By IANS
New Delhi : In a stinging attack, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has accused the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of harming the country's food security by pandering to Western capital.
The opening up of Indian agriculture to the global economy would only lead to a drastic shift away from food crops to fruits, vegetables and bio fuels, affecting millions, CPI-M organ People's Democracy said in an editorial.
"As long as the UPA government remains committed to the neo-liberal agenda of integrating peasant agriculture to the world market, as long as it seeks to make peasant agriculture subservient to corporate capital … its professed concern with food security will have a completely hollow ring about it," it said.
In the editorial titled "Food Security Under Threat", the weekly magazine said the opening up of peasant agriculture "entails dispossession, displacement, exploitation through adverse terms of trade".
"Such adjustment necessarily implies a shift away from food crops to other more exotic crops, ranging from fruits and vegetables to flowers and bio-fuels like jatropha; and it is in turn superimposed upon a shift of the pattern of land use away from agriculture to real estate and luxury construction.
"It follows then that a curtailment of foodgrains production and an undermining of food security are the inevitable sequel to the introduction of a neo-liberal regime.
"This fact, evident from the history of numerous third world countries in Latin America and Africa, also emerges clearly from India's comparatively shorter experience of liberalisation."
People's Democracy pointed out that per capita foodgrain output in India had declined since the beginning of the 1990s, and even the absolute foodgrain output has become stagnant since the beginning of this century.
It said the UPA government's proposal, placed before the National Development Council meeting May 29, re-emphasising the goal of food security and setting a target of a 20 million tonne increase in output might appear as a welcome step.
"The problem, however, is that the same resolution proposed by the UPA government also wants to carry forward the neo-liberal project of making peasant agriculture subservient to the needs of corporate capital…
"If agriculture is opened up to the dictates of the 'free market', then only those crops will be grown for which there is demand in the international economy. And the massive pull of the purchasing power of the advanced countries combined with that of the local rich will far outweigh the food needs of the indigent Indian masses in determining our cropping pattern.
"Since the demand emanating from the advanced countries is not for additional foodgrains, of which they have huge surpluses, but for a whole range of goods that are not producible in those countries but are required for a diversified consumption basket (such as fruits and vegetables), opening up to the world market necessarily entails a shift away from foodgrains."