SUNS  4297 Thursday 8 October 1998



INDIA: WOMEN'S GROUPS PLAN GANDHIAN NON-COOPERATION

New Delhi, Oct 6 (IPS/Dev Raj) -- Borrowing a leaf from Gandhian non-cooperation, the Women's Food Rights Alliance, in India, has sworn to defy recent orders banning the sale of loose, unpackaged mustard oil which they say favour transnational oil seed giants.

Led by food security expert, Vandana Shiva, the Alliance (of 20 women's groups) will use portable hand mills to extract oil from mustard seed, a staple, and sell it at the busy shopping area of Connaught Place in the heart of Delhi, Tuesday.

Mahatma Gandhi, the man who led India to freedom from British rule through 'non-cooperation', defied a colonial tax on the manufacture of salt by symbolically picking up salt from the western Indian coast where it occurs naturally and in abundance.

Gandhi's 'swadeshi' (local goods only) strategy, was best demonstrated through the mass rejection of cloth manufactured in English textile mills in favour of Khadi or coarse homespun cloth.

Latter-day Indian politicians wear Khadi and swear by swadeshi but are not averse to imports because they offer opportunities to siphon off kickbacks in foreign exchange.

Despite swearing by swadeshi, the professedly ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ruling party recently threw open the well-guarded, oil seeds market after supplies of mustard oil, a locally
produced staple, were found to be heavily adulterated.

The BJP government initially reacted by banning the sale of all mustard oil and then relaxed the order to exclude packaged and branded oil as a measure against the adulteration which resulted in the death of 50 people and injury to thousands of others during August.

Activists and food experts quickly pointed out that the unusually high toxic levels of adulterants in the mustard oil indicated a larger international conspiracy to discredit Indian farmers, traders and
oilseeds and make way for imports.

Even Health Minister Dalit Ezhilmalai, whose ministry was affected by the tragedy, went on record to say that adulteration on such a large scale and affecting even well-known brands could only have been carried out through a well-organised and motivated operation.

The BJP-led government finally ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate the "international conspiracy" angle but the government agency has a better reputation for cover-ups for
scams involving politicians and bureaucrats than for serious investigation.

India, reckoned as a major, emerging food market has been under tremendous pressure to open its doors to food, seed and pesticide transnationals in the name of liberalisation and as part of a slow
phase out of trade-barriers under WTO agreements.

The mustard oil tragedy occurred just as the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) led by Shiva launched a campaign against government orders placed for one million tonnes of soyabean from the US, which comes 'blended' with genetically engineered
seed.

Curiously, sanctions imposed against India by the United States for the nuclear tests in May have been recently relaxed to exclude agricultural exports and credits.

Last year, U.S farm exports topped $57 billion and now, fast-track negotiating authorizations, never-before opportunities are being opened up for U.S-based transnational such as Cargill and  Monsanto, Shiva said.

"The loss of markets in Russia and East and Southeast Asia because of the financial crises there means that these transnationals must look to large emerging markets such as India," she said.

Ordering the packaging of mustard oil would only add to costs without solving the problem of adulteration because even well-known brands marketed by reputable firms were found to be contaminated with argemone oil, she said.

Chairman of the Khadi and Village Industries Corporation, Mahesh Sharma, said the import of soyabean and other oilseeds would be a blow to his organisation set up to offer government support to small farmers and artisans.

"Adulteration is best prevented by allowing customers to watch oil being extracted in front of them using cheap hand mills," Sharma said admitting there was a lobby behind the order requiring the packaging of mustard oil.
According to a leading expert in agricultural economics, Devinder Sharma, the U.S relaxations may appear friendly but are in fact aimed at destroying India's hard-earned self-sufficiency in food in favour of transnationals.

"India's lifting of quantitative restrictions on agricultural commodities before Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to New York for the United Nations Assembly, was just what the Clinton
Administration wanted to hear," Devinder Sharma said.

Indeed, even as U.S sanctions were ordered in May, a delegation of the U.S Department of Agriculture was busy meeting Agriculture Minister Som Pal urging him to relax quality standards for the import of wheat from the United States.

The U.S. Embassy here has also been complaining loudly to the several ministries for commerce, food and civil supplies and agriculture about unfairness in Indian preference for Australian wheat over that from the U.S.

U.S Special Ambassador for Agriculture Peter Scher is aware that India will add 115 million new members to its growing middle class by the year 2005. "These new middle class consumers will represent a booming potential market for our farm products," Scher told the U.S House of
Representatives recently.

But Shiva who leads the Alliance - which counts 20 women's organisations as members - in a public awareness campaign plans to thwart designs on the Indian market by U.S-led transnationals.

Tuesday's activities, she said, are only part of a campaign to "educate the public about the real story behind the mustard oil adulteration the value of indigenous edible oils and health hazards of imported oils like soya."

Soyabean products have been shown to have high levels of anti-nutritive factors such as trypsin inhibitors, which damage the pancreas, lectins which are toxic, phytic acid which reduce bio-availability of essential minerals and phytoestrogens which mimic female hormones.

Genetically engineered soya, "blended" into consignments from U.S transnationals have already been rejected by the European Union because it contains genes transplanted from a bacteria, a virus and the petunia plant.

Over the next two weeks, the Alliance will not only distribute unpackaged mustard oil but also dump soya beans including the genetically engineered variety in rejection of the government order
allowing free imports.

"The public will be told how soyabean is alien to the food habit of Indians and how extraction of oil from it involves the use of chemicals and solvents which are a serious health hazard," Shiva said.

The campaign, designed to tie in with the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) World Food Day theme, 'Women Feed The World,' will also, according to Shiva, have women lighting lamps symbolically fuelled with mustard oil "so that their lives will not be darkened by the extinction of traditional food crops and food culture."