{"id":288594,"date":"2017-01-04T17:42:07","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T16:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=288594"},"modified":"2017-01-05T08:23:04","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T07:23:04","slug":"288594","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/288594\/","title":{"rendered":"From Agriculture to Demonetisation: Not ‘Make in India’ but Made in Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colin Todhunter<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016<\/em>. However, since then, India\u2019s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a \u2018demonetisation\u2019 policy, which saw around 85 percent of India\u2019s bank notes becoming invalid overnight.<\/em><\/p>\n

Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, \u2018black money\u2019 or terrorism, the reasons originally given. That was a smokescreen. Modi was acting on behalf of powerful Wall Street financial interests. Demonetisation has\u00a0caused massive hardship, inconvenience and chaos<\/a>. It has affected everyone and has impacted the poor and those who reside in rural areas (i.e. most of the population) significantly.<\/p>\n

Who does Modi (along with other strategically placed figures) serve primarily: ordinary people and the \u2018national interest\u2019 or the interests of the US?<\/p>\n

Convenient bedfellows<\/strong><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to dig too deep to see where Modi feels at home. Describing itself as a major \u2018global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy\u2019 company, APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with\u00a0firm links<\/a>\u00a0to (part of) the Wall Street\/US establishment and functions to serve its global agenda. Modi turned to APCO to help transform his image and turn him into electable pro-corporate PM material.\u00a0It also helped Modi get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as Chief Minister was a miracle of economic neoliberalism, although the actual\u00a0reality<\/a>\u00a0is really quite different.<\/p>\n

In APCO\u2019s\u00a0India brochure, there is the claim that India\u2019s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy. APCO’s publicity blurb about itself claims that it stands “tall as the giant of the lobbying industry.”<\/p>\n

The firm, in its own words, offers “professional and rare expertise” to governments, politicians and corporations, and is always ready to help clients to sail through troubled waters in the complex world of both international and domestic affairs.<\/p>\n

Mark Halton, former head of Global Marketing and Communications for Monsanto, seemed to agree when\u00a0he praised<\/a>\u00a0APCO for helping the GMO giant to:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 understand how Monsanto could better engage with societal stakeholders surrounding our business and how best to communicate the social value our company brings to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

If your name is\u00a0severely tarnished<\/a>\u00a0and you need to get your dubious products on the market in countries that you haven’t managed\u00a0to infiltrate<\/a>\u00a0just yet, why not bring in the “giant of the lobbying industry.”<\/p>\n

As a former client of APCO, Modi now seems to be the go-to man for Washington. His government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on\u00a0fraudulent tests<\/a>\u00a0and \u2018regulatory delinquency<\/a>\u2018, which will not only open the door to further GM crops but will possibly eventually boost the sales of Monsanto-Bayer\u2019s glufinosate herbicide. In addition, plans have been announced to introduce 100% foreign direct investment in certain sectors of the economy, including food processing.<\/p>\n

Neoliberal dogma<\/strong><\/p>\n

This opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing agricultural efficiency, creating jobs and boosting GDP growth. Such rhetoric mirrors that of the pro-business, neoliberal dogma we see in APCO\u2019s\u00a0brochure<\/a>\u00a0for India. From Greece to Spain and from the US to the UK, we are able to see this rhetoric for what it really is: record profits and massive increases in wealth (ie \u2018growth) for elite interests and, for the rest, disempowerment, surveillance, austerity, job losses, the erosion of rights, weak unions, cuts to public services, bankrupt governments and opaque, corrupt trade deals.<\/p>\n

APCO describes India as a trillion-dollar market. Note that the emphasis is not on redistributing the country\u2019s wealth among its citizens but on exploiting markets. While hundreds of millions live in poverty and hundreds of millions of others hover above it, the\u00a0combined wealth<\/a>\u00a0of India\u2019s richest 296 individuals is $478 billion, some 22% of India\u2019s GDP. According to the \u2018World Wealth Report 2015<\/a>\u2019, there were 198,000 \u2018high net worth\u2019 individuals in India in 2014, while in 2013 the figure stood at 156,000.<\/p>\n

APCO likes to talk about\u00a0positioning international funds and facilitating corporations\u2019 ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. In other words, colonising key sectors, regions and nations to serve the needs of US-dominated international capital.<\/p>\n

Paving the way for plunder<\/strong><\/p>\n

Modi recently stated that India is now one of the most business friendly countries in the world. The code for this being lowering labour, environmental, health and consumer protection standards, while reducing taxes and tariffs and facilitating the acquisition of public assets via privatisation and instituting policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign (US\/Western) corporations.<\/p>\n

When the World Bank rates countries on their level of \u2018Ease of Doing Business\u2019, it means nation states facilitating policies that force working people to take part in a\u00a0race to the bottom<\/a>\u00a0based on\u00a0free market fundamentalism<\/a>. The more \u2018compliant\u2019 national governments make their populations and regulations, the more attractive foreign capital is tempted to invest.<\/p>\n

The World Bank\u2019s \u2018Enabling the Business of Agriculture<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID \u2013 entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds.<\/p>\n

Anyone who is aware of the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the links with the Indo-US Nuclear Treaty\u00a0will know who<\/a>\u00a0will be aware that those two projects form part of an overall plan to subjugate Indian agriculture to the needs of foreign corporations (see\u00a0this article<\/a>\u00a0from 1999). As the\u00a0biggest recipient<\/a>\u00a0of loans from the World Bank in the history of that institution, India is proving to be very compliant.<\/p>\n

The destruction of livelihoods under the guise of \u2018job creation\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and good for business. Just how many actually get created is another matter. What is overlooked, however, are the jobs that were lost in the first place to \u2018open up\u2019 sectors to foreign capital. For example, Cargill may set up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people, but what about the\u00a0agricultural jobs<\/a>\u00a0that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the\u00a0village-level processors<\/a>\u00a0who were cynically put out of business so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?<\/p>\n

The Indian economy is being\u00a0opened-up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing (highly) productive system for the benefit of foreign corporations.\u00a0<\/strong>For farmers, the majority are not to be empowered but displaced from the land. Farming is being made financially non-viable for small farmers, seeds are to be privatised as intellectual property rights are redefined, land is to be acquired and an industrialised, foreign corporate-controlled food production, processing and retail system is to be implemented.<\/p>\n

The long-term plan is to\u00a0continue to starve agriculture<\/a>\u00a0of investment and have an urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food contaminated with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate\/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security.\u00a0This would be disastrous<\/a>\u00a0for farmers, public health and local livelihoods.<\/p>\n

Low input, sustainable models of food production and notions of independence and local or regional self-reliance do not provide opportunities to global agribusiness or international funds to exploit markets, sell their products and cash in on APCO\u2019s vision of a trillion-dollar corporate hijack; moreover, they have little in common with Bill Gates\/USAID\u2019s vision for an Africa dominated by global agribusiness.<\/p>\n

And, finally, to demonetisation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Modi rode to power on a nationalist platform and talks about various \u2018nation-building\u2019 initiatives, not least the \u2018make in India\u2019 campaign. But he is not the only key figure in the story of India\u2019s capitulation to Washington\u2019s agenda for India. There is, for instance,\u00a0Avrind Subramanian<\/a>, the chief economic advisor to the government, and Raghuram Rajan who was until recently Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.\u00a0He was chief economist at the\u00a0International Monetary Fund\u00a0from 2003 to 2007 and was a Distinguished Service Professor of Finance\u00a0at the\u00a0University of Chicago Booth School of Business\u00a0from 1991 to 2013. He is now back at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

Aside from Rajan acting as\u00a0a mouthpiece<\/a>\u00a0for Washington\u2019s strategy to recast agriculture in a corporate image and get people out of agriculture in India, in a\u00a0recent article<\/a>, economist Norbert Haring implicates Rajan in the demonestisation policy.\u00a0He indicates that the policy was carried out on behalf of USAID, MasterCard, Visa and the people behind eBay and Citi, among others, with support from the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation.<\/p>\n

Haring calls Rajan the Reserve Bank of India\u2019s \u201cIMF-Chicago boy\u201d and based on his employment record, memberships (not least of the elite\u00a0Group of Thirty<\/a>\u00a0which includes heads of central, investment and commercial banks)\u00a0and links, place him squarely at the centre of Washington\u2019s financial cabal.<\/p>\n

Haring says that\u00a0Raghuram Rajan has good reason to expect to climb further to\u00a0the highest rungs in international finance and thus play bow to Washington\u2019s game plan:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe already was\u00a0a President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times\/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoney\u00a0and by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top\u00a0jobs in international finance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The move towards a cashless society (the reason for demonetisation) would secure a further degree of control over India by the institutions who are pushing for it. Securing payments that accrue from each digital transaction would of course be very financially lucrative for them. These institutions are therefore pursuing a global \u2018war on cash\u2019.<\/p>\n

Small, wealthy countries like Denmark and Sweden can bear the impact of a transition to a cashless economy, but for a country such as India, which\u00a0runs on cash<\/a>, the outcomes so far have been catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, especially those who don\u2019t have a bank account (almost\u00a0half the population<\/a>) or do not even have easy access to a bank.<\/p>\n

But, regardless of the large-scale human suffering imposed as a result of demonetisation, it could kill two birds with one stone: 1) securing the interests of international capital, including the eventual displacement of the informal (i.e. self-organised) economy; and 2) acting as another\u00a0deliberate nail in the coffin<\/a>\u00a0of Indian farmers, driving even more of them out of the sector.\u00a0The US\u2019s game plan remains well and truly on course.<\/p>\n

Not really a case of \u2018make in India\u2019. Some 50 years after independence, as a state India remains compromised, weak and hobbled. More a case of made in Washington.<\/p>\n

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Todhunter A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016. However, since then, India\u2019s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a \u2018demonetisation\u2019 policy, which saw around 85 percent of India\u2019s bank notes becoming invalid overnight. Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, \u2018black money\u2019 or terrorism, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1214,"featured_media":288595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-288594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}