This elite thinks it can do a better job than nature by changing the essence of food and the genetic core of the food supply (via synthetic biology and genetic engineering). The plan also involves removing farmers from the land (AI-driven farmerless farms) and filling much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels. Although the food system has problems that need addressing, this misguided agenda is a recipe for food insecurity that no one voted for.

Throughout the world, from the Netherlands to India, farmers are protesting. The protests might appear to have little in common. But they do. Farmers are increasingly finding it difficult to make a living, whether, for instance, because of neoliberal trade policies that lead to the import of produce that undermines domestic production and undercuts prices, the withdrawal of state support or the implementation of net-zero emissions policies that set unrealistic targets.

The common thread is that, by one way or another, farming is deliberately being made impossible or financially non-viable. The aim is to drive most farmers off the land and ram through an agenda that by its very nature seems likely to produce shortages and undermine food security.

A ‘one world agriculture’ global agenda is being promoted by the likes of the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. It involves a vision of food and farming that sees companies such as Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and Cargill working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms, laboratory engineered ‘food’ and retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and e-commerce platforms at the commanding heights of the economy.

The agenda is the brainchild of a digital-corporate-financial complex that wants to transform and control all aspects of life and human behaviour. This complex forms part of an authoritarian global elite that has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally via the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other supranational organisations, including influential think tanks and foundations (Gates, Rockefeller etc).

Its agenda for food and farming is euphemistically called a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much-promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with high-tech ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘green’ (net-zero) production – with ‘sustainability’ being the mantra.

Integral to this ‘food transition’ is the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a commentary that has been carefully constructed and promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology tied to carbon farming and carbon trading.

The ‘food transition’ involves locking farmers (at least those farmers who will remain in farming) further into a corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and institutional investors and speculators with no connection to farming who regard agriculture, food commodities and agricultural land as mere financial assets. These farmers will be reduced to corporate profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

This predatory commercialisation of the countryside uses flawed premises and climate alarmism to legitimise the roll-out of technologies to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

In society in general, we also see the questioning of official narratives discouraged, censored and marginalised. We saw this with the policies and the ‘science’ that were used to legitimise COVID-related state actions. A wealthy elite increasingly funds science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.

This elite has the power to shut down genuine debate and to smear and censor others who question the dominant narrative. The prevailing thinking is that the problems humanity face are all to be solved through technical innovation determined by plutocrats and centralised power.

This haughty mindset (or outright arrogance) leads to and is symptomatic of an authoritarianism that seeks to impose a range of technologies on humanity with no democratic oversight. This includes self-transmitting vaccines, the genetic engineering of plants and humans, synthetic food, geoengineering and transhumanism.

What we see is a misguided eco-modernist paradigm that concentrates power and privileges techno-scientific expertise (a form of technocratic exceptionalism). At the same time, historical power relations (often rooted in agriculture and colonialism) and their legacies within and between societies across the world are conveniently ignored and depoliticised. Technology is not the cure-all for the destructive impacts of poverty, inequality, dispossession, imperialism or class exploitation.

When it comes to the technologies and policies being rolled out in the agriculture sector, these phenomena will be reinforced and further entrenched – and that includes illness and poor health, which have markedly increased as a result of the modern food we eat and the agrochemicals and practices already used by the corporations pushing for the ‘food transition’. However, that then opens up other money-spinning techno-fix opportunities in the life sciences sector for investors like BlackRock that invest in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

But in a neoliberal privatised economy that has often facilitated the rise of members of the controlling wealthy elite, it is reasonable to assume that its members possess certain assumptions of how the world works and should continue to work: a world based on deregulation with limited oversight and the hegemony of private capital, and a world led by private individuals like Bill Gates who think they know best.

Whether through, for instance, the patenting of life forms, carbon trading, entrenching market (corporate) dependency or land investments, their eco-modern policies serve as cover for generating and amassing further wealth and for cementing their control.

So, it should come as little surprise that powerful people who have contempt for democratic principles (and by implication, ordinary people) believe they have some divine right to undermine food security, close down debate, enrich themselves further courtesy of their technologies and policies and gamble with humanity’s future.

The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage. 

Courtesy: Counter Currents

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Farmers’ children were 21.1 percentage points less likely to take up farming in 2012 than in 2005, their likelihood down to 32.4%, while the children of agricultural and other labourers were 4.1 percentage points less likely to pursue the same occupation as their fathers, the likelihood, 58.6%, the study noted.

For the first time since Independence, India saw a shift of surplus labour from agriculture to the non-agricultural sectors, as employment in agriculture fell in absolute numbers, Divya Prakash, co-author of the study and a research associate at JustJobs Network told IndiaSpend. (Read more about India’s unemployment crisis at https://www.indiaspend.com/category/indias-job-crisis/.)

Reduced employment in agriculture can largely be explained by the fact that more young people are acquiring an education, and with it comes the expectation of a better job, Sabina Dewan, co-author of the study, and president and executive director of JustJobs Network, told IndiaSpend, “The quality of jobs is as important as the quantity of jobs.”

The study examined the evolution of the international discourse on job quality and economic mobility, the “missing ingredient” in the discourse on job quality.

It used the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS-I), a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households conducted in 2004-2005, and IHDS-II (2011-12), which re-interviewed 83% of the same households.

“This dataset provides a unique opportunity to study whether economic mobility improved over 2005-2012,” the study noted.

Fewer farmers’ children taking to farming
The intergenerational mobility index,which measures the likelihood of children pursuing the same occupation as their fathers, showed that the likelihood declined for agricultural and other labourers from 62.7% to 58.6%, and from 53.5% to 32.4% for farmers.

“During [2005-2012], for the first time in a post-Independence era, India saw a Lewisian structural change–shift of surplus labour from agricultural to non-agricultural sector–as employment in the agricultural sector fell in absolute numbers,” said Prakash. “There was a decline in the share of children following in their fathers’ footsteps; many left agriculture or other rural labour and farming-related occupations moving into the non-agricultural sector.”

This means that children moved out of agriculture to non-agricultural sectors, especially construction, for higher wages. A;though there was intergenerational income mobility, there was no evidence for upward intergenerational occupational mobility for children-fathers of both occupational groups, he added. 

Seventy-six percent of farmers would prefer to do some work other than farming and 61% would prefer to be employed in cities because of better education, health and employment avenues, Down To Earth reported on March 12, 2018, based on a survey report by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies.

India’s fast-expanding gig economy, involving app-based cab hailing and food delivery services, employs many workers who hail from rural or semi-urban homes, many of them either farmers or children of farmers, IndiaSpend reported on June 4, 2019.

According to the National Sample Survey, between 2004-05 and 2011-12, the number of farmers in rural areas fell by 19 million to 141 million and the number of landless labourers declined 19% to 69 million, Prakash added.

Yet, the number of people working as professionals (scientists, economists, teachers, jurists, etc.)  whose parents were low-skilled workers (launderers, carpenters, miners, painters, etc.) declined by 8%, while their share in low-skilled occupations increased by the same amount.

This implies that opportunities for “upward mobility are few and [those] for backward mobility are very high,” said Prakash. Persons from upper castes and urban regions have a higher probability of moving up in terms of occupation and vice-versa.

Source: The Evolving Discourse on Job Quality From Normative Frameworks to Measurement Indicators: The Indian Example (January 2019)

Source: The Evolving Discourse on Job Quality From Normative Frameworks to Measurement Indicators: The Indian Example (January 2019)

Meanwhile, the number of people who followed their fathers into professions and lower-skilled occupations increased 3.1 percentage points and 8.1 percentage points, respectively.
Improvement in real income between 2005 and 2012

The non-directional income mobility index, which measures the magnitude of income change, is 1.165 for India as a whole, while the directional mobility index is 0.949–both over the period 2004-05 to 2011-12. The positive index value for directional mobility implies that real income has increased, indicating improved economic well-being.

Every state in India has witnessed positive income mobility, although the change has been “unequal”, the study noted. Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya have witnessed the highest income mobility, in that order.

Income mobility was positive for the three north-eastern states (Mizoram, Sikkim, Tripura) but low in magnitude. The proportion of households here that saw their overall household income decline was higher than the proportion of households that experienced an increase, Prakash said, adding that this is why overall income mobility was unequal. The overall household income of these three states was marginally higher in 2012 compared to 2005, said Prakash.

The difference between the indexes (0.216) shows that there are a number of households that have seen their real income–income after considering the effects of inflation–decrease.

Among social groups, upward movement in income is the highest among Other Backward Class (OBC) households, followed by forward castes, Brahmins, Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST).

Marginalised caste groups such as the SC, ST and OBC earn much less than the national household income, IndiaSpend reported on January 14, 2019.

Yet, in real terms, these social groups saw an improvement in their income levels in the seven years to 2012, showing that although disparity is wide, the gap is closing, Dewan said.

(Paliath is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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For many of us, a better diet means eating more fruit and vegetables. iStock, CC BY-NC

These are the findings our the EAT-Lancet Commission, released today. The Commission brought together 37 leading experts in nutrition, agriculture, ecology, political sciences and environmental sustainability, from 16 countries.

Over two years, we mapped the links between food, health and the environment and formulated global targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production. This includes five specific strategies to achieve them through global cooperation.

Right now, we produce, ship, eat and waste food in a way that is a lose-lose for both people and planet – but we can flip this trend.

What’s going wrong with our food supply?

Almost one billion people lack sufficient food, yet more than two billion suffer from obesity and food-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

The foods causing these health epidemics – combined with the way we produce our food – are pushing our planet to the brink.

One-third of the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change come from food production. Our global food system leads to extensive deforestation and species extinction, while depleting our oceans, and fresh water resources.

To make matters worse, we lose or throw away around one-third of all food produced. That’s enough to feed the world’s hungry four times over, every year.

At the same time, our food systems are at risk due to environmental degradation and climate change. These food systems are essential to providing the diverse, high-quality foods we all consume every day.
 

A radical new approach

To improve the health of people and the planet, we’ve developed a “planetary health diet” which is globally applicable – irrespective of your geographic, economic or cultural background – and locally adaptable.

The diet is a “flexitarian” approach to eating. It’s largely composed of vegetables and fruits, wholegrains, legumes, nuts and unsaturated oils. It includes high-quality meat, dairy and sugar, but in quantities far lower than are consumed in many wealthier societies.

Many of us need to eat more veggies and less red meat. Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock

The planetary health diet consists of:

• vegetables and fruit (550g per day per day)
• wholegrains (230 grams per day)
• dairy products such as milk and cheese (250g per day)
• protein sourced from plants, such as lentils, peas, nuts and soy foods (100 grams per day)
• small quantities of fish (28 grams per day), chicken (25 grams per day) and red meat (14 grams per day)
• eggs (1.5 per week)
• small quantities of fats (50g per day) and sugar (30g per day).

Of course, some populations don’t get nearly enough animal-source foods necessary for growth, cognitive development and optimal nutrition. Food systems in these regions need to improve access to healthy, high-quality diets for all.

The shift is radical but achievable – and is possible without any expansion in land use for agriculture. Such a shift will also see us reduce the amount of water used during production, while reducing nitrogen and phosphorous usage and runoff. This is critical to safeguarding land and ocean resources.

By 2040, our food systems should begin soaking up greenhouse emissions – rather than being a net emitter. Carbon dioxide emissions must be down to zero, while methane and nitrous oxide emissions be kept in close check.

How to get there

The commission outlines five implementable strategies for a food transformation:
1. Make healthy diets the new normal – leaving no-one behind
Shift the world to healthy, tasty and sustainable diets by investing in better public health information and implementing supportive policies. Start with kids – much can happen by changing school meals to form healthy and sustainable habits, early on.
Unhealthy food outlets and their marketing must be restricted. Informal markets and street vendors should also be encouraged to sell healthier and more sustainable food.

2. Grow what’s best for both people and planet
Realign food system priorities for people and planet so agriculture becomes a leading contributor to sustainable development rather than the largest driver of environmental change. Examples include:

• incorporating organic farm waste into soils
• drastically reducing tillage where soil is turned and churned to prepare for growing crops
• investing more in agroforestry, where trees or shrubs are grown around or among crops or pastureland to increase biodiversity and reduce erosion
• producing a more diverse range of foods in circular farming systems that protect and enhance biodiversity, rather than farming single crops or livestock.

The measure of success in this area is that agriculture one day becomes a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Technology can help us make better use of our farmlands. Shutterstock

3. Produce more of the right food, from less
Move away from producing “more” food towards producing “better food”.

This means using sustainable “agroecological” practices and emerging technologies, such as applying micro doses of fertiliser via GPS-guided tractors, or improving drip irrigation and using drought-resistant food sources to get more “crop per drop” of water.

In animal production, reformulating feed to make it more nutritious would allow us to reduce the amount of grain and therefore land needed for food. Feed additives such as algae are also being developed. Tests show these can reduce methane emissions by up to 30%.

We also need to redirect subsidies and other incentives to currently under-produced crops that underpin healthy diets – notably, fruits, vegetables and nuts – rather than crops whose overconsumption drives poor health.

4. Safeguard our land and oceans
There is essentially no additional land to spare for further agricultural expansion. Degraded land must be restored or reforested. Specific strategies for curbing biodiversity loss include keeping half of the current global land area for nature, while sharing space on cultivated lands.

The same applies for our oceans. We need to protect the marine ecosystems fisheries depend on. Fish stocks must be kept at sustainable levels, while aquaculture – which currently provides more than 40% of all fish consumed – must incorporate “circular production”. This includes strategies such as sourcing protein-rich feeds from insects grown on food waste.

5. Radically reduce food losses and waste
We need to more than halve our food losses and waste.

Poor harvest scheduling, careless handling of produce and inadequate cooling and storage are some of the reasons why food is lost. Similarly, consumers must start throwing less food away. This means being more conscious about portions, better consumer understanding of “best before” and “use by” labels, and embracing the opportunities that lie in leftovers.

Circular food systems that innovate new ways to reduce or eliminate waste through reuse will also play a significant role and will additionally open new business opportunities.

For significant transformation to happen, all levels of society must be engaged, from individual consumers to policymakers and everybody along the food supply chain. These changes will not happen overnight, and they are not the responsibility of a handful of stakeholders. When it comes to food and sustainability, we are all at the decision dining table.

The EAT-Lancet Commission’s Australian launch is in Melbourne on February 1. Limited free tickets are available.

Alessandro R Demaio, Australian Medical Doctor; Fellow in Global Health & NCDs, University of Copenhagen; Jessica Fanzo, Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Global Food and Agriculture Policy and Ethics, Johns Hopkins University, and Mario Herrero, Chief Research Scientist, Food Systems and the Environment, CSIRO
 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Of the cereals grown in India, rice consumes the most water per tonne of output while delivering the least nutrients–iron, zinc and protein–according to the study published in Science Advances, a global science journal. The suggested replacements for rice are maize, finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum, all of which consume less water per tonne and are more nutritious.
 
In a first, scientists juxtaposed this potential water-saving from an alternative cropping pattern with the nutritional gains that would follow from growing more nutrient-dense and less water-intensive cereals. Replacing rice with a more nutrient-rich or water-efficient crop would marginally improve the production of protein (1%) but considerably increase the production of iron and zinc, by 27% and 13%, respectively.
 
These findings are significant considering that India today faces the worst water crisis in its history and continues to battle iron and zinc deficiencies.
 
The study, ‘Alternative cereals can improve water use and nutrient supply in India’, was published on July 4, 2018.
 
Twenty-one Indian cities will run out of groundwater by 2020, the NITI Aayog, the government’s policy think-tank, predicted last month, as IndiaSpend reported on June 25, 2018.
 
While the common belief is that urbanisation and industrialisation are the reasons for the falling groundwater levels across India, over nine-tenths of groundwater is extracted for irrigation, IndiaSpend reported in November 2016.
 
Roughly one-third (34%) of the 632 cubic kilometre (cu km) of water that India used to grow cereals in 2009 came from various irrigation sources, the new study said. Rainfall accounted for the rest.
 
While India is food secure today, the new study showed that this achievement has come at the cost of water security, and has failed to substantially improve Indians’ nutrition status, particularly iron and zinc sufficiency.
 
Just over half (53%) of Indian women of reproductive age (15 to 49 years) were estimated to be anaemic–a result of iron deficiency–in the fourth National Family Health Survey of 2015-16, IndiaSpend reported in November 2017. More than a third of the Indian population is zinc-deprived, we reported in September 2017.
 
Now it appears a solution is at hand to reverse these deficiencies while achieving water security and livelihood security for farmers. “A massive win-win” is how Mihir Shah, economist, former member of the Planning Commission and co-founder of water and livelihood security initiative Samaj Pragati Sahayog, described the cropping change solution.
 
Using less water for irrigation is key to environmental sustainability
India’s cereal production increased 230% between 1966 and 2009, according to this new study, whose credit goes to the vast improvements in irrigation infrastructure across India. Irrigation sources contributed 86% of the increase in water usage for cereal production during this period.
 
Rainwater used for agriculture on rainfed lands reduced from 300 cu km to 219 cu km. This fall expresses both the expansion of the irrigated area and the decline in average rainfall in recent decades, Ashwini Chhatre, co-author of the present study and associate professor of public policy and academic director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, told IndiaSpend.
 

Source: Science Advances; Figures in cu km.
 
Average rainfall declined from 1,050 mm in the kharif (monsoon) season of 1970 to less than 1,000 mm in kharif 2015. Similarly, in the winter cropping or rabi season, average rainfall declined from roughly 150 mm in 1970 to about 100 mm in 2015, IndiaSpend reported in June 2018 based on the findings of a new NITI Aayog study. The number of days without rainfall during the monsoons has increased, from 40% in 1970 to 45% in 2015.
 
“Protective irrigation is vital to insure farmers [growing] alternative cereals against dry days and dry spells during the monsoon, both of which are now established outcomes of climate change,” said Chhatre.
 
How foodgrain subsidy has added to water stress and nutritional deficiencies
 
Cereal consumption and cropping data show that the shift towards rice-wheat consumption and cropping has intensified since the Green Revolution of the 1960s.
 
Between the mid-1960s and 2010, an urban Indian’s wheat consumption almost doubled, from 27 kg to 52 kg. This plate-share gain came at the cost of the consumption of sorghum and millets, reducing their average annual per capita consumption from 32.9 kg to 4.2 kg.
 
As a result, since 1956, the area under millets and sorghum has shrunk–23% for pearl millet, 49% for finger millet, 64% for sorghum and 85% for small (or minor) millets.
 
This dietary shift is typically believed to have been demand-led, as wheat is seen as superior to millets and sorghum, and the cereal preferred by the more affluent Indians. This study, however, showed that the shift is significantly supply-driven, reflecting “a substantial influence from the country’s Public Distribution System”, the food security programme for low-income households.
 
By providing a guaranteed minimum support price to producers and placing heavy subsidies on rice and wheat at the consumer end, this system “has also served to influence cropping and dietary choices away from more nutrient-rich alternative cereals and is an important factor contributing to the persistence of widespread nutrient deficiencies”, the study noted.
 

Source: Indian Food Composition Tables, National Institute Of Nutrition, quoted in Science Advances.
 
“Chief minister N.T. Rama Rao’s promise of rice at Rs 2 per kg in 1982 in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh changed the dietary preferences of the last two generations, from millets to rice, without any commensurate improvement in health,” Chhatre added by way of more examples to show this supply-side push.
 
Partly as a result of this, anaemia in women of reproductive age–a key indicator of the health status of a society–has increased in Telangana (part of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh), from 49.8% in the first National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in 1999-2000 to 55% in the latest NFHS in 2015-16.
 
Shah advocated introducing healthier millets and pulses into the Mid-Day Meal scheme and Integrated Child Development Services scheme, to create sizeable demand for these crops and to create a structure of incentives for farmers to grow them. This could be followed by the decentralised procurement of the crops by the government for supply to these schemes.
 
“At present, we only incentivise the growing of water-intensive crops because those are the only crops we procure,” he said.
 
This study has also found that swapping rice for an alternative cereal would not entail a fall in production, which could have implied a shortage of food grain. For instance, switching from rice to maize in 38 rice-growing districts in Madhya Pradesh would actually increase the yield, as would happen in 22 rice-growing districts in Maharashtra. Swapping rice for sorghum in 31 rice-growing districts in Madhya Pradesh and in 14 districts in Maharashtra would produce a higher yield, it added.
 

Source: Science Advances
 
Decentralising nutrient production would protect from local climate shocks
 
Punjab, with 97% of its land irrigated, and Haryana, with 84%, vastly improved their irrigation facilities between 1966 and 2009, the period of this study. In becoming key producers of rice and wheat for the country, these states have also become the largest sources of agricultural water demand.
 
The irrigation needs of wheat–a rabi crop–have driven 69% of the increase in demand for water for agricultural purposes. Rice, meanwhile, is the most inefficient crop in nutrient production as well as water usage, in both the kharif and rabi seasons.
 
Consequently, replacing the rice grown in the northern grain belt alone with alternative crops would deliver substantial water saving, and “about half of total water savings from replacement would come from just 39 districts, most of which are in Punjab and Haryana”, Chhatre said.
 
The study has found that in the last 40 years, the burden of water stress has shifted away from southern districts, some of which have experienced a decrease in agricultural water demand, towards Punjab and Haryana.
 

Source: Science Advances
 
Changing the cropping pattern across India would effectively decentralise nutrient production, thereby reducing the impact of local climate shocks such as droughts or floods to national grain production, Kyle Frankel Davis, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at The Earth Institute, Columbia University, USA, as well as a NatureNet Science Fellow at The Nature Conservancy, told IndiaSpend.
 
“While India has done well to prioritise calorie production to avoid widespread hunger, now, considerations like nutrition and environmental impacts cannot continue to be side-stepped if the country wants to achieve better health for all and environmental sustainability,” he said.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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