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in Hyderabad, which have dramatically boosted yields, allowed poor farmers to repay debts, and removed synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides from food production.

This type of radical overhaul is needed on global scale. The IAASTD report pleads for an end to thinking of agriculture solely in terms of production, with social and environmental costs born by individual farmers, consumers, governments and ecosystems. It argues that the only hope for feeding a growing global population and for restoring our degraded land, polluted water and fractured societies lies in adopting an approach where agricultural practices promote equitable access to food and sustainable use of the environment on which humanity depends.

The dilemma for Punjab, India, and the rest of the world faced with hungry populations and a collapsing environment is how to reconcile the powerful forces of a global economic system driven by the relentless imperative to increase production - and consumption - with a holistic approach. This larger, more difficult question is, as the IAASTD report suggests, at the heart of the global food crisis.