Jain Spirit 2003 06 No 15

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 55

socially, politically, environmentally and economically destructive ways, while they required prioritisation on debt repayment and cut backs on health, education and other critical services. They have encouraged concentration on producing just a few cash crops and other commodities primarily for export, using environmentally very damaging 'industrial agriculture' that reduces biodiversity and requires costly inputs such as harsh pesticides and fertilizers to make up for the loss of free services a diverse farm ecosystem would provide. As Vandana Shiva charges, industrial agriculture "has destroyed diverse sources of food and it has stolen food from other species to bring larger quantities of specific commodities to the market, using huge quantities of fossil fuels, water and toxic chemicals in the process. ... Since cattle and earthworms are our partners in food production, stealing food from them makes it impossible to maintain. food production over time... More grain from two or three commodities arrived on national and international markets, but less food was eaten by farm families in the Third World. The gain in yields' of industrially produced crops is based on the theft of food from other species and the rural poor in the Third World. That is why as more grain is produced and traded globally, more people go hungry in the Third World. Global markets have more commodities for trading because food has been robbed from nature and the poor."
THESE ILLITERATES DON'T REALISE WHAT THEY'RE DOING TO THE ENVIRONMENT!
Mainstream economists and politicians have long been criticised for concentrating on economic growth in a way that ignores humanity and environmental costs. Perhaps one of the harshest ironies is how food and farm products flow from areas of hunger and need to areas where money and demand is concentrated. Farm workers, women especially, are amongst the world's most hungry. It is not just a problem in agriculture but in other industries too. In 1991, then Chief Economist for the World Bank, Larry Summers had been a strong backer of the disastrous SAPS. He wrote a leaked internal memo in 1992, revealing the extent to which international policies have an impact on nations around the world when it comes to environmental and other considerations:
"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]? The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that... Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City... The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously
ILLUSTRATION: MIKE TURNER
Jain Education Intemational 2010_03
going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand."
For years, rich countries have been migrating some polluting industries to poor countries, but still producing primarily for rich countries. This has been possible insofar as it is cheaper than to pay for costly environmentally clean technologies that people demand.
Diverting Resources to Non-Productive Uses
It is perhaps natural to assume that we are growing food to feed people but are struggling to keep up, chiefly due to the rapid population growth in poor countries. However, although environmentally damaging industrial agriculture threatens future sustainability, we make more than enough
food to keep up with population growth. Yet how is it that there is so much hunger, and that farm workers are usually the hungriest people in the world? An indication of the answer lies in what is less discussed in the mainstream: the purpose of agriculture in today's world. Like many other markets, food is available to those who can afford it, not necessarily to those who need it. Most food is therefore produced to meet consumer demands, not the needs of the poor or hungry. This leads to a major diversion and even wastage of environmental resources from productive uses to non-productive uses. For poor countries that need to earn
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HOLISTIC VISION
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Environmental Usage and Blaming the Victims. From Centre for Science and Environment, http://www.cseindia.org
foreign exchange to pay off huge debts, cash crops offer the chance of money. For elite landowners, this is the only way they can make money, as the poor have little. As professor of anthropology, Richard Robbins, summarises:
"To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.
"Food is a commodity... Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market. Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries. More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is June-August 2003 Jain Spirit 53 www.jainelibrary.org