A Tale of Indian Farmers and Global Corporations

There is something sublimely satisfying about a farm. An aura of peace, honest work, and sincerity expressed through the cultivation of life and life-giving foods pervades the hazy, romantic image it summons in the minds of people. This is not to say that the bucolic lifestyle does not require intense work, daily labor, and great exertions, but that the work is honest and understandable, unlike many of the things that occur in the modern world. However, at the same time, it is considered obsolete and an obstacle to progress that must be removed.

That is the situation confronting the farmers of India. Progress, represented by barons of heavy industry, demands that they sacrifice their lands. Factories, railroads, and other projects that corporations require to create massive mechanized complexes to feed the world's need for raw materials and completed products will grow on this land in place of fruits and grains. An Indian industrial revolution is supposed to provide the jobs to empower a new middle class, built up by the money that will trickle down to these new workers through factory work.

India's farmers vociferously object to that. Throughout India, $98 billion worth of investments are wobbling uncertainly as farmers squat, battle police, and otherwise prevent construction from taking place, or slowing it down to a snail's pace. The farmers are wary and distrustful, skeptical at the promises that development will bring them jobs and progress.

They're right to be wary. There are 550 million small farmers in India, a country where land transactions are so infrequent that there is no market value for land. To make matters worse for those subsistence farmers, the majority of their compatriots who lose their land to development end up unemployed and legally robbed as their lands do not fetch anything near true value. To top it off, when facilities such as Tata Motors' banished Nano factory appear, less than one job for every eight people left unemployed would have been created - and most of those jobs require skills few farmers even have.

The current situation arises from a misconception and a business trend. Historically speaking, industrial revolutions are considered a definitive step forward into the "modern" world, the inevitability of progress, the way to a more "civilized" life. Conversely, businesses deploy their production facilities for goods and services to the places where they can maximize profits and minimize costs. Through the arcane business models and sciences, corporations such as ArcelorMittal have determined that by building their factories in India, they'll gain greater profits.

However, industrial revolutions cause great disruptions and unmitigated suffering long before their benefits trickle down and "progress" occurs. In the original Industrial Revolution, as more farmland produced more food with less labor, unemployment rose in the countryside. The unemployed migrated to the cities searching for factory work. India's already dismal slums would swell with literally hundreds of millions of poorly educated and starving people, searching for jobs that are neither numerous enough nor able to hire them due to inadequate skill sets.

There's also the consideration of poverty. Poverty is the lack of basic human needs. But basic human needs are defined differently depending on time, country, and even town! Adequate and nutritious food, clothing, shelter and clean water are all universal human needs. But there are those who argue that health services, broadband Internet, and electricity are basic human needs. By those standards, all of humanity has been impoverished for the past 13,000 years, if not earlier. While subsistence farmers are by no means rolling in wealth, they do actually meet their universal human needs. By definition, they have adequate food. They have clothing, shelter, and clean water when the monsoons come. It's a hard life, but it gives them a job, a sense of satisfaction, a fulfillment of family duty and tradition.

There are other facts to consider. ArcelorMittal, for example, drafted a $20 billion dollar plan to build two steel mills in India that has currently been brought to a standstill. Why is ArcelorMittal building in India when there are literal hundreds of abandoned steel mills throughout North America and Europe with people eager to take those jobs? Those jobs would actually reduce unemployment on those continents, as opposed to creating unemployment in a Third World nation. Is it more expensive to negotiate with laborers in the First World than to build from scratch facilities that no one wants, that won't create enough jobs to replace the jobs lost, and that will be forced into cost overruns due to delays?

Most damning of all is the hubris involved. This ranges from steel giant Posco's innocuous (for a corporation)statement that they wished to transform an entire region through acquiring farm land and building a India's biggest steel mill to the audaciously wasteful, with Vedanta Resources trucking in bauxite ore from the other side of India to their under-construction aluminum refinery because the native tribes who live nearby worship the hills the company wants to mine. The modus operandi for most businesses is to take the path of least resistance and maximum profit, yet these giants prefer to dig in their heels rather than adapt, replace, or relocate.

The attitude that the farmers are in need of progress and must be lifted from their miseries into the modern world smacks of the old "white man's burden" undergoing cultural diffusion. With billions flowing into industrial facilities, business see a benefit. But as is typical, no one stopped to ask the farmers if the change the industrial barons were offering was the sort of change the farmers wanted. After all, with the world's largest largest aluminum refinery at stake, who cares about a few dirty, superstitious mountain yokels?