Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cals, many Indians continue to go hungry. The Green Revolution has not
solved the country's problems of food insecurity.
In recent years, sustainable food advocates have drawn on the writings
of the political economist Karl Polanyi to think about these and related
changes resulting from the globalization of agriculture.79 In his topic The
Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi describes how processes of marketi-
zation and the commodification of the environment devastated England
during its industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. This devasta-
tion ranged from “the denudation of forests” to “the deterioration of craft
standards [and] the disruption of folkways.”80 As the economic system
changed, industries became profit driven, and land and other natural re-
sources came to be regarded simply as inputs for industrial progress and
growth. In other words, in this process of marketization, natural resources
became atomized, seen simply as commodities with only an economic
value. This economic transformation increased the vulnerability of the
environment to unregulated exploitation. From a Polanyian perspective,
the four agrarian tragedies in Kerala—suicides, the proliferation of fun-
gal disease in pepper, the deterioration of the coffee sector, and endosul-
fan poisoning—epitomize the contemporary destruction resulting from
the commodification of agricultural inputs and outputs, the move toward
chemicals and cash crops, and the prioritizing of yields throughout India.
Despite this grim history, Polanyi saw hope in the way that communities
and societies historically responded to environmental and social crises. In
England, a “countermovement” emerged to protect the environment and
community groups from complete annihilation. According to Polanyi,
countermovements are forms of social protection for the environment and
society. They intervene in the free market to enact protective legislation,
to restrict environmental and social destruction. Polanyi wrote about how
trade unions, various classes, churches, and individuals banded together
in countermovements to regulate and monitor the free market to protect
their livelihoods from the detrimental effects of commercialization.81
Just as Polanyi would have predicted, India's agrarian crisis has stimu-
lated various countermovements, including a turn to organic farming in
states like Kerala. The state government passed an organic farming policy
in 2010, which led to the ban of several pesticides in the state. Moreover,
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