Globalization

"India is stealing American jobs." Pretty much everyone agrees with that statement. Much of our high-tech labor is being outsourced to that nation, where rents are cheap and well-educated English-speaking white-collar workers won't demand U.S.-style salaries.

The common wisdom: Liberal global trade rules are great for India, lousy for Americans.

The common wisdom is wrong.

Such is the argument of the extraordinary Dr. Vandana Shiva. I just heard a lecture she gave last October (as relayed by the Other Americas Radio, and not available on the web) in which she described growing famine in India, for the first time in decades.

Why? Because globalization is altering food production patterns in monstrous ways. Free trade may have given that nation a "new economy" -- i.e., computer-related jobs that used to be done by us -- but many more Indians live under the rule of the old, agriculture-based economy. And globalization has not been the friend of the Indian farmer.

This is from a recent article by Dr. Shiva -- I hope you will read the whole thing, and I hope she will not mind my lengthy excerptions:



In 1998, the World Bank's structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds which needed fertilizers and pesticides and could not be saved.

As seed saving is prevented by patents as well as by the engineering of seeds with non-renewable traits, seed has to be bought for every planting season by poor peasants. A free resource available on farms became a commodity which farmers were forced to buy every year. This increases poverty and leads to indebtedness.

As debts increase and become unpayable, farmers are compelled to sell kidneys or even commit suicide. More than 25,000 peasants in India have taken their lives since 1997 when the practice of seed saving was transformed under globalization pressures and multinational seed corporations started to take control of the seed supply. Seed saving gives farmers life. Seed monopolies rob farmers of life...


Monocultures and uniformity increase the risks of crop failure as diverse seeds adapted to diverse ecosystems are replaced by rushed introduction of unadapted and often untested seeds into the market. When Monsanto first introduced Bt Cotton in India in 2002, the farmers lost Rs. 1 billion due to crop failure. Instead of 1,500 Kg / acre as promised by the company, the harvest was as low as 200 kg. Instead of increased incomes of Rs. 10,000 / acre, farmers ran into losses of Rs. 6400 / acre.

In the state of Bihar, when farm saved corn seed was displaced by Monsanto's hybrid corn, the entire crop failed creating Rs. 4 billion losses and increased poverty for already desperately poor farmers. Poor peasants of the South cannot survive seed monopolies...



The second pressure Indian farmers are facing is the dramatic fall in prices of farm produce as a result of free trade policies of the W.T.O. The WTO rules for trade in agriculture are essentially rules for dumping. They have allowed an increase in agribusiness subsidies while preventing countries from protecting their farmers from the dumping of artificially cheap produce.

High subsidies of $ 400 billion combined with forced removal of import restrictions is a ready-made recipe for farmer suicides. Global prices have dropped from $ 216 / ton in 1995 to $ 133 / ton in 2001 for wheat, $ 98.2 / ton in 1995 to $ 49.1 / ton in 2001 for cotton, $ 273 / ton in 1995 to $ 178 / ton for soyabean. This reduction to half the price is not due to a doubling in productivity but due to an increase in subsidies and an increase in market monopolies controlled by a handful of agribusiness corporations.

Thus the U.S government pays $ 193 per ton to US Soya farmers, which artificially lowers the rice of soya. Due to removal of Quantitative Restrictions and lowering of tariffs, cheap soya has destroyed the livelihoods of coconut growers, mustard farmers, producers of sesame, groundnut and soya...


The rigged prices of globally traded agriculture commodities are stealing incomes from poor peasants of the south. Analysis carried out by the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology shows that due to falling farm prices, Indian peasants are loosing $ 26 billion or Rs. 1.2 trillion annually. This is a burden their poverty does not allow them to bear. Hence the epidemic of farmer suicides.


There's more. I encourage everyone to become familiar with Shiva's work. The most astounding aspect of her lecture concerned the rigged science used to buttress this economic invasion of the subcontinent. She cites an article in a prestigious scientific journal -- an article regurgitating Monsanto-approved research, giving a very false notion of the results of that company's efforts.

Never think that unregulated global markets offer a "hand-out" to the poorer nations of the world. Quite the opposite: Globalization has given less-developed nations even fewer tools with which to fight the foreign mega-corporations.

The American worker complains when he loses his white collar job and dons a McDonalds uniform. And he has a right to complain. But so do the workers in other lands. The day will come when both first-world and third-world employees stop believing in the myth that all corporations are holy.