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Monday, 8 May 2006
Education barrier for India's poor
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It was a glamorous evening in one of Delhi's most exclusive venues.
As the music played, the rich and fashionable gossiped and waiters moved through the crowd with silver trays of drinks and canapés.
Before dinner was served, the main lights dimmed and the master of ceremonies announced the star of the show, businessman Lovy Khosla.
Standing in a cascade of glitter, he launched his latest venture, Elvy — described as India's first lifestyle catalogue.
After the presentation, I asked Mr Khosla what kind of people he hoped would buy the bone china, platinum-stemmed wine glasses and other luxury catalogue items.
"Aspiring Indians", he said, "the new emerging middle-class".
He admitted the divide at the moment between rich and poor was huge — but eventually, he said, everyone in India would prosper.
'Brain industry'
At times, optimism like Mr Khosla's does seem justified.
More and more people nowadays have the means to buy the international goods now available in India's cities.
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The IT shops I visited in Delhi, for example, were buzzing with all the latest technology.
The IT sector itself is still small but clearly booming, a key part of India's new wealth.
But there's a clear mismatch between the hinterland of rural unemployed and the IT sector's demand for educated workers.
Kiran Karnik, the President of India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, told me one of their biggest problems is finding enough suitable recruits, people with the right education and skills.
"You have a lot of people with minimal or sometimes no education," he said.
"And the industry we work in requires at least a certain minimum level of knowledge. It's not a brawn industry, it's a brain industry. That means we're looking for people who are by and large graduates."
But why, in a country of more than a billion people, are graduates relatively hard to find?
Why do about some 93% of Indians never progress beyond secondary school?
Poor education
I travelled by train into rural Uttar Pradesh, one of India's biggest and poorest states to see the education available for children in villages there.
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I was taken to a small village by Sandeep Pandey, one of the founders of the educational charity Asha (Hope).
There I came across about 50 children, of all ages from about three to 15 years, sitting under the trees chanting their lessons.
They have to learn together like this because there is only one teacher.
There was also a government school nearby but some parents in the village complained that they did not send their children there because the standard was so low.
When I asked the children what they would like to do as adults, they crowded round, faces beaming.
"Teacher!" cried one. "Doctor," said another. They were full of enthusiasm. But privately Sandeep was pessimistic about their chances.
"The children saying they want to be doctors or teachers or engineers, they'd never be able to make it," he said. "In the end they'd end up being unemployed or underemployed."
Most of the children, he said, dropped out before they finished primary school.
Their parents knew they would eventually work on the land so more than a basic education seemed a waste of resources.
"The only hope," he said, "is that by learning to read or write, they will check corruption. We don't have any hope beyond that."
'Living hell'
Those who do leave the countryside without higher education, in the hope of finding greater opportunities in the cities, often end up living in slums.
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I visited Banwal Nagar, a sprawling slum on the outskirts of Delhi, a labyrinth of narrow lanes with no running water, stinking open drains and massive overcrowding.
There I met Babloo, a shy 18-year-old who came here from a village in Uttar Pradesh a year ago.
He told me he came with his brother who is earning just enough as a tailor to feed them both.
Babloo said they were always hungry in the village, there was no work there. Now Babloo is helping out — unpaid — in a mechanic's shop, trying to learn the trade.
Sitting with us, listening to Babloo's hesitant story, was an old-timer in Banwal Nagar, Anrud Mandel, who came here 25 years ago.
I asked him if he thought Babloo and his brother had done the right thing in coming to Delhi.
His answer was emphatic: "No. Like all of us, he had to leave his village because there wasn't work there."
"But we'd all be better off in our villages if we could earn enough there to feed and clothe our children and ourselves."
He gestured to the conditions all around us, the air thick with flies. "This place is a living hell."
There is no doubt India's impressive economic growth is providing new opportunities.
But the challenge is finding ways to put them within the reach of the children in India's poorest villages.
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The Deadly Gambles of Farming in Rural India
Russian Roulette in Vidharbha By P. SAINATH Nagpur Rural (Maharashtra) |
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I t is a kind of rural Russian roulette.
Only there is more than one bullet aimed at the player.
Vidharbha's farmers are involved in a deadly gamble that concerns the monsoon but goes far beyond it.
No one is sowing till the last minute.
Those who have purchased seed are holding back.
Many are yet to buy their inputs for the season.
Some have not even decided on what they will sow.
As Vijay Jawandia, a farmers' leader in Wardha, puts it: "Most do not know till the day before whether they are cotton growers or soybean farmers."
Gamble One
The immediate gamble is on the rains.
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"Last year's pre-monsoon showers caused a lot of confusion," says Yavatmal Collector Harshdeep Kamble.
"So they are being extra cautious this time. I am really worried about how the rains will work out."
Many farmers in 2004 sowed not once but three times in this region.
Like Namdeo Bonde in Kothuda village.
"He sowed three times, you might even say four," says his brother Pandurang. But the showers only misled him.
"He got a little bit with the third sowing. But the costs were killing. By his third try, input dealers were charging 50 per cent to 80 per cent more. And then his crop failed."
Sunk in debt, Bonde took his life last November.
Gamble Two
"No one has sown a seed so far in this village of Durga-Vaidya," says Vinayak Gaikwad, a farmer in Buldhana.
Gaikwad, a kisan sabha leader, says: "Even when the rains come, people might wait a bit longer to make sure."
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That is Gamble 2.
"Equally," says D.B. Naik farm activist in Bham in Yavatmal.
"If you buy and sow after the first showers and the rains stop, you're finished."
That is what drove Laxman Wankhede of Ejani village to suicide last October.
Gamble 3:
"Acting late gives you some flexibility," says Gaikwad.
"You can decide at the last moment what you will sow.
"If the rains are bad, you choose what needs less water."
With three failed sowings himself last year, he should know.
"Also, by waiting you can switch from `late' to `early' varieties of seed."
‘Late’ varieties yield more but take much longer, up to six months.
‘Early’ types yield less but are out in under five months.
When the rains are late, farmers switch to the ‘early’ type. |
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Gamble 4:
"Buying inputs too early means your loan burden is higher," says Ramesh Deshmukh in Talegaon village, Yavatmal.
"What if the rains come in July? A farmer buying inputs in May pays interest for two extra months."
This is a big problem where perhaps 90 per cent of crop loans are from moneylenders. Their interest rates vary from 60 per cent to 120 per cent per annum.
Deshmukh's brother Suresh ended his life last year, crushed by his debt burden.
This `flexibility', as many point out, can be a forced one.
"I have no money to buy the inputs," says Ranjana, widow of Suresh Deshmukh. "Who will offer us loans now?"
Given her husband's fate, lenders see the family as a high-risk client.
"Also," says Ramesh, "dealers first attend to cash-paying clients. Those needing credit come much later."
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Gamble 5:
Those who have bought seeds are betting heavily on BT cotton.
K.R. Zanzad, quality control inspector at the Agricultural Office, Yavatmal, says: "Last year, 7,000 bags of BT cotton varieties sold in this district. This year — so far — one lakh."
At around Rs.1,600-Rs.1,800 a bag of 450 grams, BT cotton costs three times or more what non-BT cotton does.
This raises cost per acre massively.
In Andhra Pradesh next door, BT cotton results have been disastrous.
And approval has been cancelled for some varieties.
Yet Vidharbha could see 70 per cent or more of farmers opting for BT in despair-driven hope.
The risks are enormous.
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Gamble 6:
Buying inputs late could jack up prices as everyone scrambles for seeds and fertilizer at the last moment.
Unless, of course, the monsoon fails and there is no demand.
Just now, it seems prices will go up.
There will also be a last minute rush for labour as all seek it at the same time.
Many small farmers work on the fields of others as well.
But with a late start, all will be tied down to their own plots.
That means a rise in cost of labour — and not getting it when you need it.
Moreover, the last minute rush for crop loans will push up already high interest rates.
So while holding back saves a month of interest, last minute credit comes at higher rates.
The banks play no role at all in this.
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Gamble 7:
Striking late deals could well force the farmer to sell his crop to the input dealer at way below the minimum support price (MSP).
Last year, suicide victim Suresh Deshmukh sold his cotton at Rs.1,600 a quintal.
The MSP for his type was Rs. 2,300.
Gamble 8:
"If it rains well today, the farmer just has to buy seeds," says Sanjay Bhagat in Mahagaon tehsil, Yavatmal.
Bhagat, a veteran journalist, is also a director on the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) here.
"Those pushing an artificial shortage can then sell at any price."
This means many could end up buying spurious seeds.
A fast emerging problem in the region.
Fake seeds have been linked to several farm suicides across the country.
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Gamble 9:
Late sowing could also expose the crop to higher risks of disease and pest attack.
That again feeds into higher costs.
What policy has done to the farmer
The great gamble.
"The great gamble is farming itself," says Vijay Jawandia.
"This is what policy has done to the farmer. Be it on credit or support price."
Some are cracking under the tension.
Like young Abhay Shamrao Chavan in Mulawa village, Yavatmal.
"The rains were just the last straw," says his brother Vasantrao.
"He was in real despair about credit."
"Yet if it had rained on June 12, he would have been here to tell you about it himself."
P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought.
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Imposed will of ruthless merchant-adventurers
In Western Kenya, a quarter of a million families earn their living from sugar-cane farming and six million depend on it for their livelihoods.
Cheap imports are likely to destroy the Kenyan sugar industry and leave many of these families destitute and starving.
In India, thousands if not millions of lives will likely be affected and India's self-sufficiency in food destroyed, all for a few more H1B visas and some outsourcing businesses.
And the sordid distinction of entry into the Big Boys Club of the WTO mafia.
Strike Two: Tariffs on industry were reduced and the coveted services sector was opened up like a brothel in Kanthipura.
Public health, education, telecom, banks, water, all pimped by the state.
And by failing to bring up TRIPS (The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) for review and amendment, India — junior Big Boy — ensured that prices of patented drugs will continue to soar, affecting the common people in poor countries.
The length of patents, the patenting of life forms, health and food security — all this might have been reviewed with ease.
Not one was.
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In an isolated spot, miles from the nearest town, is a thriving matchstick industry.
Here inside makeshift straw huts — and in the small dwellings that neighbour them — we found some of India's youngest workers.
Rows of exhausted young girls — up to 20 and as young as five are working alongside their mothers.
For 16 hours a day their tiny blistered fingers skilfully turn out matches for export.
Ordered to leave
The toxic smell of sulphur is overwhelming in the windowless room.
Twelve-year-old Sindhu dips the tips of the sticks into hot sulphur.
"I start work early but don't finish until late into the night. I get paid less than two dollars a week."
Our presence was clearly not welcome. As we were speaking to the girls the owner came in and ordered us to leave.
Within walking distance are other factories. But again, when we arrived, the youngest workers were quickly led away.
While the factory owner denied he was employing underage workers, almost every single household in this part of Tamil Nadu has one or more children working long hours in appalling conditions.
Campaigners say over 11 million children are forced to work in India.
Lighting a fire for a rare family meal, Sarojama gathers her five grandchildren around her.
Exploited
She has barely been able to feed them, so she was forced to borrow money from a local factory owner.
Unable to pay back the loan she sent her young grand-daughter to work. Parimeeta was taken out of school and has been working 12 hour days for two years.
The debt is less than $20.
Campaigners fear that as India's economy continues to boom, children are increasingly being exploited to meet the country's hunger for global success.
In a recent raid in the capital Delhi, police rescued a large number of boys from local sweatshops.
Agents had lured them from India's poorest regions, promising the children that they would be taken care of and paid well.
They were found hidden on the top floors of garment factories — held captive in filthy cramped rooms under lock and key.
They painstakingly spent hours applying crystals to garments. Many of the clothes end up being sold in shops in the UK.
Ineffective
These are places the authorities say are difficult to close down.
But Swami Agnivesh of the Bonded Liberation Front says that hundreds of children are kept hidden from public view in the buildings of crammed alleyways.
"They are kept in the most appalling conditions and not enough is being done to help them," he said.
India has laws in place to protect children and bans the use of young workers, but they remain pretty ineffective.
The United Nations Children's' Fund says that the sheer volume of children engaged in work is living proof of the world's failure to protect them.
That is the reason why the agency's work is focused on building a protective environment which safeguards children from exploitation and abuse.
In Tamil Nadu local charities have helped pay off families' debts so that at least some children can be released from the matchstick factories.
Finally freed from the shackles of work, they now have some hope of reliving their childhood.
Bu it is often a dream that is short-lived.
Charity workers admit most of the children are likely to find themselves forced back into a life of bondage.
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Traprock Peace Center April 10, 2005
Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth — India's resistance to corporations
By Vandana Shiva Director and founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
I was doing studies on mining in my valley and I remember sitting in the archives and finding all these attempts to try and make people try and hate each other.
Make people afraid of each other.
And people are coming and saying, "No, I did not write that pamphlet."
"I love my Muslim neighbor."
"I did not do this."
"I did not throw a pig in front of his front door."
"I did not butcher a cow."
For more than twelve years attempts were made to pit people against each other on the basis of religion.
But after '42 when Gandhi very clearly said to the British — Quit India.
You are killing us.
You are denying us our very basis to live — that's the time this divide-and-rule was intensified.
By the time '47 came we had killings.
We then had the partition.
Most people don't realize that Pakistan, Bangladesh, India before that we were one.
We still are when it comes to the way we eat, the way we drink, the way we cloth ourselves.
Our languages are the same each side of the border.
The same Bengali spoken, the same….
That some people go to a Mosque and others don't hardly makes any difference.
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The 1942 Bengal famine also created the economic responses.
The system of landlordism that the British had put into place to collect rents from land, is what had made hunger happen. Because people had to give away everything they grew.
And even while they grew enough rich they couldn't keep enough for themselves.
So we had a movement for [rent] abolition.
We had movements for the right to food, out of which came an amazing public distribution system.
From 1942, to about four or five years ago, nobody starved in our country.
No one starved to death.
We had malnutrition.
Not everyone was perfectly well fed.
But we didn't have famine debts.
That's come back.
It's come back because the public distribution system created for all of society as a reflection of the right to food was suddenly being called a monopoly.
Society being served its basic needs was defined as a monopoly.
And Cargill coming in to monopolize was now our liberation.
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Similarly the fact that farmers grow their own seed — we had a government corporation which ensured that farmers got varieties of seeds that were tested, that were adapted to their particular local region.
That were necessary for food.
That was called a monopoly too.
The [government] seed corporation was dismantled.
And Monsanto monopoly is called competitiveness.
Today Monsanto controls ninety-four to ninety-five percent of all genetically engineered seeds sold anywhere in the world.
Anywhere in the world.
As they have gone on record — we know we will not make money through the selling of seed.
We will make money through the collection of royalties.
If you look at the projections they have made, the projections shoot up after awhile as farmers get absolutely locked into dependence on the seed supply.
We are fighting in India right now not just the new patent law that has been introduced — and the history of this patent law changes, very interesting.
India had a wonderful patent law, which kept agriculture out of patenting.
And in medicine you could only have what were called 'process' patents, a method of making a medicine.
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Which means you could start making cheap medicine.
The WTO treated this as illegal and forced us to introduce patenting of seed, and product patent of monopolies in medicine.
What does that mean?
It means that for agriculture, that Indian farmers are today buying cotton seeds for a thousand six hundred rupees a kilo, for the same price at which American farmers are buying.
Just before coming we were watching this video where Monsanto are selling this very costly seed and the ad is not about agriculture.
It's about an Indian wedding you know.
Wonderful groom and a beautiful bride, and it's all happiness and joy, and that's what buying that seed will bring you.
I have watched Monsanto ads using Guru Nanak, the sheik guru in Punjab, Hanuman in south India, where Monsanto's seeds are brought as a mountain.
You know when Lakshman was wounded in the fight against Rahman, he was told to bring a certain herb and he didn't know how to identify it so he brought the whole mountain.
Monsanto sells its seeds as if that global mountain is now Monsanto's seed.
All this hasn't happened suddenly.
It has happened beginning with the nineteen-eighties where small groups of corporations, of people who own the corporations — its very interesting over the last few decades we've stopped seeing people behind economic interests.
They are now 'the market.'
They are 'The corporation.'
Or they are they are 'The sector.'
The agriculture agreement in WTO — No it's the Cargill agreement in WTO.
The trade related intellectual property rights of WTO — it's the Monsanto agreement of WTO.
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And while they were fixing all this through multiple channels.
One channel was using the financial institutions — The World Bank, and IMF, which were created exactly for this, just north of here in New Hampshire, in Bretton Woods, in that tiny little hotel.
In '44, in Nineteen forty four, the war was about to end.
They could see countries like India, ex colonies breaking free.
And as I read when I went for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods, in the basement of the hotel is a gift shop.
In the gift shop you can find envelopes which are first day covers.
I don't know how many of you remember things like first day covers.
When a new stamp was released they had these envelopes with the stamps — for collector's items.
The one released — the founding of the World Bank and IMF and GAT was called 'The Money Men of the World Meet.'
They got together and said how do we keep running this world as we run it, even when we don't have the old instruments of imperial control.
So they created the Bretton Woods Institutions, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Monetary Fund.
All of them looked liked such legitimate global institutions to have.
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Published on Saturday, April 8, 2006 by OneWorld.net
Many More Join Protest and Hunger Strike over Indian Dam Project by Rahul Kumar and Jeffrey Allen NEW DELHI - The hunger strike led by Indian civil rights leader Medha Patkar got a boost Friday — two days after she was forcibly hospitalized by the Indian government — as student unions, academics, and other organizations joined the protest over the Indian government's failure to properly compensate tens of thousands of farmers displaced by floodwaters from a rising dam.
Patkar, 51, who is the leader of the people's rights group Narmada Bachao Andolan (Campaign to Save the Narmada Valley, or NBA), launched an indefinite fast along with two colleagues, Jamsingh Nargave, 50, and Bhagwatibehen Patidar, 45, on March 29.
Although the government took little action at the outset of the hunger strike, it seemed rattled after Patkar's health deteriorated.
A strong contingent of police arrested and forcibly took her to the hospital Wednesday, leading to resentment and heightened protests among sympathizers.
Professor of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Kamal Mitra Chenoy, who has been on a hunger strike for the last two days, said:
"If the government thought the Narmada agitation could be stopped, it couldn't be more wrong. We joined the fast to show solidarity and support to NBA's struggle. "
According to NBA activist Deepti Bhatnagar, "Patkar has continued with the fast at the hospital. She is taking only water, salt and lemon at the hospital. Our agitation will continue till the Narmada valley oustees are rehabilitated properly."
The NBA had met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on March 25 asking for the rehabilitation of some 35,000 families displaced as a result of the construction of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the river Narmada in central India. When the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) did not respond by March 28 as promised, Patkar and two others went on an indefinite hunger strike the next day.
The government is supposed to provide a minimum of two hectares of cultivable land for farming and a plot for a house to each family that is displaced due to the dam project, according to Indian Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Parikh.
For families that owned more land the government is supposed to either provide more land or cash compensation.
A new proposal to raise the height of the dam from its current 113 meters (370 feet) to 121.9 meters (400 feet) is at the heart of the most recent protests and hunger strike.
The proposed dam expansion would cause the destruction of the homes and fields of those living in an additional 220 nearby villages, according to an NBA press release.
Though the Indian government sent a three-minister delegation to the Narmada valley, it failed to pacify the protestors. The three ministers who went to the valley are: Union Water Resources Minister Saifudin Soz, Minister for Social Justice Meira Kumar, and Minister in the PMO Prithviraj Chauhan.
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Patkar's arrest only brought more people to the site of the agitation, which is very close to the Indian Parliament. Teachers from the University of Delhi and students from three city schools came on Friday morning to express their support for the movement.
Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) president Mona Das and vice president Dhananjay also joined the fast with Prof. Chenoy. Das developed stomach problems on day two of their fast.
Das said: "After Medha was handled brutally, we thought that the agitation might fizzle out but as we were in support of the issues and the cause that she has raised, we decided to pitch in. Teachers from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) also visited us."
National convener the All India Students Association (AISA) Kavita Krishnan said: "This is not merely a struggle about one dam. It is a debate on development that causes the destruction of people's livelihoods."
Krishnan added:
We are told that displacement of people is necessary for development and they will be rehabilitated.
But many states in India do not even have fertile land to rehabilitate people.
People are being forced to migrate to cities where they live in slums.
And then in the name of beautification of cities, their slum dwellings also are destroyed.
Activist Rajendra Ravi from New Delhi-based development organization Lokayan said:
The government is trying to side-step the issue.
We wonder what the three-member delegation of ministers to the Narmada valley will find.
They do not even plan to spend two days there.
We can tell them right here that people have not been rehabilitated and that is what needs to be done."
An activist with the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), a New Delhi-based organization that monitors dams and rivers on a daily basis, summed up the whole agitation:
The Narmada dam project, which has been in the throes of a controversy ever since it was conceived, is the single biggest issue on development, human displacement and rivers.
© Copyright 2006 OneWorld.net
Common Dreams © 1997-2006 |
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Imposed will of ruthless merchant-adventurers
Strike Three: On the other side, the senior Big Boys got away with unctuous promises to ease out export subsidies by 2013 knowing full well that export subsidies are only a drop (2%) in the total subsidies to agriculture.
Even the vaunted "Aid for Trade" is smothered in conditional loans contingent on further breaking open the markets of poorer countries.
And what gains were made in market access in the developed world went largely to agri-exporters like Argentina and Brazil, not to poor countries.
And not to the lost leader of the third world.
None of this need have been.
India might have stood with the Caribbean, South American, and African countries and galvanized the G 110.
Cuba and Venezuela clearly drew the line on service liberalization and India might have joined them.
But the current Congress administration, which took the place of the BJP with a mandate to resolve India's growing agrarian crisis, has proved itself if anything less concerned with the country's welfare.
One could well ask if a nationalist BJP government would have had the ideological stomach to betray the heartland of India.
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Monday, 16 May, 2005
Britain blamed for India suicides
Free trade policies backed by the UK government have caused a crisis in India leading thousands of farmers to commit suicide, a charity has
said.
Christian Aid has examined the impact of market reforms in Ghana, Jamaica and India in a report.
It blames 4,000 suicides in India's Andhra Pradesh state on policies inspired by the IMF and World Bank.
The UK government says the criticism is "behind the times" and aid is not tied to conditions such as privatisation.
Christian Aid has urged the government to stop linking its aid to developing countries to free trade initiatives and wants the UK to use this year's presidency of the G8 to encourage change.
'Not free, not fair'
The report claimed western nations were backing free trade policies devised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, aiming at an end to barriers, tariffs and subsidies.
In Andhra Pradesh from 1999-2004, many farmers killed themselves because policies followed by the former state government resulted in increased debts.
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In Jamaica, similar policies meant sugar cane production fell, driving women into prostitution and drug smuggling, it said. In Ghana legislation to protect farmers has been dented.
"Free trade today is not free and it's not fair for developing countries," said report co-author John McGhie.
"When rich countries ask poorer countries to open up their markets, they remove their protection from vulnerable industries"
"It's not a level playing field and poor people are the ones that suffer."
Review promised
But Britain's minister for international development, Gareth Thomas, said: "Christian Aid seems to be behind the times, because our aid isn't tied to conditions such as privatisation."
He said the World Bank had agreed to review its terms after the government called on it and the IMF for a review.
The Department for International Development has said it is wrong to attribute blame for the deaths on the market reforms.
Mr McGhie said the government had made a recent "huge 180 degree" turn on the issue, which was welcome — but aid had been tied to liberalisation and privatisation for years.
"In Andhra Pradesh the result was the complete erosion of all the safety networks for farmers, which contributed to debt and an epidemic of self-killing in the fields of India," he said.
He called for legislation to underline the government's change.
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Thomas Friedman's Imaginary World
In the Naidu [Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh 1995 — May 2004] years at least 5,000 Indian farmers committed suicide.
Across India, they're still killing themselves.
A Kisan Sabha farmers' union survey of just 26 households in Wayanad, in northern Kerala, that had seen suicides shows a total debt of over Rs. 2 million. Or about Rs. 82,000 per household (which is the equivalent of just under $2,000. The average size of these farms is less than 1.4 acres. And a good chunk of that debt is owed to private lenders.)
Millions more lives millimeters from ruin and starvation.
For hundreds of millions of poor Indians, Friedman's brave new world of the 90s meant globalization of prices, Indianization of incomes.
The state turned its back on the poor.
Investment in agriculture collapsed as rural credit dried up.
As employment crashed in the countryside to its lowest ever, distress migrations from the villages to just about anywhere increased in tens of millions.
Foodgrain available per Indian fell almost every year in the 90s and by 2002-03 was less than it had been at the time of the great Bengal famine of 1942-43.
New user fees sent health costs soaring, and such costs have become a huge component of rural family debt.
...Remember, India has a billion people in it.
Maybe 2 per cent of them get to fly in a plane or go online. Around 10 per cent are well off, another 10 per cent doing okay.
On the most optimistic count we're left with over half a billion of the poorest people on the planet.
You could build call centers every mile from Mumbai to Bangalore, stuff teenagers with basic American slang in there working Friedman's stipulated 35 hours a day servicing American corporations and you wouldn't make a dent in the problem, which is that you can't dump an agricultural economy, build a couple of Cyberabads and say with any claim to realism that a New and Better India has been born.
New, yes.
Better, no.
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Traprock Peace Center April 10, 2005
Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth — India's resistance to corporations
By Vandana Shiva Director and founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
And they created the GAT, except the GAT didn't become an institution because of the Havana charter demanded the correcting of unfair trade that had grown during imperialism.
And said we've been drained of our resources.
Our markets have been destroyed.
Our manufacturers have been destroyed.
And what we need is a correction of unfair trade.
That's what the international trade organization was supposed to do.
That was put aside and the GAT kind of hung there as a half institution till 1995 and we get the World Trade Organization to complete the picture.
The two sets of instruments, whether it is the financial instrument or the trade treaties are basically ending up creating what I would call corporate rule.
Rule by corporations for corporations.
But of course corporations can't rule directly.
It wouldn't work.
People would just throw them out.
They would come in and try and monopolize salt and everyone would do what Gandhi did — sorry we can make our own salt.
They will try and monopolize water and if Coca-Cola came to your back yard, came to this region — you would say sorry we have good water.
We can supply our own water.
So they can only establish their rule over our lives through takeover of the state.
Therefore a very, very important part of the globalization project is the creation of corporate states.
But corporate states would also be resisted because normally people aren't that stupid.
People will turn around and say — sorry we are going to elect the kind of people who actually bring us education, who keep our taxes enough to run public systems, but not so low that we save all our money but society is poor.
In India they are learning everything from this country.
So every time they want to cut tax for the wealthy they talk about widening the tax net.
Which means we won't collect taxes from those who can afford to pay, but we will tax poor people more in all kinds of new ways.
And some of those new ways are privatization of water, privatization of energy.
We are having street protests everyday on the value added tax.
Which means sales tax will go.
Regions won't be able to collect their own taxes.
Everyone will be poor.
The international traders will have no taxes because they get refund.
Local trade will get wiped out.
Local businesses will get wiped out.
Exactly what happened with the British free trade treaty. |
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1716 the British bribed their way through 500, I think 600 rupees, bribed one of the last non-emperors of the Mogul — do you even remember a name called Faruk Shi.
Even I, who am from India, didn't know about Faruk Shi, until I read this free trade treaty between the Right Honorable East India Company and the Mogul emperor.
The entire Mogul empire had collapsed. There was nothing. They didn't cover any part of the country.
So what did this treaty give them?
Rights to trade in all parts of the country that the Mogul emperor didn't rule over, including Bengal, which was the prize possession. |
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It basically said the East India Company would pay no taxes.
East India Company will have the right of private armies to shoot, kill, and have merchant adventurous.
No local chieftain will be able to arrest them for unlawful activity.
If you look at NAFTA, if you look at WTO, exactly the same kind of rights.
We threw [Coca-Cola] out in 1977.
It's not so difficult to put sugar and brown color.
We created a drink called 'Double Seven.'
Coca-Cola came back with the right to investment — this whole globalization thing.
Now they are mining ground water wherever they set up a plant.
It took women.
It took tribal women to educate us about what Coke meant.
I had no idea that every Coke bottle has a footprint of ten.
That behind every bottle of Coca-Cola, behind it is the destruction of ten times that much water in the area where they bottled.
That destruction happens because they have to do things so big.
Normal societies can do things on a small scale.
But the giant corporations must work on a very big scale.
So they mine two million liters a day in one little place.
No area of the world can recharge two million liters of water per day.
Nowhere can that mining be sustainable done.
Before you know it water levels fall a hundred feet.
But the processes themselves are extremely contaminating.
The osmosis they use.
The washing off of all the toxics they put in the bottles stay in the ground water.
The combination of means there is no drinking water left.
And for woman who started this movement, now it has spread to eighty-seven plants.
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Imposed will of ruthless merchant-adventurers
The Indian government's cowardice at Hong Kong matches it's cowardice over the Iraq war, which it could have opposed more vocally, and the vote against Iran, which it need not have joined.
But the Cambridge-educated economist Manmohan Singh seems to have decided to put opportunism before principle.
For our elites, perhaps it' OK just so long long as it's Cambridge-bred, not Varanasi-bred. (4)
The betrayal of Hong Kong is the background against which events in Bangalore must be viewed.
Having reneged on its public duties, the government of India is bound to release a flood of propaganda intended as a smoke-screen and a distraction from its own craven performance.
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Traprock Peace Center April 10, 2005
Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth — India's resistance to corporations
By Vandana Shiva Director and founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
The courts in the first round ruled in the favor of the community.
It was an amazing ruling.
It said water is the common property of the local community.
Therefore any company must seek their permission for touching the water.
It upheld the rights of the local community.
But there has been an attempt to reverse it.
And we are going to have to challenge the High Court decision, take it to Supreme Court.
Everyone is back on the streets.
The people are saying we will not let a single truck move.
If Coke…in my book "Water Wars," I cite an annual meeting of Coke where they say if five point six billion people, a little while ago, the people on planet get thirsty everyday.
If we can make sure they cannot quench their thirst without Coca-Cola then we have reached our objectives.
Monsanto has the same kind of thinking.
If we can make sure a farmer cannot sow seed without depending on us for buying seed and paying royalties, that's when we have reached our objective.
The seed industry of course is more ingenious than any industry that I can think of.
They introduced patenting.
Which means farmers saving seeds are now thieves.
Because seed is now the property of the company — intellectual property of the company.
In law books if you see the definition of intellectual property — it's a fifteen year old term — it says intellectual property is property of products of the mind.
I keep having these images, you know some artist should do it, where seeds keep popping out of Monsanto's CO head.
They've come out of the soil. Millions of years of evolution.
Ten thousand years of farmer's breeding.
And they call it a produce of a fictitious person's mind.
Because that is what a corporation is.
And we accept it, and we go the next step, and we go the next step, but while they were building all these crazy ideas like seed popping out of Monsanto head — Monsanto doesn't even have a head — they were also getting ready knowing that every time they has been oppression, every time there has been lack of freedom, every time there has been slavery, people have acted.
Total domination over our water, our food, over the way we make our clothes
So while they were building the project of total domination over our water:
Over our food.
Over the way we make our clothing.
Over the way we make our housing.
Over the way we run our schools and colleges, and universities.
Our hospitals.
Health care systems.
Our social security system, while they were taking all of that over, and deregulating every one of those sectors,
in a way rendering the state and the government totally unemployed
— they had found a new employment for a dispensable state.
Culture wars
That new employment was what has been called in various discussions now — in your part of the world it's called 'Culture Wars.'
In other places it's 'Religious Fundamentalism.'
But whatever it is, it is a very interesting phenomena.
It is a very contrived distortion of the natural aspiration of people to define themselves.
Through certain ways.
Through their belief systems, their cultures, and to take that glue of society, turn it into a fragmentation of society.
It's a brilliant move.
For culture is nothing more than that which holds us together.
Gives us meaning.
Makes us understand who we are.
And yet the so called 'Culture Wars' are how to not know who you are.
To not know what is going on in your lives.
It's and erasure...in fact it's an erasure of identity.
It's an erasure of a sense of what is the economy, what is the political system, how do you engage as a person.
And I don't think this has happened as an accident.
Just as when the British created the Hindu Muslim riots and engineered those riots, and in spite of their attempts people would refuse to follow that path — I remember for the first many years, the more the British pushed Hindu Muslim divide, the more people would stand for unity.
We had new parties called the unionist parties — parties for union — so we won't vote on the basis of who we are as Hindu and Muslims, we vote because of us being farmers, and Hindu and Muslims are farmers.
We vote as a particular place, as, you know, people of Bengal.
We vote in terms of our larger common identity.
And I believe this whole upsurge of religious fundamentalism and talking of culture as a war, is really a way to deal with a number of things at the same time.
The first is, yes it is true, that corporate globalization is dispossessing people, is robbing people of economic livelihoods, of jobs, of security.
An insecure people will ten even more to depend on hanging together.
When there is an unemployment in the family, or a medical crises in the family, everyone hangs together.
So again the response is when insecurity happens people will get together.
And normally they will also know, oh yes, the wagerearner lost his, her, job because the General Motors factory moved to Mexico or outsourced jobs went to India and Bangalore, or whatever, people understand while they deal with it.
Now you have an unemployed political sector.
Unemployed in two ways.
First because you have deregulated the economy, there is no role for government.
So why on earth should you elect government representatives.
Why do you need people in Washington and why do I need people in Delhi.
Because there is nothing to regulate anymore.
But you still need to fill those holes in Congress because there are other agendas to be performed.
Now that your representatives cannot come to you for votes in Massachusetts and say we guarantee you jobs for all, living wages for all.
Because that has been take out of the political accessibility of influence.
Democracy is not where these things are decided.
Globalization is the end of economic democrary
Globalization in my analysis is the end of economic democracy.
That's what it means.
You won't influence the decisions about how you do your farming.
You won't influence decisions about how you are supplied water.
You won't in influence how you education systems are run.
That will be left to the market.
That will be left to the corporations.
That will left to international institutions used as instrumentalities of the corporations.
But you still have to get votes.
In a vacuum left by the death of democracy in economic terms, there is only one capital:
'Culture Wars.'
Representative democracy with economic dictatorship, economic totalitarianism, necessarily requires the kind of divide-and-rule policy that was tried by the British, except they worked on Hindus and Muslims in India.
Today you have this amazing definition of the red states and the blue states.
I was just this afternoon browsing through this book on Kansas on how it turned from being a blue state into being a red state.
It is absolutely no different from what happened in India.
It is no different from what happened in Punjab in the 1980's when I wrote my book called the 'Violence of the Green Revolution.'
People became terrorists because the young people weren't seeing any future in agriculture.
Incomes were declining.
Land was getting desertified.
Agriculture was being rendered unusable.
People took to guns.
That would be the normal kind of response except where you start taking them into churches.
Keep them busy.
And before you know it, farmers of the Midwest who would have joined the farmers of India to deal with the Cargill's and the Monsanto's are now treating as their worst enemies people in colleges, the 'Latte class,' the new class in this society called the 'Latte class.'
This is exactly like saying we are liberating women by allowing them to work at night — by getting rid of all labor laws.
What's happening is the blue collar workers have already lost their jobs.
In an absolute kind of way, manufacturing is kind of disappearing.
The kind of economy being created is what they call the service economy.
They also pretend at times to call it the knowledge economy.
I call it the ignorant economy
I call it the ignorant economy because there is so much ignorance about who is pulling the strings, who is controlling what, and what is happening to our societies.
The fact that it is now the white collar jobs that are under attack.
Whether it is through globalization and outsourcing, or it is by other dismantling like privatization of education or I was being told yesterday it is where private institutions can bid for the federal funds for running institutions that were so far owned only by the public universities, well all this means, as the villains of the piece, because otherwise their resistance will start making a difference in changing the system.
The pitting of the blue and the red in this country, is pitting the doubly dispossessed against the current dispossessed — or the future dispossessed.
Just so they cannot unify, and neither can farmers get back their farmers livelihood, nor can the workers get back their jobs in factories, you just neutralize it all.
But you do more than that.
In a White House, in a social ordering where we don't need it
You allow the existence of power in a White House, in a social ordering where we don't need it.
Except that now instead of the state governing over economic affairs, the state now starts to govern over social and cultural affairs, achieving two things at the same time.
First keeping people diverted.
Look at the amount of energy time that has gone in Terri's case.
Can you imagine all of that media time available to look at what was happening to livelihoods and jobs in this country.
Or to look at what is happening to health care around the world.
I was just thinking, when did the decision on Terri start being played out.
It's exactly the same month where India was being bullied by exactly the same powers that were standing there crying out about the life support being unplugged from Terri.
While they were bullying India to sign the new patent laws that will take medicine out of the access of millions and millions of people.
Same time!
Absolutely the same time!
And the language that is being crafted is the culture of life.
Here you have the economics of genocide.
Not showing itself as an economics of genocide because its mask has become the culture of life.
It does two things.
One is it pits people against each other.
Doesn't allow them to come together.
Everyone gets busy trying to defend themselves.
But is also totally diverts and detracts from understanding the genocidal impulses of the triple convergence, the convergence of economics as warfare — which is what corporate globalization is, it kills — sixteen thousand farmers in India have been killed through suicides, but when that large body of people is pushed into suicide because of the result of economic policy, I do not see it as individual actions.
It then become social.
It is driven by policy.
And a targeted extermination of a community, with a clear policy that says small farmers, family farmers should not exist in the future.
It is a policy designed to wipe out the small farmer and the small producer.
It's genocide. |
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MON 863 — Rats fed Monsanto GM corn due for sale in Britain developed abnormalities in blood and kidneys
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Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.
The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood.
According to the confidential 1,139-page report, these health problems were absent from another batch of rodents fed non-GM food as part of the research project.
The disclosures come as European countries, including Britain, prepare to vote on whether the GM-modified corn should go on sale to the public.
A vote last week by the European Union failed to secure agreement over whether the product should be sold here, after Britain and nine other countries voted in favor.
Forced into retirement
...That research, which was roundly denounced by ministers and the British scientific establishment, was halted and Dr Arpad Pusztai, the scientist behind the controversial findings, was forced into retirement amid a huge row over the claim.
Dr Pusztai reported a "huge list of significant differences" between rats fed GM and conventional corn, saying the results strongly indicate that eating significant amounts of it can damage health.
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The new study is into a corn, codenamed MON 863, which has been modified by Monsanto to protect itself against corn rootworm, which the company describes as "one of the most pernicious pests affecting maize crops around the world".
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Traprock Peace Center April 10, 2005
Deregulation, Accumulation of wealth — India's resistance to corporations
By Vandana Shiva Director and founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology
When the patent law was changed in India, the company that makes the best and the lowest cost AIDS medicine, a company called Cipla...
Dr Hamied supplied AIDS drugs to Africa for two hundred dollars when the American companies were selling them for twenty thousand dollars.
And that is what lead to the whole WTO debate on patenting, well Hamied's first statement —
I should say these patents on seeds are genocidal and people used to call me an extremist.
Hamied:
— who no one can question about his credentials in terms of trying to get affordable medicine to people in India and the rest of the world, and India provides seventy percent generic drugs of the world —
Hamied called this patent law genocide.
Exactly at that time, where the same interests are driving the killing of millions by denying them medicine, the killing of millions of farmers by pushing them into a death trap, totally avoidable death trap.
They, you know, prevent people from looking at what is going on with patent laws, you do all this media domination.
Take a family's decision out of their family life, out of their private life, push it onto the screen for months, and even in India we were getting it.
We said who is this Terri.
Why is she on our front page every day.
We didn't have the background.
I only read the background now after coming, but it is a necessary complement of economic genocide.
The real wars that we see as wars
And the third compliment of the economics of genocide is the real wars that we see as wars.
Because those wars are also about corporate takeover of other people's economies.
Iraq as everyone knows is not just about Saddam Hussein.
It was also about oil.
It is also about water.
It is also about Iraqi order 81 — doing to Iraqi farmer's what Monsanto is trying to do to Indian farmers, which we are resisting.
So with this kind of triple convergence of total dictatorship — the use of culture, the use of a distorted form of politics, and of course the use of the military and the use of a particular model of economy, how do we deal with this kind of total control system.
In which fear has a very, very important element.
I believe the first step is to give up fear.
Because fear is literally, to allow it to be fanned in our minds, or to shut it out.
Shut is out by just a more, a deeper engagement, which means changing our situation, working together in solidarity.
Absolutely wonderfully, guaranteed antidotes to fear. |
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Imposed will of ruthless merchant-adventurers
India is also likely to tighten its grip in the face of mass protests or resistance as the implications of Hong Kong become more and more widely known.
At Hong Kong itself, union leaders, farmers, and workers protesting peacefully were attacked with water-cannons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas. 900 were arrested and 70 were hospitalized.(5)
Want to know what to expect in the coming year?
Here's the graffiti already on the wall in Indonesia, which currently occupies the presidency of the Human Rights Commission (though it has yet to ratify key international human rights treaties) and in November, 2005 became a full-fledged compadre of the US in the War on Terra.
On September 18, 2005, in Tanah Awuk village in central Lombok, around a thousand peasants gathered peacefully to protest development policies denying local people the ability to feed themselves, on which they blamed a severe problem of child malnutrition.
Indonesia has abundant fertile land and all available land is cultivated for agriculture.
The real problem is that policies favor elite profits over the hunger of peasants.
At about 9 in the morning, Indonesian police forces attacked the crowd with plastic and rubber (as well as some metal) bullets, tear gas, and truncheons.
33 were injured, 27 from gunshots, and the rest from assault.
At least one child and two women were shot.
National TV footage showed unarmed women being dragged violently across rough terrain and police roughing up a man bleeding copiously from the head. (5)
That's how you play the game when you join the US Terror team.
Salaam, Bangalore.
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The second very important element is to be able to look beyond the so called culture wars.
To be able to look beyond the rhetoric of dealing with social security, by enlarging the money on social security we are putting in on the global casino and making the money available to investors at low interest rates.
By being able to understand every policy decision and how it is going to impact.
And not accept the kind of rhetoric that goes — one example I give you is we fight the privatization of water in Delhi, which is connected to the privatization of the Ganges.
The chief minister and CEO of the water utility wrote me a letter because we took out a huge march across the city to say privatization is unacceptable to us.
So they write me a letter to say we are not privatizing.
The chief minister is a very good friend of mine.
I really get along well with her.
But she is trapped with a World Bank hundred million dollar loan, poor woman.
So she says, but Vadana even you have to hire contractors to fix your plumbing and change your lighting system and build houses.
I said yah we have to hire contractors but I don't end up paying rent to the contractor after he has built a house.
Because that is what privatization means.
They get the contract to build a utility and then sit back and have twenty years collection of rents and royalties — whether they provide water or they don't.
That's the way all privatization works.
Seeing through all of this — but I believe the most important aspect of it is to prevent both the hijack of what fragile democracy we have, while we simultaneously deepen it.
I think for too long we have spent time working on perfect solutions — in the future, not of today.
We've all want built perfect utopias, when we've killed each other over the various differences between our various utopias.
I don't think we have that luxury now.
I think what we have is the here and the now, and the next step from now.
With all the dreams we could have, each of us with different dreams it doesn't matter.
The reason I loved Seattle, I loved Cancun, I am so proud of the processes we are all generating together, is because they've proved you don't all have to think in an identical way to be together in collective action.
Diversity is not the problem, in fact diversity is the solution.
We are made to think diversity is the problem, and people are finding out it is not.
And as much as diversity is not the problem, culture is not the problem.
Culture is the solution.
To the extent we do not allow our culture to be hijacked and used for anti-culture objectives. |
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Last year I was with the Prime Minister of Tibet in exile.
We were in a conference on the impact of globalization on culture.
Someone got up and asked Sandhong Rinpoche a question on the culture of violence.
He said violence cannot have a culture.
Because till we lost contact with culture, culture meant that which holds together.
In Sanskrit and Hindi we have different words processes: Sanskriti, that which binds. Vikriti that which tears apart.
So that culture wars that are going on in this country are not about culture. They're Vikriti.
They are holding up a system that would collapse if people could think with free minds.
An unfree economy needs colonized minds in order to continue to dominate.
That unfreedom of the mind is what the cultural colonization is about.
Whether it is in India with what was done with Hindu beliefs, Ayodhya temple and the rise of BJP, or what is being done with the so called red states, using the worst victims of globalization to continue to push the project of globalization.
What I feel is happening with culture, is what happened with the mad cow disease.
Remember the mad cow disease.
Among the curies of what was the infected agent, was the prion, got a noble prize.
The prion was a protein which was identical to the normal protein in the cow's brain.
Identical in substance, but with a little twist in the structure.
And that little twist in the structure made a normal protein as an agent for self infection.
It wasn't an external virus. It wasn't a bacteria.
It was a distorted prion, distorted protein.
I feel what is happening with religious fundamentalism, or the culture wars, is really the equivalent of the prion in our social and cultural lives.
A tiny twist and we self-infect ourselves.
They don't need to have armies.
They don't need to have policing.
We end up policing each other, to the extent we do not realize what is happening in society.
As for the mad cow disease, the solution was giving back their normal diet back, rather than feeding them rendered meet, which is infected meat.
The solution was that free range grazing, start giving cows what they want to eat, which is fodder not meat.
They are not carnivores. They are herbivores.
We need free range diets.
Free range mental diets.
Free range political diets.
And it is in our hands to create that free range fodder.
Not too expensive.
We just need our imagination.
Thank you. |
June 23, 2005 But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks
By P. SAINATH Nagpur Rural (Maharashtra)
Vidharbha: No rains and 116F
E ven when it's 47 degrees Celsius in the rest of the region, it's cool here.
A little away from us is a patch which clocks in at minus 13 degrees.
This is "India's first Snowdome" — in burning Vidharbha.
Keeping its ice rink firm costs Rs. 4,000 a day in electricity charges alone.
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Huge water crisis
Welcome to the Fun & Food Village Water & Amusement Park at Bazargaon in Nagpur (Rural) district.
A portrait of Mahatma Gandhi greets visitors in the office of the huge complex.
And you're assured daily disco, ice skating, ice sliding and 'a well stocked bar with cocktails.'
The 40-acre park itself offers 18 kinds of water slides and games. Also services for events ranging from conferences to kitty parties.
The village of Bazargaon (pop 3,000) itself faces a huge water crisis. "Having to make many daily trips for water, women walk up to 15 km in a day to fetch it," says sarpanch (village government head) Yamunabai Uikey:
This whole village has just one sarkari (government) well.
Sometimes, we have got water once in four or five days.
Sometimes, once in ten days.
Bazargaon falls in a region declared as scarcity-hit in 2004.
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It had never faced that fate before.
The village also had its share of six hour — and worse — power cuts till about May.
These affected every aspect of daily life, including health, and devastated children appearing for exams. The summer heat, touching 47, made things worse.
All these iron laws of rural life do not apply within Fun & Food Village. This private oasis has more water than Bazargaon can dream of. And never a moment's break in power supply.
"We pay on average," says Jasjeet Singh, General Manager of the Park, "about 400,000 rupees [about $9,500] a month in electricity bills."
The Park's monthly power bill alone almost equals the yearly revenue of Yamunabai's village government.
Ironically, the village's power crisis eased slightly because of the Park.
Both share the same sub-station.
The park's peak period begins with May.
And so things have been a little better since then.
The Park's contribution to the village government's revenue is Rs. 50,000 [$1,190] a year.
About half what Fun & Food Village collects at the gate in a day from its 700 daily visitors.
Barely a dozen of the Park's 110 workers are locals from Bazargaon.
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Growing number of such water parks for those who can afford them
Water-starved Vidharbha has a growing number of such water parks and amusement centres.
In Shegaon, Buldhana, a religious trust runs a giant "Meditation Centre and Entertainment Park."
Efforts to maintain a 30-acre 'artificial lake' within it ran dry this summer.
But not before untold amounts of water were wasted in the attempt.
Here the entry tickets are called "donations."
In Yavatmal, a private company runs a public lake as a tourist joint.
Amravati has two or more such spots (dry just now).
And there are others in and around Nagpur — which lies in the centre of India.
Ongoing farm crisis
This, in a region where villages have sometimes got water once in 15 days.
And where an ongoing farm crisis has seen the largest numbers of farmers' suicides in the state of Maharashtra.
"No major project for either drinking water or irrigation has been completed in Vidharbha in decades," says Nagpur-based journalist Jaideep Hardikar. He has covered the region for years.
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Maintaining gardens
Mr. Singh insists the Fun & Food Village conserves water.
"We use sophisticated filter plants to reuse the same water."
But evaporation levels are very high in this heat.
And water is not just used for sports.
All the parks use vast amounts of it for maintaining their gardens, on sanitation and for their clientele.
"It is a huge waste of water and money," says Vinayak Gaikwad in Buldhana.
He is a farmer and a Kisan Sabha leader in the district.
That in the process, public resources are so often used to boost private profit, angers Mr. Gaikwad.
"They should instead be meeting people's basic water needs."
Back in Bazargaon, village government chief Yamunabai Uikey isn't impressed either.
Not by the Fun & Food Village. Nor by other industries that have taken a lot but given very little.
"What is there in all this for us?" she wants to know. To get a standard government water project for her village, we have to bear 10 per cent of its cost. That's around Rs. 450,000 [c.$10,750]. "How can we afford the Rs. 45,000 [$1,075]? What is our condition?"
So it's simply been handed over to a contractor. This could see the project built. But it will mean more costs in the long run and less control for a village of so many poor and landless people.
In the Park, Gandhi's portrait still smiles out of the office as we leave. Seemingly at the 'Snowdome' across the parking lot.
An odd fate for the man who said: "Live simply, that others might simply live."
P. Sainathis the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought.
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Vandana will answer a couple of questions if you have any fodder to offer.
Garden seeds, when will they be modified?
I hope never.
The system has been very clear.
They never touched the garden because to the extent that the people could garden freely you wouldn't realize that the farmers were losing their freedoms.
In this country you have tremendous programs of seed saving but they are all saved for garden varieties.
Meantime the Soya being grown in the Midwest, the corn being grown in the Midwest, is all patented, and all genetically modified.
And the farmers are being policed.
There is this wonderful film we hope we can copy it, called 'Life out of control' about the levels of contamination that are taking place.
After the contamination, the farmer who lost his crop through contamination is sued for theft of intellectual property.
Those genes are mine says Monsanto.
I don't think they will get to garden seeds, but they could get to a situation where you can't afford to garden.
For example, this privatization of water in Delhi, one of the issues we are fighting is the changing of categories.
In India we had all water is public.
Industrial water had higher tariffs.
Domestic water, social use of water had lower tariffs, and the poor had free water.
The slums had free water.
Now the slums will pay whether or now they have water — on the promise they will get water in the future.
The public taps are being destroyed and dismantled to not allow free access.
Kitchen gardens are being treated as industrial activity.
Schools are being treated as industrial activity — they will have coin-operated toilets now.
Graveyards, cremation grounds, temples — so the squeeze is in terms of, you know, if the big companies are paying no taxes, they are not paying any taxes, in India they are being given…agribusiness is paying no taxes…the rich people don't pay taxes…then sooner or later, under the squeeze of privatization of every aspect of life…and the need to collect taxes…what ends up happening is that every free space is enclosed.
Continuing to have the right to garden...and even higher...continuing to have the duty to garden...are some of the issues. |
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You talked quite a bit about some of the situations that are wrong in India and the United States could you touch on what we could do about it.
Would you elaborate on what we sitting in here in a college town of Massachusetts, what impact can we have to roll back some of this regressive privatization, and the government stepping out of the picture, and maintaining and improving the quality of life that we would like.
I think the issue is dual.
The government stepping out of the picture on economic regulation where it has a duty, and stepping into the picture in terms of defining culture and values, where it has no business.
That's the dual challenge.
We need to push government out of domains and make it resilient enough to stand up.
The two go together.
The way we are doing it in India, is for seeds for example, we do not believe WTO has the right to force countries to enforce patents on life.
We do not believe our government should have implemented a law that is wrong internationally, but it has.
We believe we have a duty to not obey an unjust law.
And the commitment we have been making since 1991 we now absolutely committed to it, since the law was introduced on 26th December, the day of the Tsunami, we call it the Tsunami law, we started immediately.
We send the messages out.
Five million farmers have pledged to never obey seed patenting.
Which means when your seed inspectors come, try to threaten you, try to collect royalties.
When Monsanto tries to take you to case, farmers band together and say, sorry, seed is common property.
It is my duty to save it.
It is my duty to exchange it.
And paying you royalties is not on.
Partly because globalization is redefining law.
All of it is about law.
The WTO agreements are about law.
Trade treaties are law.
When law becomes the way of implementing economic policy, then not cooperating with that unjust law becomes a very important element of reclaiming freedom.
You can't reclaim freedom without starting the alternatives.
That is why I started Navadanya's seventeen, eighteen years ago.
Seed saving.
Building alternatives.
Doing all the kinds of agriculture, corporate free agriculture.
You can't ask Monsanto to give you your freedom.
You have to do agriculture in which Monsanto doesn't have a place to enter your life.
For that, besides doing organic farming, besides doing GM free farming, we are creating zones where these corporations can't enter.
Freedom zones.
The GM free movement is one of the fastest growing movements in the world.
In Europe because I advised some governments there.
At the regional level governments have declared themselves to be GM free.
The European commission says to Austria, Italy, you can't because European Union will decide.
Now there are issues of who will make decisions at what level, because normal agriculture the local level decides.
But now you have GM all of a sudden agriculture is no more local.
And these tussles are places where freedom and democracy will be decided. |
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Could you explain some more about when the Culture and Religious Wars began?
Well in the case of India the contriving started with the very way in which culture in our country, in our region, was defined.
After all India is a land probably with more diversity than any other part of the world.
When the British started to create this contrived conflict, they started to talk about, you know they didn't talk of Muslims at that time, they talked of the Musselman, they talked of the Hindus.
But what is a Hindu?
It is basically those who lived beyond the Indus.
It was a geographical indicator.
Because there are too many kinds of so called Hindus, you know.
In no way can put it into one umbrella.
There are atheists and there are Shaivites, and there are Vaishnavites and those who love Krishna, and those who love Ram — we have three hundred million deities.
To put it all into one umbrella at one term…anyway it was not a religious term, it was a geographical term.
As a result of that contrived thing…1911 I think was the first census…1921 was the first time they started to put Hindu, Muslim...no Hindu, Indian, Muslim, Indian.
And the Muslims would put Hindu, Muslim.
Because people saw themselves as Indian, and Indian was Hindu.
It took forty years, fifty years of a false labeling.
Till now, 1992 Parliament we get the Bharatiya Janata Party come to power on the philosophy of Hindutva — the essence of a fake category.
And then we start defining ourselves in those kind of terms.
I think something similar is starting to happen in this country.
The contriving is that where you have had a solidarity, between those who work, the farmers, and the workers, and the progressive elements of society, who might not be factory workers — and that is where the university and college community comes in in a big way — to try and break that solidarity.
New cultural contriving is being done to make it really look like the problem is the educated in this country.
Because the educated are able to communicate, through systems outside watching — what is it FOX? — you know I think that is the problem, why do they have to be targeted.
The latte class's [intellectual class] big problem is, it is not FOX addicted.
You can come to class, teach freely.
Get books for what you want.
And that is a huge difference.
And that's why they have to be termed in the 'larger mind' as the problems of the peace.
I think it is a huge, huge challenge.
I would love to have a discussion on how we prevent this divide.
I can just tell you in India, the way we dealt with it was, we refused to allow the right wing to hijack our categories.
We took the Ganga, and its sacredness, and made it the grounds for fighting privatization.
So rather than let a contrived cultural category be the handmaiden of corporate colonization, we take our real cultures, and our real meanings, and turn them into the grounds of resistance of economic colonization.
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"Rule by corporations for corporations.
But of course corporations can't rule directly.
It wouldn't work.
People would just
throw them out.
They would come in
and try and monopolize salt and everyone would do what Gandhi did.
So they can only establish their rule over our lives through takeover of the state." |
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Published on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 by the Inter Press Service
Peruvian Farmers Move to End Terminator Seeds by Sanjay Suri LONDON A group of Peruvian indigenous farmers have prepared an extensively researched counter to a Canadian move to revive 'terminator' seeds.
Terminator seeds work only once. For a new crop, farmers would have to go back to sellers. These seeds that do not regenerate like normal seeds would work hugely to the advantage of corporations, to the detriment of farmers.
A United Nations moratorium at present blocks commercialisation of terminator seeds.
But a group of countries led by Canada have challenged the UN safety regulation.
This has led the Convention on Biological Diversity based in Montreal to open new discussions on relaxing the moratorium on such seeds.
One of the strongest counters to the move so far has come not from experts and officials but by Peruvian, says Michel Pimbert from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) that promotes sustainable development at local levels.
After monitoring cultivation methods, about 70 indigenous leaders representing 26 Andean and Amazon communities met in a mountain village last month over two days to collate their findings and assess the damage that could be caused by terminator seeds.
''When does it happen that marginalised, excluded citizens come out and talk in this way,'' Pimbert told IPS.
The Peruvian indigenous farmers came together under the Quechua-Aymara Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES) and the International Institute for Environment and Development, a general assembly largely composed of indigenous people from villages in the Andes.
''Indigenous people and marginalised groups barely have a voice when it comes to policies and legislation,'' Pimbert said. ''These were the voices of the poorest of the poor living in biodiversity hotspots.''
Officials at the Montreal institute had acknowledged that the input from the Peruvian indigenous farmers was one of the strongest they have received so far, Pimbert said.
The indigenous farmers reported that Peruvian farmers and small farmers worldwide ''are dependent on seeds obtained from the harvest as a principal source of seed to be used in subsequent agricultural cycles.''
But their findings went beyond that to examine several aspects of any change.
The farmers ''evaluated the evidence and assessed the risks of terminator technology on land, spiritual systems and on women, who are their seed keepers,'' Pimbert said.
The farmers also showed that Terminator (Genetic Use Restriction Technology) would transfer sterility to and effectively kill off other crops and wider plant life, as well as increasing the reliance of farmers on big agribusiness which is already patenting seeds traditionally owned by indigenous people.
They reported that industrialised 'mono-culture' farming would benefit at the expense of tried and tested local agricultural knowledge.
They warned that in Peru alone, 2,000 varieties of potato could be put at risk by Terminator technology. Peru gave the potato to the world.
''Terminator seeds do not have life,'' Felipe Gonzalez of the indigenous Pinchimoro community said in a statement.
''Like a plague they will come infecting our crops and carrying sickness.
We want to continue using our own seeds and our own customs of seed conservation and sharing.''
The Swiss-based company Syngenta recently won the patent on Terminator potatoes, but under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, it cannot market these potatoes.
The submission by the Peruvian farmers will be reviewed at a conference on such agricultural technology in Granada in Spain later this year.
The moratorium issue will come up at a conference on biological diversity to be held in Brazil in March next year.
''These voices and their research will be formally communicated there,'' Pimbert said.
They would seek to challenge claims by academics who feel terminator technology is safe, he said.
Peruvian indigenous leaders are urging the UN to expose the dangers of Terminator technology and uphold the moratorium.
They also demand that indigenous people have a say in the process equal to the influence of the agribusiness lobby.
''The UN moratorium helps to protect millenarian indigenous agricultural knowledge and the agrobiodiversity and global food security it enables,'' Alejandro Argumedo, associate director of ANDES, said in a statement.
''The rush to exploit Terminator technology for corporate profit must not be allowed to sabotage vital international biosafety polices.''
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Wednesday, 6 December 2006
Tribe blesses lesbian marriage
By Sanjaya JenaOrissa, India
An Indian tribe has given its consent to a lesbian 'marriage' in the eastern Indian state of Orissa.
A priest belonging to the Kandha tribe led the ceremony between Wetka Polang, 30, and Melka Nilsa, 22, in Koraput district recently.
Both the women are day labourers and now live together in Dandabadi village.
Same-sex relationships are outlawed in India. The 145-year-old colonial Indian Penal Code clearly describes a same sex relationship as an "unnatural offence".
Sociologists say that a community blessing a same-sex 'marriage' is unheard of in India.
It was not easy for Wetka and Melka to convince their tribe that they wanted to get married and live together - the local community at first fiercely protested at the idea.
The two women then eloped to another village to escape the wrath of their neighbours.
'Unhappy'
After much persuasion by family members, Kandha villagers of Dandabadi finally gave consent to the formal wedding.
"They [Wetka and Melka] wanted to prove that they can live without the help of men. They also love each other very much. So we decided to forgive them," said village elder Melka Powla.
But the two tribal women had to pay fines to their community to get it to bless their union — they offered a barrel of country liquor, a pair of oxen, and a sack of rice and hosted a family feast.
Eventually, last month, Wetka applied vermillion on Melka's forehead in the tradition of Indian marriage ceremonies before a disari or community priest, said village elder Dalimangi Chexa.
Now the couple say they are happy.
"We are leading a blissful married life. We love each other very much," Wetka told the BBC.
Both the women have had unhappy experiences with men in the past.
Wetka says she walked out of her marriage to an alcoholic after years of abuse.
Melka's family had arranged her marriage with another local man much against her wishes — she managed to break the engagement by telling the man's family that he was mentally "not normal".
The two women now hope to extend their family by adopting the son of Wetka's elder brother.
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Poisoning Patancheru India's Pharmacuetical Industry: Warning! Side Effects May Be Severe By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The United States has become the No. 1 market for India's pharmaceutical exports, with purchases reaching $250 million in 2003. But by the time those medicines are swallowed in Chicago or Shreveport, their side effects are already felt by villagers downstream or downwind from the drug factories.
India's pharmaceutical industry is heavily concentrated in a few small areas, one of the most prominent — and notorious — being near the town of Patancheru in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Over the past two decades, a growing chain of industrial estates has turned this 20-mile stretch of countryside into an ecological sacrifice zone.
The estates, dominant plants make bulk drugs, technically known as "active pharmaceutical ingredients" — raw materials for making pills, capsules, etc. Bulk-drug market competition is fierce, and corner-cutting on waste treatment is rampant.
Given the human and ecological costs of India's drug industry, I propose that our Food and Drug Administration add additional warnings to labels on imported drugs. For example:
"Side effects, including drowsiness, skin rashes, gastrointestinal distress, neurological disorders, cardiovascular problems and/or cancer, may be encountered by those living near the site of manufacture of this drug."
A 2004 survey by Greenpeace India compared villages and found high rates of these and other illnesses where water is shared with drug plants. Two major universities have launched studies of health problems in the area.
The mere smell of the villages, water is enough to make you gag. Pollutant concentrations in area streams and lakes range from 12 to 100 times as high as those in an unpolluted lake just outside the contaminated zone, according to the 2004 report of a committee appointed by the state's High Court.
In accordance with court orders, drug companies are paying to have safe water piped into affected villages for drinking and cooking. But the polluted water is still used for other purposes in the home and on the farm.
That brings us to another labeling suggestion: "Warning: This product may disrupt food production in certain areas."
Thousands of acres of formerly good farmland around Patancheru lie uncultivated during the dry season because groundwater has become unfit for irrigation. The court committee sampled 48 wells in the area and found 81 percent polluted beyond an international standard for irrigation water.
How about this warning?: "Consumption of this antacid may induce headache, coughing and/or nausea downwind from where it was produced."
Despite repeated crackdowns by government authorities, some factories continue to pollute the Patancheru area's air with sulfurous mercaptan compounds that smell like rotten fish — ironically, during the production of stomach antacids.
Finally: "Some patients will experience sharp pangs of remorse when they learn more about the conditions under which this medication was produced."
The court committee visited 40 "pollution potential" companies in the industrial estates. Of those, 30 were producing drugs or drug ingredients, and only five were complying fully with Patancheru's lenient pollution laws.
For effluent at new U.S. drug plants, the Environmental Protection Agency sets strict limits on at least 34 chemical compounds, from acetone to xylene.
No information about toxic compounds
But in the Patancheru area, where normally only the total quantity of pollutants is tracked, there's almost no information about specific toxic compounds.
That's serious, because some of the drug industry's solvents, byproducts and ingredients can harm people even at low concentrations.
When it comes to the cost of patented prescription drugs in the United States, the sky's the limit. But in the global bulk drug market, low cost is the name of the game, and India's people and landscape are the losers.
Meanwhile, are you wondering if the U.S. medical establishment is aware of the global pharmaceutical trade's side effects?
Ask your doctor.
Stan Cox, senior research scientist at the Land Institute, Salina, Kan., lived in India for seven years and recently spent three months there. He wrote this for the institute's Prairie Writers Circle. |
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| India 2011 Antibodies from women with infertility used in creation of GMO food IMF through their implementation of austerity policies defacto exploit and loot the wealth of Third World nations and facilitate the long term asset stripping and resourcing stealing of such unfortunate countries Quite a lot if you look at the whole Capitalist Western system which is rigged to exploit the masses and especially vulnerable Third Word nations in favor of the few, again in the West. Globalization, Monetarism and Deregulation all sounded so great when they are expounded enthusiastically from the early 1980's, by the USA and their well funded fronts in academia and the global media as a globalist International Banker policy. Anglicised elite of India lording it up in London, NY and heaven knows where with looted assets. Illuminati manipulation of oil energy resources World rich elite taking advantage of middle class and poor India and corporations 2011 — Deregulation, oil price, elite accumulation of wealth In India a bill was introduced to make it a crime to question the safety of GMOs |
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Part I
Harry Potter and the Hindu gods India resistance, deregulation, accumulation of wealth — Part I |
The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
Maharashtra's Gondia district Derby is one of India's prestigious racing events |
Democracy and children Child labor Kyrgyz Peru India Bangladesh Indonesia Morocco Nicaragua Africa Cuba |
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Oxam America: Free Trade Agreement Bad Deal for Poor Countries
WASHINGTON — April 20, 2005 — International agency Oxfam called on U.S. Members of Congress today to reject the Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Central American countries and the Dominican Republic (DR-CAFTA.)
Oxfam believes that the agreement, in its current form, will do more harm than good and will endanger the livelihood of thousands of small farmers who already live in poverty.
Oxfam joined numerous other non-governmental organizations and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle at a press conference today, calling for the rejection of DR-CAFTA.
The trade agreement is under consideration by both the House and the Senate and is expected to come up for a vote in the U.S. Congress before the end of May.
"Fair trade rules and practices have the potential to lift millions of people out of poverty, as trade and development are intimately linked," said Stephanie Weinberg, Trade Policy Advisor at Oxfam.
"But DR-CAFTA will only hurt these countries as it puts the needs of U.S. agribusiness, pharmaceutical companies and foreign investors above the basic needs of citizens in the region."
The U.S. trading partners in the DR-CAFTA region, with a population of 42.5 million, are the poorest countries in the hemisphere and have unequal distributions of income and wealth.
They depend heavily on agriculture for the livelihood of significant portions of their populations.
These countries are ravaged by curable diseases due to poverty and inadequate health- care coverage.
They sorely lack public infrastructure and, in several cases, are highly indebted.
Highly unequal societies,
"Those who stand to lose in the DR-CAFTA are the ones who are already disadvantaged in these highly unequal societies, where the majority of poor people live in rural areas, rely on income from agriculture and must pay for medicines out-of-pocket," continued Weinberg.
"Instead of establishing fair and equitable rules for trade, the agreement will institutionalize an uneven playing field."
Dumping of US rice
The regional trade agreement will require these developing countries to open their markets to dumping of US rice and other commodities and forbid use of adequate safeguards to ensure food and livelihood security and rural development.
Monopoly held by brand-name pharmaceuticals
DR-CAFTA imposes strict new rules that extend the monopoly held by brand-name pharmaceuticals, which will limit generic competition and reduce access to affordable medicines in the future.
Special rights and privileges to foreign investors
The trade agreement provides special rights and privileges to foreign investors that can create major new liabilities to governments and undermine efforts to protect public health, the environment, and workplace safety.
U.S. farmers receive extensive subsidies
DR-CAFTA also blatantly ignores the fact that U.S. farmers receive extensive subsidies and domestic supports, estimated to be around $18 billion this year alone.
"DR-CAFTA is a bad deal for millions of farmers, workers, and consumers in Central America and the Dominican Republic and should therefore be rejected," added Weinberg.
"Instead of pushing through bad deals like DR-CAFTA, the US should invest in the WTO and the Doha Round, as that is the best path to build a rules-based trade system that provides more opportunity and stability for both the U.S. and developing countries."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Oxfam's written testimony before the US House Committee on Ways and Means on the Implementation of the DR-CAFTA can be found on Oxfam's Web site at: |
The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
From the video 'Holes in Heaven' — Brooks Agnew, Earth Tornographer
In 1983 I did radio tornography with 30 watts looking for oil in the ground.
I found 26 oil wells over a nine state area.
100 hundred percent of the time was accurate, which is just 30 watts of power beaming straight into solid rock.
HAARP uses a billion watts beamed straight into the ionosphere for experiments.
Picture these strings on the piano as layers of the Earth, each one has its own frequency.
What we used to do is beam radio waves into the ground and it would vibrate any 'strings' that were present in the ground.
We might get a sound back like ___ and we would say, that's natural gas.
We might get a sound back like ____ and we'd say that's crude oil.
We were able to identify each frequency.
We accomplished this with just 30 watts of radio power.
If you do this with a billion watts the vibrations are so violent that the entire piano would shake.
In fact the whole house would shake.
In fact the vibrations could be so severe under ground they could even cause an earthquake.
Download or watch HAARP Holes in Heaven
— Complete version available for mp4 download Download or watch movie on HAARP — Advanced US Military research weapon on behaviour modification
weather change, ionesphere manipulation — click here Download or watch audio of Dr. Nick Begich talking on HAARP
— The 2006 update to 'Angels Don't Play This HAARP'. 'Angels Still Don't Play This HAARP: Advances In Tesla Technology'. Planet Earth Weapon by Rosalie Bertell
ozone, HAARP, chemtrails, space war — click here HAARP/Chemtrails/Alien aircraft/Illuminati involvement
1 hour FreemanTV.com video — click here (has 30 second lead in with blank screen and silence) Angels Dont Play This HAARP weather manipulation 1 hour 36 minutes video — click here (poor quality to watch but well worth listening)
Dr. Nick Begich, his book and his articles can be found here
http://www.earthpulse.com/
Article on Chemtrails — unusual cloud formations in the US.
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50 minute discussion on psychotronic mind control with Dr. Nick Begich and Alex Jones
for mp3 — right click here |
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Torture and Bush — White House legal architect Yoo on US soldiers sent to Iraq committing suicide NSA coverup - Vietnam - Kerry The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images The House of Saud and Bush All with U.S. Money: US and Israel War Crimes All with U.S. Money: Israel agents stole identity of New Zealand cerebral palsy victim. (IsraelNN.com July 15, 2004) The Foreign Ministry will take steps towards restoring relations with New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark today announced she was implementing diplomatic sanctions after two Israelis were sentenced on charges of attempting to obtain illegal passports. Despite Israeli refusal to respond to the accusations, the two are labeled in the New Zealand media as Mossad agents acting on behalf of the Israeli intelligence community. Foreign Ministry officials stated they will do everything possible to renew diplomatic ties, expressing sorrow over the "unfortunate incident". Projected mortality rate of Sudan refugee starvation deaths — Darfur pictures Suicide now top killer of Israeli soldiers Atrocities files — graphic images 'Suicide bombings,' the angel said, 'and beheadings.' 'And the others that have all the power — they fly missiles in the sky. They don't even look at the people they kill.' The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa Follow the torture trail... Photos August 2004 When you talk with God were you also spending your time, money and energy, killing people? Are they now alive or dead? Photos July 2004 US Debt Photos June 2004 Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying Photos May 2004 American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture — London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures Photos April 2004 The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza, and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months Photos March 2004 The Iraq War — complete listing of articles, includes images Photos February 2004 US missiles — US money — and Palestine Photos January 2004 Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert Photos December 2003 Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003 Photos November 2003 Atrocities — graphic images... Photos October 2003 Aljazeerah.info Photos September 2003 |
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In Andhra Pradesh the result was the complete erosion of all the safety networks for farmers
