The cost of the urban land grab
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COMMENTS 
Should our focus be on earning enough or providing enough, asks Rahul Goswami. The Yamuna Expressway and development project will occupy 43,000 hectares of land currently being cultivated by 1,191 villages, removing the potential to harvest about 100,000 tonnes of foodgrain annually
Read Part 1 of this article here
If the Government of India is, during the finalisation of the Twelfth Plan (2012-17) direction for agriculture and food, deciding to favour production over rural livelihood needs, then it must recognise clearly the internal land grab that India's farm households are experiencing. The protests in western Uttar Pradesh by farmers' groups typify the scale of the diversion of farmland for real estate development or industrial use. In the last four years the Bahujan Samaj Party of Uttar Pradesh has approved a number of projects like the Yamuna Expressway which has been allotted to a private company, JP Infratech Ltd, which holds a contract that includes the right to construct apart from the right to collect tolls for 36 years.
Along this 165-km eight-lane "super highway" a "hi-tech city" has been planned. This will include industrial parks, residential colonies, shopping malls, professional colleges, schools, hospitals and urban services centres. Currently estimated as a Rs 9,500 crore project this "hi-tech" city will, when complete to plan, occupy 43,000 hectares of land that is currently under cultivation by the residents of 1,191 villages. This very large land grab alone will remove the potential to harvest about 100,000 tonnes of foodgrain a year -- an amount that can fulfil the cereal needs of all of urban Haryana for five weeks.
There are 533 urban centres with populations of between 1 million and 50,000 -- this is apart from the metropolises. The drive to encourage the faster urbanisation of these 533 towns and cities has already taken an unknown amount of farmland out of cultivation. There is an estimate that in the last decade -- to a large degree a consequence of the relentless expansion of the National Capital Region -- Uttar Pradesh has lost about 6 million hectares of farmland. The expansion of the NCR and its satellite developments is unparalleled in modern India, but it is the biggest example of the land grab that is taking place in all urban areas in India.
Estimates based on fieldwork and the use of longitudinal spatial mapping based on satellite imagery show that for every acre of cultivable land that is built upon or used for urban purposes, over five years an additional four cultivable acres turns fallow and is quickly converted to non-agricultural use. How much has India lost in 2010? How much has it lost from 2001 to 2010? There are no best guesses, no reliable estimates, there is not even experimental methodology to apply to the chief crop-growing regions and their expanding settlements. Yet the macroeconomic models being produced for the central government and planning agencies promise ever-increasing yields from a plateau of cultivated land area. One of them is wrong and the evidence on the ground -- and from the protests by farmers of Bhatta Parsaul village in Greater Noida -- points to the error being in the models.
When food consumption equals growth who counts social costs?
Will these errors be corrected before March 2012, when the Eleventh Plan ends? Will the social costs of real food inflation be counted, and will actual retail food inflation in India's tier two and tier three cities be recognised and its underlying causes made public? At this point, all the answers are likely to be negative. The Government of India, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food Processing, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (Department of Commerce), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and central and state planning agencies now speak the same language -- the message is that most of the growth in agriculture in future will come not from foodgrains, but from sectors such as horticulture, dairying and fisheries, where the produce is perishable, and where even greater attention needs to be paid to the logistics of transporting produce from the farm to the consumer, with minimum spoilage. Urban and urbanising markets and the structural change in nutrition being demanded by a section of the country's population form the focus.
This focus ensures that the households making the transition from low-income to medium-income will depend for their food and nutrition on the corporatised retail delivery that has behind it vast food produce aggregation, processing and logistics chains. It also ensures that the potential number of these households attracts and employs private sector investment (including foreign direct investment) which will contribute handsomely to the GDP topline of the country while at the same time externalising the environmental and social costs and ignoring entirely the effects of land grab, farm deskilling, economic migration and community collapse.
In this pursuit, the central government and its agencies are directly opposed to the findings and recommendations of studies and surveys conducted by international, inter-governmental, national and non-governmental organisations for the last four years (and especially since the 2007-08) food and commodities price crisis. These have stressed policies that support smallholder farming, administrative measures that localise the provision of and procurement of food for urban areas, the shifting from high-input agricultural methods to low- or zero-input organic methods of farming, the reorientation of agricultural research systems from sponsored and industry-specific research to strengthening traditional crop knowledge and ecological farming.
These have all been ignored in favour of technology- and capital-intensive futures that extend the current business-as-usual approach -- these routes are advocated by the seed industry, the inorganic and synthetic fertiliser sector, the pest management and plant protection industry (chemical), the bio-technology industry, the plant genetic engineering industry and their research and development networks, and the corporations and companies, large and small, which have invested in patents and specific molecules and formulae and genetic manipulation techniques, and whose hold on our government (and others in the less industrialised world) is based on the promise of short-term increases in per hectare yield which at the same time commits growing regions to few strains (at the cost of abandoning the crop biodiversity which has resulted from careful selection based on traditional knowledge) whose every growing stage is controlled by a privatised and profit-driven extension system.
It is for this reason that the Government of India wants what it calls the "active involvement of the private sector". The food processing industry (both organised and unorganised) in India is growing very fast. How big it is and what this activity does to food flows is still a black box to most of us. Data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation's (MoSPI) annual survey of industries series tell us that from 2002-03 to 2008-09 the number of factories registered as 'food and beverages' has gone up by about 14-15% but the amount invested has risen by around 90%. Those investors want their large quantities of agricultural produce supply to be assured, especially when the organised segment contributes about 81% of the gross output. Processed food items are very much more expensive -- at 100 and 250 gram equivalences, which are common measures for retail packaging of food -- than fresh food. Tomato ketchup is marketed for nearly Rs 70 per kg for example, and this is its 'value addition' when the raw tomato will cost a tenth of the processed amount per kilo.
How to talk ‘welfare’ but weaken social support
Even so, from the government's point of view -- provided to it by industry and the agricultural R&D network -- the "complexity of weak firm-farm linkages" and "inefficiency in the value chains" have kept the level of value addition low. But the outlets from the food chain -- the sum total of district food flows -- provides routes to superprofits for many actors, from mandi commission agents to warehousing services providers to agricultural commodities hedgers. In the enormous wholesale markets that supply New Delhi and Mumbai with food, commission agents collect 6-8% per trade as per the rules and upto 10-15% in practice. The contention of the government and its private sector partners is that amended APMC Acts that lead to direct farmer-buyer transactions will minimise or eliminate these commissions to the benefit of the cultivator. This is not true, and is instead an example of the discourse of equity that cloaks such moves when in fact the opposite is taking place. The hefty commissions will remain; they will simply accrue at other stages of the chain, be paid for elsewhere, with no net benefit to the grower.
To facilitate such involvement, state governments are being pressured to amend the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Acts which at present are seen as preventing private sector buyers from dealing directly with producers -- when those amendments are complete in all the major crop staple producing states, the high-input and biotech-heavy groundwork will have been laid, mechanisation will be rolled out, smallholders will become landless economic refugees forced to find daily wage employment in the informal sector of the nearest town. It is not as if the central government and its agencies are unaware of the massive social consequences -- many of which are already being seen in the states in which income inequality is most visible.
But these consequences are being dealt with separately, through the construction of an elaborate framework for welfare which will never be assembled into a working system despite the repeated claims of 'inclusion'. The MGNREGS has become one of the pillars of that framework, as it has metamorphosed from a conditional cash transfer to a form of rural dole designed to boost very low disposable income levels quickly. It is for this reason that cash transfers as a form of instant income security has become a primary argument of the UPA2 government, and with it the calls -- the World Bank's is the loudest -- to dismantle the Public Distribution System (PDS) and replace it with nothing except market responses to the availability of spending money.
How will the poor then be counted? How will the food insecure then be counted? We will have no answers by the time the Eleventh Plan ends. The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has decided to conduct a second large sample survey in 2011-12 to correct and/or verify the findings of the 2009 survey (whose poverty estimates are considered by government to have been distorted by the drought that year). It is only when estimates from this survey become available that we will be able to get reliable estimates of the rate of poverty reduction actually achieved in the Eleventh Plan period. By then however the Twelfth Plan period will have begun and its policy guidance will be translated into directives at state and central level. A review will next come only in the latter half of 2014, and by then the trajectory of foodgrains production, distribution and consumption will have changed in ways that threaten to make the food inflation of 2010-11 look very mild indeed.
Infochange News & Features, July 2011