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By Devinder Sharma India appears poised to follow Argentina's economic model - boost private investment in agriculture and encourage commodity exports. But since last year 450,000 jobs have been lost in Argentina, leaving one in four people destitute. Is this the way forward for India?
 Finance minister Jaswant Singh presented the mid-term review in parliament, emphasising the need to boost private investment in agriculture thereby encouraging commodity exports. What he forgot to say was that India had decided to follow Argentina's model for economic growth, which, in reality, lines up the profits of a few agri-business enterprises at the cost of growing hunger, malnutrition and abject poverty.
Argentina, the world's fourth largest exporter of food, faces an unprecedented socio-economic crisis. As the vast, fertile country continues to increase exports of meat, wheat, corn and soya this year, the under-privileged in the countryside have been severely affected. As hunger multiplies, images of stunted, emaciated children have scandalised Argentina, long known as the grain store of the world. Meanwhile, hunger continues to spread in India which alone has one-third of the world's estimated 860 million people who go to bed hungry, that too in times of plenty. In fact, hunger and poverty have proved to be robustly sustainable. Amidst reports of hunger and starvation-related deaths in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa that hit the national headlines a few weeks ago, India continues to make room for exporting surplus foodgrain. The fact that an estimated 320 million people desperately need food, despite more than 60 million tonnes of foodgrain stocked in the open, has failed to evoke any sense of political expediency. Perceived by the neo-classic pundits as a glorious model for economic growth, an unprecedented humanitarian crisis confronts Argentina. In India too, with the increased domination of market forces in the food sector, and reduced public policy intervention for food security, food prices have increased. Jaswant Singh has promised to further cut subsidies and reduce the government's intervention in foodgrain procurement. Already India's Export-Import Policy of 2001-02 emphasises the promotion of agricultural exports. Exports have increased by 10 per cent every year since 1991. They rose from Rs 29.7 billion in 1994, to Rs 76.7 billion in 1997. Between April-August 2002, wheat exports increased by 32 per cent, and rice 75 per cent, as compared to the corresponding months of the previous fiscal year. Agriculture and allied products grew by an impressive 8.22 per cent in the same period. However, other traditional export segments such as plantation crops (tea and spices) and edible oils continue to face growing imports with the lowering of import duties and the removal of quantitative restrictions. Instead of imposing duties that minimise the impact of cheap imports, the government has provided Rs 5,000 million to bail out the plantation sector. In other words, while small producers are driven out by cheaper imports, major producers have had their losses written off. Even as people die of hunger, the government sits atop a mountain of foodgrain. In 2001, over 13 Indian states reported starvation deaths, while the Food Corporation of India's (FCI's) storage facilities were full of grain, some of it rotting and rat-infested. When export markets could not be found for the `surplus' grain, there was a proposal to dump it all into the sea, to make room for the next crop. Meanwhile, in 2002, reports of hunger and starvation deaths have regularly poured in from the country's progressive and economically fast-growing states -- Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The Guardian (November 25, 2002) explains the dichotomy of economic growth in Argentina by quoting the Centre for Child Nutrition Studies, which advises the World Health Organisation, as saying that 20 per cent of children in the Latin American country suffer from malnutrition. Dr Oscar Hillal, deputy director of a children's hospital in Tucuman, said: "This is not Africa, this is Argentina, where there are 50 million cattle and 39 million people -- but where we have a government which is totally out of touch with the people's needs." Some of the children pictured in the north-eastern Tucuman province had bloated stomachs, blotchy skin and dry hair associated with severe protein deficiencies. The national charity Red Solidaria said that 60 children a month were being taken to hospital with severe malnutrition, and 400 were being treated as outpatients. Five non-government organisations (NGOs) from Tucuman province recently filed a legal suit against Tucuman's governor Julio Miranda for `wilful neglect' of the children who died of malnutrition in his province, where 64 per cent of people live in extreme poverty. They accused him of diverting national funding for social programmes into `clientelism and corruption'. A year earlier, a case was filed by some NGOs in the Supreme Court in India asking for directions to ensure the fundamental right to food for every citizen. A bench comprising Justice B N Kripal and Justice K G Balakrishnan directed the government to `devise a scheme where no person goes hungry when the granaries are full and lots (is) being wasted due to non-availability of storage space'. To the attorney general's plea that devising such a scheme would require at least two weeks, the court allowed for enough time. It also sought affidavits from the state governments of Orissa, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh detailing their responses to meeting this unprecedented situation of `scarcity among plenty'. A year-and-a-half later, starvation deaths were reported from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, even as exports of wheat and rice increased. Malnutrition continues to multiply, more so among children and women.
A day after prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee announced, in mid-November, that 1.3 million tonnes of foodgrain costing Rs 15,000 million had been distributed in the country under various drought relief programmes, a damning survey conducted in Madhya Pradesh, in central India, found that 6,785 children in 43 blocks of Shivpuri district were severely malnourished -- an average of 160 per block. Yet, all that the prime minister did was to call an all-party meeting to discuss the crisis emerging from drought and hunger. Elsewhere, it is the same story of desperation and apathy. Of people fighting drought alone, desperately seeking menial jobs far from their homes. As the Puri-Okha Express pulled into Berhampur railway station, The Indian Express reported a few weeks ago, the platform erupted into chaos. More than a thousand youths, fighting to clamber onto the train that was leaving Berhampur for Surat, were ready to kill or be killed for space in the two general compartments. Some were ready to hang in the doorway all the way to Surat and Mumbai. Those who were unable to board the train smashed windowpanes in their frustration. Such scenes are not confined to Berhampur railway station. Any Indian railway station presents a similar pathetic scenario. Surendra Nayak of Phasi village in the Kodola block of Ganjam district spent Rs 272 from his precious savings of Rs 700 to buy a ticket to Surat. In the melee he was unable to get on the train and had to head back home. Barely 22 years of age, Surendra had decided to leave his village as his father could not earn and drought had rendered their land useless. "Lack of employment has forced us to leave for Surat...apathy of the railways and the administration has shattered our hopes," he told the media.
Far away in Argentina, some 450,000 jobs have been lost since October last year, leaving one in every five people unemployed, one in two living in poverty, and one in four destitute. Salaries have lost 70 per cent of their value and the economy is shrinking at a rate of 14 per cent. Inflation is running at 40 per cent. In Tucuman province, The Guardian reports, parents admit to feeding their babies and infants a sugary green tea instead of milk or food, which they cannot afford. "I hardly had any breast milk," said 24-year-old Roxana de Benedetti, whose five-year-old son Hector died three weeks ago in Villa La Carmela, a shanty town outside Tucuman, and whose six-month-old daughter Milagros, who weighs only 2.8 kg (just over six pounds), is in Tucuman's children's hospital. "They told me I needed fortified milk powder, but it costs 10 pesos a box. Thank God they'll give it to her in there." For the political masters of both countries, aided and abetted by the fast emerging class of economists, it would seem as though agricultural exports were the only path to speedy growth. Reams and reams have already been wasted on theories, reports and studies detailing the virtues of export-oriented growth that would help eradicate poverty and hunger. Therefore, it isn't unusual to find economists like Jagdish Bhagwati, Lord Meghnad Desai and George Soros advocating free trade and a more liberalised economy, of leaving farmers at the mercy of market forces and withdrawing state support to agriculture as quickly as possible. After all, what have they got to lose? Not even their jobs. In an astonishing and honest admission, Argentina's production minister, Anibal Fernandez, attributed the child deaths in his country to "a sick society and a ruling class that are sons of bitches, all of them, myself included". "If not, this would not be happening," he told The Guardian. "It is a chronic and cumulative problem. It has been going on for many years and everyone has been turning a blind eye." One wonders how many heads of state of the WTO member countries would measure up to Argentina's Anibal Fernandez. Accepting fault is the first step towards resurrecting policy blunders. Hoping against hope is what optimism is all about in these days of corporate control and a market economy where the poor and hungry are nothing more than unfortunate statistics that come in the way of development. InfoChange News & Features, December 2002
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