[iDC] seed patents, Indian farmer suicides, and the future of Iraq

[Andreas Schiffler]

Ryan Griffis wrote:
>
> To be clear, the US is not subsidizing food  
> production in the interests of its citizens nutrition, this is all  
> too clear, it is subsidizing the production of "value added"  
> ingredients like corn syrup. i can make more detailed arguments if  
> needed, but i imagine most of us in the US have only to look at our  
> grocery store shelves to find initial evidence of this. 

I never intended to argue for or against subsidies in the US, Canada or 
the EU. The wikipedia article on the topic summarizes the reasons why 
governments engage in this practice very well, and you are quite right 
that nutrition was never an agenda. Maybe this is something that we 
should push for politically - Germany for example subsidizes organic 
farming with Billions of Euros - which I would categorize as a subsidy 
in the nutrition category. That subsidies distorts the market for 
commodities is clear and they will obviously create "loosers" in 
countries whose farmers are unsupported, but have to compete and sell on 
a world market.

My point was simply that subsidies establish a safety net and price 
floor for the producer and in essence assists farmers in the west to 
become more capital intensive. The effects of this can be seen if one 
looks simply at the number of farms over the last century which dropped 
from 6M in 1930 to about 170K today (Wikipedia article). I am sure it 
looks similar in the EU. But we can say, western farming has become more 
productive this way through economies of scale, for better or worse. 
Also there is one more form of subsidy the farmers in developed 
countries enjoy: disaster aid. The Canadian federal government for 
example spends substantial amounts of money to bail out depressed farms 
which were hit by drought, BSE, or flooding. I am sure a lot of this 
money is used to pay interest and support the farms substantial 
cash-flow issues that arise when crops fail.

This situation is similar for the Indian farmer in that agricultural 
practise that goes slightly beyond subsistence farming requires capital. 
Assuming that the farmer has access to capital, it can be spend on many 
different things: more land, various seeds, machinery and fuel, storage 
or processing facilities, fertilizers and weed killer, and now new in 
the mix are the GM seeds. Hence, to assist an Indian farmer to 'grow' 
one should allow the to access to capital through loans.  But since 
lending practices in India and many other parts of the world are far 
less developed, efficient AND affordable the 'microcredit schemes' have 
been very influential and effective to provide access to money for 
people who would otherwise not have it. This is not to say that we have 
similar "unsafe" lending practices in the US - maybe it is time to 
consider P2P lending there as well.

And exactly at this 'unsafe' lending in India, is where I put my hook 
back to GM seeds: their use is intimately linked to banking. I believe, 
that the problems their sale creates in India are much more pronounced 
and quick to show, because of the lack of a solid monetary support 
system. It's like selling Africans a current MacBook - when anything 
breaks, assuming they even have the power to operate it - the laptop is 
essentially 'bricked' and a 100% write-off for the buyer.  Thus, to 
'support' the operation of a MacBook in Africa really requires more 
money than the initial investment. This is why the OLPC computer that is 
supposed to lift the developing world into the 21st century IT wise, is 
specifically designed to be cheaper in the first place, much more 
rugged, modular and to be repaired easier. Exactly the same happens with 
GM seeds, which require the special expensive fertilizer and machinery 
to actually be succesfull. Thus I would simply say, GM seeds are like 
high-tech IT equipment for this reason, and should simply not be sold in 
places that cannot afford all the long term expenses that may come with 
it. And now my argument loops back to the microcredit scheme where the 
lender and the creditor are much closer together: if I lend capital to a 
farmer in India, I could conceivably have control over how the money is 
spend - much more control than giving my money to an anonymous NGO or 
relying on heavily lobbied governments to do the job for me - and this 
what I personally find so 'practical' about this idea of 
'strings-attached P2P lending to developing world farmers'.

One can also broaden this approach of 'strings-attached lending' in my 
view. The provincial government here for example is successfully 
influencing environmental policy to houses by giving out interest free 
loans for energy efficiency home upgrades - essentially a microcredit 
with strings attached. The problem with the program is, that it is too 
'micro' (only $2K) and the banks or private investors are nowhere to be 
seen (funding for example a $15K geothermal heat-pump system).

I want to also point out, that this argument does not evaluate any other 
issues associated with GM seeds on other fronts such as patent lock-in 
or the ecological impact of this stuff. That is for another discussion 
and another email. For me - at this capital-on-the-ground level - GM 
seeds are just another instance of the many forms of how our societies 
'industrialize' farming practice.

--AS


PS: And I fully admit of being a hypocrite, because I did NOT go to the 
farmers market today but took the well trodden path to the supermarket 
as usual. Shame on me.


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