The Hindu Business Line : Subsidise or perish!

DR DEVINDER SHARMA, a food and trade policy analyst, has said that scientific apartheid has begun against developing countries by the multinational companies and the developed countries.

Countries like India have no wherewithal either to carry on research and development or to fight legal cases globally to protect their rights, he told a two-day workshop for journalists here on Saturday.

The World Bank-World Trade Organisation-International Monetary Fund triumvirate overlooked huge subsidies given to the farmers in the US and European Union. But they are worried over the meagre support given by the developing countries, he said.

The workshop was organised by the Press Institute of India, Indian Liberal Group and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung.

The lion's share of farming subsidies in the US and EU went to the corporates and the farmers got only a small portion. "Eighty per cent of subsidies go to corporates and big farmers," Dr Sharma, who also chairs the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, said.

While they (the West) continue to offer subsidies, developing countries are being forced to cut subsidies further.

Whenever a proposal comes up for allocation of funds to agriculture, policymakers point to the problem of fiscal deficit. But the same analogy is not applied while drawing plans for the businesses or the salaried class.

Diversification, of late, had become the mantra in India. "The World Bank says diversification would give viability to farmers. But most of the farmers who committed suicides in the recent times had gone for diversification," he said.

Contract farming is no solution either as the crops promoted by companies require more inputs and render the land barren in a few years.

There, however, is no uniform solution for the whole country. There should be location-specific solutions, he said.

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