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The following transcript is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Link to Audio and Episode Info Here
Show Transcript
Deconstructing Dinner Kootenay Co-op Radio CJLY Nelson, B.C. Canada February 12, 2009 Title: Palagummi Sainath - The
Age of Inequality Producer/Host: Jon Steinman Transcript: Jennie Monuik Jon
Steinman: And welcome to Deconstructing
Dinner, a syndicated weekly one-hour radio show and podcast
produced at Kootenay Co-op Radio CJLY in Nelson, British Columbia.
Deconstructing Dinner is heard weekly on Radio stations across the country
including CHSR Fredericton, New Brunswick and CJJJ Brandon, Manitoba. I'm
Jon Steinman, on today's episode we'll listen in once again on recordings from
the University of Alberta's International Week, held in early 2009 in Edmonton.
The theme of the event was Hungry for Change: Transcending Feast, Famine and
Frenzy. On last week's episode we heard from keynote speaker Francis Moore Lappé on the topic of Ending Hunger, Feeding Hope. And
it was on the following day of the event that Indian journalist, Palagummi
Sainth, addressed a standing room only audience. His talk was titled The Age
of Inequality: The Wages of Market Fundamentalism. Based in Mumbai, P.
Sainath is the Rural Affairs editor for India's national newspaper, The Hindu.
He is the author of Everybody Loves A Good Drought: Stories From India's
Poorest Districts and he was instrumental in breaking the story about
farmer suicides in India. A story that has been told around the world as a
harsh reminder of how our global food system impacts the poorest regions on the
planet. increase
music and fade out JS: The topic that Palagummi Sainath spoke of speaks to one
of the goals of Deconstructing Dinner and that is to discover how our food
choices here in North America affect people abroad. In today's episode we'll
learn how, because of our support of the globalized industrial food system here
in North America, farmers in India and abroad are committing suicide. Well,
Palagummi Sainath recognizes this very disconnect as being fundamental to
Neo-Liberal policies, similar to Frances Moore Lappé,
he too, believes that we are all capable of moving beyond this system that
breeds gross inequality and instead, encourage the growth of systems that are
fair, just and responsible. A reminder that today's broadcast will be archived
as usual at deconstructingdinner.ca and listed under the February 12th,
2009 episode. Introducing
Palagummi Sainath at the University of Alberta's International Week was Ricardo
Acuna, the executive Director of the Parkland Institute. Ricardo
Acuna: After earning a Master's degree in
history, Sainath embarked on a career in journalism. But by 1991, he'd come to
understand that, in his words, "Conventional journalism was above all about the
service of power. You always give the last word to authority." He decided at
that point that if the mainstream media in India was going to move away from
genuine news and towards covering entertainment, he would move in the opposite
direction. He wrote at that time, and I quote, "I felt that if the Indian press
was covering the top 5%, I should cover the bottom 5%." Since that time,
Sainath has been reporting on the lives and struggles of the poor in India's
rural interior. More importantly however, he has been using his writing to show
Indians and people around the world, the connection between the daily struggles
of India's poor and the policies of Neo-liberal globalism. Sainath spends a
great majority of his time in the communities of the rural interior and has
done so for the last 14 years. He is
the author of the book Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's
Poorest Districts and he is a current Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu.
His writing has not only raised public awareness of the impacts of
globalization and previously hidden issues like India's farmer suicides, but
has also contributed to concrete policy changes in India and informed
development debates globally. His unflinching coverage of the negative impacts
of Neo-Liberal policy on India's poorest populations has earned him over 30
awards, including the Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism
Prize and the Raymond Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and
Creative Communication. His current project is on the agrarian crisis
nation-wide, particularly those regions where its effects are most severe. He
has filed over 100 reports on the subject in recent years and has personally
taken all the photographs that go with those reports. Some of the ones were
flashing on the screen during the introductions. These pictures of the families
of the suicide victims makes up the only photo record of its kind in existence.
Please help me welcome, P. Sainath. (applause) Palagummi Sainath: Thank you so much. What a wonderful turnout. My friend
and colleague, Joe Moulins, was scaring me this evening, he was warning me that
I was going to be competing with the Oilers. (laughter) Thank you for
coming. For
two decades now, the United Nations Development Program and other organs of the
United Nations have been telling us, that an additional expenditure of 60 to 80
billion dollars a year, will help the human race sort out all the most basic
problems of hunger, health, sanitation, education, literacy and issues like
that. The estimate for sanitation, for instance, is an additional expenditure
of 10 billion dollars a year. For hunger it's between 15 and 20 billion
according to the Secretary General. Another 10 billion on health. Water,
literacy, you can sort out the basic problems of the world with an additional
expenditure of 60-80 billion dollars a year. Now the U.N. has been putting this
out for about two decades and it has never happened because governments have
told us, 'there's no money, there's just no money, we can't do it, we can't
spend that much. Where's the money going to come from?' But when crisis struck
the suits in Wall Street, governments figured out that they could raise 1 and a
half trillion dollars in seven days. Yeah. Not 60-80 billion... 1 and a half
trillion. In a week, they found the money, because you see a crisis is only a
crisis when it hits the suits, not before that. And what's the solution to that
crisis? To throw those trillions of dollars at the guys who got you into the
mess. So that's the world we live in. Flashback
about a year and a half ago... no, not that many, sorry... less than a year ago,
around early to mid-2008 with global food prices reaching an all-time high, and
for the first time after world war two with the middle classes of Western
societies being worried about food prices. With wheat prices going up 77% in
the first 3 months in a country like India and food prices rising all over the
world. That noted nutritionist, George W., declared from the White House that
the problem really was that the Indians and Chinese were eating so much. (laughter)
It's very unthinking of them. You know, I mean really. Now of course President
Bush had considerable expertise in this area. He had personal experience with
problems of eating. He once choked on a pretzel and blacked out for two
minutes. (laughter) As David Letterman pointed out, it's very fortunate
that those were precisely the two minutes that Dick Cheney was conscious that
week. (applause) However, note that all the major journals monitoring
and covering these issues, the media, agreed with Bush. The Wall Street Journal
wrote an editorial, which I quote for you, it agreed with him that the problem
was really that these guys are eating too much. It uses the words, "China and
India are gobbling food." Two and a quarter billion turkeys. "They are gobbling
food as never before and therefore, food prices are soaring," said the WSJ
editorial. It
reminded me of the late Murray Kempton's definition of who an editorial writer
is. Murray Kempton editing the New Republic in the 60s once wrote, "The job of
the editorial writer is to go down into the valley after the battle is over and
shoot the wounded." Now is this true that the food price crisis was caused by
Indians and Chinese eating a lot more? Well, when food prices reduced by 45%
shortly after, does that mean that Indians and Chinese started starving again?
Actually, while 10 to 15% of the Indian population are eating better than they
ever did before, the per capita availability of food grain in India has
actually declined and declined very sharply in the years of the Neo-Liberal
reforms from 1991 to 2005/2006. In 1991, as India stood on the cusp of brave
new world Neo-Liberalism, the food grain available per India, that is, cereals,
pulses, the whole works, was 510 grams per Indian. Fifteen years of market
fundamentalism, fifteen years of Neo-Liberalism and the food grain per Indian
fell from 510 grams per Indian to 422 grams per Indian. Now my friends, that's
not a fall of 88 grams per person, it's a fall 88 grams into 365 days into one
billion human beings, which means that your average poor family was consuming
100 kilograms less of food grain than they did just 10 years ago. Now if the
top 10 of 20% were eating better than ever before on a shrinking cake, then it
raises the question of: What the heck were the bottom 40% eating? I
mean, I'm sure Bush would tell us, but he isn't here. At the very moment that
President Bush was speaking, at that period, tribals in India, in the state of
Rajasthan practice what they practice every year, it's called 'rotating
hunger'. A family of eight, there's not enough work to be had and everybody
can't be in physically good shapes, so many of the tribes in these areas, what
they do is, two members of the family eat very well that day, the others starve
so that those two are fit to go out and do physical labour on the rural
employment sites. Because they have to have the nourishment to do the work, so
the others go hungry so those two eat and go out and do the work, the next day
another two eat and go out and do the work, so that they are able to do the
work, they rotate the hunger between them... and the food price crisis was caused
by these people. Hmm. Incidentally, food prices then fell. Now why did this... a
month after President Bush made his statement, I was covering the food price
crisis in India where wheat prices went up 77% in 3 months and at the rural
employment guarantee sites at the government of India 74 and 75 year-old people
were going back to work in 47 degree celsius in the heat because their old age
pensions were wiped out by the food price increase. That's about 200-300 rupees
a month which they get, and when a crisis like that comes in these poor
households the old, the widows get completely marginalized because they are
seen as unproductive. They can't work, so we interviewed people who are 74-75
years-old reporting back for stone breaking work in the field. And consider
that 74 as against the life expectancy of Indians, not Canadians. But
there was something else happening at the same time, the food companies, the
agri-business companies were recording all-time historic profits. Wall Street
companies, index funds, like the Black Rock Index Fund, all of them were
heavily into betting on food. You see, at some point the planet is going to
discover that it can live with our oil if it has to because the human race did
manage for a few thousand years, but you can't live without food and water. And
therefore, you had food prices going up as index funds were investing
unprecedented sums of money in purchasing land, in purchasing companies that
manufacture pesticide or seed. You had also, unprecedented levels of
speculation in the futures markets and forward trading, the very same process
that pushed up oil prices so high and then brought them down, that pushed up
food prices so high before bringing them down, though not bringing them down to
the same level as before. Speculation, that was pretty much a Wall Street
phenomenon. At
the height of the food price crisis Archer Daniels Midland recorded its
all-time highest profits and within its profits that division of... .Archer
Daniels Midland is that giant grain processor... within its profits the unit of
Archer Daniels dealing with grain storage trading, not grain production, the unit of Archer Daniels dealing with
grain storage, transportation and trading reported a 7-fold increase in income
while tens of millions of people joined the ranks of the hungry around the
world. The giant seed and herbicide company, Monsanto, similarly reported
windfall profits in each of those quarters. Mosaic, the fertilizer company
reported similar huge profits. What we were seeing, and what we are seeing,
even now, is the biggest vertical and horizontal integration of corporations
cornering the world by its belly. The integration of food, from the control of
land, from the control of water through the privatization of rural irrigation
in dozens of countries, through the control of seed, pesticide manufacturers,
other agricultural inputs, all the things tied up by a handful of corporations. JS: This is Deconstructing Dinner. You're listening to
journalist Palagummi Sainath, speaking in February 2009 in Edmonton at the
University of Alberta. Based in Mumbai, Palagummi is the Rural Affairs Editor
for India's national newspaper, The Hindu. Today's entire broadcast is
featuring segments from his talk and I will note that some segments that could
not fit into today's one hour broadcast will be made available on the
Deconstructing Dinner website at deconstructingdinner.ca. As Palagummi
continued his talk titled, "The Age of Inequality" he addressed the current
unravelling of the global economy and he suggested that what we see happening
today is only the beginning of a much greater unravelling of an entire system
built upon artificiality. Here again, is Palagummi Sainath. PS: So you're seeing that kind of vertical integration and
it's growing from the purchase of farmland, which is what the Black Rock and
other index funds were investing in. The number of companies is getting smaller
and smaller in this extremely unequal process. At the one end of this process
are hundreds of millions plus millions of newly hungry, at the other end of the
spectrum are record profits made from hunger. Inequality was the driving force,
not just behind these activities, but beyond, behind, what everyone refers to
as, 'the meltdown' the, 'Wall Street Meltdown' which I am intrigued to find
being discussed by television anchors as if it's something that has happened
and were fixing it. I believe the meltdown has just begun. We're in Phase One. Every Great Depression, every
economic catastrophe, every major economic collapse in history has been
preceded by years of absolutely unsustainable levels of inequality. America in
1929, at the time of the Great Depression, was more unequal than America had
ever been. America in 2008, was more unequal than America had been since 1929.
Every such catastrophe has been preceded by absolutely unsustainable levels of
inequality. And if you think that the crisis is over, just look at from
September 1, if you look at the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics website, it's
easily available to you, from September 1 to December 31, the U.S. has been
losing 16,000 jobs every day. In September that was 3,000 jobs a day, by the
end of December it was 16,000 jobs a day. In November and December alone the
U.S. economy lost 1.1 million jobs, 584,000 jobs in November, 524,000 in
December and the December figure is a provisional one. When the final figure
comes in it's going to be around 600,000. Now you're laying off half a million
people each month in the last 2-3 months. A week and a half ago 50,000 people lost
their jobs in a single day. But look at how Wall Street and
the banks and the suits continue to function. In the midst of all this chaos,
as we throw hundreds of millions and hundreds of billions of dollars at the same
guys who caused the problems. Citibank decides to buy a 15 million dollar
corporate jet and has to be stopped by the Treasury Secretary personally.
Meanwhile the head of Merrill Lynch redecorates his office at the cost of 1.22
million dollars in taxpayer bailout money and part of the redecoration is an
antique commode on legs costing 35,000 dollars, maybe that was heavy symbolism
considering that his company was right down the tube. But this is not... this
crisis is not about a housing mortgage bubble. It isn't. That's a mistake. It's
a very narrow understanding of what has happened. The credit card bubble is yet
to strike and that'll take... when you're laying off half a million people each
month you're going to have millions of people in 6-7 months who will default on
their credit cards. And toxic debt in credit cards is three times as high as in
housing mortgages, it's 30-35 % as against 10-12%. So when the credit... and
that's just one more bubble, the credit card. Then you've got the private
equity bubble, then you've got the realty bubble, you've got more bubbles than
in bath foam in that economy. (laughter) And you're having giant layoffs
going on at the same time. Consider how we got here. In the
year 2008, when 2.75 million Americans lost their jobs, which is the highest
number of layoffs since the year 1945, when all the war related enterprises
closed down in the United States. In a year when 2.75 million people were
laid-off, CEOs and Chief Executives and other top executives paid themselves
bonuses of 18 billion dollars. And after getting public bailout money have
continued to do that until they get and if they can do it without getting
caught. So you have CEO's salaries exploding at one end of the spectrum and
working folks, everyday Joes and their salaries stagnating or shrinking at the
other end. It couldn't last. You know, you'd have to be an economist to believe
that it could. (laughter) Anyone else knows that is can't. Now here's the thing. In the worst
year of layoffs with 2.75 million losing their jobs. Eighteen states in the
United States have cut their welfare roles, they've reduced their welfare
lists. Direct cash assistance in the welfare system is at its lowest in 40
years, but CEO's salaries were at their highest in all-time history. You cannot
sustain that kind of inequality, it's just not possible, you've tried and
you've failed. Here is another interesting thing. Most of these corporations
didn't pay a dime in corporate income tax. The general... the government
accountability office of the United States has done a study which came out in
October last year which shows that between 1998 and 2005, two-thirds of
corporations in the United States paid zero corporate income tax. At that time,
when corporate profits were at their highest in history, because in 2006
corporate profits as a share of the nation's total income stood at 14.1%, which
was the highest in history but their tax payments were the lowest since the
1930s. You cannot sustain a system like that. It's not possible. Remember that
John McCain complained during the election campaign, he was still on the
reduced taxes line, he was saying that American corporations are being levied
the highest rates of taxes in the world, but they have the lowest rates of
payments. The rate may be the highest. It couldn't last. It was a fake world
with fake products. And as the economist Nouriel
Roubini of NYU says, "All the bubbles are blowing and bursting at the same time
now. We are in big trouble. It doesn't matter which part of the world you are
in." We've been co-opted into that bubble. In the last 15-20 years, inequality
has grown at a faster rate than at any time in the preceding 50 years. In India
for instance, it is today at a level that can only be compared to the Colonial
period of British rule and we managed that level of inequality in a space of 15
years. Imagine the decompression it has meant in the incomes, livelihoods and
diets of poor people. It's a make believe world where mythical marriages sell
mythical products, financial products, so complex that Warren Buffet says he
hasn't a clue what they're about. Complex products, I mean a lot of people
bankrupted by Madoff don't know it yet because the system never actually
invested in anything that produced anything. I give X securities my money to
invest, he gets one person as the fund manager, and he gets 15-20% of the
benefits, then he passes it on to another fund manager who passes it on to
another fund manager and it's been making the circles on Wall Street without
actually being invested in anything that produces anything except more bubbles.
But why do I insist that the
inequality of the last 15-20 years is dramatically different from inequality in
other periods? There is a big difference. There have been periods of gross
inequality in the past, but never in history has inequality been so cynically
constructed, so ruthlessly engineered and so brutally imposed on hundreds of
millions of people across the planet. That structural inequality, India for
example, let's take India, we are the shining... in India shining is the slogan
right? We are the star pupil of the star graduate of the Neo-Liberal school.
India today has 51 dollar billionaires, by the way that's twice the number of
billionaires Canada has, you have 25. Our dads are richer than your dads. Now
India has 51 billionaires to your piffling 25, but you know something else, in
the human development index of the United Nations, Canada ranks #4 and India,
which ranks #4 in billionaires, ranks 128th in human development
below Bolivia, the poorest country of Latin America and below several African
countries, too. How did we manage that? Now if you want to know how
concentrated the wealth is, how great the inequality is, India has a population
of just over 1 billion, but the 51 billionaires hold assets and wealth
equivalent to 31% of our GDP. Equivalent to 31% of our GDP. Incidentally, the #1
country in the world in the human development index went down the tube itself
because of embracing the fake economy and that was Iceland, it was #1. It embraced
this fake financial economy separate from... financial products and banking
services and look at poor Iceland now. And when we're talking about these
billionaires, 23 of them have an address in the same city as I do, it's Mumbai.
We're not talking about slumdog millionaires, we're talking about penthouse
billionaires. We're talking about Mr. Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Limited who is
building the costliest residential complex in the world, his personal house, in
the costliest real estate in the world. Well so far the home has a mere 60
floors and, being a modest man, there are only 3 heli-pads so far. See this kind of inequality that
you've created, this kind of inequality we've generated it has an impact on the
mindset; it has an impact on the way we see other human beings. It has an
impact... .you know you cannot, even if you go back to the periods of, say,
slavery, you have to absolutely dehumanize the slave in order to live with
yourself by indulging in slavery. You had to create the idea that a slave was
not a human being and, therefore, you could brutalize him endlessly because he
was not a human being, he was an animal. And that's the kind of mindset, that's
the kind of logic that inequality, gross inequality generates. I cannot be
earning a hundred thousand times more than you and treat you as my equal,
there's no way that's going to happen. The great American Jurist, Justice
Brandeis when dismissing... what was he dismissing... he was dismissing a case
seeking the abolition of income tax and Justice Brandeis summed it up so
beautifully in one line. He said, "You can have great concentration of wealth
or you can have democracy, but you can't have both." JS: This is Deconstructing Dinner as syndicated one hour
weekly radio show and podcast produced at Kootenay
Co-op Radio CJLY in Nelson, British Columbia. I'm Jon Steinman. You've been
listening to Indian journalist Palagummi Sainath speaking in 2009 in Edmonton,
Alberta. Palagummi is the author of Everybody
Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest District. He has
received over 30 awards over 30 awards, including the Amnesty
International's Global Human Rights Journalism Prize and the Raymond
Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication. Again,
segments of Palagummi's talk that do not make their way onto today's broadcast
will be made available on the Deconstructing Dinner website under the February
12th, 2009 broadcast. In this next segment which will take us to the
end of his talk, Palagummi speaks of the dangers found when a country switches
from producing food crops to cash crops and the results help those of us here
in North America who support the globalized industrial food system recognize
how our food choices here impact rural populations abroad. PS: I was mentioning that we are 128th in human
development which places us in the bottom 50 nations of the world in human
development, but when it comes to child malnutrition, we are not 128th,
we are 177th, bottom. If you take percentages, these are U.N.
figures, H.D.I.'s figures, if you take children below the age of 5 who are
underweight, Guinea Bissau: 25% of children, Burkina Faso: 36% of children,
Sierra Leone: 38% of children, Ethiopia: 38% of all children below 5 are
underweight. India: 47% with 51 billionaires. I'm trying to tell you this, I'm
trying to say this, don't try understanding the wealth in isolation from the
poverty, the two are inextricably linked. You cannot understand the deprivation
if you do not understand the wealth, you cannot understand the wealth if you do
not look at the deprivation. These are not isolated compartments, one makes the
other possible. In
the global hunger index, the FPRI, many of you have heard of the National Food
Policy Research Institute of Washington, D.C., it comes out with a global
hunger index. India ranks 66th out of 88. This time we beat Zimbabwe
by a short hair, not because of our efforts but Zimbabwe's. Last year they were
ahead of us, they were one notch ahead of us last year; they're one notch below
us this year. In employment it's collapsed, in whichever sector you look at,
the number of Tatas, who are the owners of Jaguar and Land Rover and Corus and
the biggest steel makers have increased their steel output four times and
reduced their workforce by half. The same with the biggest manufacturer of
two-wheelers in the world, Bajaj. Who've increased their output four times,
reduced their workforce by half. What
has the impact of all this been on rural India, on rural communities, on
farming, and, I assert, that farming is in crisis across the planet, if you are
looking at farming by human beings not by corporations. If you are looking at
family farms, if you are not in crisis you will be, take my word for it, all
the evidence points to it. The policies entrenching inequality have been pushed
by powerful corporations and nations, institutionalized by bodies like the
World Bank of the IMF and embraced by elite states, by elites in countries like
India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Wilfully embraced, I mean, joyously embraced. As
corporate power grows the impact of inequality on the countryside, on
agriculture has been devastating because remember that is the last frontier,
when you capture food and water you've got just about everything. From 1991,
from the period of the economic reforms, 8 million people have quit farming in
India. If you look at the '91 census there were 111 million cultivators, 2001
census there's 103 million cultivators. Where did these 8 million people go? We
don't know because the media were busy covering Paris Hilton, so we really do
not know where 8 million... and when you see the 2011 census you're going to see
that figure dwarfed by the number of people who have left after 2000. Investment
in agriculture collapsed using the WTO, using a number of levers in the names
of fighting subsidy while Western subsidies grew and grew and grew. Subsidies
as a share of farming income in the USA were 2% in 1974 and 47% in 2000 as a
share of farming income. And I'm not talking about American family farms; I'm
talking about corporate farms because American family farms are down in the
dumps, like anyone else. Don't think that the West is exempted. Today in the
United States, there are three times the number of people in prison as there
are on family farms. There are 700,000 family farms going bankrupt at the rate
of 160 a week while there are 2.3 million people in State and Federal
penitentiaries. So you have investment in agriculture collapsing, each year we
reduce investment in agriculture to the rate of about 7-8 billion dollars a
year and we directed that money towards the upper middle-class consumption of
urban India. I
have covered the suicides of farmers on India, farmers who have committed
suicide because they could not get a crop loan of 200 dollars, except at exorbitant
rates of interest. And having covered that suicide, I've gone home to my urban
middle class existence and received a letter form my bank welcoming me to buy a
Mercedes Benz at 4% interest without collateral and that guy could not get 200
dollars for his crop loan except at 14-18% because we are transferring
resources from poor to rich, we took bank credit away from poor people because
that's the whole idea, consumption-led growth. What did George W. tell the
population of the United States after 9/11? Go out there and spend. Even now
what you're trying to say is give the banks money, they'll loan money, then
you'll spend, right? It's getting back into the same... the whole thing was
created by a crisis of excessive credit and debt. Now
this, in the period as we took money away from the countryside, the
indebtedness of the peasantry doubled. Twenty-six percent of all Indian
households, before the Neo-Liberal reforms began, 26% of Indian farm households
were in debt. By 2001, that was 48.6%. Then all the other processes, predatory
commercialization, everything converted into exchange value, privatization on
health, privatization in education, commercialization of education services.
Everything became so expensive and what happened to farmer's incomes in this
period? The average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm
household, surveyed for 2002 was 10 dollars a month. Average per capita
monthly... monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household, according
to the National Sample Survey, was 10 dollars. And what was the main
expenditure on? Sixty percent of that expenditure was on food, farm households
spending on food. Another 18-20% was on the purchase of fuel, footwear and
clothing. That left precious little for health and education. At the same time
we did create 51 dollar billionaires. Skyrocketing of input costs as
corporations took over control of seed, as Monsanto took over seed, as Cargill
took over whole sectors of the wheat trade, the skyrocketing of input costs
devastated farmers who were cultivating cotton and other stuff. It cost 50
dollars to cultivate an acre of cotton in 1991, it now costs 375-400 dollars to
use Monsanto's seed and cultivate an acre of cotton. And
part of the Neo-Liberal philosophy was to move millions of peasants all across
the world from cultivating food, which they needed, to cultivating cash crops,
which you needed because we had to grow stuff that wouldn't grow in your
climates. It's very difficult to grow coffee in Alaska. So people shifted and
when you shift, what happens when you shift from food crop to cash crop? When you shift from, say, growing paddy or rice to
growing vanilla, what do you do? You undertake gigantic additional
expenditures. The cultivation cost of paddy is less than 180 dollars an acre;
the cultivation costs of vanilla is 3000 dollars per acre, 150,000 rupees per
acre. Now that means more debt, more credit, more going to the money lender
because the banks are not giving it to you. These things are happening. So the
indebtedness of the peasantry goes up. The banks abandon the farmers and move
away. Farm incomes collapse. Worldwide there's a collapse of small holder
agriculture and India's farmers are the last large body of owning small holders
in the world and their existence is under threat. What then comes out of all this?
What you saw in the photographs. Between 1997 and 2007, 182,000 farmers
committed suicide, according to the government of India. That's a gross
underestimate that excludes lots of groups. It excludes women farmers because
women are not considered farmers, they're farmer's wives. Sixty-seven percent
of all agricultural work is done by women, but they're not considered because
the property, the land is not in their name, it's in the husband's name by
custom and tradition. So when a woman commits suicide she commits suicide,
that's not a farmer's suicide, it's just a suicide. But with all the
exclusions, you still come up with a figure of 180,936 farm suicides in 11
years, which means the current rate of suicide is, on average, 1 farmer commits
suicide every 30 minutes. That is the government figure. Your guess about the
real figure is as good or as bad as mine. Who are these farmer's?
Overwhelmingly, they are cash crop farmers. Far fewer food crop farmers have
committed suicide than cash crop farmers, far fewer. Because at the end of the
day, in a crisis, you can eat your paddy. Cotton is a bit harder to digest. We
destroyed the livelihoods and food security of these people by pulling them out
of food crop growth to cash crop growth. Don't think that farmer suicides are a
phenomenon of India only, that is not true. Oklahoma has two and a half
times... rural Oklahoma has two and a half times the national average of suicides,
most of them amongst farmers. Minnesota has, unusually through the '80s it had
an extremely high rate of farmer suicides. It's an attack on... what's it about?
It's about small holder farmers, family farms getting wiped out by the growing
spread and clout of corporate farming, that's what it's about. And it goes on,
and it keeps on. And in the first 6 years that we
worked on this, on the farm suicides, there was denial from the government.
Then when we pinned it down in their own numbers, in their own numbers, all the
numbers are from the National Crime Records Bureau. In India, the Crime Records
Bureau keeps suicide figures because suicide is a crime. You commit it and
we'll teach you never to do it again. And when it became impossible to deny the
numbers because it was their own numbers, their own police stations which had
provided the figures, then they started changing the... challenging the
interpretation. One of the favourite interpretations is alcoholism. You know
what these farmers are? A bunch of drunks. They're all drunkards, that's why
they committed suicide. I have been asked this in meeting after meeting and
meeting after meeting, but it strikes me as very interesting, this argument, if
drunkeness... if excessive consumption of alcohol drives
suicides, damn it, there'd be no journalists left in the world. (laughter)
The sad thing, and I'm gonna
conclude with that, the sad thing is how we have distanced ourself from
ordinary people, disconnected ourselves from the lives of others. How does all
this matter to you? How does this matter to us? We are not in the classes that
are struggling. We are not in the classes that are about to collapse, though we
don't know, I mean, give Wall Street time; they might achieve that, too. But
why should we be bothered? Why should we be bothered? One, I think, it speaks to
the very basic humanity in us that we should be bothered. Even if you wanted to
put it in extremely selfish terms, you better be bothered. A hell of a lot of
it is happening or coming soon to a theatre near you. The farm crisis is not
restricted to India. The crisis of corporate power is not restricted to India
by any means. In fact, suffusion of corporate power in the society is far
greater in the United States than it is in India. You can still chase
corporations out in India; you can't do that in the United States. You've
really got to worry about that. I believe that you have never been
better positioned and better situated to turn things around because the great
unravelling has begun. The great unravelling has begun. It's astonishing to
watch; the professionals and experts look such complete clowns, as they do when
they are trying to fix the economy. Also, we not only challenge ourselves, we
also challenge the media that give us this information. We need to do that too.
Let me put it another way to you. The crisis which you associate with Wall
Street in 2008, that crisis has existed in hundreds of societies for more than
15 years. It's only when it reaches the suits that it becomes a crisis for the
rest of the world. But it's been a crisis and you've had those farmers
committing suicide for 11 years. It never became a crisis. It's a hell of a
crisis for millions of families, but it never became a crisis for anyone else.
It's only when Merrill Lynch tanks and Bear Stearns bails out that it becomes a
crisis. So be very clear that the crisis
doesn't exempt you. It doesn't exempt Alberta. The farming crisis certainly
will not exempt this province, understand that. Input costs, Monsanto seed
costs, pesticide cost. Most of the farmers who committed suicide were not only
cash crop farmers, they were farmers locked into the model of heavy chemical
farming, heavy chemical use, heavy use of pesticides, heavy use of high cost
inputs. They were farmers locked into that model. They were very poor farmers,
but they were locked into that model and, therefore, they simply, they couldn't
afford it. What did the media do meanwhile in
this period? We sold products where we should have told stories. We got the
best bites, but told the worst stories. Where scepticism was crucial we
displayed sycophancy. When we needed journalism at its best we produced
stenography at its worst. I believe the unravelling has begun, but I will also
say that there's, apart from the critique of the economy, apart from the
critique of Neo-Liberalism, there's also the complicity of the middle-classes,
of all of us in things that go on. In the choices we make and the decisions we
make, it's very, very, very easy, until it becomes impossible, to disconnect
from the sufferings of millions of people. Indian history is replete with
such examples. In 1876, for example, Victoria got bored of being a queen and
she had recently acquired a very large piece of real estate, some of us now
call it India and she decided to call herself Empress, with due modesty. And
they held a party, the biggest dinner party in the history of the human race
with 68,000 guests and 2,000 cooks in a year when famine raged across India and
millions of people died. The party lasted a week. Now if you read the
newspapers of the time, you see the same disconnect. The party is covered, they
cover the party and, yes, the famine is covered, but there's no connection. The
reports tell us that starving peasants trying to enter the city faced
barricades from the police, who clubbed them to death at the barricades. A
hundred thousand people died of the famine in just Madras and Mysore alone
during the seven days of Victoria's celebration. It remains one of the best secrets in history. I think only
Mike Davis has written about it in the Late Victorian Holocausts. Otherwise
it's a secret in history. Call it Victoria's original secret. (laughter)
But it shows you that an elite can so disconnect themselves from the misery
enveloping the world around them. A last note for you. Some 30 years
ago, when I entered university, only to be expelled almost immediately, but then
I re-entered again, I trained to be an historian not a journalist. And I read
the Roman historian, Tacitus, on Nero and one question on that remained with me
until 5-6 years ago. You have Tacitus on Nero and the burning of Rome. Tacitus
despised Nero, but Tacitus was somewhat objective on the history of the fire,
he said that Nero... I mean Nero did not cause the fire. In fact, Nero was very
scared of how the fire was damaging his reputation among the masses because
they believed he was responsible for it and he had to distract them, the Roman
public, so he held the greatest dinner party of the ancient world, right? And
you can read about it, you can read about Tacitus, it's online. The University
of, I think, Michigan has put him online. Now they had this big problem. They
had the crème de la crème of the old world, of the Roman Empire, the greatest
scientists, the greatest philosophers, the greatest political figures, the
centurions, the generals, the musicians... the cream. And then they had a problem
in the party. It was a night party and you needed lighting for it. A problem
they solved, according to Tacitus, and by other contemporary historians, by
bringing out criminal prisoners from the cells and burning them at the stake in
the surrounding areas. In the prose of Tacitus, "... thereby providing the nightly
illumination." Now for me, this was never the issue; the cruelty of Nero was
never the issue. We all know that Nero was nuts and like all those sane, just
Roman emperors who routinely fed thousands of human beings to animals each
year, right? The issue was not Nero, or his cruelty. There have been much more
cruel people than Nero. The issue was - Who were Nero's guests? Here you had the
world's great philosophers, scientists, political people, thinkers and not one
raised a protest at the burning of human beings to provide the nightly
illumination. It always intrigued me. Who were Nero's guests? What did it take
to remain silent and coif another goblet of wine as another human being went up
in flames? Or pop another fig into your mouth as another person burned as a
human torch. After seven years of covering farm suicides, watching one after
the other farm household go belly-up, I think I have my answer about who Nero's
guests were. In the great unravelling that is on us, we make take different
paths, we may have different answers, we may have different arguments and
different solutions, but believe me, that unravelling is happening. And we can
agree on one thing, that whatever we do or don't do, agree with or don't agree
with, we will not be Nero's guests. Thank you. (applause) JS: And this is Deconstructing Dinner. You've been listening
to journalist Palagummi Sainath speaking on February 3rd, 2009 in
Edmonton, Alberta. Palagummi is the Rural Affairs
Editor of India's national newspaper, The Hindu. He was invited to be a
featured speaker at this year's International Week, hosted annually by the
University of Alberta. Deconstructing Dinner attending the event where I spoke
on three occasions and compiled a number of recordings such as this one to
share with you. If you missed last week's keynote speaker, Frances Moore Lappé, that episode is posted under the February 5th,
2009 broadcast on our website at deconstructingdinner.ca. Now
to bring us to the end of today's episode, I do want to share two more segments
with you from Palagummi's talk, both of these recorded during the evening's
Q&A. In this first segment, Palagummi addresses a question on the promise
of producing cash crops versus food crops and he uses the example of vanilla,
an ingredient found within many North American foods, but which carries an
important story that most of us are completely unaware of. PS: The cash crop idea was actually an idea of the World Bank
and the IMF. And the reasoning was this, that you see, food crop doesn't earn
you anything and food is cheap. Well, it's cheap in the United States, where,
say, Basmati rice, for 30 years, is cheaper to buy and consume in the United
States than it is in India, where it's grown. The idea was food crop growing
doesn't get you anything, it doesn't get you anywhere. You grow cash crop, you
export. Export-led growth was a theory. And when you export to the West you
earn dollars and you can buy all the food you want because we'll export food to
you. So we'll give you food and you'll have dollars so you'll be able to buy
our food, so let us do the trivial things like food production and you do the
important things like growing vanilla. Now
the second part of it is, many of these cash crops have no internal market in
India or in the countries where they grow. Vanilla, most of the vanilla
produced in the world is consumed in the United States. Vanilla-nation. India
has a zero market for vanilla and thousands of farmers shift to vanilla and
how... it also brings up a bit to your question, sir. The government pushes this
idea, as I said in the processes that local elites fully, joyously embraced the
Neo-Liberal model. It's not as if the Indian Prime Minister accepted these
policies kicking and screaming. If he was screaming it was only with joy. So
you had thousands of farmers switching to vanilla because government policies
ensured, for instance, that credit went to cash crop farmers. So they coerced
you, forced you, coaxed you, pursued you, brow-beat you into moving towards
that and then you were also seeing that those growing cash crops were getting a
much better deal in everything, at least for a while. I
remember the vanilla boom in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Wayanad, the
name of the district Wayanad is actually Vayal Nadu, which means 'land of
paddy'. It's very hard to find anyone growing paddy now, it was one of the
ancient centres of paddy growing. People shift to vanilla from 880 dollars an
acre for cultivation costs to 3,000 dollars. The first year, the first season,
this is how corporations work... the first two seasons they made phenomenal
profits. The U.S. Vanilla Association always states the demand, all these sort of
things happen, and everybody and his grandmum from Kerala to Kenya switched to
vanilla. The entry of millions of farmers into vanilla immediately crashes the
price at one level. Then the associations in the West restate the demand and
say, 'Oops you know we got a couple of zeros there by accident.' In the first
year, farmers made 4,500 rupees per kilogram. That's, yeah this is Canada,
kilogram. Per kilogram of vanilla they got a price of 4,500 rupees, that's 100
U.S. dollars per kilogram. So they were thrilled and everybody thought this
was... they were made. When I last was in Kerala, vanilla was selling for 68
rupees a kilogram, 1 dollar 30 cents. That, my friend, is not a fluctuation,
it's an annihilation and it was a very planned annihilation. You got the mugs
to get into your scheme, got them there, now when they've made the investment
and as one of the farmers told me, "The only thing we can do, the only use that
creeper now has it to hang ourselves with it." So the cash crop thing was
nurtured, nourished, it was part of the export-led growth idea. It was very
systematically foisted on millions of people, some of whom took it willingly
believing that this was a way out of poverty, and many others who found that
unless they did it they would not get a lot of government support. JS: Palagummi Sainath. And in this last segment that will
conclude today's broadcast of Deconstructing Dinner we'll leave you with one
last recording from the Q&A following Palagummi's talk. And again, if you
missed any of today's broadcast it will be archived on our website at
deconstructingdinner.ca. Unheard segments from Palagummi's talk will also be
posted there. PS: The last famine we had was 1942-43 Bengal famine. Once
the British left we never had that because this was the result of human policy.
So what happens? 1860s, we suddenly start growing much more cotton than we
need. We grow this cotton but what happens? The civil was gets over. The civil
war gets over, cotton growers in India are getting some good remuneration and then
America re-enters the cotton market and cotton prices in India and Egypt tank.
That was the first globalization. We had a wave of suicides of cotton farmers
even then. It's the same script being played all over again. People
being made to grow what they don't need, people being denied the right to grow
what they do need and made to operate against their interests. I think some of
the solutions are pretty obvious. Dismantle Neo-Liberalism. Don't accept it.
One of the first things is to resist what is being imposed on you. A bunch of
Mafiosi destroy the planet with their financial product and then we give them
trillions of dollars to set it right. I think the answer is going to come from
you and me, it's going to come from everyday people, it's going to come from
ordinary people who have always, in my opinion, been the model of change. It's
never been easy, it has been done. It won't be easy, it will be done because
you are having protests and that unravelling all over. One
of the most interesting things I saw in the United States when I was teaching
at Berkeley last semester was, a strike in the public windows and doors company
in Chicago where the owners tried overnight speeling out of the company locking
out and abandoning their workers who then occupied the factory and demanded
their severance pay and their vacation pay, and got it. Had that happened
before the Meltdown, you'd have had the troops or the police in there clubbing
those workers and throwing them out as trespassers. Instead you had Obama declaring
support for the striking workers and every celebrity from mayor to governor
showing up to declare their support. But more importantly you had ordinary
citizens of Chicago going there with food hampers for the strikers. There's
hope. ending
theme JS: And that was this week's edition of
Deconstructing Dinner, produced and recorded at Nelson, British Columbia's
Kootenay Co-op Radio. I've been your host Jon Steinman. I thank my technical
assistant John Ryan. The theme music for
Deconstructing Dinner is courtesy of Nelson-area resident Adham Shaikh. This radio program
is provided free of charge to campus/community radio stations across the
country, and relies on the financial support of you the listener. Financial
support can be donated through our website at cjly.net/deconstructingdinner or
by dialing 250-352-9600.
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