theme 2

• Wendell Berry: 'Human continuity is virtually synonymous with good farming.'
• Edward O. Wilson: 'How much force does it take to break the crucible of evolution?'
• The promise, and dangers of genetic technologies have refocused the attention of city dwellers on an enduring reality of the human species: We are eating animals. We are breathing animals, too, forced (as we render them extinct) to notice that we exchange gases with plants. We are drinking animals, forced (as we render it toxic) to notice that the same water we drink and urinate in circulates through rivers, seas and clouds, and through the cells of all species.
• Until we pushed back the wild places of earth—that is, until very recently—humans were able to take oxygen, water, and the infinitude of wild beings for granted. Not so with food. Only since our fascination with industry developed has human attention drifted away from the source and meaning of food.
• India, with a billion plus population, has put agriculture at the heart of its economy and food security at the centre of its agriculture policy
• Civilizations were built on agriculture, a decisive break in human foodgetting. Agriculture inaugurated a new complex of relations between humans and our habitats—one as crucial as fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
• Globalisation is undoing the policies and decisions of a free and independent India which replaced colonial policies of land alienation, concentration on ownership of land, super exploitation of the peasantry, and the creation of famines
• Only with the regional specialization of agriculture, underlying the formation of the modern world-system four hundred years ago, could humans begin to entertain the illusion of transcending our animal and earthly existence.
• Globalisation is bringing back "zamindari" and land monopolies of colonial times
• With industry, a mere two hundred years ago, the illusion extended to more and more humans. Even those who manufacture plants and animals into edible commodities, and who carry them across the earth in ships, railways, trucks and airplanes, even those who cook and serve meals, seem to be part of something different: industrial or service workers or houseworkers, but not foodgetters.
• Plants and animals have been turned into homogeneous rivers of grain and tides of flesh, more closely resembling the money that enlivens their movement from field to table, than their wild ancestors.
• The public distribution system (PDS) is being dismantled
• Post-animal humans appear to eat commodities rather than other living beings. Our need appears to be less food than money.
• The fast food hamburger condenses much of the simplification of human diet, of the underlying complexity of the agrofood system, and of the still deeper simplification of ecosystems to supply wheat and beef.
• Farmers are committing suicides, reports of starvation deaths have become common, foreboding a return of famines last experienced under British rule
• The hamburger is at once American and corporate, a bearer of meaning and a commodity.
• Biodiversity is being rapidly eroded, and food, the very source of health and nutrition has become a major source of health hazards caused by toxic chemicals in factory farming and new genetically engineered foods and crops
• Changes in property rights to natural resources

  • Changes in land, water and biodiversity (including seeds) ownership and access
  • Concentration of ownership in the hands of corporations
• Changes in technology


  • New genetically engineered crops and seeds (GMOs) which promote use of agrichemicals, increase costs of production for farmers and corporate control over agriculture policies and practices
• Wheat and cattle, like the humans who bred them, were exotic transplants to New World ecosystems.
• The first stage of global foodgetting began with wheat and cattle from the Old World displacing native species in the New Worlds of America and Australia/New Zealand. It speeded up the simplification of human-affected ecosystems from millenia to centuries.
• The second stage of global foodgetting began only in the twentieth century, with industrial agriculture, and corporations that organize production on a world scale. This development speeded up human-induced ecological simplification from centuries to decades or even years.
• Changes in trade regimes

  • Privileging and liberalizing exports and imports, thus undermining national food security, farmers' livelihood and food rights of the poor
• Trade "liberalisation" policies are leading to the alienation of land, water and biodiversity from peasant communities and the concentration of their ownership in the hands of corporations
• New private property rules created by W.T.O. under TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) and GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) are leading to the enclosure of biological resources and water which have hitherto been common property
• Zamindari abolition was one of the most important steps taken in independent India and the most significant instrument of social justice was the land reform legislations in different states to ensure equitable entitlement to land and to prevent concentration of land ownership
• During the last ten years globalisation and economic reforms in agriculture have in effect meant an undoing of the earlier reform process guided by values of social justice and equitable distribution of resources
• The main argument used for the industrialisation of food and corporatisation of agriculture is the low productivity of the small farmer, but small farms are more productive than large ones in terms of food and nutrition productivity per acre, efficiency in water use, and creation of livelihoods
• Under World Bank Structural Adjustment pressure, combined with the arrival of a new breed of absentee landlords or "zamindars"—industrialists, agribusiness corporations, speculative investors—land reform laws in every state are being undone, alienating the land from small producers and cultivators, swelling the ranks of the landless, the dispossessed, the unemployed
• Coerced cash-crop labor, which defined the peripheries of the emerging capitalist world-system, was devoted to monocultures for export: wheat in Eastern Europe and a variety of transplanted species, notably sugar, in colonial Hispanic America.
• The importation of wheat allowed for more complex mixes of crops in Western Europe, the core of the world-economy. The world-economy made possible and necessary both specialized production and sale in world markets.
• Trade liberalisation is leading to the privatisation of water and creation of water monopolies
• The World Bank policy paper on liberalisation of agriculture recommends the creation of 'markets in tradable water rights' which will divert water from small farmers to large corporate super farms
• The massive $200 billion project of River Linking will also rob rural communities of their riparian water rights
• Commerce mimics natural cycles. Commerce, in a way, replaces natural cycles, by inducing ecological simplification and substituting in its place social complexity (division of labor).
• Seeds and biodiversity, which have been the common property of farmers and local communities, are being transformed into private property of a handful of corporations—Monsanto, Syngenta, Duport, Dow, Bayer
• The new corporate-driven intellectual property rights regimes (IPRs), especially the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of WTO is leading to seed monopolies and biopiracy
• The Indian legislations that have an impact on biodiversity and people's rights are: Patent (Second Amendment) Act, 2002; Protection of Plant Variety Protection and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001; and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002
• Agriculture inherently disrupts processes of natural succession and simplifies mixes of species. Farmers clear an area—a field—of its interdependent species and plant one (or a small number) of species with the intention of harvesting them.
• Laws related to rights and patents in India

  • Patent (Second Amendment) Act, 2002
  • Protection of Plant Variety Protection and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001
  • Biological Diversity Act, 2002