PRAGOTI

With trouble mounting on the three fronts of food, finance and the real economy, nothing, it seems, can avert a world depression.

Utsa Patnaik writes on the connection between the different crises in the Hindu.

In a country as huge, as diverse and as complex as India, consigning the bread and butter issues of peoples livelihood to the backburner can only signal an unmitigated disaster. In election after election, the incumbents are being voted out of office. To ensure that such changes are better informed. And daily discourse, particularly those elections be premised on the policies that parties espouse, so that there can be intermittent reality checks. That is the only way to ensure transparency and accountability.

After 1991, intense pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to reduce the budget deficit brought first a sharp rise in the PDS price of foodgrains unmatched by higher prices for farmers, and then the introduction of "Targeted PDS" in 1997. Within ten years all that had been gained over a generation was lost. "Targeting" involved the near-criminal use of indefensible "Poverty Lines" to subject a vast impoverished population to paying prevailing market prices for essentials. Though accompanied by hypocritical expressions of concern for the poor from both World Bank and Indian neoliberals, targeting was a deliberate and successful attack on the PDS system as a whole.

As the world reels with the shock of soaring food prices erupting into food riots, questions are being raised as to how this situation came about. Jayati Ghosh analyses the current world food crisis and traces its origins to the neoliberal policies that have dominated economic decision-making in the Third World. Courtesy: Third World Resurgence journal.