Land Loss, Poverty and Hunger

By Anuradha Mittal, International Forum on Globalization. Posted December 3, 2001.

According to the free market ideology, the best way to fight global hunger and improve the economic situation of farmers in developing countries is through trade and investment liberalization, production for export, and cuts in domestic support. These policy changes, however, have severely undermined food security and the livelihoods of small farmers in developing countries.

In India, according to the Indian government's own estimates, over two million small and marginal farmers now lose their land or are alienated from it each year. The number of landless in rural areas has multiplied over the past few decades from 27.9 million in 1951 to over 50 million in the 1990s. Many of the displaced farmers have ended up as daily-wage laborers for the Public Works Department, working on national highways, suffering from poisonous fumes, heat and dust, and earning less than a dollar for a whole day's toil, having long sold off their precious cattle.

Hundreds of thousands of other displaced farmers have tried to find refuge in large cities such as Delhi and Bombay, eking a miserable livelihood through piecemeal work away from their families. Others send their young children to work in factories or sell them as child beggars, or even sell their own body parts to make ends meet. And the situation is only set to become worse. According to the World Bank 's own projections, the number of people migrating from rural areas into the cities will soon exceed the combined populations of the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Part of the reason for this trend can be traced to the impact of imports. In August 1999, for example, soybean and soy oil import policy was liberalized in India. As a result, subsidized imports of soybeans were dumped on the Indian market. These imports totalled three million tons in one year (a 60 percent rise compared to earlier years) and cost nearly $1 billion. Within one growing season, prices crashed by more than two-thirds, and millions of oilseed-producing farmers had lost their market, unable even to recover what they had spent on cultivation. The entire edible oil production and processing industry was also destroyed. Millions of small mills have closed down. Another reason for massive farmer displacement is that food-growing land is being taken over from small farmers by an elite of large companies to produce cash crops such as flowers, or luxury commodities such as shrimp, for export. For those farmers that remain on the land, this corporatization of agriculture has clearly increased poverty, locking them into a new form of bondage with unfair and unequal contracts that deprive them of the majority of the revenue generated by the exports. For example, farmers in Punjab who were contracted by Pepsico to grow tomatoes, received only Rs.0.75 per kg while the market price was Rs. 2.00. Elsewhere, it 's even worse. For every dollar that a U.S. consumer pays for a melon from El Salvador, farmers earn less than one penny, the winners are U.S.-based shippers, brokers, wholesalers, and retailers.

The phasing out of fertiliser subsidies under IMF conditionalities and the increase in the price of farm inputs have also pushed a large number of small-and medium-sized Indian farmers into bankruptcy. One result has been an epidemic of suicide among small farmers in India, desperate to escape the humiliation that comes with bankruptcy and indebtedness. In 1999, more than 500 cotton farmers from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab and Haryana sacrificed their lives.

Removal of food subsidies in India, meanwhile, has led to a decrease in the amount of food purchased from the public distribution system. The off-take of rice declined from 10.1 metric tons in 1991-92 to 6.9 metric tons in 1995-96 and the off-take of wheat went down from 8.8 metric tons to 3.8 metric tons. And all while cereal exports have gone up from 1.4 percent to 3.4 percent.

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