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Editor: Nagaraja.M.R.. Vol.17....Issue. 17.............25/04/2021
Corporate Domination
of Agriculture
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By Bharath Dogra
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Keeping in view the increasing concerns worldwide to check
increasing corporate control over farming and food systems, there is a need to
look more carefully at various forms of this increasing corporatization and
consider carefully various ways and means of resisting this.
Firstly there is the increasing trend of land grab. This can be
more clearly seen in the purchase and long-tem lease of land in Africa by
companies, individuals or even governments of foreign countries. In just five
countries during 2004-09 this amounted to 2.5 million hectares. But within
various countries also corporate entities and rich individuals have been moving
in quickly to grab at low rates the land of distressed small farmers who are
facing increasing problems. Governments in many countries have been
handing over large tracts of land to corporate interests at very concessional
rates for plantations or even crop cultivation, and they have been making
changes in their laws to facilitate this. Some Indian states too have been
changing land ceiling and other laws to facilitate this.
There should be widespread national and world-level
campaigns against all kinds of future land grab and for cancelling the most
unjust ones. Land in the hands of actual cultivators must be emphasized,
while ownership of big tracts of land by outsider entities should be opposed.
On the other hand several big companies are not interested in
accessing land directly, as they feel that an easier way of ensuring access to
farm produce needed by them is through contract farming. The provisions of
several contracts enable the companies to keep pushing their expensive inputs
also on the farmers so that they benefit from both ends of getting reliable
supply of exactly the kind of crop needed by them ( for example the barley
variety grown for making beer may be different from the variety needed for
nutritious food )at a reasonable price, retaining the authority of also
rejecting a part of this crop on quality grounds, while at the same time
earning also from imposing expensive seeds, inputs and technologies on farmers.
The reality of contract farming should be publicized among
farmers , exploitative practices should be exposed and where it is clear that
farmers are suffering a lot then there should be a campaign for ending contract
farming on this pattern. The system of free cultivation by farmers should be
protected.
Another form of gaining corporate domination is through
excessive control of food processing. This should be resisted and in
particular the domination of one or very few big corporate entities should be
resisted. More and more food processing should be taken up at village level by
cooperatives and groups of farmers, particularly women.
Another form of increasing corporate control is through various
international trade and financial organizations as well as trade treaties
and other agreements. This should be resisted. In particular the rules of World
Trade Organization should be changed in such a way that the interests of
farmers are protected and unfair and unjust domination of corporate sector is
avoided. The trend to link farming and food related restrictions to
trade, including intellectual property rights in trade and imposing
intellectual property rights in the context of even plants and life-forms
should be reversed entirely. Trade should not be twisted and changed in such
ways as to threaten the farming and food sovereignty of communities and
protection of basic food and sustainable livelihood rights. There should be a
worldwide strong campaign for achieving this.
Domination of food trade and food stocks by corporate interests
should be resisted, as well as manipulation of food stocks/ hoarding and food
prices by them. There should be strong laws to prevent this as well as
monitoring of the national and international food stocks and prices to check
all such trends which can lead to the domination of the profit objective in the
food sector, leading to more hunger.
There should be strong resistance to the tendency of increasing
concentration of seeds along with other important inputs in the hands of a few
big multinational companies. In particular the concentration in the case of
seeds should be avoided and there should be a complete ban on GM seeds and
crops. At the same time grassroots efforts to protect biodiversity and to save,
protect, revive and share diversity of traditional seeds should be encouraged
in a very big and effective way.
Corporate domination has been helped greatly by securing
scientific support in various unethical and unjust ways and by misusing crucial
infrastructure like research institutes, agricultural universities and gene
banks. Research efforts should be decentralized and there should be a mutual
cooperation of publicly supported scientists and experienced farmers to
make available self-reliant, low cost, very low external input,
ecologically friendly, sustainable technologies which incorporate plenty of
local traditional wisdom as well. There should be strong efforts for exposing
and opposing unethical use of science to advance big business interests.
Corporate control in various forms seeks to break the
self-reliance of farming communities which should be resisted. This process
started in India in a big way about 55 years back with the agricultural green
revolution and then its extension to various related activities. This led to
rapidly increasing costs, loss of traditional seeds and wisdom, as well as
colossal ecological ruin. Efforts should also be made by farming communities to
regain the self-reliance we lost then. This is worth considering at a time when
the opposition of farmers to new laws aimed at increasing corporatization of
farming and food system in India is gathering strength.
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