PRAGOTI

Farmers see the ‘developers' and the corporates making profits running into several hundred times the price at which they had sold the land. Even worse is the complicity of the state whenever it uses its power to acquire land to hand over to the corporate sector, often with a subsidy element to the latter, and beyond making vague promises takes no steps to ensure that the livelihoods of the displaced are safeguarded. Prof. Utsa Patnaik provides a Marxist critique of land acquisition policies in India.

While there has been a lot of talk about the visit of US President Obama, the media has chosen to ignore the "Strategic Cooperation” in Agriculture, food security and related areas. The direction of these negotiations points clearly to a corporate take-over of Indian agriculture. Like any trader the American establishment came to sell their wares at the most profitable terms and they went satisfied. Indian ruling classes sold our interests and kowtowed to their imperialist masters. What was missed in the media cacophony was the impact of the visit on the Indian masses, the peasantry and the rural poor. Vijoo Krishnan writes.

"By creating an exclusively profit oriented banking sector through deregulation and drastically cutting the expenditure on agriculture government is crushing the farmer from all sides. Even the occasional relief of debt waiver and suspension announced by government workers against farmers as banks show reluctance in further lending to farmers who have received relief." An article on the murderous compromise in rural credit and agriculture by Srujana Bodapati.

An article towards understanding the political-ideological roots of the GM controversy in Indian agriculture with special reference to Marxist theory and practice, is attached with this post (in PDF format). The essay begins with setting the context of the currently raging debate on BT-Brinjal and reviewing a select set of empirical assessments of BT-Cotton in India on relevant parameters. It then moves to critically examine the role of ideology in how competing political forces comprehend the food and nutrition crisis in India.