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Climate Change, Drought and India’s Looming Food and Water Crisis
Vandana Shiva, Zspace
Intensification of drought, floods and cyclones is one of the predictable impacts of climate change and climate instability. The failure of monsoon in India and the consequent drought, has impacted two thirds of India, especially the bread basket of India’s fertile gangetic plains. Bihar has had a 43% rainfall deficit, Jharkhand – 47%, Uttar Pradesh – 64%, Haryana – 61%, Punjab – 26%, Himachal Pradesh – 63%, Uttarakhand – 42%.
In the final analysis, India’s food security rests on the monsoon. Monsoon failure and widespread drought implies a deepening of the already severe food crisis triggered by trade liberalization policies which has made India the capital of hunger. It also implies a deepening of the water crisis which compelled me to write “Water Wars”.
The monsoons recharge the groundwater and surface water systems. This year, because of drought there will be reduced recharge. Since 1966, as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution model of water intensive chemical farming under World Bank and US pressure, India has over exploited her ground water, creating a water famine. I had written about this in 1984 in my book, “The Violence of the Green Revolution”. Chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution use of ten times more water than the biodiverse ecological farming systems.
In the 1970’s the World Bank gave massive loans to India to promote ground water mining. It forced states like Maharashtra to stop growing water prudent millets like jowar which needs 300 mm of water and shift to water guzzling crops like sugarcane which needs 2500 mm of water. In a region with 600mm rainfall and 10% ground water rechange, this is a recipe for water famine (see Navdanya’s “Financing the Water Crisis)…
(15 Aug 2009)
Half India’s land degraded: agro-chemicals partly to blame
The Ecologist
Deforestation, wind erosion and poor farming practices blamed for deterioration of soil as the real costs of the Green Revolution are measured
Almost half of India’s total land area is classified as ‘degraded’ according to a government report.
The State of the Environment report found that out of a total geographical area of 306 million hectares (Mha), 146.82 Mha was degraded land.
The report said the main causes were wind erosion and waterlogged soil. But it listed a number of other factors including deforestation, unsustainable fuel-wood and fodder extraction, poor farming practices such as over-grazing, improper crop rotation, mismanagement of irrigation/groundwater extraction and excessive use of agro-chemicals…
(17 Aug 2009)
The report can be downloaded here. Also see the September 4 posting by EB contributor Rahul Goswami’s post India, China, and Copenhagen.
Delhi trade talks face familiar foe as India’s farmers prepare to protest
Rhys Blakely, the Times
At least 50,000 protesting farmers are expected to take to the streets of Delhi today as envoys from the world’s key trading nations meet to try to inject momentum into the faltering Doha Round of global trade talks.
The Doha talks, which the members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) embarked on in the Qatari capital in 2001, encompass an array of potential agreements — everything from the liberalisation of financial services markets to the regulation of fisheries subsidies — that could radically change the face of global commerce.
But they have made little progress since the collapse of a nine-day meeting of ministers in Geneva in July last year, which had been called to hammer out a breakthrough.
Western envoys blamed that failure on India’s refusal to dilute protection for its huge population of small farmers. The Indian Government, at the time approaching a general election, had said that they risked being swamped by sudden surges of cheap imports from developed economies…
(3 Sept 2009)
After seeing what has happened in African and Latin American countries to small farmers after those pesky “protections” have been removed (see here for how Uganda decided to ignore such advice), I think those Indian farmers need to hold fast. And why are huge American farm subsidies never referred to as “protectionism” by American policymakers? -KS
