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The government’s agricultural reforms threaten food and water security as well as deepening economic inequality in India. 1/15
In her 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine,” @NaomiAKlein Klein proposed the concept of “disaster capitalism” in reference to the tendency of governments to ram through free market policies in the wake of major crisis, whether natural disasters or acts of terrorism. 2/15
In this case, the crisis is a compound one – food and water security and deepening economic inequality in India are issues that have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 3/15
COVID-19 has propelled unemployment to unprecedented levels in India with 27% of the population of 1.3b unemployed, while the World Food Program has predicted an additional 130 million people will face acute hunger due to the pandemic and associated economic crisis. 4/15
Small and marginal farmers make up 80 percent of the Indian agricultural sector, which employs 47 percent of the population and supports the livelihoods of 60 percent of the country. 5/15
The proposition that increased agricultural liberalization will increase food security rests in the assumption that income will be evenly distributed among producers and that a reliable source of food will otherwise be available in the absence of private contracts. 6/15
It also rests on the assumption that the market is truly competitive, and not dominated by large monopolies and oligopolies. 7/15
In practice, agrichemical, pesticide, and seed suppliers have entrenched partnerships with other industries, leaving farmers with little choice while buyers have the entire market to choose from. 8/15
While India has achieved food sufficiency, food production in general is resource intensive, dependent on cereals, and regionally unequal. 9/15
To promote food security, experts recommend reforms that build food sovereignty, such as the promotion of agroecology, diversification, and shorter agricultural supply chains to build more resilience in food systems and provide greater access to vulnerable communities. 10/15
There has been a harrowing trend of farmer’s suicides in India throughout the last decade, attributed to a culmination of debt, insufficient harvests, drought, and neglect by the state. 11/15
Last year, an average of 28 people who depended on farming for their livelihoods died by suicide in India every day, amounting to at least 10,281 people in the farm sector in just the year 2019. 12/15
Back in 2012, Arundhati Roy wrote “In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the post-IMF ‘reforms’ middle class – the market – live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests”. 13/15
While the pandemic and associated economic crisis will undoubtedly be felt for years to come, anti-worker liberalization policies such as these three farm laws will only exacerbate present inequalities. 14/15
If power is tilted further toward large agri-food corporations and away from smallholder farmers, the repercussions of the current crises in India will be markedly more dire for the working class. 15/15
