Annie Zaidi: Sowing seeds of discontent

Remember Civics? Remember a text-book with the preamble to the Constitution printed on the first page? Remember: We the people of India having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic…?

I’ve often heard debates about how secular, or democratic, India is. But since we have a flag, our own currency, elections and armies, we rarely think about sovereignty, which Merriam-Webster defines as ‘supreme control’ or ‘freedom from external control’. In giving ourselves a sovereign republic, we were throwing off external controls.

Also, Wiktionary defines sovereignty as the state of making laws and controlling resources without the coercion of other nations. In other words, we are sovereign only if we use collective resources to our own advantage. So, here’s a question. Does food qualify as a resource?

Yes? What about traditional knowledge? Yes? Do I hear you say that it is imperative that India holds on to her strengths in the food department?

But food comes from seeds. And seeds… Well, there’s a seed floating around nowadays that is not ours. We don’t own the knowledge and fertility that’s embedded in that seed. Foreign corporations do and they won’t allow us to save a fraction of the crop for using as seed next year. In fact, corporations like Monsanto sell expensive seed with built-in ‘terminator’ technologies, so that the crop is useless for re-sowing. Does that spell ‘justice, liberty, equality’ to you?

The truly weird thing is that we don’t need those seeds. India, thanks to the Nehruvian-era stress on food sovereignty, invested in agricultural research. We grow enough and tonnes to spare. People are still hungry but that’s a distribution problem. We don’t have a productivity problem. Our godowns are overflowing.

We do have other problems. Nutrient diversity is down. The water table is down. Pesticide and chemical fertilizer overuse damage both the environment and human health. There’s a global emphasis on organic farming. But India seems to be falling in love with bio-tech seeds promoted by foreign firms.

This, despite thousands of farmer suicides in the cotton belt, which invested in ‘high-yield’ Bt Cotton. In fact, when Andhra Pradesh used the Essential commodities Act to regulate seed prices, Monsanto actually sued the state!

So, here’s a firm that not only patents food, then sells seeds at prohibitive prices, it also sues governments for refusing to allow it to do as it pleases! And yet, states like Rajasthan and Gujarat are setting up private-public partnerships with Monsanto.

So farmer groups, under the banner of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), decided to celebrate Quit India Day (August 9) by asking Monsanto to get out. They want the state to stop GM crop trials and work out a system of seed self-reliance instead. They’re denouncing the ‘bio-piracy’ that blocks access to seeds through ‘collaborative research’.

You may or may not agree with the ‘Quit India’ call, but remember that seeds can be contaminated, or destroyed. Crops can fail again, and again. Famines can happen. Terrible famines have happened during colonial times and one reason was that farmers couldn’t choose what to grow.

Today, nobody can make farmers grow, say, indigo, instead of maize. But what if there’s a monopoly on seeds, or patents on nearly everything they want to sow? What if external forces control what we can or can’t grow?

Monsanto aims to do precisely this. Its history isn’t just checkered. It’s a litany of unethical (if not outright illegal) practices. Knowing this, why are we holding the door open for Monsanto? Why, when it resists labelling of genetically modified food? Why, when it violates our laws? Why? To what end?

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)