Wednesday, October 20, 2010
THE CULTURE OF GLOBALIZATION
The Culture of Globalization
Sudhanva Deshpande, Newsclick, December 16, 2009
There is no question about it. Globalization is changing the way we eat, drink, dress, think. Every day we see events taking place in New York, or London, or Sharjah, or Beijing beamed into our homes via satellite television. We find Hollywood films dubbed in our local languages and running to packed houses. We find beauty contests being organized in our localities, schools, or colleges. We find children asking for two-minute noodles, hamburgers, and canned cola drinks. We find autorickshaw drivers wearing T-shirts proclaiming ‘California! Here I come!’
The TV antenna has become perhaps the most common signpost of human habitation anywhere in the world. Telephones have linked virtually the entire planet. The internet has made it possible for people in all corners of the world to communicate with each other, access and exchange information very quickly, efficiently, cheaply, and without regard to national boundaries. Millions of dollars can be transferred in a matter of seconds across the globe over computer networks that link banks, stock markets, and other financial institutions.
Globalization is changing our culture. Take the case of cinema. Taking its cue from Hollywood, our cinema is becoming more expert at depicting violence. We see cars in films skidding, turning over, sliding, hitting other cars, and exploding into a huge ball of fire. We see severed limbs, blood gushing out as a bullet hits a body, brains being blown apart. There is more and more sex in our cinema. Our heroes and heroines are dressing up like international fashion models. Song sequences in our films have started looking and sounding more and more like western music videos. More and more films are being shot on foreign locations.
A number of people feel very concerned about all this. They lament that Indian culture is being destroyed, and that a foreign, alien culture is being foisted on us. They tell us that Indian culture, Indian values, Indian customs are being degraded.
There is no question that what is happening merits concern. But concern on what grounds? When we are told that globalization is destroying Indian culture, are we to assume that there is a single, monolithic entity called ‘Indian culture’? Or do we assume that all foreign or western cultural influences are pernicious? Or are we to assume that either there are no decadent, reactionary elements in our own culture, or if there are, they are somehow, magically, totally benign? Surely not. We know that there is a no such thing as a ‘pure’, unsullied culture. There is a wide diversity of cultures in India. These cultures have always interacted with each other, they have learned from each other, they have shaped and influenced each other. And this has been happening since the dawn of human civilization. A huge number of things that we regard as essential to our lives in the modern world have been given to us by the west—railways, the printing press, shirts and trousers, cinema and radio, democracy, and, indeed, Marxism itself. We also know that there are as many reactionary elements in what is routinely called ‘Indian culture’ as there are anywhere in the world. Now, if all this is indeed the case, then why does the cultural influx that accompanies globalization cause us worry?
We do not oppose globalization and the culture it brings with it because it is ‘foreign’, much less because it is ‘western’. We do not believe that there is something called ‘Indian culture’ that has remained uncontaminated over the ages. We do not oppose the free intermingling of various cultures. And certainly, we do not believe that Indians have to depend exclusively on imports for their share of decadence.
We oppose the culture of globalization not because it is foreign, but because it is the culture of imperialism. This culture seeks to keep in place, to perpetuate, and to strengthen the highly unequal, inegalitarian, oppressive, and exploitative system of world capitalism.
Capitalism is the first global mode of production. In order to reproduce itself, capitalism needs to do at least two things. First, capitalism needs to reproduce itself on a constantly expanding scale. It needs to annex all those realms where the sway of capital has not yet been established. As Marx and Engels had put it in The Communist Manifesto,
The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
This tendency towards globalization is inherent in capitalism, and the sphere of culture is no exception to this rule.
Secondly, capitalism needs to reproduce itself not only at the point of production, but in every realm of human life, including the cultural. In fact, the existence of capitalist production relations depends, to a very large extent, on the acceptance and consent given to these relations by large sections of the people. The sway of capitalist culture is crucial to the maintenance of this consent. The reproduction of capitalist culture is, therefore, a matter of life and death for capitalism. And since capitalism is a global mode of production, it reproduces capitalist culture too globally.
In reproducing itself on a constantly expanding scale, capitalism also tends to concentrate and centralize production. This tendency has made itself apparent in the sphere of cultural production as well. Thus, for instance, only a handful of large multinational conglomerates control the production of the bulk of television programmes produced in the USA each year. These very programmes are the ones that are seen by people across the globe repeatedly: think of the number of programmes of American origin that we can today see in India.
The globalization of culture means, at the simplest level, that cultural goods (films, music, television shows, etc.) can cross national boundaries more and more easily, that the same cultural goods are available for consumption to people across the globe. The direction of flow of cultural goods, however, is by and large the same as the direction of flow of economic goods. That is to say, the countries which import cultural goods are most often also the countries which import economic goods. In other words, the relationship of dominance and subservience which characterizes the relationship of the metropolitan imperialist countries with the third world countries in the economic sphere is more or less replicated in the cultural sphere. This is because the sphere of cultural production, distribution, and consumption is not an autonomous sphere unlinked to the sphere of economic production, distribution, and consumption. On the contrary, the structures which support cultural production and consumption are the very same structures that support economic production and consumption.
The television provides perhaps the best example of this. Increasingly, transmission is taking place via satellites. Manufacturing, launching and maintaining satellites is an expensive proposition. Very few poor countries, if any, can afford the luxury of satellites for entertainment purposes—if they can afford satellites at all, they would prefer to use them for security, meteorological, and other priority purposes. Buying time on existing satellites is not inexpensive either. Rich countries, their broadcasting corporations, and other multinational corporations can, however, afford satellites for a range of uses, including television broadcasting. Further, even running a television station is an expensive venture—apart from all the expensive electronic gadgetry, you require a steady production of programmes to transmit. All this requires a lot of money. Western broadcasting corporations, however, have an immense reservoir of serials, chat shows, films, information-based shows, etc., that are relatively cheap for television stations to buy and transmit (often, by simply dubbing them into the local language).
The globalization of culture also means the homogenization of culture. The sway of capital means the standardization of economic production across the globe. The same tendency is also seen in the realm of culture. Just as, say, a pair of jeans, or a computer, or canned food produced in any country is exactly like any other pair of jeans, or computer, or canned food produced on the other side of the world, cultural products also begin to be more and more standardized. Therefore, for instance, in the early days of MTV in India, the channel was full of only western songs and singers, but increasingly, the share of time given to Indian songs and singers has increased over the past 3-4 years. However, far from representing a weakening of the hold of western culture, this signifies its very opposite: the increasing production in India of cultural goods that are not distinguishable from the cultural goods produced in the metropolitan capitalist countries in any important respect. In other words, what we are witnessing is the standardization and homogenization of cultural goods across the globe.
The capitalist culture which imperialism today seeks to universalize across the world, takes particularly obnoxious forms in countries of backward capitalism where the feudal remnants, especially feudal cultural remnants, are still alive. It not only manifests itself in such societies as the culture of extreme individualism, consumerism, and commodity fetishism, it is also an extremely patriarchal culture, and it commodifies women’s bodies. It is a culture that militates against all progressive, democratic ideas. It is a culture that does not hesitate to promote every kind of backward, reactionary, irrational, and obscurantist idea. This is the reason why ‘mythological’ and other kinds of irrational serials like Ramayana, Shaktimaan, etc., appear with such monotonous regularity on Indian television.
The RSS, BJP, Shiv Sena, and other right-wing communal–fascist parties and organisations pretend to be the only true guardians of Indian culture. Nothing could be farther than the truth. The forces of Hindutva have never stood against the onslaught of imperialist culture in our country. And for good reason. The middle classes, mercantile sections, technocrats, and others who are so seduced by the fantasy of an aggressively Hindu India are the very sections who have benefited most from globalization and the array of goods it has made available for consumption. More: the consumption of the products of Western capitalism becomes ‘proof’ of the forward-looking nature of Hindutva. Thus, for instance, Advani carries out his ‘rath yatra’ in a Toyota van, and the Michael Jackson concert in Mumbai is organised by the Shiv Sena with Bal Thackeray as the presiding deity at the event.
The RSS seeks to take over the very diverse, even conflicting belief structures and practices of Hinduism in different parts of the country and incorporate them into a single, monolithic version of Hinduism. This version of Hinduism is what it calls Hindutva. The RSS argues that religion, not language, is the only basis for nationality in India—thus, Hindus constitute one nation and the Muslims and other minorities constitute other, separate nations. Since India belongs to the Hindus, if any minorities wish to stay here, they must do so as second-class citizens. This is what the ‘cultural nationalism’ of the RSS actually means. Thus Hindutva is a fundamentally authoritarian, anti-minority, upper-caste, patriarchal and masculinist ideology that seeks to destroy the multi-lingual, multi-national character of this country and the syncretic nature of the belief structures and practices that have characterized the religious and spiritual universe of the majority of the people of India. This represents a fundamental assault on not only the cultural and spiritual lives of non-Hindus, but on the cultural and spiritual lives of all Hindus as well.
Thus the cultural offensive of globalization, fascism, and feudalism are not three discrete, unlinked forces—they are very deeply, indeed structurally, welded together. Our fight, then, will have to be against all three
Sudhanva Deshpande, Newsclick, December 16, 2009
There is no question about it. Globalization is changing the way we eat, drink, dress, think. Every day we see events taking place in New York, or London, or Sharjah, or Beijing beamed into our homes via satellite television. We find Hollywood films dubbed in our local languages and running to packed houses. We find beauty contests being organized in our localities, schools, or colleges. We find children asking for two-minute noodles, hamburgers, and canned cola drinks. We find autorickshaw drivers wearing T-shirts proclaiming ‘California! Here I come!’
The TV antenna has become perhaps the most common signpost of human habitation anywhere in the world. Telephones have linked virtually the entire planet. The internet has made it possible for people in all corners of the world to communicate with each other, access and exchange information very quickly, efficiently, cheaply, and without regard to national boundaries. Millions of dollars can be transferred in a matter of seconds across the globe over computer networks that link banks, stock markets, and other financial institutions.
Globalization is changing our culture. Take the case of cinema. Taking its cue from Hollywood, our cinema is becoming more expert at depicting violence. We see cars in films skidding, turning over, sliding, hitting other cars, and exploding into a huge ball of fire. We see severed limbs, blood gushing out as a bullet hits a body, brains being blown apart. There is more and more sex in our cinema. Our heroes and heroines are dressing up like international fashion models. Song sequences in our films have started looking and sounding more and more like western music videos. More and more films are being shot on foreign locations.
A number of people feel very concerned about all this. They lament that Indian culture is being destroyed, and that a foreign, alien culture is being foisted on us. They tell us that Indian culture, Indian values, Indian customs are being degraded.
There is no question that what is happening merits concern. But concern on what grounds? When we are told that globalization is destroying Indian culture, are we to assume that there is a single, monolithic entity called ‘Indian culture’? Or do we assume that all foreign or western cultural influences are pernicious? Or are we to assume that either there are no decadent, reactionary elements in our own culture, or if there are, they are somehow, magically, totally benign? Surely not. We know that there is a no such thing as a ‘pure’, unsullied culture. There is a wide diversity of cultures in India. These cultures have always interacted with each other, they have learned from each other, they have shaped and influenced each other. And this has been happening since the dawn of human civilization. A huge number of things that we regard as essential to our lives in the modern world have been given to us by the west—railways, the printing press, shirts and trousers, cinema and radio, democracy, and, indeed, Marxism itself. We also know that there are as many reactionary elements in what is routinely called ‘Indian culture’ as there are anywhere in the world. Now, if all this is indeed the case, then why does the cultural influx that accompanies globalization cause us worry?
We do not oppose globalization and the culture it brings with it because it is ‘foreign’, much less because it is ‘western’. We do not believe that there is something called ‘Indian culture’ that has remained uncontaminated over the ages. We do not oppose the free intermingling of various cultures. And certainly, we do not believe that Indians have to depend exclusively on imports for their share of decadence.
We oppose the culture of globalization not because it is foreign, but because it is the culture of imperialism. This culture seeks to keep in place, to perpetuate, and to strengthen the highly unequal, inegalitarian, oppressive, and exploitative system of world capitalism.
Capitalism is the first global mode of production. In order to reproduce itself, capitalism needs to do at least two things. First, capitalism needs to reproduce itself on a constantly expanding scale. It needs to annex all those realms where the sway of capital has not yet been established. As Marx and Engels had put it in The Communist Manifesto,
The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
This tendency towards globalization is inherent in capitalism, and the sphere of culture is no exception to this rule.
Secondly, capitalism needs to reproduce itself not only at the point of production, but in every realm of human life, including the cultural. In fact, the existence of capitalist production relations depends, to a very large extent, on the acceptance and consent given to these relations by large sections of the people. The sway of capitalist culture is crucial to the maintenance of this consent. The reproduction of capitalist culture is, therefore, a matter of life and death for capitalism. And since capitalism is a global mode of production, it reproduces capitalist culture too globally.
In reproducing itself on a constantly expanding scale, capitalism also tends to concentrate and centralize production. This tendency has made itself apparent in the sphere of cultural production as well. Thus, for instance, only a handful of large multinational conglomerates control the production of the bulk of television programmes produced in the USA each year. These very programmes are the ones that are seen by people across the globe repeatedly: think of the number of programmes of American origin that we can today see in India.
The globalization of culture means, at the simplest level, that cultural goods (films, music, television shows, etc.) can cross national boundaries more and more easily, that the same cultural goods are available for consumption to people across the globe. The direction of flow of cultural goods, however, is by and large the same as the direction of flow of economic goods. That is to say, the countries which import cultural goods are most often also the countries which import economic goods. In other words, the relationship of dominance and subservience which characterizes the relationship of the metropolitan imperialist countries with the third world countries in the economic sphere is more or less replicated in the cultural sphere. This is because the sphere of cultural production, distribution, and consumption is not an autonomous sphere unlinked to the sphere of economic production, distribution, and consumption. On the contrary, the structures which support cultural production and consumption are the very same structures that support economic production and consumption.
The television provides perhaps the best example of this. Increasingly, transmission is taking place via satellites. Manufacturing, launching and maintaining satellites is an expensive proposition. Very few poor countries, if any, can afford the luxury of satellites for entertainment purposes—if they can afford satellites at all, they would prefer to use them for security, meteorological, and other priority purposes. Buying time on existing satellites is not inexpensive either. Rich countries, their broadcasting corporations, and other multinational corporations can, however, afford satellites for a range of uses, including television broadcasting. Further, even running a television station is an expensive venture—apart from all the expensive electronic gadgetry, you require a steady production of programmes to transmit. All this requires a lot of money. Western broadcasting corporations, however, have an immense reservoir of serials, chat shows, films, information-based shows, etc., that are relatively cheap for television stations to buy and transmit (often, by simply dubbing them into the local language).
The globalization of culture also means the homogenization of culture. The sway of capital means the standardization of economic production across the globe. The same tendency is also seen in the realm of culture. Just as, say, a pair of jeans, or a computer, or canned food produced in any country is exactly like any other pair of jeans, or computer, or canned food produced on the other side of the world, cultural products also begin to be more and more standardized. Therefore, for instance, in the early days of MTV in India, the channel was full of only western songs and singers, but increasingly, the share of time given to Indian songs and singers has increased over the past 3-4 years. However, far from representing a weakening of the hold of western culture, this signifies its very opposite: the increasing production in India of cultural goods that are not distinguishable from the cultural goods produced in the metropolitan capitalist countries in any important respect. In other words, what we are witnessing is the standardization and homogenization of cultural goods across the globe.
The capitalist culture which imperialism today seeks to universalize across the world, takes particularly obnoxious forms in countries of backward capitalism where the feudal remnants, especially feudal cultural remnants, are still alive. It not only manifests itself in such societies as the culture of extreme individualism, consumerism, and commodity fetishism, it is also an extremely patriarchal culture, and it commodifies women’s bodies. It is a culture that militates against all progressive, democratic ideas. It is a culture that does not hesitate to promote every kind of backward, reactionary, irrational, and obscurantist idea. This is the reason why ‘mythological’ and other kinds of irrational serials like Ramayana, Shaktimaan, etc., appear with such monotonous regularity on Indian television.
The RSS, BJP, Shiv Sena, and other right-wing communal–fascist parties and organisations pretend to be the only true guardians of Indian culture. Nothing could be farther than the truth. The forces of Hindutva have never stood against the onslaught of imperialist culture in our country. And for good reason. The middle classes, mercantile sections, technocrats, and others who are so seduced by the fantasy of an aggressively Hindu India are the very sections who have benefited most from globalization and the array of goods it has made available for consumption. More: the consumption of the products of Western capitalism becomes ‘proof’ of the forward-looking nature of Hindutva. Thus, for instance, Advani carries out his ‘rath yatra’ in a Toyota van, and the Michael Jackson concert in Mumbai is organised by the Shiv Sena with Bal Thackeray as the presiding deity at the event.
The RSS seeks to take over the very diverse, even conflicting belief structures and practices of Hinduism in different parts of the country and incorporate them into a single, monolithic version of Hinduism. This version of Hinduism is what it calls Hindutva. The RSS argues that religion, not language, is the only basis for nationality in India—thus, Hindus constitute one nation and the Muslims and other minorities constitute other, separate nations. Since India belongs to the Hindus, if any minorities wish to stay here, they must do so as second-class citizens. This is what the ‘cultural nationalism’ of the RSS actually means. Thus Hindutva is a fundamentally authoritarian, anti-minority, upper-caste, patriarchal and masculinist ideology that seeks to destroy the multi-lingual, multi-national character of this country and the syncretic nature of the belief structures and practices that have characterized the religious and spiritual universe of the majority of the people of India. This represents a fundamental assault on not only the cultural and spiritual lives of non-Hindus, but on the cultural and spiritual lives of all Hindus as well.
Thus the cultural offensive of globalization, fascism, and feudalism are not three discrete, unlinked forces—they are very deeply, indeed structurally, welded together. Our fight, then, will have to be against all three
GM Crops
GM Crops: The Societal Context of Technologies
Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi & Prabir Purkayastha, Delhi Science Forum/ May 8, 2010
The Bt Brinjal debate has featured technological worries relating to genetically modified crops which appear relatively minor in comparison to the critical issue of who controls Indian agriculture and therefore food security in India. While there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology – and therefore GM will be part of the solutions. The article is an extract from a larger manuscript to be published in the EPW.
The Bt brinjal debate has been largely simplified as an ideological disagreement between camps either anti- or pro-Genetically Modified (GM) crops, at least in the public eye. There is no denying that the vitriol of the debate is in part due to ideological differences. However, what is missing is the public awareness that the disagreements fall into two distinct categories, and that conflating those is a grievous error in determining public policy.
One disagreement is over the anti-GM characterization of GM technologies as intrinsically and catastrophically harmful. A second disagreement is over the nature of the GM crop technology ownership and the effect of such ownership on agriculture in India. Anti-GM groups have sought to brand GM technologies as intrinsically harmful and to identify GM with rapacious multinational corporations (MNCs). This brings ideologically distinct groups together in uneasy and ill-fitting unity. Thus, many socially progressive movements find themselves in awkward alliance with nativist and anti-modernity opinion. On the other hand, pro-GM argument in the public sphere has portrayed GM technology with a patronizing air of triumphalism making the MNC ownership of GM technologies a core component. This has made the weak voice of the Indian scientific community sound like a handmaiden of an international agribusiness juggernaut. It is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff in all this if we are to make public policy about practical social good in agriculture.
The issue of genetic modification of crops and livestock is undoubtedly complex and replete with serious issues. The key questions are, is it practically possible in India to evaluate the risks and benefits of such technologies, and to what extent are the concerns specific to GM technologies?
Any significant technological advance generally involves serious issues. Major technological advances have always come with attendant uncertainties and risks. When we have no data to evaluate risk, the situation is one of uncertainty, and little reasonable prediction can be made. But we do know enough to be able to evaluate the risks of GM crops. So long as we are not dealing with catastrophic consequences, we can set a ‘safety’ threshold of a certain low likelihood of adverse consequences in order to permit the use of a given technology. The weight of evidence indicates that GM technology carries the risk of non-catastrophic consequences (as opposed to, say, nuclear weapons, which carry the clear risk of catastrophic consequences), and can therefore be reasonably examined and used with care.
One frequently heard criticism of GM crops is that horizontal gene transfer is an 'unnatural' technology. This is a rather strange argument. All technologies are more or less unnatural since they are human-made and do not occur naturally. Any societal move away from food gathering has always been based on such 'unnatural' technologies. In fact, this has been used by pro-GM groups to claim that the products are there in nature and just transferring traits from one set of organisms to another does not constitute anything radically new and potentially harmful. Interestingly, they would also like to create monopolies through patents claiming these are novel products! The fact is that, like any other technologies, each GM product is a new product and will need careful safety testing before release.
This is an issue that scientists have raised right from the beginning. The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in 1975 set out voluntary guidelines on what could be done consistent with safety. Till the guidelines were formulated, they even imposed a moratorium on further research. However, things have changed radically since then. At that time, scientists were in the business of doing science – today a number are closely tied to corporate interests. Scientists are no longer just experts – their personal fortunes could also be riding on their opinions. And while one could say that scientific issues are best resolved by the scientists, the introduction of a technology into society is not a scientific question but a policy problem embedded within social and political issues.
More mundane safety related issues of biotechnology arise from the genetic material thus transferred. There are health safety issues and environmental safety issues. Some of these arise from the imprecise insertion of genes by this technology. A variant of this concern is that the inserted gene, or even the insertion process itself, may re-engineer the biology of the plant and generate poisons. While this possibility certainly exists, it is not unique to GM technology. Breeders of potatoes, for example, know well the possibility that a hybrid potato made from two good varieties can generate high levels of toxic material.
Another safety issue arises from the possibility that genes and proteins may behave differently in contexts other than the one they were taken from. This can give rise to the generation of allergic reactions. A brazilnut protein in GM soyabean and a bean protein expressed in GM peas have, for example, generated significant allergic reactions. Similar studies with many other GM crops, however, did not find any allergogenicity. Once again, food allergies are not unknown with non-GM foods either.
Another issue that arises, and sounds even more appropriate in cases such as Bt brinjal, is the potential of the introduced gene product, such as the Bt toxin, to cause human/livestock harm. While there is a fair amount of understanding about the mechanisms by which, say, the Bt toxin works, this, like all other safety concerns, can only be addressed case-by-case through pre-release testing.
A key question is, for how long is monitoring to be done in the pre-release tests? There is no obvious endpoint, since in theory, it could take years or decades to make the ill-effects of a poisonous substance manifest. But in the absence of any evidence that GM crop technology carries the risk of catastrophic consequences, demands for the unattainable absolute proof of safety begin to sound like ploys to keep the technology out of use no matter what the evidence. Undoubtedly, there was need for abundant caution and rigorous testing when Bt was first introduced into crops. While it was true that Bt in its natural state in the bacteria has been long used as a bio-pesticide, that by itself does not mean that Bt is going to be safe in its new form in a GM crop. However, by now the world has experienced a fair diversity of Bt crops, including food crops. Bt Corn has now been accepted for imports even in Europe. In this context, while food crops require particular attention, almost all crops enter the food chain one way or another; there is no impermeable barrier between food and non-food crops. A case in point is Bt cotton in India. Bt cotton stalks go into cattle feed and milk products obviously come from cattle. Cottonseed oil also enters the food chain. While case-by-case safety testing still remains the correct norm, the argument that there could still be a catastrophic danger from the Bt protein in GM crops seems less and less valid.
The issue of long-term toxicity with GM crops has also been particularly raised since, once a GM crop is released, there is no effective call-back. This is also the context in which the potential threats of GM technology for diversity in both crops and the biosphere have been excitedly discussed, since there is a possibility that the introduced genetic modifications would spread naturally both to other varieties of the same species, and also to other related species. How harmful is such spread likely to be to crop diversity and to biodiversity?
Most GM crops have one (or two) genes introduced into them. These genes can be easily bred into any variety of the crop, as is done, for example, with Bt cotton. This does not appear to lead a 'loss' of the variety in the sense of flattening out the diversity landscape, since the same number of varieties, with differing trait profiles albeit with an introduced gene, would still be available.
However, it is nonetheless true that GM crop usage has led to a reduction in the diversity of crop varieties being planted. It is useful to note that this is not related to the 'GM' nature of the technology, but to the imperatives of the marketplace and to the fact that the technology is owned and marketed by MNCs which, in order to achieve the profit scales they need, will aggressively drive high-volume seed sales. Such corporate control of agriculture is likely to promote the process of monoculture that tends to thin down biodiversity on the ground. Thus, this is not an issue intrinsic to GM technology, but to its ownership.
In essence, the issue is not whether GM crops are without risks, but whether the regulatory protocols developed and used for testing them sufficient for the purpose of evaluating their safety. As noted above, GM crops appear to carry risks of non-catastrophic consequences of the kinds and scales that society is familiar with. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that familiar safety-testing protocols will serve societal needs well in this context too. Protocols for testing GM crops have been developed by international and national bodies over time. They will continue to be strengthened and improved, but either-or positions vis-à-vis GM crops are unlikely to contribute to that process.
One major criticism of the basis on which the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) cleared Bt Brinjal, has been the alleged unreliability of the safety data. Safety data submitted by the company, with a vested interest in a favourable outcome, are deemed to be suspect in this argument. And in this context, the real issue that arises is a question we are depressingly familiar with: do we have strong implementation of these regulatory processes and protocols? The answer to that is likely to tend to be more and more in the negative the greater the involvement of powerful interests, such as deep-pocketed MNCs. This is as true of, say, drug approvals, as of crop approvals. Again, who owns GM technology appears to be far more crucial an issue than its 'GM'ness.
These issues need to be seen in the larger context of Indian agriculture and food security. With a growing population and with persistent problems of poverty and malnutrition to address, there is little doubt that increases in food production would be immensely useful. What is the possible role of GM crop technologies in this context? The anti-GM position is frequently apocalyptic with regard to the risks of GM crop technology, and therefore negates any useful role for it. It is also frequently allied with nativist anti-technology views of agriculture, in which back-to-nature approaches are seen as the most appropriate solution. On the other hand, the pro-GM position frequently sounds as though GM crop technology by itself can be a major solution.
As far as the evidence goes, there is no reason to think that GM crop technology carries catastrophic consequences, and therefore it is indeed proper to consider its possible advantages for Indian agriculture and food security seriously. However, anybody who thinks that any one category of approach, nativist or GM, is going to be a common panacea for India’s food security is refusing to acknowledge the sheer diversity and complexity of agricultural practices and needs across the country. For example, anti-GM favourites such as the integrated pest management system (IPMS) or the system of rice intensification (SRI) depend on their success on rigorous practices and additional equipment, and may be successful in some situations and not in others. Thus, the use of GM crop technology is going to be a part of our food future, not because it is the sole answer to the problems of Indian agriculture, but because it can expand the basket of choices available to a wide variety of farming communities. While GM is certainly not the only answer, there is little doubt that it can very much be a part of the answering strategies. It is possible to grow more drought-resistant or salinity-tolerant crops, or use less pesticides, for example. Some of these do not need transgenic technologies. Molecular genetic marker-assisted selective breeding is another tool that can help in achieving some of these aims. Achieving true breeding of hybrids will also help in a different way. But all of these tactics together would help to expand the basket of choices available.
It is thus clear that, while there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology will be part of the solutions. The farm sector is also seeing a huge squeeze on its income – the prices of inputs are rising faster than the output prices. The increasing corporatisation of inputs, as exemplified by the Monsanto-driven Bt-crops, exacerbates this squeeze further, and must be an issue of concern. The technological worries relating to GM crops appear relatively minor in comparison, yet, sadly, it is these techno-worries that hold centre-stage in the ongoing debates
Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi & Prabir Purkayastha, Delhi Science Forum/ May 8, 2010
The Bt Brinjal debate has featured technological worries relating to genetically modified crops which appear relatively minor in comparison to the critical issue of who controls Indian agriculture and therefore food security in India. While there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology – and therefore GM will be part of the solutions. The article is an extract from a larger manuscript to be published in the EPW.
The Bt brinjal debate has been largely simplified as an ideological disagreement between camps either anti- or pro-Genetically Modified (GM) crops, at least in the public eye. There is no denying that the vitriol of the debate is in part due to ideological differences. However, what is missing is the public awareness that the disagreements fall into two distinct categories, and that conflating those is a grievous error in determining public policy.
One disagreement is over the anti-GM characterization of GM technologies as intrinsically and catastrophically harmful. A second disagreement is over the nature of the GM crop technology ownership and the effect of such ownership on agriculture in India. Anti-GM groups have sought to brand GM technologies as intrinsically harmful and to identify GM with rapacious multinational corporations (MNCs). This brings ideologically distinct groups together in uneasy and ill-fitting unity. Thus, many socially progressive movements find themselves in awkward alliance with nativist and anti-modernity opinion. On the other hand, pro-GM argument in the public sphere has portrayed GM technology with a patronizing air of triumphalism making the MNC ownership of GM technologies a core component. This has made the weak voice of the Indian scientific community sound like a handmaiden of an international agribusiness juggernaut. It is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff in all this if we are to make public policy about practical social good in agriculture.
The issue of genetic modification of crops and livestock is undoubtedly complex and replete with serious issues. The key questions are, is it practically possible in India to evaluate the risks and benefits of such technologies, and to what extent are the concerns specific to GM technologies?
Any significant technological advance generally involves serious issues. Major technological advances have always come with attendant uncertainties and risks. When we have no data to evaluate risk, the situation is one of uncertainty, and little reasonable prediction can be made. But we do know enough to be able to evaluate the risks of GM crops. So long as we are not dealing with catastrophic consequences, we can set a ‘safety’ threshold of a certain low likelihood of adverse consequences in order to permit the use of a given technology. The weight of evidence indicates that GM technology carries the risk of non-catastrophic consequences (as opposed to, say, nuclear weapons, which carry the clear risk of catastrophic consequences), and can therefore be reasonably examined and used with care.
One frequently heard criticism of GM crops is that horizontal gene transfer is an 'unnatural' technology. This is a rather strange argument. All technologies are more or less unnatural since they are human-made and do not occur naturally. Any societal move away from food gathering has always been based on such 'unnatural' technologies. In fact, this has been used by pro-GM groups to claim that the products are there in nature and just transferring traits from one set of organisms to another does not constitute anything radically new and potentially harmful. Interestingly, they would also like to create monopolies through patents claiming these are novel products! The fact is that, like any other technologies, each GM product is a new product and will need careful safety testing before release.
This is an issue that scientists have raised right from the beginning. The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in 1975 set out voluntary guidelines on what could be done consistent with safety. Till the guidelines were formulated, they even imposed a moratorium on further research. However, things have changed radically since then. At that time, scientists were in the business of doing science – today a number are closely tied to corporate interests. Scientists are no longer just experts – their personal fortunes could also be riding on their opinions. And while one could say that scientific issues are best resolved by the scientists, the introduction of a technology into society is not a scientific question but a policy problem embedded within social and political issues.
More mundane safety related issues of biotechnology arise from the genetic material thus transferred. There are health safety issues and environmental safety issues. Some of these arise from the imprecise insertion of genes by this technology. A variant of this concern is that the inserted gene, or even the insertion process itself, may re-engineer the biology of the plant and generate poisons. While this possibility certainly exists, it is not unique to GM technology. Breeders of potatoes, for example, know well the possibility that a hybrid potato made from two good varieties can generate high levels of toxic material.
Another safety issue arises from the possibility that genes and proteins may behave differently in contexts other than the one they were taken from. This can give rise to the generation of allergic reactions. A brazilnut protein in GM soyabean and a bean protein expressed in GM peas have, for example, generated significant allergic reactions. Similar studies with many other GM crops, however, did not find any allergogenicity. Once again, food allergies are not unknown with non-GM foods either.
Another issue that arises, and sounds even more appropriate in cases such as Bt brinjal, is the potential of the introduced gene product, such as the Bt toxin, to cause human/livestock harm. While there is a fair amount of understanding about the mechanisms by which, say, the Bt toxin works, this, like all other safety concerns, can only be addressed case-by-case through pre-release testing.
A key question is, for how long is monitoring to be done in the pre-release tests? There is no obvious endpoint, since in theory, it could take years or decades to make the ill-effects of a poisonous substance manifest. But in the absence of any evidence that GM crop technology carries the risk of catastrophic consequences, demands for the unattainable absolute proof of safety begin to sound like ploys to keep the technology out of use no matter what the evidence. Undoubtedly, there was need for abundant caution and rigorous testing when Bt was first introduced into crops. While it was true that Bt in its natural state in the bacteria has been long used as a bio-pesticide, that by itself does not mean that Bt is going to be safe in its new form in a GM crop. However, by now the world has experienced a fair diversity of Bt crops, including food crops. Bt Corn has now been accepted for imports even in Europe. In this context, while food crops require particular attention, almost all crops enter the food chain one way or another; there is no impermeable barrier between food and non-food crops. A case in point is Bt cotton in India. Bt cotton stalks go into cattle feed and milk products obviously come from cattle. Cottonseed oil also enters the food chain. While case-by-case safety testing still remains the correct norm, the argument that there could still be a catastrophic danger from the Bt protein in GM crops seems less and less valid.
The issue of long-term toxicity with GM crops has also been particularly raised since, once a GM crop is released, there is no effective call-back. This is also the context in which the potential threats of GM technology for diversity in both crops and the biosphere have been excitedly discussed, since there is a possibility that the introduced genetic modifications would spread naturally both to other varieties of the same species, and also to other related species. How harmful is such spread likely to be to crop diversity and to biodiversity?
Most GM crops have one (or two) genes introduced into them. These genes can be easily bred into any variety of the crop, as is done, for example, with Bt cotton. This does not appear to lead a 'loss' of the variety in the sense of flattening out the diversity landscape, since the same number of varieties, with differing trait profiles albeit with an introduced gene, would still be available.
However, it is nonetheless true that GM crop usage has led to a reduction in the diversity of crop varieties being planted. It is useful to note that this is not related to the 'GM' nature of the technology, but to the imperatives of the marketplace and to the fact that the technology is owned and marketed by MNCs which, in order to achieve the profit scales they need, will aggressively drive high-volume seed sales. Such corporate control of agriculture is likely to promote the process of monoculture that tends to thin down biodiversity on the ground. Thus, this is not an issue intrinsic to GM technology, but to its ownership.
In essence, the issue is not whether GM crops are without risks, but whether the regulatory protocols developed and used for testing them sufficient for the purpose of evaluating their safety. As noted above, GM crops appear to carry risks of non-catastrophic consequences of the kinds and scales that society is familiar with. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that familiar safety-testing protocols will serve societal needs well in this context too. Protocols for testing GM crops have been developed by international and national bodies over time. They will continue to be strengthened and improved, but either-or positions vis-à-vis GM crops are unlikely to contribute to that process.
One major criticism of the basis on which the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) cleared Bt Brinjal, has been the alleged unreliability of the safety data. Safety data submitted by the company, with a vested interest in a favourable outcome, are deemed to be suspect in this argument. And in this context, the real issue that arises is a question we are depressingly familiar with: do we have strong implementation of these regulatory processes and protocols? The answer to that is likely to tend to be more and more in the negative the greater the involvement of powerful interests, such as deep-pocketed MNCs. This is as true of, say, drug approvals, as of crop approvals. Again, who owns GM technology appears to be far more crucial an issue than its 'GM'ness.
These issues need to be seen in the larger context of Indian agriculture and food security. With a growing population and with persistent problems of poverty and malnutrition to address, there is little doubt that increases in food production would be immensely useful. What is the possible role of GM crop technologies in this context? The anti-GM position is frequently apocalyptic with regard to the risks of GM crop technology, and therefore negates any useful role for it. It is also frequently allied with nativist anti-technology views of agriculture, in which back-to-nature approaches are seen as the most appropriate solution. On the other hand, the pro-GM position frequently sounds as though GM crop technology by itself can be a major solution.
As far as the evidence goes, there is no reason to think that GM crop technology carries catastrophic consequences, and therefore it is indeed proper to consider its possible advantages for Indian agriculture and food security seriously. However, anybody who thinks that any one category of approach, nativist or GM, is going to be a common panacea for India’s food security is refusing to acknowledge the sheer diversity and complexity of agricultural practices and needs across the country. For example, anti-GM favourites such as the integrated pest management system (IPMS) or the system of rice intensification (SRI) depend on their success on rigorous practices and additional equipment, and may be successful in some situations and not in others. Thus, the use of GM crop technology is going to be a part of our food future, not because it is the sole answer to the problems of Indian agriculture, but because it can expand the basket of choices available to a wide variety of farming communities. While GM is certainly not the only answer, there is little doubt that it can very much be a part of the answering strategies. It is possible to grow more drought-resistant or salinity-tolerant crops, or use less pesticides, for example. Some of these do not need transgenic technologies. Molecular genetic marker-assisted selective breeding is another tool that can help in achieving some of these aims. Achieving true breeding of hybrids will also help in a different way. But all of these tactics together would help to expand the basket of choices available.
It is thus clear that, while there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology will be part of the solutions. The farm sector is also seeing a huge squeeze on its income – the prices of inputs are rising faster than the output prices. The increasing corporatisation of inputs, as exemplified by the Monsanto-driven Bt-crops, exacerbates this squeeze further, and must be an issue of concern. The technological worries relating to GM crops appear relatively minor in comparison, yet, sadly, it is these techno-worries that hold centre-stage in the ongoing debates
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Millennium Development Goals: A Travesty of Justice
Millennium Development Goals: A Travesty of Justice
Prasenjit Bose, Newsclick, September 20 2010
“Poverty rates have reduced substantially in the world but the number of people in risk of falling into poverty has increased” announces the World Bank PovertyNet as world leaders gather in New York today to attend the UN summit on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The agenda for the summit has already been set. The latest UN review of the MDGs says:
"The world is on track to meet the MDG target of halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day between 1990 and 2015. Overall poverty rates fell from 46% in 1990 to 27% in 2005 in developing regions, and progress in many developing countries is being sustained. This is despite setbacks caused by the 2008-09 economic downturn and the effects of the food and energy crises."
The UN is apparently not satisfied by this progress. The Secretary General has reminded the world leaders of their Millennium Declaration pledge ‘for a better world’ adopted in 2001 and urged upon the international community to fulfil their promises. The unkept promises have been identified by the UN: a $152.7 billion deficit in official development assistance by the OECD donors vis-à-vis the UN target till 2009. The summit would therefore predictably end by further urging upon the rich countries to step up assistance to fill the aid ‘gap’ in order to match the MDG slogan: ‘We can end poverty’. So is poverty going to ‘end’? Let us take a closer look.
Sham of ‘Ending’ Poverty
The poverty reduction being claimed by the World Bank and the UN is based on the following finding:1
"Between 1981 and 2005, the share of the population in the developing world living below $1.25 a day was halved from 52 to 25%…reducing the number of poor by 500 million (from 1.9 billion to 1.4 billion) between 1981 and 2005."
How can the fact of 500 million people increasing their earnings beyond $1.25 a day, in a span of 24 years, be construed as a reduction of poverty? The same research also reports that in these 24 years the number of people earning less than $2 a day across the world remained unchanged at around 2.5 billion. Evidently, a bulk of those who have started earning more than $1.25 a day in these 24 years have continued to earn less than $2 a day. Therefore they have continued to remain in the ‘risk of falling into poverty’. But can those who are at the ‘risk of falling into poverty’ be at all considered to have moved out of poverty in the first place?
The problematic nature of this measure of poverty becomes clearer if we compare it with the poverty line of the US, the richest country in the world measured in terms of GDP. There is no single poverty line the US. Poverty estimates are done on the basis of household income thresholds, with different thresholds depending on the number of family members and dependents in a household. If we take the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2009 as a benchmark, the poverty line in the US stands roughly at $15 per day (per capita). The poverty line is a little less for households with higher family sizes, but even for the highest family size it would not be less than $13 per day (per capita). The poverty rate as per the latest findings of the US Census Bureau stood at 14.3% in 2009, up from 13.2% in 2008. The total number of poor people in the US increased from 39.8 million in 2008 to 43.6 million in 2009.2
Thus, poverty is increasing even in the richest country of the world, in terms of its official poverty line. And if everything else remains the same, the 500 million people living in the poor countries, who have moved from earning around $1 a day to $2 a day in 24 years as per the World Bank finding, will take at least another 264 years to reach the current minimum poverty threshold of the US at $13 a day. Yet, it is being claimed on the basis of this finding that ‘poverty rates’ are coming down.
The facts revealed by the latest stocktaking of the MDGs by the UN are more telling.3 The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty (below $1.25 a day) will be 920 million in 2015. The effects of the economic crisis will push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty in 2010. Moreover, the absolute number of undernourished people increased from 817 million in 1990 to 830 million in 2007, i.e. an increase of 13 million. In effect, therefore, we are witnessing an increase in both poverty and hunger even as the world is supposedly ‘on track’ to meet the MDG target. What a sham.
Inane Discourse
What sustains this sham is the mainstream academic discourse on poverty, which evades any serious analysis of the causes behind it and obsessively revolves around issues of definitions and measurements. It is not that definitions and measurements of poverty are irrelevant. But making that the starting point of analysis serves the purpose of relegating the causes behind poverty to the background. The entire focus shifts to whether poverty has increased here or declined there and endless hair splitting on the direction and extent of change. When causes are at all discussed, they are done so within a framework, which through a chain of circular reasoning brings the discourse back to definitions and measurements of poverty. The question of causes gets buried in the process.
For instance, the first chapter of World Bank’s Handbook on Poverty and Inequality is titled ‘What Is Poverty and Why Measure It?’4 This chapter defines poverty as the ‘pronounced deprivation in well being’. What is well being? Conventionally, it is linked to whether ‘enough’ income or consumption is earned by people to put them above some ‘adequate minimum threshold’. This definition of threshold has been progressively expanded over time by including access to specific types of goods and services like food, housing, education and health. The latest approach further broadens the notion of well being to include ‘capabilities of the individual to function in society’, like ‘political freedoms’. The stated purposes of defining well being and measuring poverty is: “to keep poor people on the agenda…identify the poor people…target appropriate interventions…to help poor people”. But how do we ‘help’ poor people without understanding the causes of their poverty?
This comes in the eighth chapter of the Handbook, titled ‘Understanding the Determinants of Poverty’, which states that while a ‘poverty profile’ is only meant to describe the pattern of poverty and not explaining the causes of poverty, “yet, a satisfactory explanation of why some people are poor is essential if we are to be able to tackle the roots of poverty”. So at last we come to the roots. So what are they? We are served a whole menu of ‘main determinants’ of poverty, which are summarized by the authors themselves in a table (given below).
What is remarkable about this menu of ‘determinants’ of poverty is that it neither suggests any hierarchy within these myriad determinants, nor any cause effect relationship. As per the World Bank Handbook, poverty can be caused by anything, from typhoons and earthquakes to age or ethnicity. It may also be caused by lack of access to assets or lack of proximity to schools and clinics. It may perhaps be caused by the social structure and inequality too. We need to find out or establish through regression analysis, which of the determinants correlates better with poverty.5 We simply do not know yet.
To be fair to the authors of the Handbook, they are acutely aware of the vacuity of such analysis. They admit that “the ‘causes’ of poverty identified are ‘immediate’ (or ‘proximate’) causes, but not necessarily ‘deep’ causes”, and that while regression analysis can show lack of education as a cause behind poverty, it cannot explain why some people lack education. They further accept that “the weakest part of poverty analysis…is developing a clear understanding of the fundamental causes of poverty in a way that leads naturally to an effective strategy to combat poverty.” Yet, they justify their methodology in the following terms: “Because there is no reason to believe that the root causes of poverty are the same everywhere, country-specific analysis is essential.”
So there may be root causes of poverty. But these root causes are different for different countries. In order to get to those root causes, we have to do ‘country-specific analysis’. But if we do not have any a priori theory of the root causes of poverty, on what basis do we do the analysis? We go back to the first chapter of the Handbook on definitions and measurements of poverty. It is this circular reasoning which contributes to the inanity visible in the World Bank PovertyNet we noted at the beginning: “poverty rates have reduced substantially in the world but the number of people in the risk of falling into poverty has increased.”
Why is the international poverty line set at $1.25 per day? As per the World Bank’s explanation, it is the average of poverty lines found in the 15 poorest countries. But what accounts for the average poverty line of 15 poorest countries being set at $1.25 per day? The rich and affluent sections in many of these countries earn several hundred times more than that. Yet, the bare subsistence level in the poorest countries is set as the standard for international poverty. And even then, poverty alleviation targets are not being met. Just imagine the consequence of the entire poverty discourse, if the American poverty line of $15 per day is made the international poverty line.
Policy Cruelty
These conceptual inanities have grave repercussions for policy and the plight of the poor. Let us take the case of India, which is often showcased as a success story in today’s world. The national poverty line, obtained by weighting the World Bank’s $1.25 per day rural and urban lines with respective population shares, is Rs. 16.30 per day, as per which 41.6% of people in India are poor. However, the Indian Planning Commission’s poverty estimates for 2004-05, based on poverty lines of Rs 11.88 per day for rural areas and Rs 17.95 per day for urban areas, shows poverty in India to be only 27%. In contrast, the proportion of people not being able to acquire a minimum of 2,100 calories consumption in India is 62%, way above both the poverty estimates.6
What happens as a consequence of this unhealthy competition, between national and international policy establishments, to downplay and underestimate poverty? In India’s national capital Delhi, the below poverty line (BPL) population is estimated by the Planning Commission as only 2.29 million, which in a city of over 15 million population is a gross underestimate. Moreover, while only 418000 households in Delhi currently have BPL ration cards, a survey conducted by the Delhi Government (under its ‘Mission Convergence’) has already estimated over 800000 households (50 lakh people) residing in slums and resettlement colonies as ‘vulnerable’.7 The survey was conducted with the intent of identifying ‘vulnerable households’ and awarding them BPL cards. Yet, this huge number is still not being considered as BPL and provided access to subsidised food available through the PDS. Dividing the poor by drawing arbitrary poverty lines is only serving the purpose of denying basic entitlements like access to cheap food to large segments of the poor population. This injustice happens even as precious resources from the exchequer get expropriated by the powers that be under the cover of public funded jamborees of the elite like the Commonwealth Games.
India continues to be home to around 25% of the world’s hungry population currently estimated at 925 million by the UN World Food Programme. Nearly half of India’s children under three years of age continue to remain malnourished alongside half of pregnant mothers who are anaemic. And even as per capita cereal supply and consumption in India falls below that of the least developed countries (156 kg in 2008), 60 million tons of foodgrain stocks are being allowed to accumulate and overflow the granaries today, to rot or to feed the rats.8 Despite all this, the ruling dispensation in India, which thrives on the slogan of ‘inclusive growth’, continues to desperately latch on to its concepts of poverty, BPL and the targeted PDS. What underlies the veneer of MDG targets and ‘inclusive growth’, therefore, is a policy culture of cruelty and deliberate injustice towards the poor.
Two Ideas of Justice
The fundamental problem with the concept of poverty being used by the World Bank, UN or India’s Planning Commission today and its policy outcomes, lies in its underlying notion of justice. The problem arises because the principal cause behind poverty, which lies in the exploitation of labour by capital on the one hand and the poor countries by the rich on the other, are permanently shoved under the rug. The entire discourse on poverty is built by taking this exploitation for granted and shying away from discussing capitalism and imperialism.
Adam Smith, who authored one of the most celebrated of treatises in political economy, The Wealth of Nations (1776) – which justifies the individual self-interest driven order under capitalism because it creates wealth and leads to greater social good – also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) which termed the disposition to ‘despise’ or ‘neglect’ of poor persons as a ‘corruption of our moral sentiments’ and forcefully urged for more ‘sympathy’.9 Karl Marx, writing almost a century later, criticised Adam Smith’s views as that of a ‘fatalist’ economist; who looks at poverty merely as a birthpang of capitalism and not as one which gets reproduced alongwith wealth under capitalism; and who thereby remains ‘indifferent’ towards the ‘sufferings of the proletarians’.10 These divergent views on poverty arise out of two notions of social justice, which need to be contradistinguished.
Underlying Adam Smith’s framework is an apologetic notion of justice, based on the categories of ‘neglect’, ‘despise’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘moral sentiments’. If we try to develop these implicit notions of injustice and justice into explicit social objectives, the former would require an a priori identification of the aspects of ‘neglect’ of the poor, on whose removal the social effort needs to be channelised. The problem is that categories like ‘neglect’ are purely subjective and have no benchmark. What comprises ‘neglect’ would always vary, both across time and societies. Therefore, what is realizable as justice would forever remain loosely defined. And within this loosely defined framework of justice, it can never be concluded, whether justice is being or not being done. Needless to say, it is this framework that drives the MDGs today.
To this complacent moral universe of justice as apology, Marx’s notion of justice delivered an electric shock. Its superiority arose from the fact that by rigorously establishing the category of class exploitation as ensconced in the production process, it provided a firm anchor to social justice. The idea of justice was dragged out from the sphere of morality and ethics into the material sphere of production, distribution and ownership of wealth. Thus defined, the attainment of ultimate justice becomes the end of exploitation. Whether a society is more or less just, or moving towards more or less justice, can also be judged on the basis of whether there is more or less exploitation. In other words, the goalposts of justice cannot be shifted.
The acute relevance of Marx’s idea of justice today is borne by the emptiness of the mainstream academic and policy discourse on poverty. However, it is argued by some that the clarity in its notion of justice is also the main weakness of Marxism, because by taking a maximalist position – end exploitation to end poverty – it actually fails to achieve either, because ending exploitation entails a radical revolution against capitalist property. Since the revolution either happens or it doesn’t, there is nothing to do in between. This confusion arises from a misunderstanding of Marxism.
What Marxism does is to historicize exploitation under capitalism, by tracing its origins through the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ into the evolution of modern industrial capitalism. This demystification of the exploitation process enables concrete praxis on the part of the exploited against their exploitation, on the one hand, and universalises that praxis, on the other. Within this framework of justice, a whole body of socio-economic rights can be clearly conceived, struggled for and actualized over time, signifying progress towards ultimate justice. This framework, moreover, suggests that efforts to stabilise and ameliorate exploitation under capitalism through policy interventions can succeed only if struggles against exploitation simultaneously persist alongside those efforts, in order to ensure progress towards ultimate justice. In the absence of those struggles or in the case of their gradual decay, exploitation will once again intensify under the spontaneous tendencies of capitalism, snatching away extant rights and entitlements. The struggle against exploitation therefore becomes the bulwark of justice for the poor under capitalism.
There are of course serious forms of oppression and inequities which exist in society that are distinct from class exploitation – based on gender, caste, race, language or ethnicity. Marx, during his lifetime, did not deal with them independently. But what he did, and uniquely so, was not to limit the notion of social justice within the bounds of exploitative property and production relations. Marxism therefore creates space for the poor, cutting across gender, caste, race, language or ethnicity, to come together to struggle against their class exploitation, advance their rights and make progress towards a society free from such exploitation. It is the weakening of such struggles today – locally and globally, both on the ground and in the realm of ideas – which has not just made the discourse on social justice poorer but also robbed the discourse on poverty of all substance and vitality.
Conclusion
The exploited in the poor countries today; the poor peasants, the wage labourers, the unemployed and self-employed petty producers; continue to live a life of drudgery, insecurity and impoverishment, in the swamp of the informal sector. They are watching the cruel joke being played on them by the national and international policy establishments, in the name of ‘poverty reduction’, ‘inclusive growth’, ‘MDGs’ and so on even as rising prices of food and fuel eat away the pittance that they make after a very hard day’s work. And even those low paying jobs have been stolen away from many of them by the global economic crisis.
These two and a half billion plus people in the poor countries are yearning for freedom from their exploitation. They will not wait and watch endlessly. History and commonsense will inexorably drive them towards the next tide of revolutionary transformations in this century.
Notes
1. Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, 2008, “The developing world is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty”, Policy Research Working Paper 4703, World Bank, 2008
2. As per the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the total number of people living below the official poverty line in the United States (US) was 39.5 million (22% of population) in the late 1950s. This had declined to 23 million by the early 1970s (11%) but rose to 31 million by 2000 (11.3%). Since then it has gradually increased to 37 million in 2005 (12.6%) and further to 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Primary source of data is the US Census Bureau. The poverty estimation methodology has been revised in the US four times since the 1950s, the last time being 1981.
3. MDG Report 2010, United Nations.
4. See Jonathan Haughton and Shahidur R. Khandker, Handbook on Poverty and Inequality
5. Regression analysis is a method of testing causal relationships between variables on the basis of statistical data.
6. The comparisons are from Himanshu, What Are These New Poverty Estimates and What Do They Imply? 25 October 2008, Economic and Political Weekly
7. See Dipa Sinha, “PDS in Delhi” and Albeena Shakil, “On Mission Convergence”, Commission Papers for Delhi State Conference, All India Democratic Women’s Association, September, 2010.
8. See Utsa Patnaik, “The Early Kalidasa Syndrome”, The Hindu, 13 September 2010. Also see Arindam Banerjee, “The Political Economy of Rotting Foodstocks”, 17 September 2010, http://www.pragoti.org/node/4130
9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments Part I, Section III, Chapter III, 1759.
10. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, “The Method”, 1847.
Prasenjit Bose, Newsclick, September 20 2010
“Poverty rates have reduced substantially in the world but the number of people in risk of falling into poverty has increased” announces the World Bank PovertyNet as world leaders gather in New York today to attend the UN summit on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The agenda for the summit has already been set. The latest UN review of the MDGs says:
"The world is on track to meet the MDG target of halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day between 1990 and 2015. Overall poverty rates fell from 46% in 1990 to 27% in 2005 in developing regions, and progress in many developing countries is being sustained. This is despite setbacks caused by the 2008-09 economic downturn and the effects of the food and energy crises."
The UN is apparently not satisfied by this progress. The Secretary General has reminded the world leaders of their Millennium Declaration pledge ‘for a better world’ adopted in 2001 and urged upon the international community to fulfil their promises. The unkept promises have been identified by the UN: a $152.7 billion deficit in official development assistance by the OECD donors vis-à-vis the UN target till 2009. The summit would therefore predictably end by further urging upon the rich countries to step up assistance to fill the aid ‘gap’ in order to match the MDG slogan: ‘We can end poverty’. So is poverty going to ‘end’? Let us take a closer look.
Sham of ‘Ending’ Poverty
The poverty reduction being claimed by the World Bank and the UN is based on the following finding:1
"Between 1981 and 2005, the share of the population in the developing world living below $1.25 a day was halved from 52 to 25%…reducing the number of poor by 500 million (from 1.9 billion to 1.4 billion) between 1981 and 2005."
How can the fact of 500 million people increasing their earnings beyond $1.25 a day, in a span of 24 years, be construed as a reduction of poverty? The same research also reports that in these 24 years the number of people earning less than $2 a day across the world remained unchanged at around 2.5 billion. Evidently, a bulk of those who have started earning more than $1.25 a day in these 24 years have continued to earn less than $2 a day. Therefore they have continued to remain in the ‘risk of falling into poverty’. But can those who are at the ‘risk of falling into poverty’ be at all considered to have moved out of poverty in the first place?
The problematic nature of this measure of poverty becomes clearer if we compare it with the poverty line of the US, the richest country in the world measured in terms of GDP. There is no single poverty line the US. Poverty estimates are done on the basis of household income thresholds, with different thresholds depending on the number of family members and dependents in a household. If we take the weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2009 as a benchmark, the poverty line in the US stands roughly at $15 per day (per capita). The poverty line is a little less for households with higher family sizes, but even for the highest family size it would not be less than $13 per day (per capita). The poverty rate as per the latest findings of the US Census Bureau stood at 14.3% in 2009, up from 13.2% in 2008. The total number of poor people in the US increased from 39.8 million in 2008 to 43.6 million in 2009.2
Thus, poverty is increasing even in the richest country of the world, in terms of its official poverty line. And if everything else remains the same, the 500 million people living in the poor countries, who have moved from earning around $1 a day to $2 a day in 24 years as per the World Bank finding, will take at least another 264 years to reach the current minimum poverty threshold of the US at $13 a day. Yet, it is being claimed on the basis of this finding that ‘poverty rates’ are coming down.
The facts revealed by the latest stocktaking of the MDGs by the UN are more telling.3 The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty (below $1.25 a day) will be 920 million in 2015. The effects of the economic crisis will push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty in 2010. Moreover, the absolute number of undernourished people increased from 817 million in 1990 to 830 million in 2007, i.e. an increase of 13 million. In effect, therefore, we are witnessing an increase in both poverty and hunger even as the world is supposedly ‘on track’ to meet the MDG target. What a sham.
Inane Discourse
What sustains this sham is the mainstream academic discourse on poverty, which evades any serious analysis of the causes behind it and obsessively revolves around issues of definitions and measurements. It is not that definitions and measurements of poverty are irrelevant. But making that the starting point of analysis serves the purpose of relegating the causes behind poverty to the background. The entire focus shifts to whether poverty has increased here or declined there and endless hair splitting on the direction and extent of change. When causes are at all discussed, they are done so within a framework, which through a chain of circular reasoning brings the discourse back to definitions and measurements of poverty. The question of causes gets buried in the process.
For instance, the first chapter of World Bank’s Handbook on Poverty and Inequality is titled ‘What Is Poverty and Why Measure It?’4 This chapter defines poverty as the ‘pronounced deprivation in well being’. What is well being? Conventionally, it is linked to whether ‘enough’ income or consumption is earned by people to put them above some ‘adequate minimum threshold’. This definition of threshold has been progressively expanded over time by including access to specific types of goods and services like food, housing, education and health. The latest approach further broadens the notion of well being to include ‘capabilities of the individual to function in society’, like ‘political freedoms’. The stated purposes of defining well being and measuring poverty is: “to keep poor people on the agenda…identify the poor people…target appropriate interventions…to help poor people”. But how do we ‘help’ poor people without understanding the causes of their poverty?
This comes in the eighth chapter of the Handbook, titled ‘Understanding the Determinants of Poverty’, which states that while a ‘poverty profile’ is only meant to describe the pattern of poverty and not explaining the causes of poverty, “yet, a satisfactory explanation of why some people are poor is essential if we are to be able to tackle the roots of poverty”. So at last we come to the roots. So what are they? We are served a whole menu of ‘main determinants’ of poverty, which are summarized by the authors themselves in a table (given below).
What is remarkable about this menu of ‘determinants’ of poverty is that it neither suggests any hierarchy within these myriad determinants, nor any cause effect relationship. As per the World Bank Handbook, poverty can be caused by anything, from typhoons and earthquakes to age or ethnicity. It may also be caused by lack of access to assets or lack of proximity to schools and clinics. It may perhaps be caused by the social structure and inequality too. We need to find out or establish through regression analysis, which of the determinants correlates better with poverty.5 We simply do not know yet.
To be fair to the authors of the Handbook, they are acutely aware of the vacuity of such analysis. They admit that “the ‘causes’ of poverty identified are ‘immediate’ (or ‘proximate’) causes, but not necessarily ‘deep’ causes”, and that while regression analysis can show lack of education as a cause behind poverty, it cannot explain why some people lack education. They further accept that “the weakest part of poverty analysis…is developing a clear understanding of the fundamental causes of poverty in a way that leads naturally to an effective strategy to combat poverty.” Yet, they justify their methodology in the following terms: “Because there is no reason to believe that the root causes of poverty are the same everywhere, country-specific analysis is essential.”
So there may be root causes of poverty. But these root causes are different for different countries. In order to get to those root causes, we have to do ‘country-specific analysis’. But if we do not have any a priori theory of the root causes of poverty, on what basis do we do the analysis? We go back to the first chapter of the Handbook on definitions and measurements of poverty. It is this circular reasoning which contributes to the inanity visible in the World Bank PovertyNet we noted at the beginning: “poverty rates have reduced substantially in the world but the number of people in the risk of falling into poverty has increased.”
Why is the international poverty line set at $1.25 per day? As per the World Bank’s explanation, it is the average of poverty lines found in the 15 poorest countries. But what accounts for the average poverty line of 15 poorest countries being set at $1.25 per day? The rich and affluent sections in many of these countries earn several hundred times more than that. Yet, the bare subsistence level in the poorest countries is set as the standard for international poverty. And even then, poverty alleviation targets are not being met. Just imagine the consequence of the entire poverty discourse, if the American poverty line of $15 per day is made the international poverty line.
Policy Cruelty
These conceptual inanities have grave repercussions for policy and the plight of the poor. Let us take the case of India, which is often showcased as a success story in today’s world. The national poverty line, obtained by weighting the World Bank’s $1.25 per day rural and urban lines with respective population shares, is Rs. 16.30 per day, as per which 41.6% of people in India are poor. However, the Indian Planning Commission’s poverty estimates for 2004-05, based on poverty lines of Rs 11.88 per day for rural areas and Rs 17.95 per day for urban areas, shows poverty in India to be only 27%. In contrast, the proportion of people not being able to acquire a minimum of 2,100 calories consumption in India is 62%, way above both the poverty estimates.6
What happens as a consequence of this unhealthy competition, between national and international policy establishments, to downplay and underestimate poverty? In India’s national capital Delhi, the below poverty line (BPL) population is estimated by the Planning Commission as only 2.29 million, which in a city of over 15 million population is a gross underestimate. Moreover, while only 418000 households in Delhi currently have BPL ration cards, a survey conducted by the Delhi Government (under its ‘Mission Convergence’) has already estimated over 800000 households (50 lakh people) residing in slums and resettlement colonies as ‘vulnerable’.7 The survey was conducted with the intent of identifying ‘vulnerable households’ and awarding them BPL cards. Yet, this huge number is still not being considered as BPL and provided access to subsidised food available through the PDS. Dividing the poor by drawing arbitrary poverty lines is only serving the purpose of denying basic entitlements like access to cheap food to large segments of the poor population. This injustice happens even as precious resources from the exchequer get expropriated by the powers that be under the cover of public funded jamborees of the elite like the Commonwealth Games.
India continues to be home to around 25% of the world’s hungry population currently estimated at 925 million by the UN World Food Programme. Nearly half of India’s children under three years of age continue to remain malnourished alongside half of pregnant mothers who are anaemic. And even as per capita cereal supply and consumption in India falls below that of the least developed countries (156 kg in 2008), 60 million tons of foodgrain stocks are being allowed to accumulate and overflow the granaries today, to rot or to feed the rats.8 Despite all this, the ruling dispensation in India, which thrives on the slogan of ‘inclusive growth’, continues to desperately latch on to its concepts of poverty, BPL and the targeted PDS. What underlies the veneer of MDG targets and ‘inclusive growth’, therefore, is a policy culture of cruelty and deliberate injustice towards the poor.
Two Ideas of Justice
The fundamental problem with the concept of poverty being used by the World Bank, UN or India’s Planning Commission today and its policy outcomes, lies in its underlying notion of justice. The problem arises because the principal cause behind poverty, which lies in the exploitation of labour by capital on the one hand and the poor countries by the rich on the other, are permanently shoved under the rug. The entire discourse on poverty is built by taking this exploitation for granted and shying away from discussing capitalism and imperialism.
Adam Smith, who authored one of the most celebrated of treatises in political economy, The Wealth of Nations (1776) – which justifies the individual self-interest driven order under capitalism because it creates wealth and leads to greater social good – also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) which termed the disposition to ‘despise’ or ‘neglect’ of poor persons as a ‘corruption of our moral sentiments’ and forcefully urged for more ‘sympathy’.9 Karl Marx, writing almost a century later, criticised Adam Smith’s views as that of a ‘fatalist’ economist; who looks at poverty merely as a birthpang of capitalism and not as one which gets reproduced alongwith wealth under capitalism; and who thereby remains ‘indifferent’ towards the ‘sufferings of the proletarians’.10 These divergent views on poverty arise out of two notions of social justice, which need to be contradistinguished.
Underlying Adam Smith’s framework is an apologetic notion of justice, based on the categories of ‘neglect’, ‘despise’, ‘sympathy’ and ‘moral sentiments’. If we try to develop these implicit notions of injustice and justice into explicit social objectives, the former would require an a priori identification of the aspects of ‘neglect’ of the poor, on whose removal the social effort needs to be channelised. The problem is that categories like ‘neglect’ are purely subjective and have no benchmark. What comprises ‘neglect’ would always vary, both across time and societies. Therefore, what is realizable as justice would forever remain loosely defined. And within this loosely defined framework of justice, it can never be concluded, whether justice is being or not being done. Needless to say, it is this framework that drives the MDGs today.
To this complacent moral universe of justice as apology, Marx’s notion of justice delivered an electric shock. Its superiority arose from the fact that by rigorously establishing the category of class exploitation as ensconced in the production process, it provided a firm anchor to social justice. The idea of justice was dragged out from the sphere of morality and ethics into the material sphere of production, distribution and ownership of wealth. Thus defined, the attainment of ultimate justice becomes the end of exploitation. Whether a society is more or less just, or moving towards more or less justice, can also be judged on the basis of whether there is more or less exploitation. In other words, the goalposts of justice cannot be shifted.
The acute relevance of Marx’s idea of justice today is borne by the emptiness of the mainstream academic and policy discourse on poverty. However, it is argued by some that the clarity in its notion of justice is also the main weakness of Marxism, because by taking a maximalist position – end exploitation to end poverty – it actually fails to achieve either, because ending exploitation entails a radical revolution against capitalist property. Since the revolution either happens or it doesn’t, there is nothing to do in between. This confusion arises from a misunderstanding of Marxism.
What Marxism does is to historicize exploitation under capitalism, by tracing its origins through the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ into the evolution of modern industrial capitalism. This demystification of the exploitation process enables concrete praxis on the part of the exploited against their exploitation, on the one hand, and universalises that praxis, on the other. Within this framework of justice, a whole body of socio-economic rights can be clearly conceived, struggled for and actualized over time, signifying progress towards ultimate justice. This framework, moreover, suggests that efforts to stabilise and ameliorate exploitation under capitalism through policy interventions can succeed only if struggles against exploitation simultaneously persist alongside those efforts, in order to ensure progress towards ultimate justice. In the absence of those struggles or in the case of their gradual decay, exploitation will once again intensify under the spontaneous tendencies of capitalism, snatching away extant rights and entitlements. The struggle against exploitation therefore becomes the bulwark of justice for the poor under capitalism.
There are of course serious forms of oppression and inequities which exist in society that are distinct from class exploitation – based on gender, caste, race, language or ethnicity. Marx, during his lifetime, did not deal with them independently. But what he did, and uniquely so, was not to limit the notion of social justice within the bounds of exploitative property and production relations. Marxism therefore creates space for the poor, cutting across gender, caste, race, language or ethnicity, to come together to struggle against their class exploitation, advance their rights and make progress towards a society free from such exploitation. It is the weakening of such struggles today – locally and globally, both on the ground and in the realm of ideas – which has not just made the discourse on social justice poorer but also robbed the discourse on poverty of all substance and vitality.
Conclusion
The exploited in the poor countries today; the poor peasants, the wage labourers, the unemployed and self-employed petty producers; continue to live a life of drudgery, insecurity and impoverishment, in the swamp of the informal sector. They are watching the cruel joke being played on them by the national and international policy establishments, in the name of ‘poverty reduction’, ‘inclusive growth’, ‘MDGs’ and so on even as rising prices of food and fuel eat away the pittance that they make after a very hard day’s work. And even those low paying jobs have been stolen away from many of them by the global economic crisis.
These two and a half billion plus people in the poor countries are yearning for freedom from their exploitation. They will not wait and watch endlessly. History and commonsense will inexorably drive them towards the next tide of revolutionary transformations in this century.
Notes
1. Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, 2008, “The developing world is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty”, Policy Research Working Paper 4703, World Bank, 2008
2. As per the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the total number of people living below the official poverty line in the United States (US) was 39.5 million (22% of population) in the late 1950s. This had declined to 23 million by the early 1970s (11%) but rose to 31 million by 2000 (11.3%). Since then it has gradually increased to 37 million in 2005 (12.6%) and further to 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. Primary source of data is the US Census Bureau. The poverty estimation methodology has been revised in the US four times since the 1950s, the last time being 1981.
3. MDG Report 2010, United Nations.
4. See Jonathan Haughton and Shahidur R. Khandker, Handbook on Poverty and Inequality
5. Regression analysis is a method of testing causal relationships between variables on the basis of statistical data.
6. The comparisons are from Himanshu, What Are These New Poverty Estimates and What Do They Imply? 25 October 2008, Economic and Political Weekly
7. See Dipa Sinha, “PDS in Delhi” and Albeena Shakil, “On Mission Convergence”, Commission Papers for Delhi State Conference, All India Democratic Women’s Association, September, 2010.
8. See Utsa Patnaik, “The Early Kalidasa Syndrome”, The Hindu, 13 September 2010. Also see Arindam Banerjee, “The Political Economy of Rotting Foodstocks”, 17 September 2010, http://www.pragoti.org/node/4130
9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments Part I, Section III, Chapter III, 1759.
10. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, “The Method”, 1847.
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