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Thursday March 28, 2024

Rural people in Asia badly affected by Covid-19: webinar

By Our Correspondent
June 27, 2020

LAHORE:An NGO organised an international webinar titled “Food producers shall not go hungry: The broken globalised food system.”

The speakers explained that small farmers, landless peasantry, agriculture workers and the rural poor in Asia were badly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. They spoke not only about the larger crisis in agriculture in the region, but also regarding agrarian visions in Asia. The crisis is all due to uneven land distribution, ecological change, and the increased marketisation of agricultural markets, they argued.

The speakers shared that the Covid-19 lockdowns had resulted in food rotting in fields, leaving food producers, including peasants, farmers, and agricultural workers, to go hungry. The mass return of tens of millions of migrant workers, many walking hundreds of miles on foot, to their home villages has raised serious questions about the lives of landless poor across rural and urban settings. The tragedy of many returning to their home villages is that they no longer have land to cultivate, no subsistence crops to get through these difficult times.

They said that this has exacerbated an already bleak situation for Asia’s peasants, small food producers and working poor. One of eight people in the world was facing malnutrition due to a lack of adequate and healthy food before the Covid-19 pandemic. This global hunger is a product of landlessness, uneven social relations and capitalist imperatives underpinning relentless dispossession of people from land, as well as inadequate infrastructure and logistics of food provisioning. This has led to a global food system designed to fail to address the needs of the most hungry, instead increasingly supplying food grown in the global South to the global North and not the other way around.

The speakers explained that the policies that were promoted for growing cash crops on agricultural land, such as cotton and palm oil, have made agricultural producers particularly vulnerable in the face of the Covid-related economic crisis in the global North.

Replying to a number of questions, the speakers explained why Asia is home to nearly half a billion people that go hungry every day. While UN bodies like the FAO, explain this “food insecurity” through the causes of poverty, conflict, climatic and technological challenges, they say next to nothing about the colonial and neocolonial processes that dispossess peasants of their land.

This has created a situation where millions no longer earn enough to access adequate food, as food continues to be wasted to keep prices high. Moreover, this has meant that the poorest people must continue eating cheap, unhealthy food that leaves long-term health impacts, making them particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Covid-19 has exposed the authoritarian nature of the regimes in Asian countries. In Pakistan, several dozens of farmers were arrested this week who wanted to go to Islamabad to protest against growing electricity bills. The same pattern is seen in India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and several other Asian countries.

The Covid-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequality and injustice in a food system that was already broken, panellists explained in response to viewer questions. Mass famine is a serious concern as the Covid-19 situation has been made worse by locust swarms, floods and cyclones in the region. Precarious migrant and agricultural workers, the landless and homeless, and women and youths engaged in care work are far more susceptible due to worsening conditions of hunger, disease and indebtedness, compared to national elites and their Western counterparts. The speakers stressed the need for land reforms in all South Asian countries as a first step to solve the agrarian crisis. The feudal call has become a real hurdle to the path of growth of agriculture production.

The webinar was moderated by Yifang Slot-Tang of Germany and Farooq Tariq from Pakistan. Speakers included Hashim Bin Rashid, a member of Pakistan Kissan Rabta Committee/La Via Campesina, Professor Felix Anderl from University of Cambridge UK and Asienhaus Germany, Arie Kurniawaty from Solidaritas Perempuan Indonesia and Ashlesha Khadse from LA Via Compesina South Asia, India.