Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Budget must end debt cycle: Vandana Shiva

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, has said that the effort of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram when presenting the 2008-09 budget should be to put an end to the debt cycle in the farm sector rather than making more consumer credit available to farmers.

Speaking to The Hindu while here for the launch of “Annam,” a good food movement being spearheaded in Kerala by Environment Collaborative and Centre for Innovation in Science and Social Action (CISSA) the other day, Dr. Shiva pointed out that while debt relief did have a role to play in providing relief to the farmers, more consumer credit to farmers would only mean more money being spent on seeds produced by multinational monopolies, such as Monsanto, and on agrochemicals.

“The budget should promote a low-cost farming system so that farmers do not get into debt. Rather than perpetuating debt, what the budget should do is to put an end to the debt cycle and farmer suicides.

This will happen only if the budget promotes a low cost farming system that does not push farmers into debt,” she said.

Dr. Shiva felt that the second major task the Finance Minister should undertake was to promote and strengthen the local economy with adequate production and local farmers’ markets to meet the local needs.

The farmers should get support for pursuing a low-cost ecological farming model which would depend on internal inputs rather than on produces of the corporations.

When farmers had their own seeds, they would not have any crisis or debt. The only places where there was no farm crisis of the kind seen in Vidarbha had been where the farmers had their own seeds, their own markets and where there was no debt. “If Chidambaram was looking to solve the farm crisis, he must look at these local economies, whether they are emerging in Bundelkhand, Uttarakhand or Rajasthan,” she added.

She said localisation was also the answer for the kind of violence witnessed in Mumbai recently. The answer for such a crisis was not communalisation of sectarianism, but development of the local farm community.

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