What does the word 'chocking' mean? According to the dictionary
chocking involvespreventing the movement of (a wheel or vehicle) with a chock.
"the front wheel will need to be chocked"
supporting (a boat, cask, etc.) on chocks.
"outside, chocked up on the waterfront, was a yacht"
Why Aren’t We Talking about Farmers in India?
Raj immediately provides the answer-
They are fighting in a global war over the future of agriculture. Modi is chocking the debate.
Debates can be choked. Can they also be 'chocked'? Perhaps. The urban dictionary tells us that chocking means to gag on a penis while performing fellatio. Clearly, Raj Patel was debating this issue when Modi rushed in and shoved his dick down Raj's throat. This is totally reprehensible behavior and I for one am ready to condemn it unreservedly. Chocking can cause oxygen deprivation resulting in irreversible brain damage which in turn can lead to writing stuff like this-
When Shashank Yadav took to Twitter to plead for oxygen to save his dying grandfather last month,
Cabinet Minister Smriti Irani tried to phone him twice but was not able to get through. Yadav's grandfather passed away from heart disease while being treated in a private hospital.
the Indian government swept into action. They arrested Yadav and charged him under section 269 of the Indian Penal Code for acting “with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public.”
That is Section 505. There is a good faith defence.
Why did the U.P Police book Yadav? Because fear that oxygen cylinders were running out would cause hoarding and a black market. However, since Yadav hadn't mentioned COVID and in any case it was third parties who amplified his tweet he won't face punishment. It is enough that the threat of draconian action was made manifest.
Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has yet to take action to tackle the horrors of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, the administration has been exceptionally diligent in managing the circulation of information regarding politics and the pandemic.
So, it does what it can not what is beyond its power. But then all other successful administrations in India do the same thing- unless they want to profit off panic buying in the black market.
Such competence has been long in the making.
Indeed. The Indian Penal Code dates back to 1860. However, Section 505 was amended last year to bear down more heavily on hate speech.
In a 2002 interview, after he had overseen brutal pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat where he was then Chief Minister,
The Indian Supreme Court decided there was no evidence against Modi. A sitting C.M is unlikely to destroy his own career and cause the State to be put under President's rule.
Patel is of Hindu Gujarati ancestry. If he believes Modi oversaw a 'brutal pogrom' carried out by Hindu Gujaratis, then he must believe that Hindu Gujaratis, who kept voting overwhelmingly for Modi, harbor genocidal intentions against Gujarati Muslims.
Why does he not denounce his own community? If Modi is a bad man, his community is a bad community.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that his only regret was not better managing the media.
Modi should have blamed Ghanchis from Godhra, linked to gangsters in Karachi, for the whole thing and then spun a story about the ISI. It is noticeable that his skill at managing the Media prevented a backlash after the Akshardam attack.
Patel- perhaps because of incessant chocking by all and sundry- does not understand that politicians must manage the Media and directly affect Public Expectations. They are plenty of other matters where they can only follow the advise of technocrats because they lack expert knowledge.
When #ResignModi trended on Facebook, where Prime Minister Modi has 47 million followers, posts containing the hashtag were blocked.
Good. These nutters might have created a nuisance in which case a lot of them would have ended up dying of COVID in crowded jail cells.
Farmers, a constituency banished from the headlines within and outside India, rallied the entire country last year.
Farmers are important. They want more money and they got more money. Can they get even more by hanging around? Perhaps. But they may die of COVID instead. Sad.
Since then, the horrors of the Indian healthcare system have been too obvious to censor.
The truth about India is that it is very very poor. Most Indians, being very very poor can see this for themselves. But Modi comes from the poor. He is not a Patel- i.e. a land owning agriculturist with sons in the professions. He can always move to the Left and give the Patel and other kulak classes a big kick in the backside.
The front pages carry stories describing bodies floating in the Ganges and the disaster of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturing country’s inability to vaccinate its own population.
So what? Indians know about this. They can see their country is very poor. They may not be able to read the 'front pages' Raj Patel peruses while chocking on diverse cocks. But they can only vote for the best candidate available. At the Center, that is Modi. He literally has no rival.
The Indian government can’t lock up every journalist, no matter how much they’d like to.
This government finds that the anti-Modi press is highly beneficial to them. Why? Like Raj Patel, it is anti-Hindu. More specifically, it depicts the Gujarati Hindu as a blood-thirsty beast. This helps a Hindutva party in a country where 80 percent of the population is Hindu and the very word 'Gujarat' stands for moral probity and sound business sense.
Media attention has shamed the Modi administration, though not enough for the administration to admit that its electoral campaigning was partly to blame for super spreader events associated with regional elections.
Thanks to the farmers' agitation, Indians believed that the COVID virus had not been able to withstand India's filth and squalor. It had been killed and eaten by hardier indigenous viruses.
Despite vast rallies and significant investments, the BJP didn’t win the gains they had sought.
Yes it did. In Bengal, Congress and the Left have been wiped out. It is now either Modi or Mamta. Those two have helped each other by destroying each other's traditional rival.
This is in part because of farmers, a constituency banished from the headlines—within and outside India—but whose issues rallied the country last year.
There were no elections where farmers might have a voice. It was thought that the farmer's movement could split the BJP coalition in Haryana- but this does not seem to have materialized.
Today the farmer protests continue in Delhi’s blistering heat and raging COVID-19 outbreak. Protesters have declared that they will remain either until Modi repeals his agricultural reforms or until he loses his 2024 reelection bid, whichever comes first.
Cool. They are enjoying themselves. The truth is being out of doors reduces risk of infection. Still, as deaths mount and the money coming in dwindles, the agitation may begin to fade away. On the other hand- like the Greenham Common protest against Cruise Missiles which lasted for 19 years, i.e. 9 years after the cruise missiles were removed- it may become a way of life.
And this isn’t just talk—inside the protest camps there is infrastructure for the long haul. Farmers camped on the city’s outskirts have built community kitchens, clinics, foot-massage parlors, and a fixture of many farmer protests, libraries.
They were well funded. Will those funds continue to flow in after donors realize that the farmers return home to spread the infection to their families?
Farmers understand their fates have always turned on what they know and what they’ve been allowed to plant. They exchange knowledge from books and seeds freely.
While getting foot-massage. Still, at least they aren't chocking Raj Patel.
India is a frontline battleground for a global war around agricultural knowledge.
No it isn't. Who now listens to Vandana Siva? The fact is, only the beneficiaries of the 'Green Revolution' (which Shiva considers the work of the devil) who are protesting.
From Rwanda to the United States,
a few nutters are talking bollocks but everybody ignores them.
farmers and anti-hunger advocates are pitched against philanthropists, agro-chemical giants, and food multinationals around the future role of government, technology, and food systems in ending hunger.
But, because they concentrate on telling stupid lies, Raj Patel ends up chocking on sundry dicks. Sad.
The fate of Indian farmers matters for the entire planet.
No. Indian farmers don't matter to anyone except Indian politicians. If India gets richer and more secure, farmers will matter less and less. But, if there is a fiscal crunch, all their entitlements will disappear. They can agitate till they are blue in the face but they will still get nothing. Indeed, the vast majority of Indian farmers currently get nothing. The privilege given to the Green Revolution farmers will disappear once the State runs out of money to finance the Public Distribution system.
On March 24, 2020, Modi announced on the evening news that, beginning less than four hours from the time of airing, his country’s 1.3 billion people would be forced to go into lockdown for three weeks. COVID-19 infection levels were rising, and health infrastructure had been frail for decades. Without a lockdown there would have been an apocalypse then of the kind currently underway now.
Modi realized that India was too poor to do lockdown. So his Government chose to believe a report that suggested India had achieved herd immunity. Henceforth, Modi left it to the States to do lockdown- if they could afford to.
During the Spanish Flu epidemic, 14 million out of a 300 million population died. Did this have any political or other repercussions? None at all. The fact is, even if India had 40 million excess deaths, there would be practically no effect on anything.
India’s COVID-19 relief package was a beard for radical structural reforms to the coal, energy, civil aviation, and agriculture sectors. It was textbook disaster capitalism.
No it wasn't. It was textbook bureaucratic populism.
The 2020 lockdown was extended through April, and then until the end of May. Migrant workers were stranded. Unable to find public transport home, and criminalized for remaining where the lockdown had left them, some walked hundreds of kilometers, dying along the way. Images of migrant workers being beaten by police circulated widely.
Causing Raj Patel to beat his own meat while waiting for chocking. Who says no one benefited from this calamity?
With each lockdown extension, the government came under pressure to do more. It failed to invest in healthcare or prepare for the coming disaster. On Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, the BJP took a beating.
Raj Patel can bash the keyboard with one hand while bashing his bishop with the other.
On May 12 Narendra Modi responded by announcing a call for a “Self-Reliant” India (Atmanirbhar Bharat), funded with a $263 billion stimulus package. The following week India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a series of press conferences detailing the package.
The stimulus staples of food aid, loans to small businesses, and rent relief amounted to one of the lowest rates of fiscal stimulus anywhere in the world. The Covid relief package was a beard for radical structural reforms to the coal, energy, civil aviation, and agriculture sectors which, Sitharaman suggested, would help India’s economy out of its slump.
These were already in the pipeline. The truth is Modi wants to keep something in the kitty so as to indulge in big bribes to voters at election time.
India would prepare for its bold post-pandemic future by opening up its fossil fuel sector and selling off mineral rights and airspace. It was textbook disaster capitalism.
Naomi Klein is not an economist. Indians know that the 'disaster' of India's foreign exchange crisis in the early Nineties turned out to be a blessing in disguise. That's why Manmohan was a two term Prime Minister. Indonesia knows that the IMF's tough stance was what enabled them to get rid of Suharto.
Patel is British, not Indian. He may prefer a poor and starving India which keeps getting chocked by its neighbors. But Patel's views are scarcely representative of the views of Patels. He probably hates Priti Patel. But British voters want her sort of Patel hard-headedness. Raj, meanwhile, is welcome to try to chock himself.
Moreover, the BJP announced, India’s largest source of employment would also enjoy the fruits of deregulation; farmers would be unshackled from government purchasing arrangements dating back to the early years of Indian independence.
Unshackling is bad. Slavery is good. Could somebody please manacle Raj and chock him but good?
Although agriculture, forestry, and fishing only account for 16 percent of India’s GDP, about half the population depends on them in one way or another.
So, getting them to stop depending on these sectors is the only way they can get richer and more secure and have access to decent health and education etc.
The laws passed through the BJP-majority Indian parliament swiftly; on June 5 they became part of the emergency ordinances at the government’s disposal to manage the pandemic. By the end of June, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service had analyzed the proposals, and lauded them as “ordinances that will liberate existing market restrictions, eliminate free trade barriers in agricultural production, and empower farmers.”
No Economist say the laws are bad. On the other hand, Green Revolution Farmers can agitate for higher support prices- which they have got. If they can keep up their agitation till National Elections they may get something yet juicier. But how long can this game continue? Sooner or later there will be a fiscal crunch. A succession of weak coalition Governments will bow to the inevitable. Bureaucratic populism will collapse. Far from being a disaster, this will be a blessing in disguise for the vast majority of Indian people.
Farmers themselves created study groups to analyze the proposed reforms and came to a rather different conclusion: the laws, farmers argued, were the beginning of the end for small-scale farming.
But small-scale farming has already ended for any with the nous to escape it. Few farmers want their sons to continue in agriculture. There has to be bigger scale mechanized farming.
To cast India’s 146 million farms to the free market would inevitably lead to a more consolidated, monopolized, ecologically destructive, and, ultimately, American agricultural model.
Raj doesn't seem to understand that America is a very rich and secure country. Indians want to emulate the 'American agricultural model'. Why? It is so that the main health problem for poor Indians will be morbid obesity, not malnutrition.
Prior to the three new acts— the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020—farmers primarily in Punjab and Haryana sold their harvest through licensed commission agents. These agents, at least in theory, helped farmers find the highest prices from licensed purchasers in state-level Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees.
These agents also function as power-brokers and can gain important benefits- e.g. soft loans from Nationalized Banks- for their clients. Naturally, they are prepared to fund protests which serve their vested interests.
The first of these new acts limits the zone of state oversight to these committees, while allowing new actors to create new markets.
Raj may think the Indian State is very wonderful. It has a tender care for Dalits and women. It is not biased towards the dominant castes and their patriarchal ways. However, this is not the experience of poor Indian people. They don't want to eke out a miserable existence as migrant labor for wealthy kulaks.
The second allows farmers to contract with anyone they’d like.
How shocking! If farmers are allowed to do this, what is to stop young people demanding the right to marry whoever they like? Society will collapse! Patels may start marrying Iyers! Dhokla will begin to taste like idli! Miscegenation is a great threat to social stability! Farmers must be denied freedom- though the are welcome to chock Raj Patel from time to time.
The third allows corporations to stockpile food and engage in the warehouse and supply management systems that characterize Walmart’s daily operations in the United States.
This means less waste and a streamlined supply chain. The State has neither the resources nor the skill to create any such thing. The alternative to letting private enterprise doing it is for the thing not to happen at all. The farmers will continue to grow food but much of it will rot before reaching the consumer. This means, ceteris paribus, a lower reward for farmers.
“Farmers saw the consequences before everyone else,” Sudha Narayanan, a Delhi-based economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute told me. As Narayanan has argued, the laws seemed designed to help two well-connected allies, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani—both from Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Adani, a coal billionaire, runs an agro-logistics empire which in 2016 landed a thirty-year contract to warehouse grain for the government. Ambani, with a net worth of $75.7 billion, has just started a foray into e-retail. With the ability to set up private markets free of state oversight, farmers worry that they will get locked into the kinds of monopsony that characterize U.S. agriculture.
Sudha- who is perfectly sensible- understands that farming is doomed. 83 % of farmers own about as much land as a soccer pitch. Her point is that streamlining the supply chain won't generate local jobs. It will cut out the middle-men who currently provide other services- e.g. getting your son out of jail if he rapes a girl from a lower caste. It will change the rural power structure.
To understand how catastrophic this might be, I ask you to imagine a world where anyone can get a telephone. You don't have to be of Joint Secretary rank to be supplied with this luxury. Moreover, imagine that these phones are 'mobile'. What if they even have a camera built into them? This means that when you grab the servant girl for a bit of chocking, she can phone for help. She can record what you are doing. A society where some filthy Ambani can get rich supplying phones even to servant girls is a society doomed to nihilism and anarchy. Suppose your daughter starts chatting on her own phone with some boy of a different caste. What if they decide they are in 'love'? What if they run off and get married? Miscegenation is the result of freedom. We must ensure that freedom fucks off to Amrika. We don't want in out pure and sacred and starving land.
No doubt, there are business houses which don't like Ambani or Adani because both are smarter and more successful. Such business houses may fund protesting farmers. But which ordinary Indian cares which billionaire provides something he needs? If these people are making a profit, let the State tax that profit and use the money for public goods.
Sudha does have some sensible policy recommendations- but so do most people. The problem is that this entire sector is doomed just as handloom weaving, which Gandhi considered a panacea, was doomed.
A fiscal crunch under weak coalition Government will see the whole thing go the way of industrial licensing. Maybe, Modi will get another term by doling out money at election time. But the money will run out sooner or later.
Nobody believes that the current system is perfect. For instance, the reliance on intermediaries opens opportunities for trading agents to trap farmers in debt. Proponents for reform contend that doing away with the variations in state-administered grain trading will produce a national market with reduced bureaucracy and more transparency in pricing. There is, however, little reason to think that preventing state governments from regulating markets, and preventing farming contracts from being governed by state laws, will lead to a utopian free market exchange. Indeed, the language around private contracts suggests that it’ll become harder, not easier, for farmers to know what a fair price for their harvests actually is.
Nobody knows the 'fair price' for anything- except God. All we can find out is the open market price. True, in the short run, farmers in some places can get the Government to pay over the odds. But farming will still get less and less profitable. Even if there isn't a fiscal crunch, there will be an environmental crunch or else cheap migrant labor will dry up. The proportion of the population dependent on primary industries has to keep falling year by year, decade by decade. The alternative is an involuted Malthusian poverty trap.
Some of these reforms have already been tried outside Punjab. Grain trade liberalization in the Indian state of Bihar supports farmers’ worries. Bihari wheat farmers get $16 for 100 kg, while Punjabi farmers sell the same weight for $25.
Bihar has less state capacity and is too poor to subsidize its farmers. So Biharis go to Punjab to harvest their crops. But, it is the Punjabi- not the Bihari- farmers who are protesting. If Bihar gets safer, entrepreneurs will improve its supply chains and so Bihari farmers will get more. But, in that case, the State will break its compact with the Green Revolution beneficiaries because the P.D.S will no longer be dependent on them. In any case, there is no longer a strategic reason to want food security even in 'thirsty' crops. There is no LBJ or Nixon who will use the 'food weapon' to get us to change our foreign policy.
Modi’s government insists that it knows the best way to direct the infrastructure to feed the country. Meanwhile, in the camps outside Delhi, you’ll hear “Sarkar ki Majboori—Adani, Ambani, Jamakhori,” or “The government is beholden to the hoarders, Adani and Ambani.”
There you have it. Adani & Ambani's billionaire rivals are financing the whole show. Why should we take sides in a spat between the ultra-rich?
The laws are an authoritarian approach to agriculture.
But they reduce State power.
Passed without debate or transparency, they also forbid dissent;
No. Dissent is legal. However nuisance law suits are barred.
they include provisions making it impossible for anyone to take the government to court as a result of actions consonant with these new agricultural acts.
The lawyers are upset because they can't earn money bringing nuisance law suits. Boo hoo.
Initial farmer protests in June, July, and August, mainly in Punjab, were largely ineffective; the farm ordinances passed into law in September. After the acts passed, farmers groups proposed to relocate, with the call “Dilli chalo”—let’s go to Delhi. They never quite arrived.
The did get to Red Fort- greatly to Modi's glee. The thing looked like a Khalistani operation.
Delhi sits in the Northern Capital Region, a “Union Territory” similar to Washington, D.C., with its own central police force. When the protesters arrived from Punjab in October, they met blockades and force. Farmers pitched camps. Word spread and farmers from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan arrived at border posts. Soon thousands of farmers encircled Delhi. Media portraying police riots spread, and, with it, sympathy with the protesters.
Thankfully, the Khalistani element played into Modi's hands.
After scenes of the farmers protests went viral, the Indian government suspended the internet for several days around Delhi.
Because these nutters beat policemen and invaded Red Fort. Sadly, as with Shaheen Bagh, Kejriwal did not rise to the bait. He is able to project himself as a devout Hindu.
This convergence of people in Delhi broke the record for the world’s largest single protest. In December over 250 million people joined a national strike, and the government detained pro-farmer opposition leaders. On January 26, the 72nd anniversary of India’s constitution, thousands of farmers drove their tractors through New Delhi, where police and a handful of protestors soon clashed. These scenes went viral, and the Indian government reacted by suspending the internet for several days around Delhi. The world had already begun to see what was happening, though. “Why aren’t we talking about this!?” asked Rihanna, tweeting a CNN story about India’s protests to her 100 million followers.
Why is the Print- Shekhar Gupta's vehicle- sticking with the story that Rihanna was paid 2.5 million dollars by some Khalistani bloke nobody has heard of for this one tweet? The very notion is absurd. But Gupta knows his audience. Patel may know his audience- but that audience aint Indian.
Greta Thunberg soon voiced her support for the farmers
because they are wrecking the environment and Thunberg who used to lurve the environment is now jealous that it has been going out with other people.
and reposted a toolkit for activists, a three-page document comprising a short history of the global persecution of farmers, a few hashtags, links to petitions, and information about the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina. Internet trolls soon seethed in Rihanna and Thunberg’s feeds, posting misogynistic and nationalistic chauvinism echoing Donald Trump’s infamous social media commentary.
Thunberg and Rihanna aren't Indian. They don't know that the dominant caste, Green Revolution, farmers are misogynistic and employ darker skinned migrant laborers to help destroy a fragile ecosystem. It is obvious that Punjab and Haryana and Western U.P should get out of 'thirsty' cereal production. They shouldn't be burning stubble. They have to go in for water conservation and renewable energy. But more important still is that manufacturing growth takes off. But that means reforming labor laws.
In real life the Indian police wasted no time. Soon after Thunberg tweeted, Disha Ravi, a twenty-two-year-old climate activist, was arrested on suspicion of authoring the toolkit.
Why? That foolish woman was encouraging people to join 'super-spreader' events for no good reason. She is out on bail and will waste precious days going to court for many years to come.
The government scoured Twitter, Google, and Facebook’s products for her accomplices in humiliating the nation. As Naomi Klein reported, Silicon Valley obliged, handing over correspondences between the young activists quickly.
Did you know Silicon Valley is run for profit? How shocking that private enterprise does what is in its own commercial interest!
This brings us to one answer to Rihanna’s question: we aren’t talking about this because the Indian government and its cronies are targeting those who are speaking out about the protests on- and offline.
But the only reason the Farmers Protests happened at all was because Adani and Ambani's rivals were willing to finance it.
And by one measure, they’ve succeeded. For example, Prabir Purkayastha, the editor of the online website NewsClick, was raided by the government earlier this year for alleged financial crimes.
To have any money at all is a financial crime in a Secular, Socialist, Republic.
It may be just a coincidence that his site has covered the protests in depth and that he has accused Adani and Modi of crony capitalism, but that is unlikely. I have been researching and writing about Indian agriculture for several decades
but Indians have never heard of you- or if they have they think you are a virtue signaling cretin
and have never seen so much reluctance to go on record with a comment.
It is wiser not to go on the record if your comments are libelous or seditious.
The space allowing for dissent in India is shrinking.
But the space for dissenting from Raj is increasing.
The Indian government and its cronies are targeting those who are speaking out about the protests.
Good. The thing is a nuisance. It must be curbed. On the other hand, Modi gains by the backlash against 'andolanjivis' so we are shit out of luck.
In September 2020 Amnesty International suspended its operations supposedly because its bank accounts were frozen as part of an Indian government investigation for irregular transfers from Amnesty’s UK office.
Amnesty shat the bed right here in London. It had turned into an anti-Semitic bunch of money-grubbing thugs.
The more likely reason for the organization’s suspension in India is that Modi’s government did not like Amnesty’s findings of human rights violations by Delhi police earlier that year.
No. Manmohan Singh brought in these rules to punish foreign Agencies which were stirring up trouble. However, the precedent was Indira's kicking various Gandhian organizations in the goolies for their previous support of J.P.
Why pretend that anybody in India cares about Amnesty or Greenpeace or other such stupid outfits?
I’ve recently heard it said that Modi is behaving like a fascist.
I heard it said 20 years ago. But then Mahatma Gandhi was described as the 'Il Duce and Fuhrer of India'- by Congress stalwart Govind Vallabh Pant.
This is unkind to fascists. The Shiv Sena is an ultranationalist Hindu supremacist party in Maharashtra that thrives in congruences of organized crime, religion, and politics. Yet, despite their political alliance with the BJP, even Shiv Sena has distanced itself from the farm laws. Parties of blood and soil have always lauded the yeoman farmer against the city slicker, but it’s a telling split in the Hindu right when the BJP can’t bring along its saffron clad goons.
No it isn't. The Sena ditched the BJP to ally with Congress and Sharad Pawar and thus gain power.
While the Indian government frowns on the meddling of pesky foreigners, it has long sought to ingratiate itself with its allies.
Fuck off. Indian diplomacy tried to ingratiate itself with countries which didn't matter in the slightest. Still, it has allies in so far as there is a common enemy. Yes, I'm talking about Israel.
The Indian government’s official news source compared the farmer protests against the government to the white supremacist attacks on the Capitol. The U.S. State Department issued an unattributed, gentle rebuke, noting that “We recognize that peaceful protests are a hallmark of any thriving democracy and note that the Indian Supreme Court has stated the same.”
But Biden had already won. Like China, India will go on accusing the US of killing Blacks any time Whitey plays the human rights card. Did you know Kamala Harris is the descendant of slave owners? Also she is a Brahmin- on her mother's side. A Brahmin slave-owner who locked up lots of African Americans is an easy target.
There are two reasons why the U.S. State Department hasn’t been more forceful in its condemnations of the Indian government. First, it can’t. Second, it doesn’t want to. The U.S. government’s China strategy means it must keep India close in the Quad. Even if it were freer to criticize the Indian government, the U.S. government approves of Modi’s policies. In the same statement offering unsound support to the protestors, the U.S. State Department offered that “In general, the United States welcomes steps that would improve the efficiency of India’s markets and attract greater private sector investment.” The United States approves of Modi’s policies because it helped write them.
Moreover, Americans invented the Gujarati language so as to brainwash Modi. Thankfully, Raj is British. So he was able to escape this brainwashing.
Like too many countries in the Global South, the first draft of India’s agricultural policy was penned in the United States. The laws that Modi is seeking to supplant are vestiges of the Green Revolution, brought to India by the U.S. State Department in the 1950s. The 2020 replacement for those laws was written in a 1991 World Bank memorandum, conceived when the Washington consensus was destiny, and its detractors could only end up as intellectual roadkill, pancaked by the inevitable juggernaut of free enterprise.
This is nonsense. The memo draws entirely on Indian expertise. It is not ideological. Unlike Latin America, India had no raw materials which the US was keen to import. It was a starving shithole. What the 1991 memo did not anticipate is that lifting tariffs would increase GDP so much that subsidies could be increased.
More recently the Indian and U.S. governments teamed up to create the U.S.-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative, a 2005 project that attempts to influence the contours of agricultural knowledge. The initiative was a $100 million fund intended to bankroll the collaboration between scientists from India and the United States to improve farming technology, in order to bring about “a second Green Revolution.” If you believe that agricultural policy is just seed technology, then it’s easy to treat the accompanying legal and administrative architecture as epiphenomenal, as something that needs to work so that seeds can do their thing. It’s a sophisticated bait-and-switch, and one that the architects of the knowledge initiative appreciate. Despite their claims to transparent cross-border scientific collaboration, open records requests revealed that the Initiative pushed regulatory change in favor of U.S. vendors of genetically modified crops and those looking to push contract farming.
Manmohan Singh supported this because he knew that there were plenty of Indian origin agronomists, virologists etc in the US. This was a good way to support them in helping the mother country. Of course, the Left howled and howled. But Manmohan put his foot down on the 123 nuclear agreement. From then on, the Left was doomed. The fact is Indians want to have more food. They don't give a fuck about combating American Imperialism.
There’s nothing new about foreign powers messing with Indian agricultural markets.
Raj is British. Why is he trying to fuck with Indian agricultural markets? Let him go fight Priti Patel if he really is so woke.
European colonists did it for centuries, and India’s current legal framework for agriculture is the result of a subtle series of historic forces.
as opposed to blatantly hysterical discourses
India’s post-Independence government was acutely aware of how domestic and international agricultural markets worked.
No. They were almost completely ignorant in this regard. During the War, the internal market was fragmented. This policy was not reversed.
After all, they’d seen the British export grain and local hoarders keep it off the market while 3 million people died in the Bengal famine of 1943–44.
B.R Sen- later a 12 year chief of the F.A.O- was Director General Food from '43 to '46. He knew there was no 'export' and no 'hoarding'. His enemy- Shurawardy who controlled Civil Supply- claimed that evil Hindus were hoarding food and his goons had a fun time raiding Hindu homes. But even before that, the Muslim District Commissioner of Sen's native Midnapore had used famine to target the 'disloyal' Hindus. Sen admitted he had not understood the scale of the problem though there is clear evidence that he warned of Famine in February 1943. Had Civil Supply and Finance been united under a Hindu Minister, Sen might have been able to tackle the problem. Instead, the Muslim League came to power and a very profitable famine killed millions.
The 1955 Essential Commodities Act prevented farmers from being scalped in the market by unscrupulous middle-men and prevented hoarding.
This led to endemic hunger and increasing dependence on American PL 480 food shipments. Why was the Act brought in? Essentially the bureaucracy's power under wartime regulations lapsed because the War was over. The Constitution allowed the Govt. to extend these for five years. This meant that to keep all power in its hands, this Act had to be put on the statute book. It was a marvelous way to harass small businessmen. No doubt, they proved generous in refilling the ruling party's coffers. This is why the ECA kept getting tighter and tighter into the Eighties. Then Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. Manmohan was able to show the country could get richer by ignoring hysterical shitheads who blamed everything on evil Hindu 'hoarders'. That's it. That's the whole story.
The Green Revolution wove itself into this history. Though a potent cocktail of knowledge, technology, and subsidy, the Green Revolution is often misremembered. From the New Yorker to NPR, the Green Revolution is presented as a miracle of agricultural technology owing to the fact that India doubled its wheat production in the seven years between 1965 and 1972. That fact is true, but it’s important to understand why that occurred, where it did, and at what cost.
No. 'Bread is truth'. All that the vast majority of Indians cared about was that they were getting more to eat. No doubt, Leftist Mathematical Economists were very annoyed that Swaminathan had gone and planted hybrid wheat on the lawn of his Lutyens' bungalow and that dehati Cabinet Ministers who visited him became eager to take these seeds and try them at home. Such behavior is very uncouth. You should lecture these rustic politicians about the Pontryagin principle in control theory and then go on to question whether Kantorovitch had really resolved the Marxian problem of value.
It’s no accident that many of the farmers surrounding Delhi are from Punjab and Haryana.
Because Punjab and Haryana are close to Delhi.
Those states were key sources of India’s wheat crop, and the epicenter of the Green Revolution almost sixty years ago. Their farming system came from the U.S. government and philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation. Unified in a Cold War effort to prevent hunger and communism by raising levels of wheat production, the Green Revolution was a foreign policy tactic designed to forestall a Soviet Red Revolution.
How perverse! Everybody knows that Red Revolutions are wonderful things. It isn't true that Stalin and Mao were responsible for millions of starvation deaths. Furthermore, Indian farmers would be delighted to surrender title to their ancestral land. They want to live in one big commune regardless of caste and creed.
Although U.S. plant breeder Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize for the Green Revolution, it wasn’t driven by new seeds.
Yes it was. No new seeds no increase in yield. However the seeds needed other inputs to thrive.
In 1968 the then-administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the man who coined the term “Green Revolution,” William Gaud, was grilled by the senate. Borlaug’s seeds were too expensive and crop prices were too low for the technology to work. Gaud affirmed that it was subsidies, not the seeds themselves, that should be given the “primary credit for providing the incentive” to grow more.
Obviously, the guy had to say this so as to get Government money for the project. If he'd said 'these seeds are magic. Those who plant them will immediately get rich.' then no US Aid would have been forthcoming.
Punjabi farmers grew more grain because the government promised to pay them more. The technology worked only if there was also support for irrigation and fertilizer, expensive inputs that worked best with the economics of larger farms growing just one crop. (Indeed, recent scholarship suggests that India’s burst of wheat production was made possible by thousands of small tubewells.)
I was aware of all this back in '82. Problems of falling water table, salinification of canal land etc were well known.
Government support also came in the shape of The Patents Act 1970, which waived patent rights on things such as fertilizers and pharmaceuticals, stating that the same product could be patented by different people if produced by different methods (it is from this act that the Indian pharmaceutical industry sprang, and which the Knowledge Initiative sought to correct).
India, under autarky, faced a stringent foreign exchange constraint. This meant that Indians had to settle for inferior products. As India gained one or two higher value adding niche export sectors, it could do what everybody else does- viz. pay for customized solutions. It doesn't matter if initially it is some foreigner or some Ambani who profits. What matters is that a market is created such that smart people compete to provide you with a better solution. Since India is a huge market, we get richer by making others rich. Look at Israel. Initially they were giving away water conservation technology. Then Indians started paying for a customized solution to get an even bigger proportionate benefit. It was a win win.
Though more wheat grew in the early course of the Green Revolution, it didn’t translate into a direct improvement in hunger.
Yes it did. However, population grew rapidly so the total number in absolute poverty kept growing.
Wheat output increased, but at the expense of dietary and biological diversity. The other staples and proteins farmers grew to eat at home were squeezed out to make way for monocultures; while some peasants profited, the poorest often did not. Though more wheat grew, it didn’t translate into a direct improvement in hunger in the early course of the Green Revolution. Today, India ranks 94 out of 107 in the Global Hunger Index.
But, in the Sixties and early Seventies, excess mortality due to drought, etc, was measured in the hundreds of thousands.
Daily per person calorie and protein intake estimates in India 1961-1980 (FAOSTAT) The above doesn't really tell us anything. The fact is that those who were somewhat malnourished became well nourished and then rose in affluence. This meant their kids had fewer kids. Meanwhile some who would have died of inanition without reproducing came up to a level where their share of the total population rose.
Today Indian farmers are living the endgame of industrial agriculture.
No. We don't have industrial agriculture. We have small holdings. One hectare is average. In the UK, the figure is 80 times that.
Like their counterparts in the declining US grain belt, farmers in the Green Revolution belt of northern India have higher rates of suicide, debt, ecological destruction and endemic drug abuse among the young.
But farmers and ranchers in the US are only 1.3 per cent of the workforce. They have alternatives. Because India did not aggressively pursue industrialization by getting rid of silly Labor laws, the 40 per cent of Indians who work the land have a bleak future. On the other hand a farmer who kills himself in India believes his family will get money from the Government.
The soil is dying, the water’s running out, and climate change is rendering the future even more uncertain. Farmers are ready for a different system, because they know what this one has wrought.
Why are they demanding the continuation of the existing system? Why have they offered no new plan of their own? The answer is that they are funded by rivals of Ambani and Adani. In the short run, they got higher prices. Long run, there will be a fiscal crunch and all the subsidies will disappear.
But the Indian government has only offered them a set of laws to make the death spiral of industrial agriculture profitable for the private sector.
But, in return for that profit, the private sector will increase productivity and hence the reward for farming.
It seems very unfair to me that Bill Gates has so much money. The world should have banned Microsoft so as to prevent him and other such people making so much profit. But the world would have paid a very high price.
People don't care who is making the profit so long as they get a better service.
In so doing, the government has denied farmers the space to discuss and debate a different system altogether.
Farmers haven't come up with any new ideas. Thirty years ago there was Sharad Joshi and fifty years ago there was Charan Singh. Now there is nothing.
Indeed, Modi is managing the media landscape around this debate very well.Because he is good at his job. How is that a stick to beat him with?
Indian farmers are an augur for their brethren elsewhere.
No. They aren't even an augur for Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is blindingly obvious that you have to get rural girls into big factory dormitories while boys are absorbed by construction or services. Let demographic transition occur. Stop talking bollocks. You aren't a teenaged girl from Sweden.
Later this year the United Nations will host a Food Systems Summit. Convened by the UN Secretary General, it will be helmed by Agnes Kalibata, Rwanda’s Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources from 2008 to 2014, and current President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). The Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum champion an approach that has increased yield and done little for hunger in Rwanda, akin to the Green Revolution in India.
No. The Green Revolution did see big increases in yield. But then it was indigenously led. It is not often remembered that an Indian political exile- Pandurang Khankoje- led the Mexican corn breeding program in the Thirties. Sadly, on returning to India after independence he forgot about agriculture and started talking Commie bollocks- which any cretin can spout.
Unlike the original Green Revolution, active state support for farmers is off the table. (Support for farm workers has never been on the table.) Instead, the summit will draw on carbon-intensive chemical fertilizer, a privatized supply chain, and “value-chain partnerships” driven by partners convened by the World Economic Forum. Such ideas, already in circulation leading up to the summit, exclude the poorest from being allowed to know how they might feed themselves through different economic policy.
How is this relevant to India? If Raj is right and India is an 'auger' then Africa should take the help of Rockefellers & Gates. But Raj is wrong. Africa like India must get rural girls into big factory dormitories. Fuck agriculture. It is a miserable business- unless done properly on a commercial basis.
Recently a collection of 500 groups linked to the Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism announced that they would not participate in the process, concerned that it is beholden to a corporate vision for how to end hunger. These groups, representing over 300 million constituents, point out that Green Revolution-style agriculture is neither inevitable nor the best option for reducing hunger.
Cool. Protesting against Neo-Liberalism will make it go away. Next, you should protest against Hunger. If it doesn't go away, you starve to death.
Peasant farmers have invested in organizing peer-to-peer education networks to develop alternatives.
So have non peasant farmers who cultivate marijuana. Knowledge of hydroponic and other techniques has developed greatly thanks to this peer-to-peer education.
The Amrita Bhoomi Center in Karnataka, an agroecological research and advocacy center founded by M D Nanjundaswamy, one of India’s most vociferous critics of U.S. economic policy, uses “natural farming” methods to build soil fertility and biological diversity. These practices have increased incomes and soil fertility, and combatted hunger in ways that the Green Revolution has yet to do.
The problem is scalability. It is certainly true that if you have the knack for organic farming and are prepared to spend your life in the boondocks then you can have higher yields and, through judicious choice of crop, even quite a good income. But the thing isn't scalable. Anyone smart enough to learn how to do it would be better off selling his land and going into business.
They estimate that there are 170–255 million group members cultivating 300 Mha. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that local people can figure out better solutions for themselves.
Such knowledge networks are the norm, not the exception. A research team led by British academic Jules Pretty concluded that there are currently more than eight million groups of farmers studying such agroecological techniques.
Many of these demonstrate, at scale, both higher food outputs and better hunger metrics than the package of technology, subsidy, and knowledge at the World Food Systems Summit.
We all readily believe that 'World Summits' are shit-shows. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on. If Raj Patel's own agricultural group is growing tastier veggies for a lower price, we will buy from him or- if we are farmers- join his group or imitate what it is doing.
Which returns us to the libraries and discussion spaces which persist in Delhi despite the wave of COVID-19 infections. Farmers there have been successful in creating space for debate. They have forged unlikely, if temporary, alliances around the opposition to the farm laws. Hindu farmers who have traditionally been BJP stalwarts have allied with Sikh farmers in Punjab. Farm laborers have joined their bosses. They’ve peeled off support in urban areas, and in Southern India. Modi’s electoral defeats tracked high levels of disapproval for the farm laws.
What defeat? In West Bengal, BJP went from 3 seats to 77. Congress lost all of its 44 seats and the CPM lost all its 26 seats. Mamta herself was defeated by her former Deputy.
How did Modi manage this? By pretending he could win with 200 seats! Talk of chutzpah! But it paid off.
The farm laws could have mattered if Punjab or Haryana was going to the polls. The question is whether, as Modi hopes, Amarinder has been more damaged than Khattar. One good outcome is that BJP is not no longer tied up with the Akali Dal. Leave Sikh politics to the Sikhs. Outside interference can only hamper their ability to come together to pursue sensible and morally sound policies. Indeed, Sikhism- as a pure and spiritual Religion- will play a big role in the environmental regeneration of the region.
The question now is whether there is the space to know, discuss, and propose an alternative to industrial agriculture where government support is directed toward workers, farmers, and the poor.
No. The question is whether the thing is actually happening. Discussing shit don't change shit. If the thing is happening- as I believe it is- mimetic effects amplified by social media can lead to very rapid change. Armchair pundits and woke cretins should be disintermediated.
Farming differently, using technology differently, and figuring out more democratic ways to use government support will touch every eater on the planet.
No it won't. We don't care how the sausage is made. What matters is that it be cheap and tasty. The proportion of people involved in farming should go down to about 2 per cent across the entire globe. That's when 'democracy' will become meaningful.
In international organizations such as La Via Campesina, the 200-million-member peasant movement, these conversations are happening and that knowledge circulates freely.
But it has achieved nothing. I recall that they did hold a summit in Bangalore some years ago. What happened next? Nothing at all. India found that these duffers had zero influence. To get a better deal from the WTO, India needed to be an attractive market. Money talks. Bullshit walks via some fucking campus but goes nowhere. The peasants of the earth are doomed to go the way of the dodo.
It is vital that we make sure that the Modi administration doesn’t choke this conversation in India. So, why aren’t we talking about this?
Because we are imagining Modi chocking Raj but good. Still, if some rival of Ambani and Adani wants to give me money to write Raj Patel type shite, I'll happily do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment