The cost of the food we eat

Report from India

 

Friends,

A friend recently talked to me about what would happen if Nike had to tell us, in small print in each advertisement, the price that buyers would be paying for the production of each pair of shoes as well as the cost of getting them endorsed by Michael Jordan, etc. This in contrast to a shoemaker, where what you pay is for what you get.

Talking of which, let me tell you about the real price of the food we're all buying in supermarkets:

1)    we pay once, in cash, for the food;

2)    we pay once, in our taxes, for the subsidies that go into farming. In India, just the  fertilizer subsidy costs the central govt. Rs.12,000 crores annually. If you want to know what your share of that is - when the Gujarat earthquake's damage was estimated at requiring Rs.13,000 crores for reconstruction work, the govt. decided to make income tax payees cough up a surcharge of 2% ( now the estimate has gone up to 21,000 crores and the taxes will be more too );

As for pesticide subsidies, the state govts. spend for that, I have no estimates, but here's a telling example:

In Andhra Pradesh in 2000, bud necrosis, a viral disease affecting the groundnut crop, was identified by agricultural scientists as immune to any of the chemical pesticides presently in use, but an all-party political meeting called to discuss the wide-spread problem decided that it would be politically unwise to admit such helplessness. Hence, an order was given to spend Rs.9 crores to aerially spray 5 lakh litres of monochrotophos, a highly toxic pesticide, over 20 lakh acres of crop area, although it would be ineffective in this case, for the sake of showing some kind of supportive activity on the government's part. An empty gesture, in short, which cost over Rs.9 crores. For one disease of one crop in one state of our nation.

(Incidentally, all these subsidies for agricultural chemicals go straight into the coffers of the manufacturers, though a little sticks to the palms of the government administrators as it goes by. The farmer doesn't see the colour of this money at all. When a farmer takes a crop loan from the government, part of it is for the fertilizers used, which is reimbursed after the farmer has produced the bills from the authorised depot. As for the free pesticides, this is the method of choice for Indian farmers who commit suicide because they can't repay crop loans, the means for it are freely provided by the government.)

3)    we pay once more, in taxes, for environmental clean-up efforts, for instance the work every city corporation has to do to get the polluted ground-water and river-water sufficiently detoxified so that users won't get killed.

4)    we pay again, through the ill health we and our live-stock suffer, in response to the toxins in our food and water, and our efforts to provide medical treatment, none of which is free in this country.

5)    all of nature pays, with the health and lives of living creatures. Our unborn descendants will be paying these bills, long after we're gone.

Organic farming, on the other hand, carries no subsidies of any kind in India. When you pay for the food, you pay just once. So now think about the prices again.

Padma Rajagopal. - SEED Trust

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[Editor's Note:  Although set in India, these observations are parallel to  California's Glassy Winged Sharpshooter, New York's Mosquito war and hundreds of other toxic stories all over the world.  We need to put a human face on the extinction of the human race.]

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