Cheaper rice is not a panacea against poverty in India - stop land grabbing!

Today, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) expressed skepticism about the Indian Parliament's plans for an initiative to fight hunger. The impoverished population is to be supplied with cheap, subsidized rice and cereals. "However, many of the 95 million indigenous people in India are suffering from protein deficiency and malnourishment. Cheap rice and wheat won't help much here," said the STP's Asia-consultant, Ulrich Delius, in Göttingen on Tuesday. "In order to fight poverty among the indigenous Adivasi effectively, the most important measure would be to stop the theft of their territory." Every year, tens of thousands of square kilometers of precious arable land are being used for the construction of dams, wind power plants, for mining, roads and factories.

According to Delius, the terrible fact that more than 50 Adivasi children in the district of Attappadi (Kerala state, southern India) died of hunger during the recent months clearly shows how short-sighted and insufficient the new program against hunger is. After their families had lost their farmland to investors, these children had received rice-based meals from government-funded soup kitchens – but they soon suffered from malnutrition and eventually died because of the unbalanced diet.

One of the investors is a German company that constructed wind turbines on the indigenous people's land. At first, the Indian company Suzlon Energy Limited – whose intermediaries managed to acquire almost 2650 square kilometers of land in 2007, by relying on threats and fraud – had built wind turbines and had later sold the land to investors. The company's department of product development is located in Hamburg and has employees in Rostock and Berlin.

Several agricultural enterprises have now established plantations on extensive stretches of the traditional land of the the 30,000 Adivasi in the district. In some areas where plants are cultivated for export especially, there are Adivasi people working merely as day laborers. They only have about 10 percent of their former territories left.

Nowadays, about 90 percent of the pregnant Adivasi women in Attapaddi are suffering from iron and protein deficiencies due to their unbalanced diet. Traditionally, the native people ate protein-rich legumes, spinach, millet, nuts, several different leafy vegetables, honey, fruit, fish and meat. Since they lost most of their land, they are dependent on government-funded food supplies. Due to the plight, they are forced to get their meals in soup kitchens, where the children are also supposed to be weighed and checked on their growth regularly. However, many of the 172 soup kitchens in the district are currently not in operation because the authorities are having problems with the coordination.