Development aid from the West will ruin India

Originally from: Farmtalking
                        
Indiaweekly
 Friday 6 September 2002

India's opening up its markets to the West and accepting conditional aid will ruin that country; a British environmentalist warns.

 India will face ruin from the so called policies of sustainable development, Edward Goldsmith, founder of 'The Ecologist' magazine and pioneer of the environmental movement in Britain since the 1960s, told 'Indiaweekly'.

 Up to 500 million farmers in India will be made destitute by opening up the Indian market to agriculture produce from the West, he predicts.

 As the World Summit on Sustainable Development proceeds in Johannesburg, he says the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agriculture agreement specifies that developing countries open their borders to food from the European Union (EU) and the US.

 "But opening up markets to subsidised food will throw the small farmers out of business. India has 500 million small farmers. They will go to the slums, you will have cities of 100 million people," says Goldsmith.

 Commenting on the $350 billion in subsidies to farmers in developed countries, Goldsmith says that opening up of markets in developing countries to this subsidised produce will make up to two billion people destitute around the world. India and China will be hit hardest.

 "When you kill off the farmers, others go too. In India and China, an opening up of markets to subsidised food from the West will be one of the greatest crimes in history," he warns.

 Goldsmith also cautions India against increased aid. "About 50 to 70 per cent of aid is, at present, tied to Western products and services. Britain is giving £65 million in aid to the Vision 2020 project in Andhra Pradesh to reduce the number of peasants from 70 million to 40 million. What will happen to the 30 million pushed off the land? The plan funded by Clare Short (minister for international development) is making people destitute."

 There is another plan for a 600 square mile (about 1,500 sq km) plantation in Andhra Pradesh for genetically modified crops for export, he said.

 "Britain's position on aid could not be worse. It is supporting the worst possible schemes."

 India was forced to buy 22 Westland helicopters from Britain "but was never able to use them," Goldsmith claims. "They are rusting in a field somewhere."

 Aid does not help the poor "and it usually has the opposite effect. The poor get very little aid; the aid goes mostly to politicians and the bureaucracy. Aid is a subsidy for Western exports."

 Development aid means turning small farms into massive plantations. "If 40 to 70 per cent of agricultural land gets marked for export crops, how can you feed people? This is not aid. All the aid we give, tied or not, is only helping us."

 The policy, Goldsmith added, is to transform developing countries into a market for finished products and a source of cheap labour. "This has nothing to do with making developing countries a better place.

 "This is economic colonialism, which is incredibly more effective than the older kind of colonialism. What is called development is killing local economies; the people gaining from the imports and exports are the huge multi-national corporations."

 Indiaweekly
 Volume 38 Issue 138
 Page 10, Fri 6-Sep-02 – Thu 12-Sep-0