Climate Change: Time to shift gears in agriculture

At the recently concluded G-20 Heads of the State meeting in Brisbane, host Australia tried its best to keep climate change out of the final communique. It was only after the United States and European Union exerted pressure that the final declaration had a vague statement about climate change. 

The Brisbane declaration finally had a paragraph that supported strong and effective action to address climate change, consistent with sustainable economic growth and certainty for business and investment, a reaffirmed G-20 resolve to adopt the recommendations, protocol and legal instruments agreed at the 21^st Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change scheduled to be held in Paris in 2015.

The G-20 reluctance to address the global concerns over climate change comes a few days after US President Barack Obama and the Chinese President Xi Jinping, heading the two biggest polluting countries, announced a so-called promising US-China agreement on greenhouse gas emission. Accordingly, while China will make its best efforts to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the US has set-up a target of reducing its emissions by 28% in 2030 from the commitments it made for the 2005 level.

While the US media has hailed this as a ‘potentially landmark climate change agreement’ in reality it is a sweet deal benefit both the polluting countries. The Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, has in an analysis shown that both the US and China have worked out a mutually convenient programme of inaction that allows both the countries the freedom to pollute.

China has to do nothing to limit or reduce its emissions for the next 16 years, by which time its per capita emissions would reach around 12-13 tons. The US, which had a target to reduce emissions by 17 per cent by 2020, will now get a breather and its per capita emissions will also equal 12 to 13 ton by 2030.  In other words, both US and China have crafted a self-serving deal while the world not only mutely looks on, but also applauds.

In contrast, India’s per capita emissions which hover around 1.6 ton of carbon dioxide equivalent at present, is not expected to exceed 4 ton by 2030.

Since both US and China are responsible for more than 40 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions, the freedom to pollute unhindered for the next 16 years has serious implications for the global climate. Needless to say worst impact of the resulting climate change is being felt by developing and least developed countries, who have hardly any role in the acerbating the crisis. Rising temperatures is leading to serious climate disruptions, resulting in melting of glaciers and the rising of ocean levels. The impact is going to be catastrophic on food and water, with many experts pointing to escalating political crisis within and among nations as a consequence.

One-third of the global greenhouse gas emissions actually come from agriculture and forestry. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which governs the 15 agricultural research centres, “reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint is central to limiting climate change.”Food production system, including deforestation and land-use changes, account for the release of 12,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere every year. Such a huge contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is not only leading to climatic aberrations but also necessitates adaption and mitigation technologies for the small farmers who face the brunt.

Considering the role agriculture plays in climate change, a pro-active stand on food security from G-20 was expected. Although food security figured prominently in the Seoul Development Consensus in 2010, and did get a push with the development of an Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture under the French presidency in 2011, everything ended with the formation of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS). Except for the usual rhetoric and an unsuccessful attempt to create food reserves in western Africa, food security has for all practical purposes disappeared from the G-20 agenda.

In the 2013 declaration, G-20 did emphasis on the central theme of food security. The G-20 Food Security and Nutrition Framework do recognize “the importance of boosting agricultural productivity, investment and trade to strengthen the global food system to promote economic growth and job creation.” However, except for the usual talk of assistance to smallholder agriculture to boost productivity, the Framework does not talk of addressing the systemic problems that has led to global agriculture turning into a major villain of climate change. The Framework itself reads well, and does mention that business as usual may not be the right approach but still the underlying emphasis is on more of the same.

The CGIAR does admit that the food-related emissions and the impact of climate change will profoundly alter the way we grow food crops, but the G-20 Framework talks of integrating smallholders into markets. In a way, integrating farmers with global markets and bringing in more investments to enhance productivity – which is what the World Economic Forum too desires – only shows that no lessons have been learnt from the climate debacle. Intensive farming is what led to agriculture becoming the biggest contributor to climate change, and therefore it is futile to accept that more intensive farming will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in future. 

As temperatures rise, and water becomes scarce, irrigated wheat yields in developing countries are feared to fall by 13 and rice by 15 per cent by the year 2050. CGIAR also estimates that production of crops like potato, banana, and other cash crops will dramatically slump. Several other studies, including those by Indian Agricultural Research Institute, too points to a bleak farming scenario in the years ahead. But strangely, while the international effort, especially by the donor agencies, is to provide financial support to civil society groups for mitigation and adapting small farmers to the effects of climate change there is no mention of any serious effort to suitably make systemic changes in the way crops are being farmed.

While it is true that the G-20 has great convening and coordinating power over other international actors, it isn’t in a position to disregard some of the principles that have failed to enhance food security. In 2008, the same prescription of linking crop production to global markets led to the global food crisis sparking food riots in 37 countries and creating food deficiencies in several parts. Moreover, the entire thrust of the food security and climate change deliberations seem to be industry-driven with hardly any space for reinventing the sustainable agro-ecological methods of farming.

The G-20 Framework on Food Security therefore needs to be redrawn based on the recommendations of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) which was an inter-governmental effort under the co-sponsorship of FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO and World Bank. This report, submitted in 2008, calls for a radical change in the ‘business as usual’ approach. #  

जानी-पहचानी अनदेखी Dainik Jagran, Nov 29, 2014
http://bit.ly/16dkJYB 

Pushing farmers out of agriculture is not economic growth.

A few days after the release of the latest census data I happened to be participating in a TV discussion on the continuing distress in agriculture. After all, with nearly 2,500 farmers quitting agriculture every day, and with the number of cultivators owning land declining to less than the number of landless farm labourers for the first time, the question that was asked to me was whether this was good news or bad.

“It certainly is bad news for the country,” I replied, adding: “But it must have come as a great disappointment to India’s planners and policy makers. They were anticipating a bigger shift in population from the rural to urban areas, and it shows that all their efforts to force the farmers to abandon agriculture have not worked so well. They have not been able to meet the economic prescription that the World Bank had prescribed.” Needless to say, the economist on the panel wouldn’t agree.

At a conference organised by M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, in Chennai, way back in 1996, I vividly recall a presentation made by the then Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and also a vice chairman of the World Bank, Dr Ismail Serageldin. He said as per World Bank’s estimates the number of people migrating from the rural to urban areas in India in another 20 years – by 2015 – would be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany. The combined population of these three European countries is around 200 million. So the World Bank had anticipated 400 million people, more than the population of United States, moving out of rural areas in India in the next 20 years.

I thought this was a warning. Perhaps the World Bank was telling us to be doubly careful and initiate appropriate policy approaches to restrict the population shift, which is laced with disastrous socio-economic as well as political ramifications.  No, I wasn’t correct. The World Bank was actually spelling out an economic prescription. This becomes apparent when you read the subsequent World Development Reports, annual publications of the World Bank. Reading the 2008 World Development Report, I was shocked to find the bank actually asking India to speed up the population transfer by encouraging land rental markets. 

At the same time, the bank made it abundantly clear that the younger people in rural areas do not know anything but farming. Displacing them from agriculture without teaching them the skills to become industrial workers will only add to the rural workforce. It therefore suggested setting up a network of training centres where these youngsters could be trained to become industrial workers. And no wonder, in the 2009 Budget speech, just before the elections, the then Finance Minister made a budgetary provision for setting up 1,000 industrial training institutes.

I wasn’t therefore surprised when Dr Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), parroted the same economic prescription. In an interview with the New York Times, this is what Rajan had to say:  “In terms of where will growth come from, it doesn’t need to come from fancy stuff like extraordinary innovation of one kind or another. Just getting people from agriculture into services and industry itself is growth.” He has repeated the same solution to the economic woes in a Walk the Talk he had with Shekhar Gupta sometimes ago. And as I said earlier, Rajan too is disappointed. In another interview, he admitted that the exit of people from agriculture has not kept pace with economic growth.

Soon after assuming office, when Rajan said he is not looking for the number of ‘likes’ on the facebook but is contemplating some tough decisions, my impression was actually he wanted to convey was that he will opt for ‘tough love’ – tough for the aam aadmi, and love for the rich -- because this is exactly what the market economy textbooks prescribe. Allow for unbridled privatisation of profits, and when the bubble bursts socialise the costs. It’s the poor who must make sacrifices to keep the wheels of economy churning. This is exactly what happened at the time of the 2008-09 economic melt-down. This is what subsequently led to the Eurozone crisis, and this is what has been at the back of India’s economic downturn.  

Moving people out of agriculture may be the ultimate goal, but there are some ways to prop up the economy in a short-term. Sometimes back, senior journalist and author M J Akbar had in one of his columns given us an excellent idea. He quoted a Russian Finance Minister, who in wake of declining GDP in Russia, actually asked fellow Russians that the least they can do to help the economy grow is to start drinking more vodka. The Economist too has among other things suggested opening up of casinos to ensure that people with surplus money do not flock to Sri Lanka on weekends. As if this is not enough, the Thai have proposed setting up of massage parlours under the Indo-Thai free trade agreement that is being renegotiated. Massage parlours are of course a service industry.

If these are the options available to raise the sagging economy, there is something terribly wrong with the way we perceive economic growth.  But let us first look at the flawed thinking that is aimed at destroying domestic agriculture. The neglect of agriculture is deliberate and part of a bigger design. In a country where roughly 70 per cent of the population lives in the countryside, there can be nothing more disastrous than to plan for a massive population shift in the coming decades. Just because the World Bank/IMF and the American universities have been flouting the crazy hypothesis, does not mean that we should follow it blindly. What India needs therefore are leaders with vision and wisdom and not ideological free market brats who cannot see beyond the G-20 mandate. 

Agriculture provides livelihoods for nearly 600 million people. They are certainly underemployed, and undernourished. The challenge therefore is to make them gainfully employed, and not to uproot them and turn them into agricultural refugees. Like the young graduate from a business school, a farmer is also an entrepreneur. He needs improved skills for which he needs training, and also needs a launching pad. Take the case of a poorest of poor women in a village. When she goes out to buy a goat, she needs microfinance. She eventually ends up paying 24 per cent interest to MFIs, which at weekly repayment plan turns to be 38 per cent. With such a predatory interest, she will perpetually remain in the poverty trap.

If steel tycoon Laxmi Mittal can be advanced Rs 1,250-crore at zero interest for investment in Bathinda refinery, or if Ratan Tata can be provided land at a throwaway price and financial credit at 0.5 per cent rate of interest, I wonder why the poor are penalised. Provide the poor women credit at zero percent, and I bet she would be driving a Nano car at the end of the year. Give the farmer a decent monthly assured income, and make appropriate investments in rural infrastructure, and I can tell you he will not only put the country’s economic growth on a much higher pedestal, but ensure that the gains of economic development are distributed widely and equitably.

India therefore provides a unique opportunity for neoliberal breed of economists like Raghuram Rajan to de-learn and un-graduate. As someone said, that’s the only way we will learn to challenge all that we have accepted as time-tested truths. Move away from the growth fetish, remove the IMF/World Bank cap, and start looking afresh at economics as if people mattered. If a non-descript village like Hiware Bazaar in Maharashtra can boast of 60 millionaires, and that too without any forcible land acquisitions under public-private partnership or sucking the state exchequer dry with tax sops and tax holidays, each of the nearly 6.4 lakh villages that dot the country can do the same.

What India needs is a production system by the masses, and not for the masses. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi said. And he wasn’t wrong. #   

Source: Tehelka, Vol 10 Issue 38, Sept 21, 2013.

 http://www.tehelka.com/forsaking-agriculture-is-not-the-right-answer/