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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Opening India’s Food Economy to Demands of Imperialism -Prabhat Patnaik

-Newsclick.in

Every step in the direction of opening agriculture to global trade – as announced in the three ordinances by the Modi government – is a step towards reducing domestic food availability.

The tropical region can grow a variety of crops which either cannot be grown at all, or for much of the year, in the cold temperate regions of the world where metropolitan capitalism is located. These include beverages, fibres, vegetables and fruit, and a variety of cereals and oil-crops.

The tropical land mass, however, is fixed in size and already used up; increases in land productivity which could raise the effective supply of this land-mass requires State investment (as Marx had observed with great acuity), which the “fiscal rectitude” demanded by metropolitan capitalism, whether under the Gold Standard (when budgets were to be balanced) or under neoliberalism (when fiscal deficits must remain below a certain percentage of GDP), does not permit.

The problem before metropolitan capitalism, therefore, is: how to acquire control over the use of this tropical land-mass in order to obtain the products it needs? Since such control would necessarily undermine domestic food production, the problem is to persuade Third World governments to permit a diversion of land use from food crops to those demanded by the metropolis, i.e., to persuade them to throw open tropical agriculture to global trade, where the greater pull of metropolitan purchasing power would do the needful.

Matters were easy under colonialism, when the taxation system was used not just to keep domestic food demand restricted, permitting the use of land for products demanded by the metropolis, but also to get these goods gratis for the metropolis by using these very tax proceeds to pay for the goods it demanded.

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