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Thu24May2012

You are here: Home Human rights Analysis From Empire to Monsanto: Challenges of seeking the truth

From Empire to Monsanto: Challenges of seeking the truth

Using the MNC Monsanto as a metaphor for concentration of money power and political influence, Rajni Bakshi asks: How should we tackle the enormous distortions of power that are as much a reality in our times as the British Empire was in Gandhiji’s time? Can we speak truth to power today in the dialogic and persuasive manner that Gandhiji did?

How should we fight the battles of our age? How long can we remain locked into sharply polarised positions which eliminate even the possibility of a shared search for truth in all its multiple shades?

Let us begin by refreshing the image of Miraben’s labour of love, that simple mud hut we all know as Bapu Kuti. The Kuti and surrounding structures of Sewagram Ashram are a tribute to pre-industrial simplicity. But they are often unfairly condemned for symbolising a negation, or complete avoidance, of the industrial age. Perhaps that wrong impression persists because it is easy to miss the telephone booth that stands just outside the Kuti, close to its back entrance.  

Since 1986, I have stayed at Sewagram Ashram on several occasions and marvelled at that quaint old phone. But it was only recently that I learnt that in the days when the Kuti was actually Bapu’s home, that phone had a hotline connection to the Viceroy.

Immediately on hearing this I was struck by a question that puzzles me, even ‘haunts’ me a bit. What would it mean to have a hotline to Monsanto today?

What, you might ask, is the connection between Gandhiji’s hotline phone connection with the Viceroy, the highest representative of the British Empire in colonial India, and Monsanto, a major American multinational corporation now working in the area of agriculture and related products?

Monsanto is drawn into this story partly as a metaphor for concentration of money power and political influence. It is also particularly relevant because Monsanto’s area of business -- namely agricultural technology -- could well determine our food future. A wide variety of activist groups are engaged in dogged struggles with Monsanto and its worldview -- a tableau which is not entirely dissimilar to the battles against imperial power.

Here are four further questions which might help to contextualise that random thought: What would it mean to have a hotline to Monsanto?

One: What would be involved in standing up to harmful actions and technologies without positing either Monsanto, its owners, or its supporters as evil?

Two: What kind of discipline and cosmological frame of reference would enable us to meet the representatives of Monsanto as equals rather than as ‘exploiters’ vs ‘victims’? And I request your forbearance with that mouthful of a phrase ‘cosmological frame of reference’, but I promise to come back to this later in a simpler and clearer way!

Three: Is speaking truth to power enough today? Power now flows in much more complicated and subtle ways -- and mostly not through the barrel of a gun. Truth itself is much more multi-shaded and multi-dimensional. This is most acutely the case in matters related to science and technology. So what inspiration can we seek from Gandhiji in Seeking Truth With Power?

Four: Speaking truth to power is a universally respected strength. But can this still be done in the dialogic and persuasive manner in which Gandhiji engaged with the most powerful empire of his time?

Now that I’ve opened up this modest list of questions, a disclaimer.
I don’t have clear or definite answers to these questions -- no single individual can. Finding answers, and there will be multiple answers, to these questions is necessarily a collective, ongoing endeavour. I hope that what I share with you today might be a small part of that collective effort.

I venture into this territory at all because I have a hunch, perhaps a faith, that 63 years after the Viceroy withered into history and Gandhiji met Godse’s bullets, the flow of time has expanded rather than restricted the space for the loving heart and equanimity of mind with which Gandhiji sought out his opponents.

So let us start by first looking more closely at whether it is even valid to juxtapose Empire and Monsanto in this manner. And then explore what kind of frame of mind might enable us to even aspire, let alone achieve, Gandhiji’s confidence in both seeking truth and speaking truth to power.

Background
To mention Empire and Monsanto in the same breath can seem offensive from two radically different vantage points.

1. One set of people might object on the grounds that Monsanto is a highly respected company that is a signatory to the most up-to-date international governance standards. It was Forbes magazine’s ‘Company of the Year’ in 2009. It is a sterling example of how private enterprise can facilitate economic growth within the framework of democratic societies. How dare I compare Monsanto with imperial rulers!

2. Another set of people might be outraged because they see 19th- and 20th-century imperial power as being less damaging than current concentrations of power. That imperial power had a face. British power, in particular, had some points of vulnerability to moral pressure. Corporations like Monsanto are faceless and hardly moveable by moral pressure. The modern corporation, they argue, fits the clinical definition of a psychopath -- an entity that is incapable of remorse about a course of action that is known to inflict suffering on others just so long as it increases the company’s profits (1). 

Before attempting to navigate the ground between these diametrically opposed perceptions, first a quick review of the realities of our times.

  • In May 2010, there were reports of farmers in Haiti rejecting Monsanto’s seeds. Haiti had just suffered a devastating earthquake and Monsanto offered to donate 475 tonnes of hybrid corn seed and vegetable seed, some of them treated with chemical pesticides known to be highly toxic. The activist group Business and Human Rights reported that one organisation of farmers had given a call to burn Monsanto’s seeds because they represent “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds… and on what is left of our environment in Haiti”. Monsanto described this as a smear campaign based on untruths, since it was sending not genetically modified seeds but hybrid seeds to Haiti. A similar donation of hybrid seeds to Malawi, said Monsanto, “turned a region from a food aid recipient to a food exporter…” (2)
  • At another end of the spectrum are people like Gary Rinehart who runs a general store in Eagleville, Missouri -- a tiny farm community near Kansas City in the USA. In 2008, Vanity Fair magazine did a detailed article called ‘Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear’ which opened with a description of how a representative of Monsanto walked into Rinehart’s shop and accused him of planting the company’s genetically modified (GM) soybean in violation of the company’s patents. Settle with the company or you will be sued, Rinehart was told. To quote the Vanity Fair article

“Scenes like this are playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers -- anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the ‘seed police’ and use words such as ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Mafia’ to describe their tactics. When asked about these practices, Monsanto declined to comment specifically, other than to say that the company is simply protecting its patents.” (3)

  • A documentary titled The World According to Monsanto confirms this picture by showing interviews with farmers in several different countries, including India. Both farmers and agricultural experts have made a link between Monsanto and the political economy of agriculture, as one of the major causes of distress which has led to farmers committing suicide across India.
  • In declaring Monsanto ‘Company of the Year’ for 2009, Forbes magazine acknowledged that it has ‘image problems’ but is still a winner in economic terms because in fiscal 2009 it sold $ 7.3 billion worth of seeds and seed genes versus $ 4 billion sold by Dupont, its closest competitor. To quote Forbes: “(Monsanto’s) sales have increased at an annualised 18% clip over five years; its annualised return on capital in the period has been 12%. Those accomplishments earn it the designation as Forbes’ Company of the Year.” (4)

These profits are partly due to the sheer scale of Monsanto’s reach: 90% of the US soybean crop and 80% of the corn crop and cotton crop are grown with seeds containing Monsanto’s technology. Monsanto’s biotech crop spread includes 20 million acres of cotton in India, 35 million acres of soybean in Brazil, 43 million acres of soybean in Argentina, etc (5).

A comprehensive list of such illustrations fills volumes. The Internet is awash with accounts of the dire consequences of Monsanto’s muscle power as well as the counter-responses of those who defend Monsanto’s model as being essential to the food security of the world.  

Broadly two issues emerge:

One: Enormous control over particular technologies and through them acquisition of money power.

Two: The politics of knowledge.

How then may we think about those four questions opened up at the beginning?

Thinking about the questions

What would be involved in standing up to harmful actions and technologies without positing either Monsanto, its owners, or its supporters as evil?

There is ample evidence on the ground to answer this question in more practical than philosophical ways. Several food movements are bubbling across the world, but particularly in North America and Europe. These are mobilisations of citizens and farmers based on a growing awareness that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

In the USA, these forces have found support from First Lady Michelle Obama who has planted an organic vegetable garden at the White House.  Ms Obama has also challenged the old claims of big agri-business that it provides Americans with an ample supply of low-cost sugary, fatty and salty foods because that is what they want. The truth, says Ms Obama, is that agri-business “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations -- it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them (6).


US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ initiative to promote local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve Americans’ access to healthy food.

In India, thousands of farmers and scores of activist groups recently collaborated to organise the Kisan Swaraj Yatra. They set out from Sabarmati Ashram on October 2, 2010, and after crisscrossing 20 states of India, the yatra culminated on December 11 with a prayerful gathering at Gandhiji’s samadhi in Delhi. The yatris renewed their pledge to fight for non-toxic food, sustainable livelihoods for farmers, and India’s food sovereignty.

Of course, all this mobilisation can look rather fragile when you see how power is actually arrayed.

For example, CropLife America, a US trade association representing pesticide makers, wrote to Ms Obama suggesting that her organic garden is unfairly maligning chemical agriculture. They encouraged Ms Obama to use ‘crop protection technologies’, namely the pesticides they manufacture.

According to Michael Pollan, a noted writer on food-related issues:

“The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agri-business, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.” (7)

In India, just days before the Kisan Swaraj Yatra reached Raj Ghat, our Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar made a statement that India’s future food security depends on genetically modified food crops. This implies that it is a matter of time before GMO foods are released into the Indian market.

What we are witnessing is a simmering conflict over what kind of agriculture will not only feed 9 billion people -- which is the projection for the world population in 2050 -- but will also give us healthy, non-toxic food through methods that are ecologically sustainable.

Endeavours like the health food movement in the US and the Kisan Swaraj mobilisation in India are in firm opposition to the technologies and mindset epitomised by Monsanto. Some votaries might at times demonise the corporation, but most do not. They are instead busy forging an alternative path. There is no hesitation is standing up to prevailing powers, but the basic focus is on being the change they seek.

So what kind of discipline and cosmological frame of reference would enable us to meet the representatives of Monsanto as equals rather than as ‘exploiters’ vs ‘victims’?

Answers to this question depend on individual orientation. Here is what I mean by ‘cosmological frame of reference’:

Do you see human beings as being naturally oriented towards cooperation and community relations?

Or

Do you see them as fundamentally rooted in dark energies of greed, vanity and avarice?

The latter view lies at the heart of the market culture which emerged in Western Europe in the 18th century and is now a global phenomenon. In its most extreme form, this perspective dismisses all community-based norms and values, which limit or curb greed, as obstacles to economic dynamism and growth. Since human beings are viewed as narrow self-aggrandising creatures, systems which tap these traits are deemed to be the most viable and desirable. It follows that systems that depend on cooperation and altruism are dismissed as being unrealistic. In the 1990s, this approach was broadly recognised as ‘market fundamentalism’.

From this vantage point, the dwindling of family-owned farms in America was not merely accepted but celebrated as both a superior and natural outcome of ‘the market’. Those who complained about the undermining of community-based systems of production and exchange were dismissed as anti-progress romantics.

However, the emergence of a diverse food movement in the USA has demonstrated a resurgence of cooperative and community-oriented structures of production and exchange. Essentially, these are efforts driven by the quest for a life worth living. As Pollan writes:

“The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. …The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just ‘good value’ but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.” (8)

There is an implicit and nascent possibility here that we might approach Monsanto not merely as a powerful entity but as the manifestation of a mindset that looks more and more outdated as it is challenged. When this is done by groups and individuals who are themselves building alternative structures, the relationship is not one between ‘exploiter’ and ‘victim’ but between an unwieldy incumbent power and the more and more empowered paradigm changers -- however small and emergent they may seem to be at present.

Also, if you are convinced that power is necessarily a dark force and can only be matched with a similar competing ‘force’, then any attempt to engage the opponent in a dialogue seems foolish and futile. But if you view reality as a fluid process of dark and light energies constantly reforming and taking new shape -- this opens up the possibility of otherwise unimaginable transformations. 

Is speaking truth to power enough today? Truth itself is much more multi-shaded and multi-dimensional. This is most acutely the case in matters related to science and technology. So what inspiration can we seek from Gandhiji in Seeking Truth With Power?

Perhaps nothing illustrates this challenge more than agriculture and our food future, where the politics of knowledge seems to be stuck in a deadlock. Let us look at what happened to the most ambitious effort so far to address this problem.

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme and other UN agencies set up a democratic multi-stakeholder process to study which agricultural technologies will enable every person on earth to be well fed. They called it the International Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD). The exercise included scientists and executives of major seed and pesticide companies that are keen to promote biotechnology, as well as civil society organisations asking for a more holistic approach to technology and development strategy to ensure food security, and independent scientists from a wide range of research institutions.

This global team of 400 experts from different fields, including social scientists, went on to challenge the conventional gatekeepers of agricultural knowledge. Its final report, completed in 2008, concluded that the business-as-usual model of prevailing industrial agriculture cannot meet the food needs of the 9 billion who are expected to inhabit the earth within a few decades.

In particular, the IAASTD report emphasised that food security requires a multi-functional approach to agriculture and ownership structures -- particularly protecting local knowledge systems that have been passed on from one generation to the other over millennia. Focusing on increasing per acre production in the short run will not secure our food future.

So where’s the catch? Monsanto’s representatives attended early meetings but the company chose not to join the assessment process. Another major private sector stakeholder, Syngenta, joined the process but resigned a few months before the report was finalised.

Subsequently, the IAASTD report has been caught in a deadlock. The proponents of industrial agriculture claim that its findings are based on bad science and thus invalid. Proponents of organic agriculture and others who favour a radical overhaul of agricultural technologies reject this criticism and claim that there is insufficient empirical evidence that genetically modified crops produce substantially higher yields. And that the blanket claims about the safety of GMOs are not scientifically valid.

Underlying the details of this dispute is a deep conflict over how knowledge is produced and owned. For instance, the IAASTD’s final report cautioned that if governments give more prominence to biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, this may consolidate the biotech industry’s dominance of agricultural R&D.

An editorial in Nature magazine noted: “The idea that biotechnology cannot by itself reduce hunger and poverty is mainstream opinion among agricultural scientists and policymakers.” Nature went on to urge that both Monsanto and Syngenta reconsider their boycott of the IAASTD -- partly because their stand would undermine public confidence in the biotech industry and in its ability to engage with its critics. The companies chose not to reconsider their stand.

So where do we go from here? How do we seek multiple shades of truth from a position of confidence and integrity? It is in this sense that I referred to ‘seeking truth with power’.

Much depends on how much transparency and fairness can be brought into the politics of knowledge.

The outcome of the IAASTD process may not have been as satisfying as many hoped, but it did open up spaces -- for bringing marginal ideas out of the cold, for enabling scientists, policymakers, farmers, citizens and private entrepreneurs to constructively challenge each other in a spirit of free enquiry.

Is this sufficient to tackle the enormous distortions of power that are as much a reality in our times as the British Empire was in Gandhiji’s time? No.  

Speaking truth to power is a universally respected strength. But can this still be done in the dialogic and persuasive manner in which Gandhiji engaged with the most powerful empire of his time?

This has to be made possible. Why? Because the opposite is to be locked into sharply polarised positions which eliminate even the possibility of a shared search for truth in all its multiple shades.

I am comforted by the fact that a wide variety of people are engaged in looking for multiple answers with openness -- as opposed to just pushing an alternative dogma. What the world seems to need most are not dazzlingly original ideas but a more intensive engagement by people whose honesty will not be compromised by ideology or held captive by prejudices and pet assumptions.

And above all I place my faith in the intensive enquiry and quality of concern that is evident in so many of the young people I meet -- who are grappling with many of these conflicts. Yes, it seems as though millions and millions of young people are graduating every year with the highest academic qualifications, and enter working life without questioning the power distortions that dominate our age.

But that’s not very different from what a young Indian lawyer did in 1893 when he sought better prospects in South Africa. History owes a great debt to the man who had Gandhiji thrown out of a train -- because it was then unacceptable that a non-white travel in the first class compartment. So Gandhiji found himself sprawled on the platform of the railway station of a town called Pietermartizburg.

Exactly a hundred years later, Gopal Gandhi was invited by Nelson Mandela to be present for the conferment of ‘Freedom of the city of Pietermartizburg on Mahatma Gandhi’.

I would like to close by sharing with you what Gopal Gandhi said at that ceremony:


“Here in Pietermartizburg today, here at this railway station, the question may well be asked: Who was the man that was flung out, who was it that fell?

“Again, who was it that rose from his humiliation -- somewhere here -- on two very different feet?

“The question may be answered thus:

“When Gandhi was evicted from the train, an Indian visiting South Africa fell;
But when Gandhi rose, an India and South Africa rose…
Gandhi fell with a ticket no one honoured,
He rose with a testament no one could ignore;
He fell a passenger, but rose a patriot;
Fell a barrister, but rose a revolutionary;
His legal brief became a political cause;
His sense of human decency transformed itself
into a passion for human justice.
The personal died with him that moment
and turned public.
‘Mine’ became ‘thine’.
In fact, Mohandas Gandhi was not flung here.
He was launched.” (9)

Underlying all these responses was a fundamental trait, a spiritual strength -- a refusal to be embittered or reduced to seeking vengeance.

This was what launched Gandhiji on the path that led to prisons in South Africa and India -- and also to direct conversations with the Viceroy and the King himself.

However differently power may be dressed up in our times, the challenge for each one of us remains the same. We can dis-empower ourselves further by being bitter and resentful. Or we can seek deeper strengths and be ‘launched’ in our own small way. This would enable us to engage in conversations with opponents in ways that are mutually enriching and create possibilities that neither side can as yet imagine.  

NB: This is a work in progress and I essentially seek to start a conversation about these possibilities. So please post your comments and rejoinders below.

Endnotes

(Rajni Bakshi is a freelance journalist and author of Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom: For a Market Culture Beyond Greed and Fear and Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi. This article is based on Bakshi’s recent lecture at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Bangalore, at a memorial function dedicated to K S Narayanaswamy, a prolific writer and founder of the Gandhi Bhavan.)

Infochange News & Features, May 2011

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