Agricultural 'modernisation' is another phrase for the commercialisation of agriculture. 'Modernisation' is misleading because it suggests only progress and improvements, and hides the retrogression, dispossession and destruction that large-scale commercialisation agrlculture has involved.

There are two distinct paths for the commercialisation of agriculture. The first involves the large-scale replacement of food crops by cash crops, largely for export. This is the pattem that has been prevalent through most of Latin America and Africa. The second involves the large-scale replacement of indigenous varieties of food crops with so-called Green Revolution varieties, requiring intensive inputs of irrigation and chemicals. The Green Revolution strategy has been applied in most countries of Asia.

The two strategies of modernisation differ in two ways. The first difference is that one strategy is based on production of non-food export crops, the other on staple food crops for domestic consumption. The second difference is that in the first strategy transnational agribusiness enters the 'modernisation' process directly, while in the second it enters indirectly through supply of inputs such as seed, fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, etc.

In spite of these differences, there is a shared basis of commercialisation in both strategies, which treats agriculture merely as a system for producing agricultural commodities for profit. It is assumed that as a result of commercialisation, economic growth takes place in the agricultural sector.

However, agricultural commercialisation also creates new hunger and poverty. When land is diverted to cash crop production, food production falls and small peasants and pastoralists are pushed off the most fertile tracts into marginal lands where productivity is low, and ecological vulnerability is high. Dispossessed people are rapidly pushed into a downward spiral of poverty, hunger, and death.

Africa is the most vivid example of a continental scale of starvation induced by export of agricultural commodities. Africa was self-sufficient in food as recently as 1970. By 1984,140 million Africans, out of a total of 531 million, were fed with imported grain. In the 24 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, grain production fell from over 150 kg/person in 1970 to 100 kg in 1984.

In the Sahel, peanuts and cotton have pushed food crop cultivation from irrigated lands along the rivers Senegal and Niger into poorer soils with lower rainfall.

As Alan Grainger says in Desertification: How people make deserts, how people can stop and why they don't:

"Being pushed onto marginal land forces farmers to bring into production even more marginal land. Yields both per hectare and per farmer fall. In Niger, grain yields fell from 500 kg/ha in 1920 to 350 in 1978 and were expected to fall to 250 kg/ha by the year 2000. Per capita grain production fell by 44% between 1951 and 1974."

The Ethiopian famine, which has killed nearly one million people and affected eight million, is not merely related to the failure of rainfall. It is more closely linked with the damming of the Awash river. Before the construction of dams, more than 150,000 people were supported by agricu]ture in the Awash Valley.

The building of a series of dams on the Awash with World Bank funds to provide water to the sugarcane, cotton and banana plantations of rich Ethiopians and Dutch, Italian, Israeli and British firms dried up the lands downstream and flooded the lands upstream, uprooting more than 20,000 people. The Afar, the traditional pastoralists of Awash Valley, were pushed up the fragile slopes, which their herds turned bare in the struggle for survival. The 1972 drought killed 30% of the Afar tribe.

Agricultural modernisation of Africa has clearly failed to provide food to those who need it most. Even countries like Sudan, which were until the 1980s seen as a bread basket and had enough food security to escape the drought of the 1970s, were pushed into scarcity with World Bank-guided export oriented policies. While it was the presence of advice from agencies like the World Bank and their experts that are recognised as being the cause of Africa's food crisis, the World Bank prefers to read the crisis as arising from the absence of international agencies and experts.

The India model

"Today's general perception of Africa as the region most directly threatened by intractable food crisis finds its most natural parallel in the 1960s perception of the Indian subcontinent as the primary arena in which the battle to avert catastrophic famine had to be fought and won." States the World Bank MADIA (Managing Agricultural Development in Africa) study. Africa today is supposed to be in the condition of India of the 1960s, and the prescription is to apply the strategy that was applied to India in Africa viz the Green Revolution.

'Jatindar Bajaj', in his study of pre- and post-Green Revolution performance shows that the rate of growth of aggregate crop production was higher in the year before the Green Revolution than after it. 1967-68 is the year the Green Revolution was officially launched in India.

The record of agricultural production before the Green Revolution was clearly not 'dismal'. Nor has the record of production been miraculous after the introduction of the 'miracle' seeds. The usual image that is created to support the image of the 'miracle' is that India was transformed from 'the begging bowl to a bread basket' by the Green Revolution and food surpluses put an end to India's living in a 'ship-to-mouth' existence. This common belief is based on the impression that foodgrain imports after the Green Revolution substantially declined. In fact, however, food imports have continued to be signlrlcant even after the Green Revolution.

A second reason for the Green Revolution being seen as a miracle lies in an historical view of grain trade. The flow of grain from North to South is of recent origin before which, grain travelled from the South to the North. India was a major supplier of wheat to Europe until the war years.

As Dan Morgan reports, 'In 1873, with the opening of the Suez Canal, the first wheat arrived from India, after a push by British entrepreneurs to obtain a cheap, secure sourse of wheat under British control. The British envisaged India as a potentially great source of wheat for the Empire. Industrial tycoons pushed railroads and canals into the Indus and Ganges river basins, where farmers had been growing wheat for centuries.

According to George Blyn, in the quarter century before World War 1, rising per capita output and consumption pervaded all major regions. 'Most foodgrain crops also expanded at substantial rates, and though much rice and wheat were exported, domestic availability grew at about the same rate as output... This early period gives evidence that per capita consumption of agricullural commodities increased over a substantial period of years'.

In times of crisis and scarcity, the colonial govemment of course put its revenue needs above those of the survival of the people. On 3 November 1772, a year after the great famine in Bengal that killed about 10 million people, Warren Hastings wrote to the Board of Directors of the East India Company: 'Notwithstanding the loss of at least one third of the inhabitants of the province, and the consequent derease of the cultivation the net collection of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1788.... It was naturally to be expected that the diminution of the revenue should have kept an equal pace with the other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not was owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard.'

Injustice has been at the worst forms of scarcity throughout human history, and injustice and inequality has also been at the root of societal violence. By separating issues of agricultural production from issues of justice, the Green Revolution strategy attempted to diffuse political turmoil. But bypassing the goals of equality and sustainability led to the creation of new inequalities and new scarcities. The Green Revolution strategy for peace had boomeranged. In creating new polarisation, it created new potential for conflict.

The second assumption that the World Bank's MADIA study makes is that 'India's progress toward food self-sufficiency was helped by predominantly US sources of assistance. India's agriculture is frequently cited as an example of a hopeless situation turned into a success that ought to be emulated in Africa'.

The assumption that the 'miracle' of the Green Revolution can be replicated in Africa is flawed on two grounds . Firstly, India was not an ecologically ravaged continent in the 1960s like Africa is today. Secondly, the miracle was not such a miracle even in India, as the experience of Punjab illustrates. The 'miracle seeds' of the Green Revolution were meant to free the Indian farmer from constraints imposed by nature. Instead, Iarge-scale monocultures of exotic varieties generated a new ecological vulnerability by reducing genetic diversity and destabilising soil and water systems.

Punjab was chosen to be Indla's bread-basket through the Green Revolution, wlth high response seeds, misleadingly called high-yielding varieties. The Green Revolution led to a shlft from earlier rotations of cereals, oilseeds and pulses to a paddy-wheat rotation wlth intense inputs of irrigation and chemicals. The paddy-wheat rotation has created an ecological backlash with serious problems of waterlogging in canal-irrigated regions and groundwater mining in tube-well irrigated regions. Further, the high-yielding varieties have led to large-scale micro-nutrient deficiencies in soils, particularly iron in paddy cultivation and manganese in wheat.

The table below is an indicative summary of the costs and benefits of the Green Revolution in Punjab:

The fading miracle of the Green Revolution is now creating pressure for India to adopt the African strategy of export-oriented cash crop production, of which the Pepsi project in Punjab is an example. Cash-crop exports have been tried elsewhere and are a proven way to be trapped in food scarcity and spiralling debt burdens.

As India's Green Revolution fades, it is offered the African experience as a cure, and as Africa's food crisis grows, it is offered the Green Revolution as a miracle.

The Green Revolution in Punjab

Indicative costs and benefits

1. Decline in pulse production 1.Increase in riceproduction from 370 to 150 thousand from 292 to 3228 thousand metric tonnes between 1965 metric tonnes between and 1980. 1965 and 1980.
2. Decline in oilseed production 2. Increase in wheat productn from 214 to 176 thousand from 1916 to 7694 thous metric tons between 1965 metric tonnes between and 1980. 1965 and 1980.
3. Destruction of genetic diversity with introduction of rice and wheat monocultures.
4. 40 new insect pests and 12 new diseases in rice monocultures.
5. Soils diseased with Salinity, Soil Toxicity, Miao-nutrient deficiency.
6. 2.6 lakh hectares waterlogged.
7. Punjab floods in 1988 linked to Dhakra dam. 65% of 12,000 villages submerged, 34 lakh people affected, 1,500 people killed. Loss to state, Rs 1,000 crore. 50,000 hectares of land destroyed through sand deposits exceedinq 60 cms in some places.

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