Control your food. It is your business
Our control over our food and our health requires inventive institutional reordering and new ideas about the way food regulations work.
Our control over our food and our health requires inventive institutional reordering and new ideas about the way food regulations work.
Visit the website of Gurgaon’s civic authority and the visual that unfolds on your screen might confuse you.
The Forest Rights Act of 2006—also known as the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act—came after considerable and bitter opposition from conservation groups.
It began like every other year. I am talking about the frenzied activities that usually take place in various parts of the world in the last week of May. This year too, Mission Cleanup was on in full swing to give our grimy planet that fake spruced-up look on 5 June, when the global community celebrates ‘World Environment Day’.
They say you are what you eat. But do we know what we are eating? Do we know who is cooking and serving us the food we take to our kitchens and then into our bodies?
Vijay Jawandhia is a farmer in Vidarbha, the region which brought home to us the crisis that is compelling farmers to kill themselves. He is also a leader of farmers. Recently, he spoke of new challenges: "In my village we are hiring vehicles and bringing people from cities to work in the field." Sounds bizarre but news stories from across farming regions suggest a similar trend.
There is no question that India desperately needs to generate more power. The energy indicators say it all. It has the lowest per capita consumption of electricity in the world. This when access to energy is correlated with development, indeed with economic growth.
There is one being-Indian-thing, which spans the urban-rural and the rich-poor divide: our annual watch and wait for the monsoon. It begins every year, without fail as heat climbs and the monsoon advances. The farmers wait desperately because they need the rain at the right time to sow their crops. The city managers wait because by the beginning of each monsoon period, the reservoirs that supply water to cities are precariously low. All of us wait, in spite of our air-conditioned living, for the relief rain brings to the scorching heat and dust.
The Bhopal question has one more angle: why was there so much public and media outrage over this 25-year-old issue? Why did the national media focus on this story, which till now had been consigned to the backrooms where only noisy environmental activists live?
Which cooking oil is best for us? Why do I ask? Are we not bombarded with advertising messages telling us there is a healthy oil that is good for the heart? They talk of monounsaturated fatty acids (mufa), and polyunsaturated fatty acids (pufa) and of course, catch-us-words like omega properties. I am sure you, like me, try to understand this scientific jargon and conclude that any oil that has all these elements, must be good.
Days after President Barack Obama lashed out at British Petroleum (BP) saying he would not let them ‘nickel and dime’ his people in the oil spill case, a sessions court in Bhopal did precisely that with the victims of the world’s worst industrial disaster. After 25 long years the court of the chief judicial magistrate pronounced its verdict on the criminal case against Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary on the matter of negligence and liability.
Jambudwip is a tiny dot in the Bay of Bengal. A few years ago, it hit headlines when wildlife activists dragged fishermen, who used the landmass to dry their fish, to the Supreme Court. A case was filed regarding ‘encroachment’ of this island, partly covered by mangroves. The apex court’s central empowered committee (cec), which advises it in all forest matters, got into the act. Its report to the court was clear: fish drying was a non-forest activity, so disallowed under the Forest Conservation Act (1980).
IN this past month, farmer associations in Haryana and Tamil Nadu have located and burnt field trials for genetically modified Bt rice. In Chhattisgarh the state government has stopped similar trials happening under its nose. It is all too easy to deride these actions as the handiwork of some misinformed eco-fundamentalists or miscreants out to seek ‘cheap’ publicity. It can also be argued that these actions will impede scientific progress designed to find answers to malnutrition and food insecurity in the country.
Some innovations change lives. A favourite of mine is the village milk collection system, a cooperative model. There’s a dairy in the village, people bring in milk, the dairy in-charge places a sample on an instrument, checks the fat content, prints a receipt that tells the seller the fat content and the price.
In Sikkim, bowing to local protests, the government has cancelled 11 hydro-electric projects. In Arunachal Pradesh, dam projects are being cleared at breakneck speed and resistance is growing. In Uttarakhand last month, 2 projects on the Ganga were put on hold and there is growing concern about the rest. In Himachal Pradesh, dams are so controversial that elections were won where candidates said they would not allow these to be built. Many other projects, from thermal power stations to Greenfield mining, are being resisted.
Should India import and reprocess the world’s growing mountains of junk and toxic garbage? Should this become our business opportunity, capitalizing on the fact that rich countries need cheaper and more efficient ways of dealing with their waste—everything from electronic to medical? The question is if we can manage the waste of others, even as we struggle and fail to deal with our own piles of garbage.