economy: production and consumption
Pakistan: Corporate hybrid seeds flood efforts in agricultural reconstruction
> by Roots for Equity, PANAP and GRAIN - 07 December 2010
The flooding that submerged nearly a fifth of Pakistan starting in July this year displaced about 20 million people and killed nearly 2,000. This number of people whose property and livelihoods were destroyed surpassed the number of combined victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the Haiti earthquake earlier this year. Without a doubt, it was one of Pakistan’s worst floods ever. “The destruction isn’t over yet. A big threat looms in the way the government is (...) read
date of on-line publication : 21 December 2010
Is bamboo a tree or a grass?
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/2 (...)
The definition is contested as the answer has immense economic implications. If bamboo is a tree or timber, it belongs to the forest department and can be auctioned to the paper and pulp industry, often at throwaway rates.
If it is a grass, then it would be classified as a minor forest produce and people would have the right to cut bamboo for sale or for value addition by making furniture or baskets.
The Indian Forest Act 1927, the bible for forest managers in the country, says “forest produce” is what is found in or brought from a forest. This includes trees and leaves and plants that are not trees. Furthermore, trees include palms and bamboo. Timber is defined as trees, fallen or felled. Over the years, foresters have interpreted these provisions to mean that bamboo, being a tree, is timber and, therefore, under the control of the department. The legacy passed down from generations of forest managers has meant that this grass-like tree is not included in the list of minor forest produce.
The minor produce of a forest is everything valuable that is not timber. This produce, from tendu used in beedi manufacture to lac resin and tamarind, is big bucks business. It is also the main source of earning a living for the people who live in and around the country’s forests. The opportunity is to use this ecological wealth for building economic wellbeing of the people, mostly poor, in these rich regions. But forest policy has worked deliberately to destroy this option.
So over the past years different state governments have nationalised different produce and differently handed them over to either federations or contractors or corporations to collect and sell. People, who live in the forests, have no right to sell the nationalised minor forest produce, other than to governments. They are wage labourers and collectors for contractors and forest departments.
B D Sharma, a former civil servant who has spent a lifetime campaigning for the rights of tribal communities to forest produce, will tell you that many attempts have been made to correct this distortion. In 1974, when the tribal sub plan was conceptualised, it was agreed that the collector would be the owner of the produce. But even as the policy got operationalised governments took control over the produce, leaving collectors to be just collectors.
Then in 1996, the Central Act for panchayats in Scheduled V (tribal) areas was passed. It directed state governments to ensure that in these areas gram sabha (the village assembly) would be given the “powers of ownership of minor forest produce”. But even before the ink on the Act was dry, the resource battle was lost again.
First, the forest department objected, saying PESA (as this act is known) did not define what constitutes minor forest produce. As Sanjay Upadhyay, a lawyer working in this area, points out this is when the Indian Forest Act does not define minor forest produce. Second, states made rules to bypass these provisions.
The fight for the minor produce does not stop here. In 2006, the Forest Rights Act (FRA) for the first time defined minor forest produce as including bamboo and tendu and many other things. It also gave tribals and other traditional forest dwellers the “right of ownership, access to collect, use and dispose of minor forest produce, which has been traditionally collected within or outside village boundaries.” Now the fat is in the fire. Tribals and other traditional forest dwellers have the right to both collect and sell bamboo.
What happens now? As my colleagues found when they traversed the country’s tribal districts, the right exists only on paper. Of the 2.9 million claims settled under the FRA, only 1.6 per cent pertained to community rights. Worse, virtually no right of any community has been recognised for minor forest produce. They noted the missing right was deliberate. Governments across the tribal districts ensured no information was ever provided to people that this right was available. The technique was simple: the form issued to people to ask for rights left out this provision.
Two villages did ask. Menda Lekha and Marda in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra asked for the community right over their forest and its produce. The right was recognised. But as Mohan Hirabai Hiralal, an activist working with the villagers, will tell you this legal right is still not worth the paper it is written on. The forest department now says that people can indeed have control over the sale of the bamboo, but they cannot take it out of the forest. The transit rules over forest produce do not allow for transportation of any produce unless it has been “authorised”. The state forest department is busy inserting provisions to say that people have rights over the minor forest produce, but only if it is for self use.
The forest department will tell you these controls are needed to protect forests. But forests in India are the habitat of millions of people. The conservation of forests will require more productive benefits. The challenge is to use the green wealth and also regenerate it and increase it for the future. Putting a fence around it and negating its value as the livelihood of millions will not do.
So, let us hope that this time the definition of bamboo will remain settled. It is a tree-grass, one that can give a million new shoots and provide a million new jobs to the people.
Source: Down To Earth, Dec 15, 2010
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date of on-line publication : 21 December 2010
Enough is enough : Ideas for a sustainable economy in a world of finite resources
Enough is Enough is the single most complete collection of policy initiatives, tools, and reforms for an economy that makes enough its goal instead of more. This report features the papers given at the Steady State Economy Conference, Leeds 2010, published by CASSE and Economic Justice for All. The report deals with three main points : Part one describes why economic growth is becoming an obsolete goal and provides a crystal-clear description of the desirable alternative ; Part two (...) read
date of on-line publication : 29 November 2010
European retailers: threatening livelihoods in India
The role of major supermarkets like Tesco in wiping out small retailers across Europe is well known. Now the giants have India in their sights. For a country in which small-scale retail employs 33 million people, what kind of impact will this have? Read more read
date of on-line publication : 21 October 2010
Where did our money go?
> Banks set to demand fresh bail-out in 2011
Despite at least £1.2 trillion of taxpayers’ money being put at risk to bail out the banking system, many of the major high street banks may well be asking for another hand-out from the public purse in 2011, according to new research from independent think-tank nef (the new economics foundation). These figures raise the question of whether the Government is aware of the problem, and if so, whether the scale of planned cuts to public services is being influenced by the likelihood of another (...) read
date of on-line publication : 21 October 2010
Sri Lanka. Contradictions of capitalism
One of the major tasks that face progressive political forces in Sri Lanka today is to identify and tackle the major social contradictions generated by more than three decades of liberal economic policies. These interventions have to be at the local as well as global level. It now appears certain that the stability created by the end of the war is bound to intensify the capitalist relations in the country’s economy, and unless specific targeted policies are put in place, the social (...) read
date of on-line publication : 21 October 2010
dossier
RICE LANDS: STILL UNDER SIEGE
This is an updated version of the first booklet "Rice lands: Fields of Agony and Fields of Hope". It describes the grabbing of rice lands all over Asia by corporations and governments and the destruction this wreaks on poor rice farming communities. Land is becoming more and more a critical issue as the right to land and productive resources is fundamental to genuine agrarian reform and food sovereignty. This booklet drives home the fact that the right to land is tantamount to the right to (...) read
date of on-line publication : 7 October 2010
Garment Strike in Phnom Penh Reaches Critical Mass
> Will Adidas, Gap, and Puma Pay Workers A Living Wage?
On Monday, following a wave of strikes across Asia, around 60,000 textile workers in Phnom Penh walked off factory lines, protesting pay that stands at around half the living wage. By Wednesday, according to Kong Athit, Secretary General of the Cambodian Labour Confederation, the number of strikers had swelled to over three times that. By some estimates, around two thirds of the 297,000 garment workers and 48,000 athletic-shoe makers refused to work in protest of low wages. (The Garment (...) read
date of on-line publication : 7 October 2010
Ethiopians say Indians grabbing land. Indian farmers claim it is official
RAM KARUTURI, the world’s largest rose grower, calls it a situation that needs immediate intervention. Else, he is sure the rush of Indians to Africa will ebb to a trickle, which, in turn, could have serious implications as ethnic tensions with the locals are slowly, but steadily, rising in some parts of the continent. The hub of the crisis is Gambela, one of Ethiopia’s nine states, for long starved of investment. To reverse the situation, they invited Indian companies to boost its near- (...) read
date of on-line publication : 7 October 2010
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Trade Invaders – How big business is driving the EU-India free trade negotiations
A new joint report from Corporate Europe Observatory and India FDI Watch reveals how, in the negotiations for a trade deal between the EU and India, the EU Commission and the Indian government have handed the agenda over to corporate lobby groups. This big-business-first agenda will put at risk the livelihoods of millions of small farmers, street traders and patients. The report shows how negotiators on both sides have entered into a symbiotic working relationship with big corporations and (...) read
date of on-line publication : 7 October 2010
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