Themes > Analysis

20.02.2000

The Cost of Free Trade : The WTO Regime and
The Indian Economy

(The First E M S NAMBOODIRIPAD MEMORIAL LECTURE delivered on February 16 2000 by UTSA PATNAIK Centre For Economic Studies and Planning, J N U Draft, not to be quoted until published)

It is indeed a privilege to have been asked to deliver the E M S Namboodiripad memorial lecture and I thank the organisers for it. Two years ago, after EMS (as he was referred to affectionately by everybody) passed away in March 1998, there was a memorial seminar held in June at Perintalamana in Malabar, the town which is within a short distance of EMS's ancestral home. I read a paper on this occasion, which was specifically on EMSs writings on the agrarian question - in particular how his famous Minute of Dissent to Commission  Malabar Tenancy Reforms, was informed by the Marxist theory of ground rent. This has been published in a recent issue of Social Scientist.[1] In that paper the concern was with the contradiction within the agrarian economy between those who monopolise landed property and those who derive a livelihood from the land.
 
In today's lecture I propose to talk about another very important contradiction which is fast maturing - that initiated by the liberalised trade and investment regime under the earlier loan-conditional structural adjustment programmes from the late 70's as applied to the developing nations, and strengthened further with the current WTO discipline imposed after the signing of GATT in 1994. All of this, I would proceed to argue, is part of a new onslaught by the advanced capitalist countries (following their own economic interests), on the third world countries' attempts to follow growth trajectories best serving their peoples' development and welfare. In talking of this emerging new contradiction I would like first to discuss briefly the historical experience of trade-liberalized regimes, and refer to the theoretical underpinnings of analysis relating to these trade liberalized systems. Then we will discuss, again briefly, at the costs paid by the other developing countries which in the last two decades have followed a liberal trade and investment regime and finally look at the specific results and future implications for the Indian economy of the current 'free trade' regime.
 
It is often accepted as an unquestioned truism by economists, including economists from developing ex-colonized countries, that the freest possible international trade, is necessarily a good thing for everyone participating in that trade. For over two centuries now the ideology of free trade has been so thoroughly dinned into the heads of students, via the textbooks and in today's world also via the conventional wisdom filtering through the print and electronic media, that any systematic alternative viewpoint which stresses the costs of 'free trade' is hardly  ever encountered. The ideology of free trade dates back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and it is no accident that both theorists should be from Britain and have written at a time when that country was in the process of  grasping the land and resources of other civilizations, and launching on the world's first Industrial  Revolution after creating a conducive economic environment for it by forbidding its colonies to manufacture anything and forcing them to specialize in producing the wage goods and raw materials its own industry needed. Neither theorist was English, for Smith was a Scotsman while Ricardo's forebears came originally from Spain. Yet both were the quintessential theorists of the emerging manufacturing bourgeoisie in Britain in the last quarter of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th century respectively. The free trade that  they advocated has been much misunderstood; it was the freeing of British trade from its own monopoly trading companies, but very much while retaining control of subjugated colonies; hence the freedom to Britain to continue to industrialize at the expense of other nations and peoples, and definitely not a general freedom for any potential rival to do likewise. Thus Adam Smith, in a passage in The Wealth of Nations which is never quoted, strongly opposed the idea of North America developing its own manufactures rather than relying on importing manufactures from Europe:
 
"It has been the principal cause of the rapid progress of our American colonies towards wealth and greatness that almost their whole capitals have been employed in agriculture. They have no manufactures, those household and coarser manufactures excepted which….are the work of the women and the children in every private family. The greater part both of the exportation and the coasting trade of America is carried on by… merchants who reside in Great Britain. Were the Americans, either by combination or by any other sort of violence, to stop the importation of European manufactures, and, by thus giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of their capital into this employment, they would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and  greatness." [2]
 
Here was the first clear articulation by a metropolitan economist, of the now familiar and self-serving argument that the colony's best interests lay in remaining an agricultural exporter, leaving the manufacturing and trade to be done by the metropolis.
 
These words, published in 1776 were famous last words, for after winning independence less than a decade later, from 1783 North America's European settlers went on precisely to do the opposite of Adam Smith's advice, namely they erected protective barriers against the inflow of manufactures from Britain and Europe and built up their own industry in a process of  import substitution. Because they did so the USA is today the world's leading capitalist country: had they listened to Adam Smith's version of 'free trade' it would have been at most an Argentina. As the leading capitalist and imperialist country in the world the USA follows today in turn policies to encourage its own growth at the expense of the third world's freedom to industrialize, a question I propose to discuss later.
 
Of course, the modern theory of international trade is associated above all with David Ricardo and is an elaboration and development of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage[3]. The essence of the ideology of international free trade can be said to reside in this theory, for it says that specialization and trade is necessarily of mutual benefit to both parties entering into trade as long as relative cost differences in producing goods exist, even where one country may produce all goods at a lower absolute cost than does  the other. The theory has been immensely influential and has been used to explain not only the trade between countries of equal economic strength, e.g. intra-European trade, but also the pattern of international trade in which the colonies and subjugated areas came to specialize in agriculture while the European countries specialized in manufactures; and to argue that not only the colonizer but the colonized too benefited from this pattern of specialization and  trade. Comparative advantage is the reason given, for example, by Professor K N Chaudhuri in the Cambridge Economic History of India to explain why from being the world's largest exporter of cotton textiles in the pre-colonial era, India turned into an importer of cotton manufactures from Britain and an exporter of agricultural products like raw cotton, jute, opium, indigo  and so on.[4]
 
No argument can be more fallacious than Ricardo's theory. Why it should have been necessary to use military force to induce countries like Portugal, China or India to trade, if it was so beneficial for them, is not explained. Even more important, the theory is internally logically fallacious. A fallacy in a theory can arise either because the premise is incorrect, or because the argument is incorrect. In the case of the comparative advantage theory applied to Northern trade with warmer lands, the premise itself is incorrect. The premise is that in the pre-trade situation (assuming the standard two-country two-commodity model) both countries can produce both goods. Given this premise, then it can be shown that both the countries gain by specializing in that good which it can produce at relatively lower cost compared to the other country, and trading that good for the other good: for compared to the pre-trade situation, for a given level of consumption of one good a higher level of consumption of the other good  results in each country. This mutual benefit arising from comparative advantage, is adduced as both the reason for and the actual outcome of specialization and trade.
 
The reality was that the tropical or sub-tropical regions with which Britain, Netherlands France etc. initiated forced trade using military power, were bio-diverse and could, and did, produce a much larger range of goods than the N. European countries could, including tropical crops which could never be produced under field conditions in the temperate regions. In tropical regions crops can be grown all the year round and multi-cropping of the same physical unit of land is possible. Not only is the output vector much larger but it is a qualitatively  different output vector, for it contains elements which are not present in cool temperate lands at all. Moreover since it is agriculture which provides not only food for subsistence but raw materials for manufacture, fibres for clothing and traditional materials for housing, the better resource base and lower costs of subsistence in a bio-diverse tropical region led to abundant supply and lower costs of all these elements vital for the standard of life.
 
While Portugal which is a warm temperate land could produce both cloth and grape-based wine on a large scale, Britain could produce only cloth but not grapes under field cultivation, for the latter requires land within a mean July isotherm of at least 19 degrees Celsius or 66 degrees Fahrenheit, which no part of Britain (except  perhaps Cornwall) possessed. Similarly while India, Burma or China could produce both cotton cloth as well as raw cotton/sugarcane/ indigo/tea/jute/ rubber etc., Britain, Netherlands, Germany and France could produce only cloth and none of the other crops, and so on. The cost of production of raw cotton, indigo, tea, coffee, jute, rubber etc thus cannot even be defined for cool temperate Britain, Germany, or Canada. If absolute cost is not definable, then ipso facto relative cost is not definable. The premise of the theory does not hold, namely that both countries can produce both goods, hence the conclusion does not hold, that specialization and trade is necessarily mutually beneficial. (Certainly the country with the poorer output vector benefits by acquiring goods it cannot produce; but the country with the superior output vector does not necessarily benefit : specialisation and enforced trade can lead to very adverse welfare outcomes such as falling mass nutrition levels, as we will show below). Yet economists have continued to make logically untenable hence nonsensical statements like the following: Britain exported cloth and imported tea/indigo/cotton  from India because it had a comparative advantage in cloth production while India had a comparative advantage in the crops specified. How does one at all talk of production, or cost of production of tea and indigo in Britain? This absurd fairy tale masquerading as serious theory continues to hold sway in trade theory to this day, modified only to say - the labour-abundant country produces labour intensive (primary or simple manufactured) goods while the capital abundant country produces capital intensive (advanced manufactured) goods.
 
The lack of satisfaction of the basic and crucial premise  - homogeneous productive capacities across countries - in  history, itself was the positive real reason for this important segment of trade: thus adopting the  premise, amounts to assuming away the real reason for this trade. The basic motive of forced trade was for the temperate lands to gain access to tropical bio-diversity and to inexpensive manufactures like textiles of mass appeal and mass consumption which were based on using the  unique and cheap resources of these regions. In the course of the three centuries since 1700 the consumption basket and standard of living of the Northern populations has altered beyond recognition. It is based on importing goods from all over the world, the major part being goods not producible at all in the temperate lands.
 
While Ricardo's explanation was superficially extremely clever, he did a signal disservice to the cause of objectivity and science, by pretending in effect that all trade including forced trade, was freely chosen trade determined by technologically determined, neutral cost factors. Trade patterns which had been in reality the outcome of trade wars, genocide and political subjugation, were discussed in such a way as to ignore this historical reality of 'capitalism's blustering violence' (to use a memorable phrase first employed by Rosa Luxemburg [5]); and by focusing only on value-neutral cost factors - necessarily in a fallacious manner - Ricardo provided an intellectual justification for, and hence an apologetic for forced  trade. 'Capitalism's blustering violence' was neatly sanitized into the theory of relative costs. All subsequent mainstream trade theory has been similarly tautological and apologetic in character, and has talked of mutual gains from trade as the necessary cause and result of all observed  patterns of specialization- not simply that between countries of similar economic strength.[6] 'Factor endowments' are talked of while completely ignoring the real differences in productive capacities in the same 'factor', land, in different countries. Many generations of third world economists have been fooled into believing that somehow being involved in a particular pattern of primary sector specialization, was unavoidable in terms of pure cost-of -production logic and was to the ultimate benefit of their countries.
 
But why blame Ricardo  alone ? It is more than that: we in the third world remain mentally and intellectually colonised even when we are politically independent: we do not dare to question the most nonsensical of theories as long as they come from the centres of academic hegemony and power, we do not dare to point out that the Emperor is naked. This is not accidental: as long it is not the search for objective truth which guides us, as long as it is professional publications and professional recognition in metropolitan centres which remain our implicit aim, in short as long as third world academics continue to suborn themselves, intellectually dishonest theorizing will continue to hold  sway.
 
What was the historical cost to the countries like ours of being involved in 'free trade' as defined and implemented by the colonizing powers? I am here not talking of the well known costs by way of the genocide and decimation of entire peoples, their numbers running into millions, involved in colonial conquests. I would like to focus on the mechanisms of free trade in more recent times.
 
There have been two very important types of cost historically, which have again come to the forefront in the present era of loan-conditional liberalization and WTO discipline : the first is the re-emergence of an inverse relation between agricultural exports and domestic food availability, and the second is de-industrialisation. To understand the first type of cost we have to conceptualise tropical land as akin to a non-renewable resource. Usually it is the fossil fuels alone and the minerals which are thought of as being non-renewable. But we have to recognise that land is not homogeneous in productive capacity, and that the earth's bio-diversity and botanic diversity is concentrated in the tropical lands. It is clear that there is a limited supply of these lands, for unlike in the 19th century when cultivable wastes existed, by now there are no open frontiers, the limits of physical expansion have been reached and only the vast tropical rainforests remain whose ongoing destruction carries serious adverse  environmental implications. In big countries like India and China total cultivated area is no longer expanding, in fact it is shrinking. Our land now is virtually like a non-renewable resource. It is not completely non-renewable: sown area can still be expanded if enough investment is pumped in, especially into irrigation. But the regime of neo-liberalism is precisely one of macroeconomic contraction, 'withdrawal of the state' and falling productive investment, and in this context tropical land must be conceptualized as non-renewable.
 
But the global asymmetry of demand, established over two centuries ago, continues: the world's rich countries which account for 75% of global income although they have hardly 16% of world population [7], cannot produce in their own countries anything but a small fraction of the highly diversified consumption basket on which their populations have come to depend, and  they want access to our more productive, bio-diverse but limited lands on the one hand, and on the other hand access to our markets for the few primary goods they can succeed in producing,(notably foodgrains), and for their manufactures. Their high living standards are crucially dependent on the physical availability of our products. A typical Northern supermarket in W. Europe or USA carries on average 12,000 items of food alone in raw and processed form [8] and at least 60-70 percent of the items have a wholly or partly tropical to subtropical import content. If these goods  were to disappear from the supermarket shelves the standard of life of Northern populations would plunge to a near- medieval level, that prevalent three hundred years ago.
 
The solution developed earlier under colonial and imperial systems where there was direct political control, was simple: first, protect metropolitan industry through trade barriers to the inflow of cheaper manufactures based on ample supply of raw materials, from countries like ours;  second, promote in the colonies the export of the wage-goods and raw materials required for running metropolitan industries; third, keep the colonial markets completely open to the flooding in of manufactures from the metropolis, and fourth, monopolize invisible incomes (at that time, from shipping and financial services). This remains the basic agenda of the advanced imperialist countries today although the economic mechanism has changed to debt-conditional policies and a trade discipline operating through international organizations, (while invisible incomes have changed to modern forms of financial and communication services, the electronic entertainment industry, and returns to research in pirated bio-resources). Advanced countries continue to protect their own producers, continue to demand that we export tropical primary products or at most simple labour-intensive manufactures and continue to seek market access for their manufactures, their surplus temperate crops and for invisible services.
 
As regards the costs of these policies, in particular the second one, to the subjugated nations then (and the developing nations today), the single most important in my view, is the fact that nutrition levels of our people were lowered and in extreme cases mass starvation resulted. An inverse relation necessarily developed between primary product exports and food consumption of the colonized populations. While demanding an increasing supply of the products of tropical lands, the foreign rulers did not put in adequate investment to raise productivity, hence increasing primary exports could only take place by diverting land and resources away from producing the necessary food consumption of the people. In every single case of export of primary products to advanced countries the per head food consumption of local producers fell. Considering Ireland as a colony of Britain we find that the Irish tenants, who were "pauperized beyond belief" (Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire 1969), were obliged to export wheat and livestock products to Britain to pay high rents to their English landlords, while they themselves had to live on potatoes; in the great 1847 famine one million Irish died out of the 6 million total population i.e one sixth of the population perished, and still the primary exports  continued. [9] This is undoubtedly the greatest recorded famine in history, more severe in its impact on a given population, than the Bengal famine of 1770 which had carried away one-tenth of the population. Looking at the data for Java under the Netherlands we find that per capita foodgrains output fell by about 20% from 199 kg. annually to only 162kg. between 1885 and 1940, while sugarcane and rubber production rose 762% and 332% respectively [10], and on a per capita basis rose by 380% and 166%. The volume of exports rose 3.7 times in the half century after 1890. (See Tables 1a and 1b) Colonised Korea under Japan was forced to export foograins, viz. rice and by the second war over half of its output was going to Japan, while Koreans were forced to eat millets and suffered a nearly one-fifth decline in per capita calorie intake over a mere quarter century.[11] Colonised India had a growth rate of exportable commercial crops  which was over ten times higher than the growth rate of foodgrains, indeed the foodgrains output almost stagnated. The per capita food production fell by nearly 29% in the inter-war period in British India, and by as much as 38% in Eastern India (termed 'Greater Bengal in the data source); since there were little or no net imports the availability declined also to the same degree. I have argued in a critique of Amartya  Sen's theory, that it was the increased vulnerability resulting from lowered nutrition, as a direct result secularly falling per capita food output arising in turn from colonial export policy (a fact totally ignored by him), which accounts for the extent of the toll in the Bengal famine of 1943, though the proximate cause of the toll itself was wartime deficit financing.[12]
Table 1a Table 1b
 
Nothing can be more immoral than the fact that the North sustained its own high consumption and low-inflation growth literally at the expense of squeezing the living standards of millions of subjugated people, to the extent of precipitating mass famine in many cases. [13] I may add that all this was not possible without the willing collaboration of comprador elements within the third world populations, those who identified their interests with the powerful rulers and in the way they lived their lives, betrayed their own countrymen. That element too remains unchanged today: power will always attract the opportunists and the servile persons who have no scruples in identifying themselves with what they consider to be the 'winning side' and by their servility hope to gain, and do indeed gain very materially.  In the charge of intellectual servility I would include all those globalized Indian academics today many of whom are intelligent enough to know very well what the real economic mechanisms are, but who find it impolitic to ever mention it in their  writings, because their objective is to be acceptable to and to be lionized by the powerful North-dominated academic establishment.
 
I would argue that the costs of the 'free trade' instituted under loan conditional trade liberalisation in India from 1991 and accelerated after the signing of GATT 94, are exactly the same as in colonial times. They are the same because the agenda of imperialism is the same although conditions are so different. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose as the French say: the more things change the more they remain the same. For, the dependence of Northern populations on Southern bio-diversity has increased, not declined, despite sporadic attempts to find laboratory substitutes for natural tropical products; hence the present WTO regime insists on the prising open of third world land in order to alter cropping patterns and increase exports of those primary products which advanced countries cannot produce themselves, [14] and prise open third world markets to free imports of the wheat and processed dairy products of which they have a  glut.
 
The second great historical cost of 'free trade' to our economies has been de-industrialization. Forcibly open and trade liberalized economies like ours and other subjugated countries too, underwent a destruction of their traditional manufactures and the occupational structure moved towards higher dependence on the primary and tertiary sectors. This resulted from one-way free trade, viz. a situation where the North protected its own industry by various means and opened up the subjugated markets of the third world countries. To use a memorable phrase that Keynes had once used, describing a situation where a country insists on exporting to another the good that the second country also produces, thereby the North 'exported its unemployment' to other countries. [15] That agenda too remains unchanged : market access is a prime objective of the earlier and ongoing loan conditional liberalization and of the present WTO regime which is its continuation. Although on paper the provisions on market access are to be applicable to all countries, in practice steps are taken to ensure differential market access, viz, opening the advanced country door a very little to third world exports of manufactures but forcing open the third worlds' doors wide to unrestricted inflow of advanced country  manufactures. This has already resulted in substantial de-industrialization in many Latin American and SSA countries in the last two decades and the process is now underway in India as well.
 
Let me, to begin with, take up the first great cost of present-day one-way free trade namely, falling food output per head and falling nutrition levels in developing countries, and then go on to discuss de-industrialization briefly. As we know agriculture was included for the first time in the Uruguay Round of negotiations leading up to the signing of GATT 1994. The  trade-related intellectual property rights and trade-related investment measures also carry important implications for primary sector trade. What was the basic objective of including agriculture whereas it had never been included earlier?
 
The reason does not have to do only with intra-Northern trade, despite the wrangles between USA and the European Union over subsidized output, which have been much publicized. All Northern countries made sure that they did not have to reduce subsidies at all (by using a trick brought out by Table 2, which we discuss a little later). I believe that the most important impetus lay in two developments: first, the loss of export markets for foodgrains by the advanced countries of N.America and W.Europe owing to the economic collapse of Russia and Ukraine as well as Eastern Europe, and hence their desperate desire to seize new Asian markets; and second, the rapid growth of monopoly in the already concentrated structure of the big transnational agri-business  corporations. The first, the loss of E European and Soviet markets in the early nineties was very substantial, amounting to around 28 m.t of grain exports in the early nineties, and gave an urgency to the targeting of Asian markets - first the S E Asian markets and now India. For this it was necessary for the advanced countries that all independent systems of domestic food grains procurement and maintenance of buffer stocks by third world governments should be dismantled and they should turn into food importers from the global market. The Philippines provides a case study of the success of this strategy: its public procurement and distribution system was wound down in the early nineties under loan-conditional pressure and it turned into a substantial net grain importer.
Table 2
 
Some 85% of the global trade in foodgrains was accounted for by the advanced countries organised in the OECD on the eve of GATT 94. Both the specific provisions of loan-conditional liberalisation, and the provisions relating to agriculture in GATT 94, have been tailor made and designed for this purpose: it attacks input subsidies, attacks subsidies for stock holding and general subsidies to the consumer.[16]  The small print of the Agreement has been written in such a way (allowing cash to be paid to farmers under 'green box' and other provisions) and such prior measures have been taken that advanced country subsidies have remained almost unchanged while third world subsidies have declined.
 
The second development was the growth of monopoly through mergers and take-overs in the already oligopolistic sphere of global agro-business corporations, in the course of the late seventies and the decade of the eighties. These are now giant vertically integrated companies each with a wide range of interests ranging from pesticides, fertilisers, genetically engineered seeds, farm machinery, plantation production for export, exportable crops acquisition through contracts, and operation of agro-processing and livestock industries. The existing international agreements on plant-breeders' rights have been found to be inadequate by these corporations, which have their eye on the immense gene pool which tropical bio-diversity represents, which though located in developing countries, they see as providing the free raw material  for their laboratory research leading to highly profitable potential applications in the sphere not only of agriculture and pest control but also medicines, cosmetics, health foods and so on. Companies like Monsanto took a very active part in mobilising other TNC executives, formulating the TRIPS provisions and lobbying the US government to incorporate the precise provisions they wanted. The provisions of the TRIPS agreement in relation to bio-resources are tailor made and designed to introduce into new regions and strengthen elsewhere the monopoly control of these giant TNCs, over drugs, chemicals, and bio-technology comprising new varieties of plants including genetically modified varieties,and over genetically modified organisms in general. [17]
 
The traditional rights of local plant breeders are not the issue at all; modification of the existing patent laws are sought solely to extend the period of monopoly that a patent confers, and to restrict the ease with which others can at present reproduce the patented product. Given that the entire process of research by the TNC's is based upon the pirated genetic materials from third world countries over which then a monopoly is instituted, and is to be enforced by international policing organisations like the WTO which is answerable to no general body of nations, the  authoritarian implications are clear. These are dangerous developments for the third world countries given the background of the already existing trend of falling per head food output in such a large part of it owing to an enormous primary export thrust under loan-conditional trade liberalisation.
 
The Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries had been implementing structural adjustment programmes and trade liberalisation for a decade and half before India did and the results have been plain to see. Mexico which had pioneered high-yielding wheat varieties turned into a net foodgrains importer by the eighties and has been experiencing falling per head output of maize and beans at the same time as it has turned into a tropical agricultural annexe for supplying beef products and fruits and vegetables to supermarkets in the USA. The effects of cattle-raising for supplying the US market has been devastating for the Central American countries like El Salvador and Honduras.
 
The Sub-Saharan African countries engaged in a primary exports thrust in the eighties very successfully - the exports have been growing at minimum rates of 6 to 14 percent annually- but at what cost? The per head foodgrains output has fallen all through the eighties and continues to stagnate in the nineties. In 1992 I carried out a fairly painstaking calculation using the UN data for all 46 countries of SSA for cereals plus tubers and plantains which showed that in the six most populous countries, accounting for over three-fifths of the population, cereals output had fallen by 33 percent in the second half of the 80's and the all-food output had fallen by one-fifth. For the entire region cereals has declined by 16.6 percent and for all food  it has declined by nearly 12 percent. Since the initial per head cereal all foodgrains output was already low by Indian standards - only 156 kg.gross annually per head - the level after falling, was only 137 kg. by 1990 and the situation has not improved since. It is no wonder that large area of SSA are on the verge of famine.
 
It is often argued that the inverse relation does not matter for exchange earnings from primary exports can be used to import food. But whether this is so, depends on the terms of trade. The absolute unit dollar price of primary exports declined by nearly half in the 80's alone owing to the fact that dozens of  developing countries were made to competitively devalue and deflate their economies while engaging in a competitive export thrust, under loan-conditional programmes overseen by the Fund-Bank. After a brief two years of improvement the decline continued in the nineties at a slower pace.
 
A subsequent calculation of availability by adding on food aid and imports shows that it was insufficient to maintain nutrition levels, for calorie intake per head has declined for four out of six most populous countries and is stagnant for one, (showing a rise only for Nigeria which is exceptional in being an oil exporter. See Table 3). These four are precisely the countries which had gone in for a successful export thrust under intensive adjustment programmes. Their primary exports have been growing at between 8 to 14 percent annually (the inverse relation between their primary exports and domestic food production was pointed out in an earlier article of mine). [18] Since the unit dollar value of their exports have been declining however their foreign exchange earnings hardly rose at all. It is little wonder that it was some of the African countries who, given their long and bitter experience of liberalization, were at the forefront of the anger against the WTO  regime at the Seattle meet.
Table 3
 
On the basis of some knowledge of this alarming experience of the L American and SSA countries under liberalisation and adjustment I had written in December 1992, 18 months after India went in for a $4.8 billion loan and started implementing SAP, that with trade liberalisation and export thrust we in India too could expect a decline in per head food output as the powerful magnet of the advanced countries' demand, start to restructure our own cropping patterns away from the foodgrains our population needs and towards exports, just as it had done in colonial times. [19] It gives me no pleasure to say that my prediction has been fully borne out. For the first time in 30 years, in the nineties the food grains growth rate in India has fallen to a mere 1.66 percent, well below the population growth rate (even though this itself is slowly declining) whereas it had averaged 2.6 percent in the preceding two decades, well above the population growth rate. Furthermore this is against the background of a sharp rise in the rural poverty percentage to 44% from around 33% between 1990 and 1992; while poverty moderated subsequently as more expansionary policies were followed, the latest estimates by an economist in the Planning Commission, shows a rise again to 45% in 1998 admittedly on the basis of the thin sample data.
 
It is to be noted that the data given on foodgrain availability in the Annual Economic Survey, which do not seem to show a fall, is subtly doctored. If we look at the population figures used to calculate the per capita availability and given in the relevant Table every year, we see that the same absolute number, 16 million (1.6 crores) is being added to the population year after year; the base is enlarging but the assumed addition to population remains the same, so that by 1998 the implicit growth rate is only 1.66 percent, doctored to be exactly equal to the declining foodgrain growth rate. [20] In fact with Indian population crossing the one billion mark in 1999, the compound growth rate from 1990 to 1999 works out to near 2 percent, well above the sharply lower foodgrains growth rate over the same period.
 
The per capita expenditure on cereals in real terms has been declining in India as a number of analysts of the NSS consumption data have pointed out, at the same time that the per head production is declining, and per head availability is stagnating. [21] It is only those illiterate in  economics who can argue that this reflects an Engel effect in toto, i.e. more diversified consumption for everyone as per head income improves. There is indeed such an effect for the top 15% of the population, who concentrate anything between 70 to 85 percent of national income, depending on the estimate of black money we adopt. But the remainder especially the poorest are paying for it with a decline in their consumption of basic staples, given the overall stagnation of per head availability of cereals in physical terms.
 
A little explanation is in order, since there appears to be a widespread misconception not only among students of economics but also among many senior teachers, that with rise in income, the absorption per head of the staple cereals, falls. Exactly the opposite is the case: per capita cereals absorption rises, and rises quite a lot, owing to indirect cereal consumption in the form of animal products. The USA produces over 300 million tonnes of foodgrains, for a population a quarter our size; even after a substantial fraction is deducted on account of exports, the average US citizen consumes annually nearly 1000 kg. of foodgrains, or about five times the average Indian annual absorption of 200 kg (we are taking throughout the gross figures viz, gross foodgrain output retained within the country, divided by population). Even the Soviet Union in the late eighties when its agriculture was supposed to be in crisis, was producing and absorbing 760 kg. foodgrains per head of its population, nearly four times India's level. Of course, North Americans and Russians do not directly consume all grain as grain: they eat about 200 kg. directly as bread etc, while the remainder is converted to animal products by being used as feed. The reason that this process leads to such a high absorption of grains per capita, is because as is well known, at even the most efficient technologies of conversion, animal production - especially beef and mutton favoured by Northern populations- is highly grain intensive and therefore wasteful from a social point of  view. The grain which could feed directly six to eight poor families in a year, goes in to providing milk, meat etc for one well-to-do family. The income elasticity of demand for animal products is high and has been estimated at 1.6 taking a large number of developing countries. As the per capita income rises, so therefore does the average absorption of the food grains which double as feed grains, rise.
 
In the light of this, it may be judged how serious is the situation today in India given that per head foodgrain availability for the population as a whole has been registering decline. We know that the top decile of the population is absorbing grain per head to a much greater extent than before owing to the fast growth in their demand for animal products, which implies that there must be a greater than average decline in availability of grain for direct consumption by the poor.
 
The situation is not entirely hopeless; many organisations have become aware of the threat to food security faced by third world countries and that nothing less than an economic recolonization is being attempted by the advanced countries through WTO. Within India the many womens' organisations have come together with NGO's to form the Alliance for the Protection of Food rights. Similar organizationa are active in a number of Asian countries. At Seattle the African nations in particular were at the forefront of the opposition mounted against the advanced countries for obvious reasons, for they know from their direct experience of the last 15 years the sinister outcome of the designs of the advanced countries. What is urgently required is unity among the developing nations to work out a common minimum strategy to protect their interests against the onslaught on their land and bio-resources.
 
Many of you must be aware that India had put forward a nine-year phase out plan of giving up the prevailing QR's on imports starting from 1997 and ending in 2006, but this was not acceptable to the advanced countries wishing to access our markets, who argued that India's foreign exchange reserves position was comfortable and India could no longer invoke article XVIII (b) which specifies that QR's can be retained by countries facing possible balance of payments  problems. Subsequently even though five out of six countries accepted a reduced period of six years phase-out, the USA remained obdurate and took India to the dispute settlement board which ruled against India. As a result all QR's are to go by fiscal year 2000-01 which is already upon us. Now, in anticipation of converting QR's to tariffs the advanced countries had announced very high tariffs ranging from over 200% for wheat to over 150% for other cereals. India's tariff bindings on the other hand are only 150% for wheat and amazingly, zero percent for rice and sorghum. Why and how the rice farmers and sorghum farmers of this country are to face the onslaught of competition without any protection whatsoever is not clear. Who were the incompetent officials who gave this anomalous structure of tariff bindings and is this a conspiracy against the farmers of this country, are questions which need to be answered. Japan which produces highly subsidized rice declared tariff bindings for all crops except rice and have thereby kept its options open while we seem to have closed ours quite inexplicably.
 
There is not only mere absence of a level playing field but indeed the field is steeply inclined towards the developed countries owing to the trickery they have employed. Let me illustrate this from the subsidies data on agriculture. GATT 94 specified that the AMS or aggregate measure of support to agriculture was to be reduced by all countries compared to the base-level support in 1986-88, but reduction was to be to a greater proportionate extent by advanced countries compared to developing countries.
 
This looked good, on paper, for developing countries: but what is the reality? The advanced countries in anticipation of future reduction commitments, without exception scrambled to raise their subsidies to agriculture phenomenally up to the base period, 1986-88. As may be seen from Table 1 the USA raised its Producer Subsidy Equivalent which is part only of its total transfers to farmers, from only 9% of value of agricultural production in 1980, to as high as 45% of the value of agricultural production by 1986, namely a 500% rise in the relative share alone, representing a much higher rise in the absolute sums  involved. It is this highly inflated transfer which then became the base for reduction, so that after reduction the transfers still remain a multiple of what they were in 1980.
 
The story is the same for the other high-income primary exporters; even Japan in which PSEs already amounted to 71% of agricultural output value in 1980, raised it further to 93% by 1986. Ten countries of the EC raised the share from 25% in 1980 to 66% by 1986. Even full compliance with the reduction commitments by advanced countries from these inflated base period levels, would leave them with an absolutely dominating position; and full compliance has not taken place. (Developing countries on the other hand, not only did not raise their meagre subsidies at all but sincerely - and foolishly- tried to comply with WTO reduction commitments, this steeply tilting the field against themselves). It is this kind of manipulation and dishonesty, which makes the demand by advanced countries that developing countries should reduce their already meagre subsidies, such a hypocritical demand.
 
This leads us  logically to the question of De-industrialisation  Let us briefly take up this other very important result of the trade-liberalisation discipline of the WTO namely the de-industrialisation of developing countries. Again the WTO  is merely codifying and implementing the provisions which were already a part of loan -conditional liberalisation earlier. We have ample documentation on the way that the free inflow of capital has served to de-industrialise the Latin American and SSA economies from the works of many economists, and not necessarily those of radical persuasion alone. [22]  In India too it is becoming clear that even while the entire economic policy regime is geared to a servile wooing of foreign DFI, the total actual inflow has been not more that 10-12 billion dollars over the entire last decade and a substantial part of it has gone into mergers and acquisitions.
 
At the same time that they forcibly prise open our markets for their goods the advanced countries blatantly mount non-tariff barriers against us. The question of using labour-standards as a weapon against the competition of cheaper goods is not new and is familiar to students of inter-war history. From the late 1920's when Japanese textiles invaded Indian markets ousting Lancashire textiles there was an outcry from Britain that Japanese labour was super-exploited. All these crocodile tears shed on behalf of Japanese labour had only one objective, to exclude Japanese competition and continue the British monopoly of the Indian market. Similarly the same countries which are bombing others and denying medicines to children in Iraq, are today shedding crocodile tears on behalf of Indian child labour, with the sole objective of erecting non-trade barriers to our cheaper imports.
 
Unfortunately the awareness of these tactics and the opposition to it has come rather late, at a time when our markets have been already substantially opened up and penetrated, for the developing countries have been bullied into lowering their average tariffs to a much greater extent, which is nearly double the meagre extent to which developed countries have  lowered tariffs. The time phase of QR removal and tariff reduction has been shortened for developing countries whereas important barriers to their exports to advanced countries like the Multi-fibre Agreement which is a system of quotas, have been given a much longer lease of life; and by the time it is dismantled other non-tariff barriers will have been put in place which will effectively close their markets to our textile exports.
 
Perhaps the saddest and most disturbing aspect of the present neo-liberal regime is the speed with which our industrial structure in the public sector is sought to be dismantled through discrimination in favour of foreign companies. Our governments in their eagerness to woo foreign capital is ready to underwrite private foreign profits and get the risk to be borne by the Indian people by giving sovereign guarantees to companies like Enron and Cogentrix. This is no different from the way that the colonial governments gave guaranteed returns to private foreign companies to build railways in the last century - a process which Daniel Thorner had described as private profits at public risk. It has been estimated that not only will the power supplied by these projects have substantially higher cost per unit owing to inflation of the capital costs, than power supplied by the plants set up using domestically produced power equipment, a staggering additional burden will be put on the government exchequers by way of guaranteed returns. For example a decision in March 1993 was taken by Government of Karnataka that the KSEB should buy all  power from Cogentrix. This decision involved guaranteed payments totalling over 2000 crores a year for a period of 30 years, namely a guaranteed purchase order of Rs. 75,000 crores to a company whose total equity was only Rs. 45 lakhs! Economic unreason appears to hold sway. Despite a severely critical report from a team of experts, a power purchase agreement was signed in 1995 with a power company whose sole promoter was Cogentrix. Public outcry and a writ petition led and to a ruling by the Karnataka High Court for a CBI enquiry. [23] Again recently despite the success of this  public interest petition and High Court ruling which led to Cogentrix announcing a welcome pull-out, the Supreme Court was induced to overturn the High Court verdict, and the Central government has come forward  with fresh guarantees. It is a difficult situation indeed when comprador thinking and comprador elements pervade the intelligentsia and the Administration, when many bureaucrats and academics alike in positions of power, are prepared to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.
 
The solution to the attempted recolonisation is to fight back. This fighting back has to be at many different levels: through mass organisations of workers like trade unions, through the womens' movement, through the indispensable political parties, and through theoretical analysis and exposure of the agenda of neo-imperialism. Never has the discipline of economics in particular become more of a battlefield than it is today - as the other disciplines like history and politics have always been. This is not a time for continuing intellectual servility to the  self-serving ideas generated in the mainstream of theorising in  the Northern universities: the real issues must be understood and young people in particular must come forward to provide the badly-needed theoretical competence and moral commitment for a renewed resistance to economic recolonisation.

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