indian society wants to come out of WTO

[Center contemporary studies & research]

Dear friends
greetings from CCRS! now the new droft of WTO negotiations is under debate, As we all remember some times back the hongkong menisterial was faild due to mass resistence.After seeing the new droft (resleaseed on 19th may 2008) a discussion was held in Delhi on 11th June 2008, in which farmers Unions and civil socity organisations took a cleare stand agaist WTO. after a day long meeting a resolution came out and I am sending it for your consideration. Now there is a strong need to push this issue to save our farmers from the trap of multi national copmanies.

 

Utkarsh Sinha

      
'WTO Negotiations: Protecting Livelihoods and Ensuring Food Security'
Organized by
Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security & UNCTAD India
11th June 2008

Resolution

We, the representatives of farming community, fisher folks, agricultural workers, adivasis, dalits and rural women, civil society organizations, academia, resolve that the latest drafts on Agriculture and Non Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) are the final nails on the coffin of the country's food security and sovereignty.  Both the drafts are an orchestrated attempt to open up the Indian markets for highly subsidized cheaper imports. Importing food is importing unemployment that will destroy livelihoods and the country's food self-sufficiency.

We, representing the majority India are highly concerned about the dilution of Government's position in the WTO negotiations which will play havoc with the lives of us millions. What is being offered to us at WTO by way of special products (SP) and Special Safeguard Measures (SSM) is only a smokescreen and offers no real protection to Indian agriculture, fisheries and forestry.  We do not see any efforts by rich countries to remove their agriculture subsidies that depress global prices and insulate their transnational corporations against any market volatility. 

In this context and given the above concerns, we demand that the Government should reject the two drafts, as they fail to take India's minimum concerns on-board. Since this has implications on millions of lives and livelihoods of our people, the government should restore import duties to the bound levels and bring back quantitative restrictions. Given the global food crisis, and the extent of agrarian distress in the country, the SP's and SSM's are inadequate to protect livelihoods and food security.

This entire process of negotiations ending up in such one sided deals is a wasted and futile exercise. It is high time the Indian government stands up for its people otherwise the socio, economic and political consequences will be disastrous. Hence, Agriculture should be left out of WTO.

Signed:

                                          

1.          Mr. Mahendra Singh Tikait, Bharatiya Kisan Union, Baghpat, UP

2.          Mr. Rakesh Tikait, Bharatiya Kisan Union, Baghpat, UP

3.          Mr. Gurnam Singh, Pradhan, Bharatiya Kisan Union, Haryana

4.          Mr. Yudhvir Singh, Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers' Movement, New Delhi

5.          Mr. K Chellamuthu, President, Tamizhaga Uzhavar Uzhaipalar Sangam, Tamil Nadu

6.          Mr. P. Chennaiah, Andhra Pradesh Vyavasaya Viritidarulu Union, APVVU, AP

7.          Mr. KS Puttannaiah, Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, Karnataka

8.          Mr. Malla Reddy, Andhra Pradesh Rythu Sangham, Andhra Pradesh

9.          Mr. Suneet Chopra, Joint Secretary, All India Agricultural Workers Union

10.     Dr. Sunilam, Madhya Pradesh Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, MP

11.     Mr. Bhagirath Chaudhary, Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, Rajasthan

12.     Mr. Basavaraj Ingin, Karnataka Pradesh Red Gram Growers Association, Karnataka

13.     Mr. Vijay Nandkishore Jawandhia, Shetkari Sanghathana, Maharashtra

14.     Mr. N. D. Koli, National Fishworkers' Forum

15.     Mr. Ambrish Rai, Lok Sangh Morcha, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

16.     Fr. Mathew Vadakemury, Indian Farmers' Movement (INFARM), Kerala

17.     Mr. Kanniyan, Thamizhaga Vivasayigal Sangam (Tamil Nadu Farmers' Association)

18.     Mr. Sukhdev Singh Kokrikalan, Bharatiya Kisan Union, Punjab

19.     Ms. Pratibha Shinde, Adivasi leader, Gujarat

20.     Ms. Sheelu Francis, Tamil Nadu Women's Collective

21.     Mr. Ram Kumar, Dynamic Action Group, Lucknow

22.     Mr. Umendra Dutt, Kheti Virasat Mission, Jaitu, District - Faridkot, Punjab 151202

23.     Ms. Alka Awasthi, CECOEDECON, Rajasthan

24.     Dr. Surjeet Singh, Institute for Development Studies, Rajasthan

25.     Mr. Utkarsh Sinha, Centre for Contemporary Studies & Research, Uttar Pradesh

26.     Mr. Sanjay Singh, Parmarth, U.P.

27.     Dr. GV Ramanjaneyulu, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, AP

28.     Ms. S Usha, Thanal, Kerala

29.     Ms. Sangita Sharma, Annadana, Karnataka

30.     Mr. Sanket Thakur, Chhattisgarh Agricon, Chhatisgarh

31.     Dr. Ranjit Singh Ghuman, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab

32.     Mr. Benny Kuruvilla, Focus on the Global South, New Delhi

33.     Dr. Aseem Shrivastava, New Delhi

34.     Mr. Sudeep Chakravarti, Writer

35.     Mr. Devinder Sharma, Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security, New Delhi

--
Center For Contemporary Studies and Research
5/426, Viram Khand, Gomti Nagar
Lucknow 226010
+91 522 4005040
Please join  www.ccsrindia.blogspot.com  to updates of the farmers struggle

[jashodhara dasgupta]

Civil Society consultation on EU-India Free Trade Agreement

Dear friends,

I would like to get this information to as many people as possible in India who have anything to do with impact of trade agreements.

As you may know EU is negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with India and a civil society consultation is being planned for 23 June in Delhi - and being organized by CUTS. Please check the attachments for details.
I also attach a report -Trade Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) of the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA): Draft Global Analysis Report.
You have to confirm participation at the consultation to -  L P Katara - l...@cuts.org,  and copy to p...@cuts.org and to tsia...@ecorys.com
Please forward this - if we pass the word around I hope some people can find out what's happening, and participate.

In solidarity,

Jashodhara

--
Jashodhara Dasgupta
Coordinator
SAHAYOG
A-240 Indira Nagar
Lucknow 226016 UP India
Phone - +91-522-2310747, 2310860
Fax - +91-522-2341319
website - www.sahayogindia.org

[vijay nandkishore jawandhia]

  Dear Jashodharaji
          Namaskar
              Thank you.Please see the attached paper.
                  With best wishes
                                    Vijay Jawandhia


On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 jashodhara dasgupta wrote :
>*Civil Society consultation on EU-India Free Trade Agreement*

>Dear friends, I would like to get this information to as many people as
>possible in India who have anything to do with impact of trade agreements.
>As you may know EU is negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with India and a

>civil society consultation is being planned for *23 June in Delhi* - and

>being organized by CUTS. Please check the attachments for details.
>I also attach a report -Trade Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) of the
>EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA): Draft Global Analysis Report.
>You have to confirm participation at the consultation to -  L P Katara -
>l...@cuts.org,  and copy to p...@cuts.org and to tsia...@ecorys.com
>Please forward this - if we pass the word around I hope some people can find
>out what's happening, and participate.
>In solidarity,
>Jashodhara
>
>
>
>--
>Jashodhara Dasgupta
>Coordinator
>SAHAYOG
>A-240 Indira Nagar
>Lucknow 226016 UP India
>Phone - +91-522-2310747, 2310860
>Fax - +91-522-2341319
>website - www.sahayogindia.org
>
>>

Vijay Jawandhia
Shetkari Sanghatana Paik
Ramnagar, Wardha.
Phone No.:+91-7152-240590

[periyapatna satheesh]

This makes for a great reading Vijayji   Many thanks   satheesh --- On Tue, 17/6/08, vijay nandkishore jawandhia <shet...@rediffmail.com> wrote:

Phone No..:+91-7152-240590  NEW INTERNATIONALIST Search the NI Website Advanced search | Mega Index Contact NI Site help Report bug About NI Current Issue Back Issues Features Columns Blogs Radio Subscriptions Shops What's new Home » Features April 2007 • Issue 399 The world’s favourite fabric Cotton: peril and promise Gentle and breathable to wear; harsh and suffocating to work with. Richard Swift unpicks the world’s favourite fabric. Spinning cotton, spinning money – worker checking machinery in an Indian textile factory. Atul Loke / Panos Pictures If you want to make money from cotton, best to stay well away from it. Historically, that’s how it has always been. Take the big planters of the US South, who cooled their heels in old New Orleans or perched up in their genteel Natchez mansions on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Not for them the snake- and bug-infested bottomlands where their slaves and overseers worked the fields. Similarly, the shareholders of the British East India Company stayed well away from the Indian villages which first produced the handloom fabrics that took Europe by storm, followed by the raw cotton that fuelled the fledgling Lancashire textile industry. Granted, there was a brief period when entrepreneurs like the Lancashire-based Sir Richard Arkwright (Britain) or the Boston Brahmin, Francis Cabot Lowell (US), pioneered a factory system based on textiles and were intimately involved with creating the dreary rhythms of factory life. But their sumptuous dwellings were far away from the grim slums of Manchester and the like, where their textile workers were warehoused. Certainly the colonial officialdom of the British, Portuguese and French empires, whose coercive taxation policies forced Africans to grow the ‘white gold’, had very little direct contact. If anything, the distance between ‘working cotton’ and those who profit from it has grown even greater in our own time. For traders in ‘futures’ who speculate on the international market, cotton is little more than an abstract part of a profit-and-loss equation. Although the corporate farmers who dominate Big Cotton in the US are still theoretically ‘on the land’, their relationship with the crop is mediated by massive machinery and hi-tech production methods. On the more advanced farms, fixed-wing aircraft produce digital scans that can customize the needs of each plant for fertilizer, insecticide and growth hormones. These are then delivered to each individual plant by agricultural machinery carrying on-board computing capacity. Sounds good, but makes for expensive cotton that without US Department of Agriculture subsidies would have a hard time competing with African and Indian smallholders. The ‘brands’ which now sell us our cotton clothing have little or nothing to do with its manufacture. That is done on contract far away – mostly in places like China, Bangladesh and India – where wages are low and working conditions largely unregulated. The people who own and run these new satanic mills are euphemistically called ‘suppliers’. But what happens in the fire-plagued ‘three-floor-factories’ of Chinese free trade zones (one floor: storage; one floor: production; one floor: workers’ accommodation) is well below the radar of the average Wal-Mart customer. As they say: ‘Always Low Prices’. You can see the appeal of not getting too close. Working in the textile industry has never been a lot of fun. And, for a scrawny old shrub, cotton is pretty demanding. It requires a long growing season, plenty of rain to get it going (three months or so), then a lot of heat. After that there needs to be a period of very dry weather for the harvesting to take place. It’s a lot of hard, often backbreaking work under a blistering sun, particularly when you come to the cotton-picking stage. Then there is the disappointment once you get your cotton to the marketplace and, often as not, find your hard work poorly rewarded. It’s always ‘the middleman’ – the broker, the government agent, the moneylender, the buyer from the factory – who seems to make out best. The Blues and cotton just seem to go naturally together as in Charlie Patton’s Mississippi Bol Weevil Blues: ‘Well, the Merchant got half the cotton, The Bol Weevils got the rest. Didn’t leave the poor farmer’s wife But one old cotton dress, And it’s full of holes, all full of holes.’ All the attempts to make cotton friendlier seem to have ended up just antagonizing it. In recent years two waves of industrial agriculture have sought to ‘revolutionize’ production. The Green Revolution wave brought in hybrid varieties that needed lots of water and agro-chemicals. In some places yields were better for a while, but the chemicals were too expensive and poisoned everything – the soil, the water, the cotton, the farmers themselves. Now the next wave has arrived: genetically modified cotton. Just change one gene and all your problems vanish in a puff of smoke. But, for lots of farmers in India at least, it isn’t turning out that way. While the new BT cotton, as it is called, depends less on agrochemicals, it needs more water. The money that poor farmers used to spend on the pesticides now must be spent on buying new ‘miracle’ seeds. And while yields have been okay in some places, they tend to be a lot less dependable in conditions of rain-fed as opposed to irrigated agriculture. And irrigation has its limits, when agriculture is based on ‘mining’ otherwise renewable resources like water and soil. Over the next few decades both the US and India (the world’s second- and third-largest cotton producers) face seriously depleting water aquifers. The irony is that hardier, more environmentally friendly types of cotton have been displaced by long-staple, high-yield varieties considered more suitable for industrial textile production. Still, for all the pain and misery, there is something about cotton that appeals – and not just to consumers, who love the feel of the ‘breathable’ fabric against their skin. Despite all the heartbreak, cotton farmers persist in the cycle of planting, tending and harvesting that keeps millions on the margins of the cash economy. Some 99 per cent of cotton farmers now live in the Global South – two-thirds in India and China – making cotton very definitely a poor person’s crop. Champion of cotton Demand for cotton has doubled since the 1980s. Homespun, it used also to be the mainstay of poor people’s wardrobes. But that has changed. The bulk of cotton is now consumed in Europe and North America and other parts of the industrial world. Now, in most years, there is a glut on the world cotton market, with reserve stockpiles and slumping prices. When I was researching this issue I had the chance to meet the colourful farmers’ leader Vijay Jawandhia in his home in Ramnagar, in the eastern part of the Indian state of Maharashtra. I was in line just ahead of a whole village of cotton farmers who had come to consult. Jawandhia was generous with both his time and his views. I quickly realized I was dealing with a formidable intellect, quite comfortable jumping from Marx’s theory of value based on labour, to that of Rosa Luxemburg based on resources, to the plight of Indian smallholders. He estimates that just one per cent of the price of a cotton shirt bought in the West ends up in the hands of the farmer. The textile worker who made the shirt doesn’t fare much better. Jawandhia points to the cotton shirt I am wearing and gesticulates dramatically as he asks the obvious question: where does the rest of that money go? Jawandhia is all too familiar with the hardships faced by cotton farmers in the Global South. Still, he is a champion of cotton. He compares it favourably to oil-based artificial fabrics. ‘The petroleum source is going to the toilet. Whereas the source of cotton is sun-energy.’ He also champions the employment associated with cotton as opposed to artificial fibres. ‘For every bale of artificial fibres there is work for 9 people; every bale of cotton provides work for 30.’ He even sees a place for cotton waste, which can be recycled into paper ‘to help with the tree shortage or to make charcoal for fuel’. People around the world will be wearing cotton for some time to come. But if it is to fulfil any of the promise Jawandhia sees in it, it must start to reward the farmers and textile workers who have intimate contact with it, rather than just those who have always drained arms-length profit from it. And we also need to make sure we don’t turn it from a sustainable crop to an unsustainable monoculture, dependent on agrochemicals and gene-manipulation. If we are kinder to it, maybe it will be kinder to us. • With thanks to Stephen Yafa’s excellent Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber, Penguin, 2005. Write to the Editor Print this story E-mail this article also by... THIS AUTHOR Organic and beyond Can ‘going organic’ save India’s besieged cotton farmers? Not on its own, argues Richard Swift, as he sorts through the evidence. Death by cotton Richard Swift travels to the troubled cotton belt of eastern Maharashtra, where a tragedy has been unfolding. Cotton As part of the preparation for doing this issue I travelled to India. Dictatorship of no alternatives Richard Swift reports on how an internationalist vision fell among the wolves. Write to the Editor Print this story E-mail this article Make text bigger Make text smaller Language Tools Enable this page... Disable page... English->Spanish English->French English->German English Definitions Powered by Ultralingua Join over 10,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, issue alerts, contests, and more! other articles FROM THIS ISSUE What next? Future threats and counter-strategies Second strife True tales of a mixed-up world Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski Two for the price of one, in the shape of Tweedledum and Tweedledee Neruda Songs Neruda Songs by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Grinderman Grinderman by Grinderman recently IN THIS COLUMN An African struggle African civil society is getting results, reports Dismas Nkunda. Salaam Darfur Moataz El Fegiery and Ridwan Ziyada challenge the Arab world’s silence. War against women Femke van Zeijl on the devastation caused by rape. Darfur – Facts and timeline Facts, timeline and map Don't ignore Darfur How to take action. Over a barrel Leben Nelson Moro on the curse of oil. Voices from the margins: Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more. Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets. Published by Pambazuka News. Raised Voices video: Atossa Soltani from Brazil on the Climate Change Desmond Desai from South Africa on Corporate Power Iranian women speak out 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign. Produced by Heidi Bachram. Raised Voices audio: Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power Vinayan from India on agriculture New Internationalist Need help? Home Sitemap Search Shop Subscribe Help Podcast help Contact NI Copyright notice Reprint policy Regular columns Big bad world Country profile Currents Essay Letter from Making Waves Mixed media Southern exposure View from Worldbeaters On the go? RSS E-mail Radio / Podcast New Internationalist (NI) workers' co-operative exists to report on issues of world poverty and inequality; to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide; to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary to meet the basic needs of all; and to bring to life the people, the ideas and the action in the fight for global justice. Except where otherwise noted, images on this site are copyright of the photographer/illustrator or representative agency. 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