Seeds of treason

There are all kinds of security issues.  In the last three decades the word ‘security’ was associated with protection from terrorist attacks.  Today territorial integrity is not threated by terrorists.  If at all it comes under threat by Indian fishermen and trawlers. 

Sovereignty, on the other hand, can be compromised in many ways.  It is not a land thing and neither is it a maritime boundary thing.  It is about other kinds of invasions, in particular through trade regimes constructed by the arm-twisting of weaker/poorer countries by powerful/rich nations.  It is also compromised by policy ‘prerogatives’ scripted by way of conditions for financial aid.  Not all of it however is foreign-born.  We can also shoot ourselves in our collective foot. 

Food security is an integral part of national security.  This is why moves to obtain a shift from rice to so-called High Value Crops have to be resisted.  The same goes for dependency on imported inputs, not least of all on account of the poisoning of soils and waterways and through these the people. Food, however, begins with seeds.  Control seeds and you control food, population and nation.  It is in this context that the proposed Seed and Planting Material Act needs to understood as a dangerous invasion on sovereignty. 

All seed, we all know, originates from nature and the most competent architects of their modification in terms of food security, health of consumers and nutritional enhancement have been farmers.  The proposed Act would destroy biodiversity by promoting uniformity, but worse, undermines farmers’ rights. 

Under this proposal, “No person shall do anything that will contravene the provisions of this

Act including import, export, sell, keep for sale, offer to sell, dispose in any manner or supply or exchange with commercial intention of seed and planting materials except in accordance with the provisions of this Act.”  This clearly compromises the farmers’ rights to save, exchange, sell, breed and improve seed all of which have been considered a birthright by rulers and ruled throughout this country’s long history.   

It appears as though the authors of this document are either oblivious to the pernicious machinations of the seed industry and the deplorable complicity of both officials and academics in their many efforts to destroy biodiversity and cripple farmers to facilitate the fattening of the said industry.

The Technical and Advisory Committee does not include farmer representatives even though farmers have the best experience and expertise in all matters pertaining to seeds.  There is no biodiversity expert to ensure the conservation of genetic diversity either.  There is however a ‘Genetic Engineer’, an entity that has absolutely no role in Seed Law!

We should keep in mind that the primary article of faith for industrial seed breeding has been uniformity.  Even according to the FAO (no innocent in these ‘wars’) more than 75% diversity in agriculture has been destroyed due to the spread of industrial monocultures.  This is not error but crime. 

What is needed and what common sense advocates in the face of the tragedies that mono crop cultures have engendered is breeding for diversity, nutrition and resilience.  In this sense the draft act is archaic.  Worse, it amounts to colluding with entities that are antithetical to national interest, as embedded Mahinda Chinthana Idiri Dekma, and rebels against the overall citizenry and especially the farming community.  Let us not forget that in terms of sheer numbers it was this community that sacrificed most lives to rid the country of the terrorist threat and keep safe, inter alia, the very architects of these treacherous documents.

The consequences of violating regulations clearly betray this treachery.  Farmers would be drawn over the coals while importers and handlers would be treated with ‘consideration’. No fines or imprisonment for them.

It is clear then.  This is one more piece of the puzzle to compromise or even destroy national sovereignty.  Take over seed control and you take over the nation.  We say this because this country has seen officials, academics and politicians coming together to transform land and water into marketable commodities, to make farmers playthings of seed companies, encourage the use of toxic chemicals banned in the countries of origin, among other things.  We have already compromised our ability to feed ourselves.  We have already agreed to consumer poison in the name of development. 

This would be the last straw.  Does the President know that his officials, advisors and ministers are thumbing their collective noses at his chinthanaya?  

msenevira@gmail.com

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Banking for the Poor or Banking on the Poor?

There are people who still believe that the British built our roads and railways.  This is utter rubbish.  The labour was Sri Lankan.  The funds were obtained by taxing our people.  As for the roads and railways they were not designed to get Kusumawathi from Anuradhapura to Kataragama but to streamline resource and value extraction. 

This is how power imbalances play out.  The powerful are able to make the powerless inhabit a version of reality they (the powerless) have no say in authoring.  Bishop Desmond Tutu in his more progressive days, speaking on the colonial encounter in Africa and in particular the ‘priest’-accomplice of the sultans of destruction and resource extraction put it this way: ‘In the beginning we had the land and they had the book; they said ‘close your eyes, let us pray’ and when we opened our eyes, we had the book and they had the land.’ 

I have over the years found it safer to treat with suspicion those who wear benefactor-garb.  I am thinking here about a new buzz-term in the development discourse: microfinance.  It is not new, really.  ‘Banking with the Poor’ is a couple of decades old already, but it was buried in a heap of other buzz-words for years. 

Today microfinance is seen as the magic formula for poverty alleviation.  Sorry, it is SAID to be the magic formula for poverty alleviation.  The distinction is important and is indicative of my cynicism. 

Discussions on microfinance tend to be liberally laden with references to poverty alleviation and how it is important to rope the poor into formal banking systems.  It is the unsaid that makes the most interesting reading, though.

Those who talk about banking with the poor will not tell you that banks have always needed the poor.  First of all, money doesn’t fall from the sky.  Value has to be created.  Profits have to be EXTRACTED. It is called ‘exploitation’.  I don’t have to re-write Kark Marx’s Labour Theory of Value here. Someone gives and someone takes, to put it simply. There are TERMS of extraction and these can even be legal. 

Next we get to savings.  Who saves?  The poor!  The rich don’t save. They invest.  Take the People’s Bank, the Bank of Ceylon and the National Savings Bank.  They are made of poor people’s money. Salaries. Pensions. The little something put aside every month in numerous savings schemes.  Who gets the loans?  The rich! 

The rich have always banked ON the poor. They NEED the poor.  ‘Microfinance’ in its banking-only manifestation then is nothing else than the banks realizing that little drops of water can make big bucks at the end of the day.  The margins are obtained by volume.  They have figured out, these rich microfinance gurus dressed as do-gooding poor-lovers have, that the poor outnumber the rich by about 100 to 1 or more.  Any idiot with even an iota of business sense would see this as ‘potential’.  You can get the one rich guy to save 100 bucks or get the other 99 to save 10 bucks each.  That would make 990 rupees or an 890% difference.  It’s good business, ladies and gentlemen.  Now factor in the loans, the micro-credit and the profits from interest.  Astounding!

The problem with microfinance is that it is marketed as a delivering-all kind of tool. It is nothing of the kind.  Stripped of rhetoric and promise it remains just another banking product.  It has a sound-good feel to it, yes.  It is made to fatten CSR portfolios, yes.  At the end of the day, commercial bank are interested in profit and little else. 

Microfinance in its thrift-and-credit avatar was essentially a collective effort that was governed by cooperative principles.  Today, microfinance is a term that the ace defenders and approvers of shameless resource extraction and labour exploitation, the World Bank, has appropriated.  Today it is a concept that the World Bank has re-defined and is dishing out to each and every naïve and/or pernicious taker who does a google search, courtesy the CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor). CGAP is ‘addressed’ at the World Bank and focuses on financial services. 

The focus itself tells a story.  The assumption is that it is all about money.  Well, it is.  At least from the point of view of the banking outfits that micro-finance.  How about the poor, though? 

Where issues of comprehensive betterment of a given community are not addressed, when sustainability is not a concern, when culture is factored out, when national development frameworks are not referenced, when training and education so necessary for resource and potential identification are ignored, you don’t get poverty alleviation. You get PLAYED.  In your name.  That’s the beauty of banking on the poor.  You don’t say you need the poor, than you are literally banking on them, you say you are doing it with them.

To me, banking WITH the poor is like raping WITH the victim.  There is an element of ‘consent’ that gets scripted in.   You can say ‘We are doing it with you, brother,’ even as you do him in.

The British, they tell us, built our roads. Microfinance is a road, I think.  The poor are building it. With their money and labour.  Someone is using the road to take out cartloads of value away from the places that the poor inhabit. 

Roads are good though but only as long as those who build them decide what kind of road to build and from where to where and why.  Microfinance is not that kind of road, I am afraid; certainly not in its dominant articulation. 

It boils down to a simple matter: who owns the road.  Let’s think about it.  

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