As a person engaged in agricultural issues, I am quite shocked yet again about the fact that Indian farming is out of the radar map of most political parties – Left, Right or Centre – and the media in the country. The whole nation seems to be besieged by the 123 nuclear deal with a raging debate on various perspectives around it. However, there has not been a whimper heard on the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), hailed as the harbinger of the second green revolution in the country.

Signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s US visit in July 2005, this bilateral deal is ignored even as the agricultural establishment happily plods on with KIA’s implementation. This is all the more surprising and unacceptable given the many parallels that exist between the two deals. For one thing, both the deals were signed without any consultation or discussions within Indian Parliament. In fact, the KIA should have been discussed at the state level also given that agriculture is their constitutional domain too

While the 123 deal is geared to secure India’s support of US foreign policy, the KIA is about changing Indian domestic regulation in agriculture and allied sectors to promote and protect American commercial interests thus taking care of the two most powerful lobbies in the US ( arms and agri-business).

In both the deals, there are international agreements being ignored by the US. They have not signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) or the Kyoto Protocol or the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.
It is interesting to note that the main themes of these protocols to which India subscribes to through ratification and which US discounts or fights in the international arena – biological resources including biodiversity, climate change and safety with regard to living modified organisms – are ironically key parts of the KIA. While in the case of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, the US is violating something that it is a signatory to, in the case of KIA, it even refuses to acknowledge the basic tenets that India subscribes to. This does not seem to hurt Indian principles or sentiments.

There have been no analyses of past performance that have informed the present deals – of the civilian nuclear programme in India or of the agricultural establishment. India’s nuclear programme is known for its lack of accountability and opaque functioning in addition to its unimpressive performance. When it comes to the KIA, there was no balance sheet drawn up on the Green Revolution (GR) to assess the benefits and the negative impacts and no lessons were drawn and articulated. The deals also centre around classifying and categorising certain technologies as “clean” – nuclear and transgenics. However, there are strong arguments and evidences in both cases that break these myths on which the deals are being rationalised.

Nuclear energy, right from the mining stage to the waste disposal stage is hazardous just as transgenic technology carries many unknown and known hazards with it. In reality, they are not clean, in front of other successful alternatives – whether it is renewables in the energy sector or ecological farming in the agriculture sector.

It is interesting to note that there are no new commercial nuclear reactors that have been set up even in the US since 1996. On the other side, there is growing resistance against transgenic technology globally. There are more bans and GM-free zones in the world today than five years ago. India however wants to function in an old mindset.

Both the deals have raised concerns about exclusive rights that will accrue to the US or rights denied to India. In the case of the KIA, the concerns are centred around monopolistic commercial rights in the form of Intellectual Property Rights. Bio-piracy legitimised through the KIA has been a repeated concern from groups that have studied the KIA. Prima facie, the KIA is already violating many of the Collaborative Research guidelines notified by the MoEF under the Biological Diversity Act.

From all accounts, the ostensible targets of both these deals are quite unimpressive by themselves, even if we put aside other issues for a while. What they set out to change at the policy level are clearly worrisome. The KIA in fact needs to be discussed a lot more on precisely those grounds - the implications for the vast majority of Indians due to policy and regulatory changes in
farming.
One did not hear much opposition from political parties within the UPA or its opponents on the KIA. While nuclear scientists are positioning themselves in nationalist hues by raising several arguments against the 123 deal, very few agricultural scientists have even bothered to look at the KIA critically!
Unfortunately, the parallels also extend to the fact that voices that argue on fundamental grounds against both deals are sidelined from the debate completely.

It can be shown that both energy and agricultural produce demands in India can be catered to only if we recast our definitions of development into definitions that question unsustainable aspirations and resource use. Coming back to the KIA, it is important that the country as a whole debates its national development priorities including food security and sovereignty, improvements in the livelihoods of the invisible millions and the implications of the KIA in the context of the current crisis in Indian farming.

(The writer is Consultant with the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Hyderabad.)