Infochange India

A new front has been opened up in the struggle for food sovereignty. The top global agricultural research institutes, represented by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and supported by agri-business corporations, economic policymakers from countries of the developing South and the research and development might of the biotech industry, have come together to  further the agenda of control of cultivation and food. To do so, they have co-opted  health and nutrition exigencies.

In so doing, they will exploit the shortfalls in the provision of social sector services to the poor of South Asia, Africa, South-East Asia and South America. Pressing forward by holding up deficits in healthcare, or by holding up examples of continuing mal- and under-nutrition, those behind this new front will push governments towards 'reform' that brings in genetically modified crops and the control of agricultural cultivation and crop choices.

This new agenda became clear during the recent international conference held in New Delhi from February 10 to 12. Called 'Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health', the large conference was organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which is one of the CGIAR centres. "This global policy consultation is designed to bring the agriculture, nutrition, and health sectors together and unleash the potential of agriculture — as a supplier of food, a source of income, and an engine of growth — to sustainably reduce malnutrition and ill health for the world’s most vulnerable people" is how IFPRI described the meeting.

In early-November 2010, the CGIAR Fund Council met in Washington DC, USA. On the agenda was the development of what are now called the CGIAR Research Programme (CRP) proposals. Two of these proposals were 'fast-tracked' at the meeting. These are the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) -- which has particular relevance to Asia and India -- and the programme on climate change, agriculture and food security (called 'CRP7' in CGIAR shorthand). The agriculture, nutrition and health programme is called 'CRP4', and has with the Delhi conference come to the foreground of CGIAR activity worldwide.

Supporting the agriculture, nutrition and health agenda are an array of organisations -- multilateral development banks, overseas aid agencies and their partners in business (specifically agri-business) and academia. These are: Asian Development Bank; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Canadian International Development Agency; The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) -- the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) and EU partnership; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ); International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); Indian Economic Association; International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada; Irish Aid; PepsiCo; UK Department for International Development (DFID); United States Agency for International Development (USAID); Feed the Future Initiative; and The World Bank.

The New Delhi meet was inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose address indicated the extent and depth of support the CGIAR-led programme will get from India and presumably from other developing countries in Asia. "Looking ahead, we must all begin to take more concrete steps to meet people's aspirations to get access to healthier, more nutritious foods for their families," said Singh. "The Green Revolution in our own region of South Asia, to which Dr [MS} Swaminathan made a magnificent contribution, shows just how much can be accomplished when technology advances are combined with sound policies. This was followed by the White Revolution in milk, which has made India the largest producer of milk based entirely on small-holder dairying. We now need a major revolution in agricultural marketing."

The ‘biofortification’ and ‘micronutrient’ threats

These 'revolutions' in agricultural technology and marketing that Prime Minister Singh has asked for are linked directly to the repetition, at all levels of central government in India and particularly amongst the economic and social sector planners, that the agriculture sector must grow at 4% per year. For the CGIAR system and its supporters, these statements by the central government provide it the ideal setting within which to roll out its 'components and objectives' for its CRP4 programme -- agriculture, nutrition and health. These are:

1. Nutrition-sensitive value chains ("increase the demand for and access to nutritious foods by enhancing nutrition through the value chain").

2. Biofortification ("improve the health of poor people through biofortification -- ie, by breeding staple crops that are rich in micronutrients").

3. Control of agriculture-associated diseases ("prevent and control agriculture-associated diseases").

4. Integrated agriculture, health, and nutrition programmes ("support and strengthen integrated agriculture, health, and nutrition programmes through applied research in close collaboration with development partners").

5. Policy and decision-making across agriculture, health, and nutrition ("provide evidence-based policy advice and advocacy for agriculture that incorporates health and nutrition objectives").

Placed against these objectives, Prime Minister Singh's support of the new CGIAR programme shows the real intent and meaning of the 'revolution' he foresees: "I understand that research efforts have made it possible to bio-fortify some crops for better nutrition outcomes. Golden rice containing beta carotene provides the calories as well as nutritional supplements that take care of several diseases associated with vitamin A deficiency. Multi grain flour that mixes soya, oats and millets with wheat flour in different product combinations is yet another approach to meeting the challenge of malnutrition."

From a human development perspective, there is enough evidence the central government can and will marshal to support the call for such 'revolutions'. In its submissions to the Planning Commission for the approach to the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for example, Nabard (National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development) has categorically mentioned the decline in cereal consumption which has been greater in rural areas, where the improvement in rural infrastructure has made other food and non-food items available to rural households. Nabard has also emphasised that the bottom 30% of the population has not shown any improvement in cereal and calorie intake in the rural and urban areas despite a significant improvement in their real per capita expenditure.

Their per capita calorie intake (1,600 to 1,700 kcal) falls short of the required norm: 1,800-2,400 kcal under various measures. Intra-family food distribution is also inequitable in the rural households, Nabard has said, and pre-school children get much less than their physiological needs as compared to adult males and females. Micronutrient deficiency is indeed common while the diets of about 80% of the rural population contain less than half of the normal requirement of vitamins.

For the CGIAR system, the combination of continuing chronic poverty in Asia and Africa, of continuing hunger and malnutrition, the threat of reduced crop production due to climate change impacts, the increasing incidence of nutritional imbalance and the yawning gaps in public health --- these have all combined to provide both urgency and a new context in which to thrive, and ask for more funding. In the corporatised and smallholder-unfriendly world of agricultural research, the commonly accepted version of history is that the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, in El Batán, Mexico) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, in Los Baños, the Philippines) played lead roles in the Green Revolution. This occupies the periods of the 1960s to the 1980s, when the worldwide increase in cereal production ensured that money flowed into the CGIAR system.

By the early part of the decade of the 2000s, investment in agricultural research was drying up and the CGIAR centres were worried about funding. Donor countries -- mainly from the OECD -- had been forced to respond to civil society concerns and were asking that their money be tied to 'development objectives', however ill-defined and short-term these were. This shift away from the relatively unrestricted flow of funding which the CGIAR system has enjoyed for 30 years was profoundly disturbing to the by now enormous tribe of crop and agriculture scientists worldwide. It was also of concern to the corporations which had partnered the CGIAR system --- the companies engaged in genetic engineering, in creating genetically modified organisms, in creating plant and crop hybrids, in capturing the markets for seeds, pesticides, fertiliser and in replacing national agricultural extension systems with their brands of technical inputs.

The widespread backlash against GM and the growth of organic agriculture boded ill for them, as it did for the rank-and-file scientists of the CGIAR system. In December 2009, the CGIAR decided to ‘reboot’ itself in an effort to internalise the new agricultural realities. In April 2010, the CGIAR centres formed a new entity which is called the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres. This is intended to set priorities that are common throughout CGIAR, particularly for a number of major research themes, and the Consortium is now the primary window for funding. This reorganisation has apparently pleased the CG system's traditional donors and they have gone through a reorganisation of their own, being now called the CGIAR Fund with the intention of providing stable, long-term financing. The Consortium secretariat now works in Rome, but will soon be based in Montpellier, France (which has long been a CGIAR location). As for the CGIAR Fund, it is headquartered in the offices of the World Bank in Washington DC, USA.

Restructuring has "provided a context for a focused conversation about how the CGIAR can help deliver greater development impact", one of the heads of the CGIAR centres, Stephen Hall of the WorldFish Center (Penang, Malaysia), told the journal Science in a recent interview (February 4, 2011). "One example is the Global Rice Science Partnership, which will study rice genes to increase yields and boost tolerance of adverse conditions. Three CGIAR centres plus three national labs -- two in France and one in Japan -- will coordinate their efforts under IRRI's lead." The Global Rice Science Partnership programme was most conspicuous during the New Delhi conference, with CG system scientists and participants alike seeing it as the strongest indication that the CGIAR can return to its heydays of big world-spanning projects and assured funding over a comfortably long duration. CG system spokespersons have said that the Global Rice Science Partnership will bring together six centres, that it is the "first time there is a global research approach to address issues relevant to rice". Approved by the CGIAR Fund Council in November 2010, the GRiSP as it is know, will be a five-year, US$600 million project to "lift 150 million people out of poverty" -- just the words and ambition that the Fund donors want to hear so they can hold it up as justification to their citizens.

India and Africa, the ‘hot zones’ for CGIAR

It is both the grant funding channel and the corporate-industry partnership with CGIAR which will heavily distort the activities and outputs of the 15 CGIAR centres (list below). Already, the 'agriculture, nutrition and health' programme has faced stern criticism for its preparatory work in sub-Saharan Africa. Packaged in the 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)' programme, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this approach is seen in Africa as supporting inappropriate high-tech agricultural activities, thereby ignoring the many credible and comprehensive scientific studies that confirm the value of small-scale agro-ecological approaches.

In December 2010, civil society organisations, farm-workers, farmers and farmer organisations, grassroots groups, health and consumer organisations, environmental groups, scientists and academics wrote to the Gates Foundation under the umbrella of AGRA Watch/Community Alliance for Global Justice and La Via Campesina North America. "We believe the Foundation is mistakenly funding an antiquated thrust to industrialise agriculture in Africa -- including chemical fertilisers, pesticides, monocropping of 'improved' and genetically engineered (GE) crop varieties, further deregulation of trade, and regulatory frameworks that will privatise seed -- which science and historical precedent indicate will come at the expense of the hungry, small farmers, consumer health, and the environment," they said.

The critique was signed by 74 organisations and by a number of individuals -- scientists, academics, economists -- amongst whom are seven authors and reviewers of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, released in 2008, which has upheld both the importance of small and marginal farmers in achieving food security and the organic and ecological agricultures they practice. But the new CGIAR system, its corporate partners, its donors and its supporters in governments such as India sent out a clear signal during the New Delhi conference on 'Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health'.

They will aggressively expand the ambit of intellectual property rights, which facilitate corporate rather than farmer control of inputs. They will ram through even more trade liberalisation, which in recent decades has been catastrophic for small farmers. They will exploit gaps in human and social development to roll out massive programmes based around genetically engineered monocultures, and they will co-opt or coerce national agricultural research institutions to do this work. They will relentlessly promote the 'biofortification' and 'micronutrient' agenda, denying completely that 30 years of high-input, chemically-dependent agricultural practices have been responsible for India's soils losing their natural micronutrients in the first place. They will deny that genetic contamination of indigenous varieties poses an enormous threat to already declining biodiversity -- the foundation of resilient traditional and organic farming systems that promise real solutions to contemporary problems.

Why will Indian crop scientists and agricultural researchers agree to join this assault on our food sovereignty? "Developing-country research institutes and universities will be an important element of the CRP research partnerships," the CGIAR has explained in its CRP4 document, which is on the agriculture, nutrition and health programme. "Current partnerships in this area will be expanded, particularly relating to zoonoses, food safety, and ecohealth with universities in eastern and southern Africa and South and Southeast Asia. In India, key partners in research on agriculture and nutrition issues include the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Institute of Dalit Studies, and the Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research."

What are the inducements? The 2011, 2012 and 2013 budgets for the agriculture, nutrition and health programme are, in current US dollars, $58.816 million, $63.334 million and $69.073 million respectively for each of those years. Within these annual budgets, the amounts allocated for "Partners / Collaborator / Consultancy Contracts" is $25.884 million, $27.517 million and $29.370 million respectively for each of those years. The reach and influence of those guiding programmes like CRP4 is considerable. At their forefront is the Gates Foundation, the Feed the Future Initiative (the US government's global hunger and food security programme), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the extremely powerful agri-biotech supporters of the CGIAR and a dense revolving door-based network of scientists and administrators.

To illustrate, William J Garvelink, who recently served as the US Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is involved. So is Patricia M Haslach, who recently served at the US Embassy in Baghdad, and was also responsible for overseeing a multi-billion-dollar "reconstruction programme" in Afghanistan. In the CGIAR centre Bioversity International (formerly IPGRI, International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), a board member is Luis Téllez, currently chairman of the board and CEO of the Mexican stock exchange. Also on the board is Trish Malloch-Brown who is married to Mark Malloch-Brown, who is a former World Bank vice-president, a former UN deputy secretary-general, and who was also, during 2009-10, vice-chairman of the World Economic Forum.

It was a few days before the New Delhi conference on 'Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health' that the World Economic Forum had, on January 29, 2011, launched what it has called "Realising a New Vision for Agriculture: A Roadmap for Stakeholders", which is described as "a coalition of business, governments and farmers" who will "significantly increase food production while conserving environmental resources and spurring economic growth". This so-called strategy consists of 17 global companies (no farmers there) and these are: Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Bunge Limited, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro AG, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Yara International. Representing the retail food business, agro-chemicals, genetically modified crops, synthetic fertiliser, soft drinks and colas, processed foods and global foodgrain merchants, these 17 are described by the World Economic Forum as "spanning the full agriculture value chain". Indeed, it is the terms "value chain' and "supply chain" that were much in evidence during the discussions at the New Delhi conference.

The US-led roll-out of the industry-policy-tech ‘reform’

For India, the sequence of events has followed a pattern that began even before the visit of US President Barack Obama. Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma and former Union Minister of Food Processing Industries Subodh Kant Sahay all made repeated calls for foreign investment in agriculture and the food industry before November 2010. During Obama's visit, on November 8, 2010, the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) announced "in order to improve farm-to-market links in India", a “'reverse trade mission” for business and government representatives from India to the USA focused on introducing modern cold chain technologies and US practices and standards. Obama said during his visit: "Building on the Indian and American agricultural collaboration that led to the Green Revolution, we're launching a new partnership for an Evergreen Revolution to improve food security around the world."

On November 9-11, 2010, the First Global Conference on Biofortification was held. At the meeting, the need for micronutrients in agriculture was emphasised (with references made to research in journals such as The Lancet). During the gathering of international experts on biofortification, two significant announcements were made: that high-iron pearl millet seeds will be released in India in 2011; and that cassava and maize boosted with beta-carotene (which the body turns into vitamin A) will be released in Nigeria and Zambia in 2012. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are focus areas for CGIAR's big CRP4 programme. Later in November, a "new research initiative funded by several global development agencies", the Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), to "explore new ways of helping vulnerable rural communities adjust to global changes in climate" was announced with a funding corpus of US$200 million. This programme is to be operated by the CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) "to address agricultural challenges and reduce poverty by 10% by 2020 in targeted 'hot spot' regions in Africa and India".

Almost on the eve of the New Delhi conference, on February 7, 2011, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Union Government's Department of Biotechnology (DBT) began a week of activities focused on agriculture, health, and nutrition in New Delhi. Meetings between ICAR and DBT officials and scientists were held with HarvestPlus, a CGIAR programme, "to assess progress on biofortification" and also to "assess progress made in breeding more nutritious varieties of staple food crops including rice, wheat, maize, and pearl millet". ICAR and the DBT are to help identify, for HarvestPlus, how to promote biofortified crops more quickly in India.

Immediately after the New Delhi conference, on February 13-16, 2011, the Board of the newly established CGIAR Consortium of centres convened at the headquarters of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) which is in Patancheru, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. At the top of the agenda was to approve the CGIAR’s Strategy and Results Framework, "which is envisioned to increase the probability of achieving wider development impacts", as the Consortium has announced. The project of 'Advancing India's Evergreen Revolution' will follow soon thereafter, during March 28-31, 2011 in Mumbai and New Delhi, under the US-India Business Council's 'Food & Agriculture Executive Mission'. This business and industry grouping will take further the agenda that was prepared in advance of the Obama visit, and has distinct goals. Chief amongst these are to "advocate policy reforms that will foster an environment conducive to private sector investment into the agricultural supply chain" and to "explore opportunities for partnership and investment into India's agricultural supply chain."

The Indian national agricultural research system is not ideologically homogenous, not yet. It is one of the largest in the world in terms of the number of scientists and researchers, and also in terms of the breadth of sciences and domains studied. These qualities are what make it attractive to the CGIAR Consortium, the CGIAR Fund donors and of course to the private sector sponsors -- the foundations and corporate R&D labs – that view its people and its institutions as potential collaborators. Yet the national agricultural research system consists of 97 institutes, 46 state agricultural universities, five deemed universities, one Central Agricultural University and 589 Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) all over the country.

There are enough Indians in this national sprawl of institutes and kendras who can recognise the danger for what it is, who have so far resisted the lucrative attractions of the commercial biotechnology industry. They know well why "life sciences" was invented by this industry 15-odd years ago, when the global agrochemical industry began finding it more difficult to develop new chemical pesticides -- that's when biotechnology entered the field. Now, 15 years later, with the once-powerful CGIAR forced to find for itself a new role, the biotech rubric for crops has been recklessly widened to include health and nutrition.

At the New Delhi conference, neither the health nor nutrition sectors was represented critically enough to give India's senior-most planners pause for thought. For industry, taking a new crop variety -- using the 'micronutrient' or 'biofortified' route -- to the Indian or Kenyan or Tanzanian field costs only a fraction of the amount it would need in the OECD economies. The profit-seeking bonus is that it will lock a new generation of small farmers into utter dependency and complete the field-to-thali control of India's food flows. Our scientists, administrators and extension workers know their reasons and the consequences. They must now choose between slavery and swaraj.

Note: The CGIAR Consortium of Centers is: Africa Rice Center (Côte d'Ivoire); Bioversity International (formerly IPGRI, International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Italy); CIAT - Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (Colombia); CIFOR - Center for International Forestry Research (Indonesia); CIMMYT - Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo / International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (Mexico); CIP - Centro Internacional de la Papa / International Potato Center (Peru); ICARDA - International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Syria); ICRISAT - International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (India); IFPRI - International Food Policy Research Institute (USA); IITA - International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (Nigeria); ILRI - International Livestock Research Institute (Kenya); IRRI - International Rice Research Institute (the Philippines); IWMI - International Water Management Institute (Sri Lanka); World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF, Kenya); WorldFish Center (Malaysia).

Infochange News & Features, March 2011