‘Farm Bills’ open doors for global grain merchants and Indian corporate giants

food

Reproduced below is well-known environmentalist and scholar Dr. Vandana Shiva’s unpublished briefing paper “Protecting the Rights of Small Farmers (our anna datas), the Right to Food of All Citizens to Create a Food Sovereign, Food Self-Reliant India (Atmanirbhar Bharat)” on the potential impact of the dismantling of India’s food sovereignty and food security regulatory and legal infrastructure framework through three food and farming Bills. The paper has been distributed by JanVikalp:

Three Bills have been passed in Parliament which are being referred to as “Farm Bills”. However, these are not about farming alone.

They are food system Bills. They affect the entire food system. These laws will determine how we produce our food, how much do farmers get for what they grow, how much do people pay for food, how many people have livelihoods in the food system, and how we manage our soils, biodiversity, and natural resources.

They could dismantle India’s centuries-old biodiversity-based, small farmer centered tradition of Atma Nirbhar small farmers, and 70 years of a regulatory system to protect small farms, small farmer livelihoods, the livelihoods of millions of workers and small traders in mandis, the right to food, and the food sovereignty of the country.

The three bills are:

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The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 which excludes food from the Essential Commodities Act

Farming Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance, 2020 which dismantles the regulatory market framework that prevents traders and Agribusiness from exploiting farmers

The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance, 2020 which opens the door for global agribusiness and food processing corporations to lock farmers into new corporate slavery

The Essential Commodities Act is not related to farm prices, but to the entire food system.
The Essential Commodities Act is a regulation to prevent profiteering from essential commodities on which life depends like seed, food, and medicine. It is meant to prevent speculation and by creating artificial scarcity through hoarding.
Food is an essential commodity. When prices rise, people starve. Excluding food from the Essential Commodities Act is a recipe for speculation and profiteering.
Putting trade and profits above people’s right to food is also a recipe for hunger as we experienced during British colonial rule which destroyed our food sovereignty through trade and a system of extraction of taxes from the peasants.
Around 60 million Indians died due to the resulting famines created by the British Empire. In 1942 the Great Bengal famine killed two million people. That is why in 1955, independent India passed the Essential Commodities Act, to prevent traders from profiteering from food while people died.
The government used the Essential Commodities Act to regulate the price of Bt Cotton Seeds and stop Monsanto’s exploitation of Indian farmers. Indian farmers paid Monsanto Rs 14,000 crore during 2002-2018 (17 years) even though Monsanto had no Patent on GMO Bt Cotton.
The Essential Commodities Act is related to the right to food as a fundamental right .Food is life . Article 21 guarantees it, as does the Food Security Act of 2013 which opens with the statement that the Act is meant to provide for food and nutritional security in human life cycle approach, by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices to people to live a life with dignity and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.
The Essential Commodities Act embodies the duty of a sovereign government to regulate the prices of essential commodities. Without the regulation of food prices, there is no right to food.

The second Bill is the Farming Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance, 2020 which dismantles the regulatory market framework that prevents traders and agribusiness from exploiting farmers and is the foundation of the biggest public food system in the world to ensure the right to food mandis are governed by Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMC) on which both farmers and traders sit.
As an example, the Karnataka Agricultural Produce Marketing (Regulation) Act, 1966, clearly states:

“(iv) representation on the market committee to purchasers of agricultural produce, representatives of the purchasers’ co-operative societies, representatives of co-operative marketing and processing societies, municipalities, taluk boards, and the Central Warehousing Corporation or State Warehousing Corporation…”
APMCs embody three aspects:

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

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Neeraj Nanda

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