Developing alternate systems requires a discussion on what is wrong with the mainstream system. In that regard, what do you mean by globalization and what do you think are the effects of globalization?
Let me tell you what we mean by globalization. Globalization essentially considers your local and national economy as part of the world economy; it is just an extension of colonization, where you do not have rights to your own resources, over your economy, they will not give you the rights you have as a citizen, and corporations will decide on how to use your resources. The profit motive comes first and the public interest comes later. I’m being very brief about this. We can go on for hours. But essentially, this is what happens when you open up your economy and your markets to an unlimited degree. Now, if you want to discuss globalization, first we take some assumptions. The assumption is that a country is made for the benefit of its own citizens-that is the obvious. This means that for their survival, their food security and for their livelihoods, you first provide resources to your people, so that they can be self-employed or you employ them, however it is. But that is the state’s first duty. It is the surplus that can go into profit making or export. That is the second step. You cannot export or serve the international market at the cost of your own people, which is what is being done. States these days are parroting the American and the Europeans, especially the former. People who are at the lower level, who don’t have either jobs, high skills, or education, they’ll have to wait a bit for development, so that the people at the top can monopolize resources, make the money, which will then trickle down. That doesn’t happen. That’s nonsense. That’s feudalism. Capitalism is just a glorified form of feudalism. So now whatever resources are left, even they are being monopolized, even public resources and public institutions such as electricity, gas - which belong to the people - these are now being sold or taken over by the corporations. Either they are getting the first rights or they are buying them over. Now that is a violation of resources. That is how globalization is working. It doesn’t have to work that way. The whole idea is that you can have globalization if you have rules about how much you can export, about how you cannot sell anything on the international market, you only import technology which you cannot do yourself, you only export things (which you have in surplus, otherwise export results in serious shortage of supply in local market). For example our food sector, Pakistan has an entire market here, but most of our food is being exported, while our people are going hungry. And feudalism is still alive. Feudalism is very much a part of globalization. It is the basis of capitalism and globalization, and it is continuing that way.
You spoke about the economic side of globalization and the monopolization of resources. What are your views abut the cultural side of globalization?
Culture comes from agriculture essentially. It comes from the activities you engage in. and it all starts with agriculture. If your read the history of agriculture in any country, you will understand the culture of that place, whether it is Africa, whether it is Latin America, whether it is South Asia, or most of the Southern countries where you have two crops a year, meaning summer as well as winter. The reason why these colonizers came was because they have only one growing season and they have snow the rest of the year. That is the essential problem. Now there were two ways of obtaining these goods from the Southern countries.. One was to trade with somebody and the other was to shoot and take by force, and they preferred to choose the latter. The trade part is also more by force, and it is being disguised as trade because it is trade without limits, without rules. There is no regulation. What they now call for is deregulation, deregulation implies no limits.
In this wave towards globalization, there is an increasing emphasis on privatization. This trend is also catching up in Pakistan. How do you perceive the situation here, given this drive, say 10 or 20 years down the road?
That’s a long time. I’m thinking about what is going to happen at the end of the year, people are already hungry. The purchasing power of the rupee has gone down. Look at the oil prices. They have risen recently. The price of fuel goes up every week or every month. I remember last year they were raising it every month. Automatically, the price of food goes up because of transportation. Also, the cost of agriculture goes up, which is a negative thing. They practice chemical agriculture here, which means they use oil based inputs. So everything goes up, and the food prices follow. People are already hungry. I haven’t been into the field for a while now. But I’m talking of just three years back. I went deep into the interior areas of Sindh, and people were starving there already. People were eating one meal a day. Then, most people wouldn’t go beyond daal (pulses) and roti(bread) during that meal and daal too, if they were lucky. Otherwise they would have just roti, with an onion perhaps. It was that bad! I’m talking about three years ago. So what is the situation now? You go to the poorest localities of the city, the katchi abadis, and you see hunger. Listen, people will not tell you that they’re hungry. It is very hard for people to say that. But they suffer. It is bad already, and what shocks me is that the average citizen doesn’t respond, even when they feel the pinch. Like the lower-middle class is not starving, but they have had to cut down their expenditure. They have a fixed salary. When the cost of your transport goes up, so does the price of food. The only place left to cut down on is food or a girl’s education. You have nothing else to cut down on.
Are you suggesting that we should go back to the agricultural system?
I did not say that I want to return back to that system. There are some basics about agriculture that you have to know. People don’t know because they are misled by corporations into what technologies they should choose. They brought a system where they took the seed and took some gene qualities from it. It went against the laws of bio-diversity. Bio-diversity’s principle is that every plant/organism evolves to its own environment, that is, the temperature, the soil type, the elevation, etc. That is why in different regions you may have the same basic thing, for example, banana, but different types of it. For example, in Peru alone, you have 200 varieties of potatoes. It changes with every elevation. In South Asia, you had 30000 varieties of rice. Today we have only 50. What they did was that they took this new seed and advertised that with this seed you could get a yield that was three to four times greater. This was a lie. But nobody listened to or asked the ordinary people. The authorities buy these false claims, not knowing that this seed does not reproduce. You’ll have to buy this seed again. When you grow your own food, you are actually growing your own seed. You eat the food and the save the seed to replanted it. You don’t have to buy it. The commercial seed however, you have to buy because it cannot reproduce because it has been destroyed. They have killed its ability to reproduce. Also, it does not grow unless you use chemicals. In a nutshell, it is all artificial and this is how they have monopolized agriculture. After a few years, you use so much pesticide that you poison the soil, the plant and you poison yourself. That is why wherever you have chemical agriculture, most of the organisms in the soil are dead, the butterflies are dead, and the moths are dead. Organisms which carry the pollen are dead. So instead of trying to resolve it by stopping that, the authorities promote chemical farming even further. The authorities are very ignorant. They have very little or no knowledge about agriculture.
Chemical farming is all based on oil. But when you are growing things naturally, everything is free. You don’t need to buy anything. You do your own labor. You don’t need a tractor. A tractor is destructive. Perhaps you didn’t know that. The education system-don’t call it agriculture, call it biology or environmental science. The natural world is an essential interaction of plant life and animal life-you can’t have one without the other. And bio-diversity. Economics began with agriculture. They started treating agriculture like a factory. Now, these are things in nature. One plant will grow in a particular way, the other in another way. It’s not like a factory, where inanimate things where a million things of the same size and color are made. But a plant is not a dead thing. You just put the seed and the plant will do everything. You are not supposed to interfere. So they forget that you cannot expect an organic living thing to perform in the same way as an inanimate factory manufactured goods. So these are the mistakes that they have made. They started calculating that if this someone is growing this much in one acre, with a better seed he can grow that much more, say 3 times as much. But the fool doesn’t know biology and bio diversity, which is a part of biology, where the health and survival of plant or animal life depends on interaction. So in one place you are not to have one plant but 20, 30, 40. Their interaction is what brings health. So he calculates wrong. In the first year there is high productivity and then in the third and fourth year the productivity goes down. So economics is a very deficient, very false or a very dubious science. There is no such thing as trickle down, there is no such thing as economies of large scale production because it does not take into account the public good.
Given these problems that you have just highlighted, where do you suggest change should come from-the government or the people themselves?
This country has been under constant threat. The feudal has been the agent of the government, and that can never bring about democracy. Tthere is nothing you can do but keep on mobilizing people. But when you see these people break, and I tell you there is nothing stronger than a well-organized labor movement. When they can’t succeed, what chances do others have? A policeman picks up a gun at the drop of a hat. You cannot expect a second chance. I’m sorry about sounding so discouraging, but I really don’t see any hope here. When things go absolutely wrong and when all hope is lost, and there is nothing left to lose-when even the oppressed have nothing to lose. Either they are gone or they are dead. When the oppressors start going to other places to look for other people to exploit, people rise up then. Relevant examples are Germany and Japan after the Second World War. They were completely finished. They became like Third World countries. But why do you think the USA helped them? They knew that these people were educated, they had technological skills. They knew they would rise up, and they also are a market. Ultimately the long term profit market was always there. They took the best of German and Japanese minds. Germany and Japan had already reached the advanced stage of industrialization, of technology. In power relations, I’m sorry to say, but racism does come in, and America was not going to let the white Germans suffer. I don’t know how they feel about the Japanese, but I think they felt that they were definitely more superior to the Blacks. That was the attitude.
My only contention is that feudalism itself has emerged from agriculture.
Let me go back further. We did not have feudalism in South Asia. Feudalism was brought in by the British. Our own version of feudalism was not exploitative. The state used to have control of the land. The king-and I’m talking in general terms because there were variations in South Asia-was the owner of all land, and he gave it to the people to use. It was like this that during your lifetime it would be given to you for use. If you stop using it even for say two years, it would be given to somebody else. You couldn’t take the land and sit on it. You have to make it useful. The king used to maintain infrastructure, like building canals, giving credit, without charging interest. Why do you think the subcontinent was so rich? And that is why the colonizers came. They came to steal. How did this begin? It began in England in the 18th or 19th century. Feudalism is very much a European institution-not a South Asian one. It started there when the elite and the royalty wanted to monopolize the land so that the ordinary people wouldn’t assert themselves. They brought out what is known as the Enclosure Act. Enclosure means to enclose. They started taking over all the lands because they were the ones in the Parliament, part of the lawmaking machinery-they made the rule that this belongs to so and so, and this is how Prince Charles and all these various people get their land. I mean, ask for logic. Why should they get it? What have they done? They have no rights over these things. They have just made a rule and honestly, this is nothing but ‘might is right.’ They are the ones who started it, they are the ones who came to South Asia and Latin America, and they introduced feudalism there. We did not have feudalism, despite having 10,000 years of agriculture. They brought it and strengthened it, because they were the agents, and the descendants of those agents are now sitting in the Parliament and doing the same thing.
Given this situation, what kind of practical and sustainable measures would take us towards real development? And where do you think these changes will come from?
I’ll tell you what we are trying to do. We hope to make some kind of a little beginning. And that is micro-farming. You must read our agriculture issues. Our basic theme is growing your own food. In India and in parts of South America, and even in some industrialized countries like Cuba and Germany, they are already doing small scale farming, and they are very successful. In India, several people have had experiments on reasonably good soil (not very good soil); they found that on 600 square yards you can grow enough food for 5-6 people, minus the aata or the rice. If it’s very rich soil you can have a surplus too. 600 sq yards is one eighth of an acre, which is nothing. So what we want the government to do is to give every woman a quarter acre. Nothing like giving two acres of course, because then you can raise livestock, which also promises free milk and manure. There are so many advantages. One leads to the other, and nothing goes bad. Chemical agriculture cannot work on such a small price of land because for that you need a large space and a lot of money to spend on inputs. And even then it has problems. Agriculture is a natural source of employment. Growing your own food is natural. There is this assumption-perhaps we are now getting to culture of psychology or whatever you want to call it. There is this assumption among the government and the intellectuals that nobody wants to farm, and everybody wants to do a desk job. That is simply not true. God has made everybody differently-some people are artists, some are who make good scientists, some make good doctors. Some people just don’t want book work. And agriculture, believe you me, it is a very highly skilled area. Its knowledge system fills hundreds of books. The only difference is that it keeps changing and because of these constant changes it becomes specialized. So you become a specialist in your own environment-the animals there, and the plants too. That is a different kind of knowledge system that you do not want to acknowledge. But this is a fact. They are specialists and nobody can equal that. There are a number of CBOs and NGOs, not too many though, who are trying to teach organic farming on a small scale. We want to introduce urban farming because it takes up very little space. Since we have very little space here and since the city so badly planned ( they only have small plots and the rest is cemented up) several houses or the community can share a space.
We have a deal with an NGO which has promised to arrange community space so that we can train them this year. Also in the katchi abadis, we have made an agreement with the “Katchi Abadi” authority to train them. You can only convince people by actually doing something. So we don’t talk too much. Once people see that this can be done, other communities will start emulating. Last year we did it here in the office lawn. We stopped because we needed a full time person. But that was just to prove it can be done. We proved it to ourselves also. If it is successful, the aartis and the local retailers will automatically come to buy your surplus from you. The thing is if they calculate how much they have grown on their plot they’ll realize that they have grown Rs 2000-3000 worth of vegetables, which they could not have bought from the market because they do not earn so much. So it is really an employment opportunity.
Don’t people have any information or skill about organic farming whatsoever at the grassroots level? If not, where can we get this information from?
No. that is what I am saying. They have forgotten. It is surprising, but it is true. And most of this lost knowledge I get from India, because all the crops are mostly common between India and Pakistan. Even the ancient irrigation systems are common. These British and American style dams and irrigation systems do not work. They are destructive. In India, they have been reviving this knowledge and putting it into books, both in their native languages and in English. There is no dearth of information. They have gone ahead and are doing so much. In agricultural universities here in Pakistan, they just teach you how much chemical to put. In India and Bangladesh they have institutions that teach ordinary peasants who might have forgotten or want to learn more. They come and stay there and learn. Some people from Pakistan have also gone there to learn. You can see how eroded our basic education system has become. There is so much to rebuild upon, and India and Bangladesh have rebuilt it. Nothing on the government level, but at the grassroots level in pockets. We don’t have to start from scratch. We can have a head start by taking advice n learning from them. But with feudals who want bonded labor, that is not just not possible.
Do you want to give any message to our EDucate! readers?
I only want to add that if you do not learn to work with your hands, you do not get anything. You learn science or surgery only through working with your hands. But when it comes to agriculture, these feudals or economists will tell the peasant how to do his job, despite not knowing a thing themselves.
Download Pdf
Printable version