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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