IranianVisa.com

While I can’t imagine that anyone’s particularly eager to plunge into the Middle East at the moment, if anyone is planning on heading to Iran, we would both recommend that you consider researching other companies than IranianVisa.com – they’ve had some good reviews, but our experience was pretty bad.

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From our experience If you need a visa for Iran, think twice before using iranianvisa.com.

We needed a visa and were already out of our home country. We’d heard mixed things about iranianvisa.com from the thorntree forum, but decided to use them anyway.

When we initially contacted them, they were very friendly and responded almost immediately. This encouraged us to use them. However, once we had made our payment, communication became very poor.

To start with, they charged us more than they state as their exchange rate from Euros to pounds isn’t at the current (at the time) rate, so we ended up paying almost an extra ten pounds between the two of us.

When we applied, we were told that we would receive our visa code (which you take to the embassy) within 15 working days. When 15 working days had passed, we got in contact with iranianvisa and they apologised, saying there had been “some difficulties” – of course, everything has been kicking off in the Middle East, so that’s understandable, but they hadn’t contacted us at all. They also told us that some people’s codes had been sent to them already and that it was looking good for us.

Another two weeks later, we still had not heard anything from them. So we emailed again, and this time we were told that “there must be a misunderstanding”, and that it is normal not to receive your visa code until 10 days before you intend to pick it up. That leaves you ten days to book transport into the country! Good luck getting anything cheap! We hadn’t been told this at the start, in fact we were told the opposite, as above.

We only heard back from them 2 days after we were meant to pick up our visa and we had been rejected, which isn’t their fault in the slightest but we should have heard back long before then.

While this may be totally out of the ordinary due to the political situation in Iran, it suggests to us that it would be worth investigating other companies.

 

Sun, sand and sea

Skin cancer costs an arm and a leg, man
People on the beach self-harming to get tanned
Laid out flat like an army of dead mans
Red necks, red bellies than expand
Like jellyfish on the wet sand
Very Engurlish, suncream and sweaty hands…

– Dizraeli, ‘Engurland’

When we were in Orissa, there was a sign on the wall with a quote from some wise ancient. It said, ‘A traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving’. This basically summarises our experience of trying to do anything in India… Don’t have a fixed plan, and don’t expect your vague expectations to materialise any time soon either. When you don’t try and do anything, when you spend your time eating fruit salad every morning, swimming in the sea, and lying on golden-sanded beaches, then you’re fine. But as soon as you start trying to organise anything, discuss going anywhere, plan anything, catch transport, in short when you try to achieve anything, it all becomes a bit difficult and stressful. Someone who said they’d email you back by Wednesday hasn’t contacted you by Tuesday the next week, the computer full of your data is broken and won’t be fixed until an unspecified date referred to most days as “tomorrow”, someone advised you not to run for the bus as there will be another “soon” only for you to wait a whole hour for the next scheduled bus which incidentally is running on time… I could go on. Speaking to our Mumbai CouchSurfing host (who we’ll tell you about in a later post), he just nods and laughs – it’s the same for him – and explains that it’s part of the joy (or frustration) of India.

Having basically travelled for six months without really stopping for a break, the stress was starting to mount. Since Josh recently cut off most of his hair, I was beginning to worry that he would start pulling out mine. His mate even emailed us suggesting that we “do nothing, literally NOTHING for a while”, so we thought we should take heed of that advice. So we did, and this is the first time that we actually achieved everything that we had set out to since we entered India.

Having left the hills, we made our way back into Kerala and plonked ourselves on the beach near Kannur. Retrospectively, it wasn’t the greatest of beaches, but at the time it was exactly what we needed. While it takes an hour to get there from town, if you’re after a basically empty beach (literally there must have been three other people on the 100m long beach most of the time we were there), no hassle when you’re there, white sands, palm trees but a rather rough sea, this is the place to go. Josh taught me how to throw a ball properly and I taught him how to do front crawl properly. It was a learning experience for all. One of the days we were approached by a bunch of Indian lads and instead of it being the usual perve-hassle, they joined us in our throwing game – they seemed surprised that I was capable of catching. That was basically all we did for a few days, which was more than pleasant.

Then we made our way to our next beach. Gokarna in Karnataka is definitely THE most touristy place we have been in the whole of India. We spent ten days surrounded by Westerners, which usually would have made both Josh and myself cringe, but it was a welcomed break before plunging back into the sometimes-organised chaos of the next three months travelling (we’ll be home on the 17th June for anyone who’s interested). There was a large contingent of dreadlocked, spiritual, circus-skills, alibaba pants (no Indian actually wears these) types. It was the first time in my life that I’ve ever heard a sentence like this: “Hey! Guess what? She’s an Aquarius with Scorpio rising!!!!” Someone actually said that.

When you choose to ignore such things, the place is lovely. As suggested by the introduction, we spent our days eating fruit salad and indulging in non-Indian food, swimming in the sea and generally chilling out. The most stressful thing that happened for the whole time we were there was that I stood on a sea urchin or something that’s built so that things don’t eat/stand on it, and spent several days trying to remove the splinters from my toes. One day we walked through some jungle to a beach a few beaches along, where we shared the 70m stretch of sand with one other person, and occasionally Indian tourists who would dash in in speedboats, stare at us swimming and then dash away again.

We had arrived at a pretty good time – at the end of the season, just before many guest houses pack up for the summer, so accommodation was brilliantly cheap.

It’s kind of part of the point, as Josh points out, that there isn’t much to say about our time there. It was a time of relaxation and of doing pretty much nothing, which I’d never really done before. I felt like I should balance out the total relaxation by stretching my mind a little, and read about Israel’s war on Palestine in Pappe and Chomsky’s Gaza in Crisis and Ghada Karmi’s Married to Another Man. Made me feel ever so slightly less indulgent!

Our only stop in Goa, the usual stop for beach-seeking India travellers, was a train change. We spent a luxurious few hours in the Air Conditioned waiting room – spend a pound for four hours in light, chill, with cable TV and a western toilet, which was a relief to my legs as I had an upset stomach (it’s never fun to spend long on a squat toilet).

Now we’re in Mumbai, experiencing the contradictions of India at their most obvious – the largest slum in the world, and the world’s largest number of millionaires in one city. We’ll tell y’all about it in the next blog.

The Egg Blog part 2

Our faithful followers will remember the Egg Blog (part 1) – an egg in China, deshelled and vacuum packed, summarising for us much of the consumerist and wasteful practices in the Chinese system as we saw it.

In India we have found another egg which similarly suggests towards various generalisable things.

India is the world diabetes capital, which is unsurprising due to the high levels of fat, sugar and carbs that make up day to day food intake for many of the people here who are not starving.

Deep or shallow frying everything seems to be a specialty. This apparently includes already boiled eggs. Curious as to the taste, I tried one of these eggs – hard boiled, stripped of its shell, battered then deep fried. It tastes like a hard boiled egg, battered then deep fried. It really tastes no better than a healthy egg boiled only in water.

To me, it really did represent why so many people in this country have diabetes…

What I never want to become (and never will)

Have you ever met a reactionary, nihilist, self-centred, ignorant and spiritual primitivist anarcho-capitalist? Last week I would have answered no as well. Today I have the misfortune of sleeping under the roof of one.

WWOOFing (the Worldwide Organisation of Organic Farming) is a mixed kettle of fish. While there are almost always many positives, they normally come with negatives. Unfortunately, one of the more consistent negatives is the hosts. It seems the majority of the people that host wwoofers either come from the minority perspective of simply seeing this as an opportunity to get free labour. The other group are more complex, but are basically fallen lefties. They normally come from an anarchist school and due to lack of coherent and sophisticated theory have become disillusioned and retreat to “living outside the system” and often find spirituality on the way.

Before departing on the trip, Lucie and I excitedly decided upon a farm in Kerala which we would work on in order to save money, meet people and learn more about agriculture and farming (not in that order of importance). While we may have saved some money, we have met no-one really (the farm only has one guest room), and I have learnt very little past the initial basics of picking coffee. This is bearable, however. What is not is working for a man who believes that “capitalism is the best system, it is people that are the problem”, that “any problem an individual may have is their own lookout”, that “if you are sick or if you are healthy, it is down to karma”, that “life is a transition from [unspecified] place to place”, that “all political parties are the same” whether this be the fascist Front National or the Socialist Party in France (all parties are racist apparently). A man who believes that “ideology means nothing, the only thing that matters is practice” (which is why we should except his ideology) whilst simultaneously dismissing any practical examples I offer as to why his ridiculous beliefs are wrong; that “nothing ever changes” and , best of all, that “all Muslims are the same”. Oh yes, and that the Poll Tax riots were organised by a bunch of foreign anarchists and culminated in things burning in Trafalgar Square.

When we first arrived, I remember telling Lucie how excited I was to work here – I had just spoken to Bruno (our boss)’s brother Pierre (who is very interesting), who had told me that they had both lived in a squat in London during the Poll Tax riots. This excitement was extinguished faster than a match in a hurricane when Bruno told me that “it doesn’t matter what happens in Egypt, it will not change a thing”.

At first, we simply believed that he was a fallen anarchist who, disillusioned, had turned to India and nature for solace. Having struggled to remember the name of the group with which he was involved in the UK – Class War – he proudly told us how he used to be an anarchist, how he’d been on the barricades teaching the stupid English how to make a Molotov cocktail… At this point I almost looked forward to talking to him –  I saw this as an opportunity to put my theory into practice. To test my belief  that without an adequate theory you will eventually fall.

I had spoken too often to people about how if you do not understand the nature of the State, the nature of power, if you do not understand what the USSR, China etc truly was (ie State capitalist), your perceptions would be skewed and your determination hindered. This analysis is almost certainly still the case with Bruno, but Bruno as a “fallen anarchist” quickly turned in my mind into Bruno as a reactionary conservative, followed shortly after by my current view of him. This man is a walking contradiction. He is like an angsty thirteen year old boy who is more concerned with winning an argument than with coming out with anything coherent. He is amusing in a tragic sort of way, and not tragedy in a Shakespearean sense – he has no noble tragic flaw, just a total lack of analysis and coherence.

Food seems to be one of his favourite subjects. “In Europe they eat sheet” he told us almost every day. The irony of this was that he eats 2 meals a day, one at 11am (this being 5 hours after he woke up and 3 hours after he started doing manual labour) and at 9pm (one hour before going to bed). On top of this, his diet (and ours while we were there) consisted almost exclusively of carbs. The first meal would be Indian bread of some kind, butter and what can best be described as veg stew, followed by a curd drink and dinner would probably be the same, replacing the curd drink with rice pudding (ie rice cooked in milk and sugar). He rarely drank water, instead filling himself with coffee. So for him to claim that “in the west they eat sheet” seemed quite ironic. The other irony was that he never mentioned the diet of Indians, which seems odd given India has the highest level of diabetes in the world. When I asked him why he thought people in the west eat “sheet” he would say “because they like it” and when I asked him why he thought it was that as a general rule the richer you become in the west the better your diet he would respond “because they are rich”.  This incoherence was a consistent feature of our week there. Social movements apparently changed nothing, but when I asked him how all the positive social changes in the C20th had occurred he would say “through popular movements obviously”.

I could go on, but as a friend of mine said, this man matters very little, and come the revolution, his opinion might even change. So, with this relationship failing, we cut our 17 day farming experience down to 8 days, taking refuge in the hills of Tamil Nadu.

Kochi to Kannur

Kochi

We were given mixed advice about the pleasures of this town, ranging from ‘my favourite place in India’ to ‘a bit of a tourist shit-hole’. Our experience is somewhere inbetween, tending less towards it being a favourite… Fort Cochin, which is the tourist bit and on a separate island from the mainland, has an incredible flair for colonialism – Dutch, Portuguese and British. Especially the churches. At first, we assumed they must be Protestant, given the fact that the British arrived in this part of India after the Reformation – this would explain their whitewashed walls and general lack of enthusiasm. Not for all of them, though – the Santa Cruz Basilica instead went for tacky kitsch, with lovely pink statues of Jesus, etc. How Indians can relate to a religion which is based on a ‘white’ man nailed to a cross, I find even more confusing than for white Westerners. What a clever way for imperialists to establish racial supremacy, though, eh?

Having not really gone in for “Experience the Culture” events, we decided to experience one. Kathakali, the ancient dramatic art, was simultaneously fascinating and unbelievably boring. Our friend described it as “a bit like pantomime”, but while this might be the closest thing to it in the UK, it’s basically nothing like it! The performance began with an hour-long makeup session which was actually quite interesting – the men (all men, even playing the female role – got to keep these things traditional…) lay down as someone made fins on their faces made from rice paper and rice paste. These added detail to the red, black, green and yellow of their faces – each colour has its own significance. Green means good, red means bad, black is demonic and yellow feminine.

This was followed by an introduction to the language of gesture that Kathakali uses – facial expressions, twitchy face muscles, eye movement, hand gestures. I think I took in approximately one meaning from the whole thing.

Then we were treated to a grim tale involving betting wives away in games of dice, murdering enemies gorily and then wiping their blood through the reclaimed wife’s hair. Unfortunately, one figures this out from the leaflet provided rather than the action on stage, as Kathakali for us was a bit like watching a play in a foreign language where even the body language means something totally different.

Kumily

Our time in Kumily will be better described in a following blog. It is safe to say that we were hoping for more than we experienced when we were there. We had gone to Kumily to work on an organic farm through WWOOFing – we were going to help with the pepper and coffee harvests. We did help with the coffee harvest, but it was all a bit less enjoyable than we had hoped, so we did not finish our proposed two weeks there and left after 8 days.

On our day off, we went to a Tiger Park, and although of course we didn’t see any tigers we did catch glimpses of wild elephants hainging out around the water. There were unidentified grazing animals, wild boar and of course loads of monkeys.

Having acquired an extra few days, we decided to return to Tamil Nadu as Kumily is literally on the border – Tamil Nadu starts just after the post office – and spend some time in the hills.

Kodaikanal

Great views and colonial heritage.

We met some travellers for the first time in a while – it’s good to have company other than ourselves sometimes! The views here are absolutely spectacular. You can see across the entire plains of Tamil Nadu. This is also apparently why our hotel felt justified in charging Rs500 a night (the expensive end of our budget) for a grim room, although it did have a fire place.

As the picture demonstrates, there is a resounding feeling that you could be in Dorset or something – quaint little cottages, sculpted lake, pine trees. It was a very odd experience.

The nicest part of being in this town was meeting other people, especially a Czech man who had lived in London for four years and is an Arsenal supporter. I think Lucie had become bored of me discussing the fine details of tactics and strategy with her, so this was a welcome opportunity to talk football with someone who actually understood what I was going on about.

Ooty

2,500metres above sea level, Ooty is the highest hill station in Tamil Nadu. It is also refreshingly cool and, outside of the town, extremely beautiful.

We trekked through tea plantations, through villages and up to the top of a mountain, enjoying the company of a Bristolian anarchist whose grandfather had fought for POUM in the Spanish civil war. I had to change my initial impression of him – I heard on the bus that he had come to India just to follow the cricket, which did not gain my immediate respect. However, after classic lines such as, “I always told my kids not to join the army. I didn’t spend money on raising my kids just so they could grow up and kill other people’s kids. It’s a waste of money”, and, “if Pakistan win against India in the final [Cricket World Cup taking place in India], I reckon they [India] might just nuke Kashmir or something”, I changed my mind about him.

One of the ironic highlights of Ooty, and one of the kitschiest things I have ever seen (I think Lucie was more impressed than me), was the Thread Garden – the only one in the whole world, they proudly declare. This is unsurprising. It took a whole bunch of people 12 years to accomplish this bizarre feat – everything in the garden, and they all look pretty convincing as flowers, is made from thread wound around canvas. What a waste of time…

Kannur

Having been in India for over 2 months and having not had a real break since we set off from London all those many months ago (nearly 6 now by the way), we are having a long and overdue break. My mentality in particular has increasingly become overly negative, and as a close friend of mine emailed me to say, I am in need of some time where I just don’t do anything. So we are spending four days on a beach in Kerala, followed by seven days on a beach in Karnataka.

I intend that it be as uneventful as possible and horribly relaxing.

 

Resistance is Fertile – Vol 3

This one isn’t really an interview as such, more a QandA session where a big group of people chatted and we wrote down what they said. Again this was a farming community in Orissa, west of Bhubaneswar.

Due to the nature of the discussion, this article may seem disjointed – this is because the meeting was disjointed…

“GM seeds create negative impacts. More than this, they cross-pollinate with traditional varieties and so destroy them.”

“Once you start hybrid farming, it isn’t easy to go back. It is much easier to shift to hybrid than away from it. Farmers for commerical purposes (big farmers) are interested in traditional seeds, but marginal farmers are. It is these farmers who are the direct victims of climate change.”

How they organise

The group explained how they organise demos and rallies at Block level (a Block is local self-governance in tribal belt areas of small marginalised farmers. Leaders are both male and female and there are approx. 170,000 people in each Block. Communities in the area are approx. 80% Adivasi). Through this they have been successful enough to get a national consultation on Bt brinjal (aubergine). Due to the pressure, the Environment Minister of India has written a letter stating that he will not introduce Bt.

Bt seeds vs. traditional varieties

Officially, all farmers in Orissa do not grow Bt Cotton. Before Bt was unofficially banned through the letter, packets had to be labelled. Now there is no such label. It is unknown whether this is because it is no longer used (which is unlikely) or because it doesn’t need to be labelled because it isn’t supposed to be there.

Traditional varieties of seed are promoted by the group. They have seed exchanges in villages at district and Block level. At the last one, there were 123 varieties of paddy (rice), veg and pulses exchanged. Since 2006, there has been an emphasis in the group on organic farming and traditional seeds. At the last seed fair, the seeds were 70% organic, 30% mixed and none exclusively intensive.

Because of popular mobilisation and knowledge transfer, farmers have agreed that Bt seeds should not be sold in the local market.

Perceived dangers of hybrid seeds

Through eating hybrid crops, people have perceived health hazards and diseases. They believe that hybrid crops increase likelihood of cancer, TB, malaria, skin diseases, stomach problems, diabetes and blood pressure. Traditionally these types of diseases occurred in cities and not villages, this is now changing. Immune systems are also being affected. Antibiotics are not as effective as crops are now full of them.

Hybrid crops also kill useful insects such as earthworms which are beneficial to farming. This reduces soil fertility.

How to fight

The struggle over seeds and farming is different from other struggles such as land grabs and water privitisation. When a mining corporation rips up your land, you know who the enemy is. But with seeds you cannot see the enemy.

While there is support coming from the rest of the world, ultimately change must come from the farmers. They must realise that intensive farming isn’t good for them or the environment.

Reasons gathered from the group as to why they farm in an organic way

1. Their ancestors did it.

2. They couldn’t meet the costs of hybrid farming.

3. They learnt about the negative impacts of chemical fertilisers and intensive farming methods from meetings and so started organic farming.

Further privatisation

The government is interested in registering traditional organic seeds through scientists linked to MNCs. There is a plan to document all seeds which is very dangerous as it allows others to take control of the seeds. Farmers have the right to this information, not governments and MNCs. Let them document their own seeds!

Comments from individual farmers

The individuals we interviewed have been farmers for 10-50 years. Their ages ranged from the 30s to the 60s. They grew a variety of things from paddy to millet and pulses. Some had previously used hybrid methods, others had used traditional methods their whole lives. They all agreed that there are not many difficulties with traditional farming, especially when compared with intensive methods. They were also all of the belief that while intensive methods generally produce high yields in the first couple of years, the returns reduced as the years went by – as soil fertility decreases, useful insects are killed and bad pests become resistant to the pesticides.

“The first year was good, the second year was okay, and the third year was bad. The soil required more fertiliser, and the beds became dry and rocky – the plough could not work as well. This is why I went back to traditional methods.” – RK

Is this a battle you are winning?

“I hope so. I hope by arguments can win. Lots of people are joining. I strongly believe we can win this battle.” – GD

What are the best tactics?

“The unity of farmers through mass organisation. We must motivate, have seed fairs, have hope and meetings. And we shouldn’t purchase any seeds from the market.” – GD

Why do people turn away from traditional farming?

“Farms want to use modern agricultural practices because it yields more, but they are not analysing the cost/effectiveness of the crop properly. They analyse for one year, but if they compare for 2 or 5 years, they will see the negative impacts of modern farming”. – RK

Does the government support your struggle?

“There is no government support promoting traditional organic agricultural methods” – KD

A catch-up interlude

*We interrupt our Resistance is Fertile broadcasts to bring you up to speed on where we are and what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks…*

We left Bhubaneswar in need of a holiday, and headed to what turned out to be the most touristy place we have been to so far – Mamallapuram. From there we escaped to Trichy which didn’t provide that much of an escape then on to the very southernmost tip of India. Then we officially began our way home, heading westwards up the coast to Trivandrum, then Kollam, Amrithapuri, and now Allappuzha. It has been a fairly relaxing time, and Kerala is by far the most beautiful state we have been in in India.

Mamallapuram

We balked at Backpakistan and the largest proportion of white faces in the local (temporary) population that we’ve seen since leaving Europe, but we did manage to meet up with Josh’s friend David and his girlfriend Tabitha which was pleasant. I got horribly sunburnt on the beach, and we visited a bird sanctuary: I have never seen so many birds all in one place. We tried coconut fish and red snapper, fresh from the sea. Coming out of the hotel, someone came up to Josh – ‘Um, do you know my brother? He has the same T-Shirt as you’. This wasn’t as odd a question as it sounds, as Josh was sporting his ‘I’m with Plane Stupid’ top, and the guy’s brother turned out to be a friend of ours from London. It’s a small world when so many people are plane stupid, eh?

Trichy

There is little to commend this town other than the few temples, although these are definitely a good enough reason to visit. We staggered tiredly from expensive hotel to fully booked hotel until we were found by an Indian man who offered his homestay. So Josh and I squeezed onto a single string bed (no mattress) for the night, and spent the next day realising our train tickets were wrong and dashing around trying to sort them out. Our final day there, having accepted we would need to stay an extra night, was chilled – we took time to just sit and relax in the enormous temple complex, discussing how someone white would be able to convince the people that they were Hindu and therefore allowed into the temples themselves…

Kanyakumari

I have never associated Mahatma Gandhi with the colour pink in particular,  but apparently somebody has. You are now, thanks to a faster internet connection, able to appreciate the incongruity of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial, all trussed up in pink and yellow… The end of the subcontinent is exciting for its being the place where three seas merge and where an 113ft poet stands looking over the land, but our experience was mainly of queuing. Tip: if you fancy heading out by ferry to the island with all the temples on it, go after lunch when the queue isn’t literally 3 hours long! There’s more queue hidden inside!

Trivandrum

On our first stop in Kerala we realised how green everywhere is. Also, the roads have real markings and road signs and traffic lights, and the rickshaws have metres that actually work! It was like being in Europe or something. We headed for the galleries and zoological gardens, all beautifully laid out in a big green space. The museum is in an enormous building and full of carvings – nothing is explained about any of them, but it’s good to make up stories for yourself. Another gallery houses the history of the area in enormous cartoon-like pictures. The ‘zoological gardens’, where the Lonely Planet claims animals live in what is very close to their natural habitat, was, as to be expected, full of cages and enclosures that are far too small for the enormous animals and birds housed inside…

Kollam

Here we found a canoe tour to take us through the backwaters, amongst the villages, ducking under footbridges. I learnt what cashew nuts and peppercorns look like as they grow, we saw a rat snake dart through the water and a kingfisher sit overhead. Some local people demonstrated for us how to spin coconut fibres into rope, the same rope used to tie together the planks in our canoe. When I arrived I banged my elbow in the bus and a little girl bandaged me up with some multi-coloured cloth. The man at the tourist help centre explained that at the state government guest house there were rooms so big, you could play football in them, and we were not disappointed. The frogs came to hang out in our bathroom in the evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amrithapuri

Quite possibly the most alien experience on the trip so far was visiting Amma’s ashram. Amma basically believes that love will save the world and so goes around the world hugging people. Thousands of people. For hours on end. She believes that there are two forms of poverty in the world: material and spiritual. By curing the latter, she believes we will eradicate the former. On the plus side, as well as a lot of complete nonsense, Amma’s NGO seems to do quite a lot of admirable humanitarian work – they have built homes for many of the Indian and Sri Lankan victims of the tsunami. Though, this NGO also seems quite chummy with the likes of Bill Clinton and India’s president (analysis, anyone?). An introductory video proudly quoted the New York Times statement that Amma wishes to eradicate world suffering “through hugs”. I think Amma’s film makers missed the cynical tone…

I must admit I had been expecting something a bit like a monastery so I was surprised to be faced with several enormous tower blocks upon arrival. They are all pink. We were encouraged to come to the 4.50am chanting session, and were invited for the free (basic would be a euphemism) meals whilst being warned away from “local” food…

Allapuzha

There is nothing really to do here if you aren’t interested in expensive canoe trips/ barge tours/house boats. We walked around a little and Josh ate some very nice chicken.

Kochi

We are now in Kochi. So far we have indulged in dental tourism or whatever you call it when you go to the dentist for cheap when in another country. Luckily neither of us needed anything. The streets are full of spice sellers with sacks full of pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon and many other good smelling things. Today there was an almighty downpour which was a tad unexpected. Keralan martial arts are exciting – they did this bit with whips made from blades!

Resistance is Fertile – Vol. 2

We agreed with all the people that we interviewed that we would send them drafts of what they said before official publication (STOP GM). So, what is here will be a paraphrasing of the main points, plus we won’t use their full names.

Interview with N.S.

N.S. has a farm 40km east of Bhubaneswar. He grows predominantly rice, also pulses, veg and fruit. He grows all of these organically. He has also collected 350 varieties of indigenous paddy (rice) and promotes the use of these.

Orissa, he says, is the birthplace of rice. Before the first Green Revolution there were 35,000 different varieties in Orissa. In India, there were 1.5lakhs (150,000). During the Green Revolution, farmers were persuaded to use hybrid seeds, reducing the amount of variety. In 5-10 years, all indigenous rice was basically wiped out.

Propaganda

GM is a threat to the survival of farming and of the farmer. It is claimed that with an ever-increasing population GM is needed to feed the people, but it is a myth that indigenous seeds do not yield more [NOTE: it is useful to remember that between 1958 and 2008, the number of people on the planet rose from 2.5billion to 6.7billion. In the same period food production grew from 631million tonnes, to 6834million tonnes -3 times faster. The problem is not production!].

Seed companies propagate the myth that their seeds are good for you. They reduce eye problems, infant mortality, malnutrition. The reality is that it takes 1kg of hybrid “Golden rice” to provide the same amount of vitamin A (good for eyes) as can be found in 100g of sago or amaranth.

The pit-falls of intensive farming techniques

Chemical farming needs lots of external imput. It needs chemical fertiliser, pesticides, and large quantities of water. Farming becomes costly and small marginal (poor) farmers cannot afford this.

Hybrid rice seeds tend to take 10-20 days longer than traditional seeds to mature. Rice usually take 70-140 days. But hybrid take 140-160 days. This affects the duration of your second crop, so with hybrid varieties, you can only sow your second harvest 10-20 days later than with traditional seeds. Thus, you are unable to sow a 3rd harvest and gain more crop which is often possible with traditional varieties.

Hybrid techniques also make the land hard, reducing water retention capacity. The soil cannot hold the water, and the water runs away.

The farmer invests in GM but problems occur such as cyclones, pests, rains, droughts. Farmers will have had to take out loans to supplement their costs [NOTE: on average, micro-loan companies charge 30-70% interest, but this can be as high as 130%] and when their crops fail, they cannot pay back. These farmers often commit suicide.

Bt cotton is the main culprit in relation to farmer suicides. The State and central government are not interested in compensating the families. They always blame something else – they all place an emphasis on family disputes and disruptions. Even if this was the case, why are these families disrupted? It is because their crops are failing. Their crops are failing because of the weaknesses of GM and hybrid seeds.

Displacement

For those farmers who do not take such drastic measures as suicide, many  sell their land and move to cities, where they inevitably end up in slums [NOTE: 60% of Mumbai’s population are slum-dwellers. It is the largest slum in the world]. In their place, multi-national corporations (MNCs) buy their land. MNCs want to throw away labour – small famers, marginal farmers. They say, “Give up farming, you are not profitable”, but where are these people supposed to go? In America, a farmer owns between 1-5000hectares of land. This is not a farmer, this is a agro-business man. And this is what MNCs want.

Future of GM

For MNCs the future looks very encouraging. For us it is very dangerous. In the US, they are growing GM corn. The Rockies in Western America used to have vast corn fields, now these lands are barren. Not even grass grows there.

Re1sistance

Traditional organic farming allows the farmers to keep the seeds and so not have to buy from the market. They can reuse seeds, plough their fields with bullocks and use the dung for fertililser. Plus traditional varieties of paddy need 20-30% less water than hybrid.

Every farmer more than 60 years of age, is as good as an agri-scientist who grows veg/fruit in their labs, with their note- and textbooks. Our knowledge is scientific because it is based on experience. It gets results.

Good tactics to tackle GM and hybrid seeds are to show results in the field. This provides a challenge and alternative. Traditional farming methods have survived for the last 10,000 years. We also have protests, seminars and workshops.

The importance of seed

Seed is the most important input into agriculture, it is the wealth of the farmer. A farmer in control of seeds controls agriculture. If the seeds belong to MNCs, then agriculture belongs to MNCs. Today they offer free seeds, free fertiliser and more and more, until one day you will have no choice. MNCs will own the farms. This is the ultimate aim of GM.

subramanian.m@fullertonindia.com

Fact sheet on Monsanto

Monsanto is by no means the only criminal mulitnational corporation in relation to agriculture around the world, but it is certainly the biggest. Here’s a bit of an introduction to the history of Monsanto and its impact on Indian agriculture, courtesy of Living Farms. The following is from Kavitha Kuruganthi and Aishwarya Madineni, Monsanto-ising Indian Agriculture (2010).

“No food shall be grown that we don’t own” – reported objective of Monsanto

Monsanto is an American agri-business corporation which is today the world’s largest seed company. It is also one of the world’s largest agri-chemical corporations. Their seed sales were nearly US$5bn in 2007, constituting 23% of the global proprietary seeds market (the non-proprietary seed market around the world is now only 18% of the world seed market). Monsanto is also the world’s fifth largest agri-chemical company with sales worth nearly US$3.6bn in 2007, which constitutes 9% of the world agri-chemical market share. In 2009, Monsanto’s global net sales were US$11.72 billion.

Monsanto has grown into the largest seed company in the world by aggressive market maneuvers including 60 acquisitions, taking stakes in 14 companies and divesting from 17, between 1985 and 2009.

Monsanto’s history of human rights violations, lies and omissions

For decades, Monsanto dumped highly toxic PCBs in Anniston, Alabama, and then spent years covering up the dumping. On February 22^nd, 2002, Monsanto was found guilty of poisoning the town. They were convicted of suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage. The residents of Anniston, whose blood levels contained toxic PCBs 100s or 1000s of times the average were given US$700million in compensation from Monsanto.

Monsanto is also known to have covered up toxic contamination of several of its products. In Indonesia, Monsanto gave bribes and questionable payments to at least 140 officials, attempting to get their GM cotton accepted. In 1998, 6 Canadian government scientists testified that documents were stolen from a locked file cabinet in a government office, and that Monsanto offered them a bribe of US$1-2million to pass the drug without further tests.

Monsanto is also known to “routinely falsify data”, especially in relation to glyphosate (Monsanto’s brand of this herbicide is called Roundup). Monsanto’s first mass marketed bio-engineered food product – recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) – was “linked to cancer in humans and serious health problems in cows, including udder infections and reproductive problems”. In the case of GM crops, it was found that Monsanto chose to keep biosafety data away from public scrutiny and has committed scientific fraud by wrongly interpreting its data and classifying a GM product as safe.

Monsanto also has a habit of suing and jailing farmers for… saving their own seeds and resowing! Since 1996, Monsanto has filed 1000s of lawsuits against hundreds of farmers across the world. In the USA, the Centre for Food Safety investigated Monsanto’s anti-farmer behaviour and concluded that “… Monsanto, the world’s leading agricultural biotechnology company, has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have fundamentally changed the ways American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country, and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest rights to save and replant crop seeds… Monsanto has an annual budget of US$10million and a staff of 75 devoted solely to investigating and prosecuting farmers”. Monsanto is currently being investigated by the Justice Department in the USA for its anti-trust behaviour, based on the unprecedented rise in seed prices that began a decade ago. The seed market in which prices have soared higher in an unprecedented way is dominated by Monsanto. In 2009 the agricultural department (the UCDA) figures show that corn seed prices have risen 135% since 2001, and soy bean prices 108%, whereas the Consumer Price Index rose only 20% in the same period.

Monsanto’s sordid history (from the Centre for Food Safety)

From PCBs to Agent Orange to Roundup, we have many reasons to question the motives of this company that claims to be working to reduce environmental destruction and feed the world with its genetically engineered food crop.

Founded in 1901 in Missouri, Monsanto became the leading manufacturer of sulphuric acid and other industrial chemicals in the 1920s. In the 1930s Monsanto began producing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs are potent carcinogens and have been implicated in reproductive, developmental and immune system disorders.

The world’s centre of PCB manufacturing was Monsanto’s plant on the outskirts of East St.Louis, Illinois, which has the highest rate of foetal death and immature births in the state. By 1982, nearby Times Beach was found to be so contaminated with dioxin (a product of PCB manufacture) that the government ordered it evacuated. Dioxins are endocrine and immune system disrupters causing congenital birth defects, reproductive and development problems, and an increase of incidence of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in laboratory animals.

By the 1940s, Monsanto began focusing on plastic and synthetic fabrics like polystyrene which is ranked fifth in the EPA’s 1980s list of chemicals whose production generates the most total hazardous waste. During WWII, similar to Dow Chemical (which you now know all about) Monsanto played a significant role in the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. After the war, Monsanto championed the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture and began manufacturing the herbicide 2,4,5-T, which contains dioxin.

The herbicide Agent Orange, used by the US military to maim and murder hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese during the Vietnam war, was a mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, and very high concentrations of dioxin. Since the end of the Vietnam war, an estimated 500,000 Vietnamese children have been born with deformities.

In the 1970s, Monsanto began manufacturing the herbicide Roundup, which has been marketed as a “safe general purpose herbicide for widespread commercial and consumer use”, even though its key ingredient is glyphosate (a highly toxic poison). In 1997, Monsanto was forced by the New York State Attorney General to stop claiming that Roundup is biodegradable and environmentally friendly!

In August 2003 Monsanto agreed to pay $600million to settle claims brought by more than 20,000 residents of Anniston, over the sever contamination of ground and water by tones of PCBs dumped in the area from the 1930s to the 1970s. Court documents revealed that Monsanto was aware of the contamination decades earlier.

Monsanto in India

Recent news stories report that Monsanto’s plans to do business in GM material has been okayed by the agriculture ministry which had told the Foreign Investment Promotion Board that Monsanto India should be given the green signal. One financial media report explained that “the FIPB approval is expected to pave way for the Gm giant to bring in its menu of genetically modified food products including GM corn, maize and soya”. Around 95% of the GM crops currently planted worldwide are supposed to have Monsanto’s proprietary traits which also include an in-built market for its herbicide.

In 2006 Monsanto slipped out of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission inquiry into Bt cotton seed pricing – the costs levied for farmers were exorbitant, particularly comparing them to the price in China and the USA. It is estimated that thousands of crores [WHAT IS A CRORE?] of rupees were paid by Indian farmers as royalty/technology fees. Monsanto claimed another company is the technology provider in India, thus avoiding involvement, but financial statements for Monsanto India show 490 lakhs (49,000,000) of rupees as balance due from that other company.

Monsanto is reported to have tried to use its American influence to ensure that its proprietary technologies are not breached. In an infamous incident in 2005 the US Ambassador to India wrote a letter to the Chief Minister of Gujarat, asking him to curb the illegal trade of Bt seeds in the state. Failure to do so, he warned, would “dampen the transfer of technologies and investments from abroad, including from the United States”.

The government of India allowed Monsanto to direct the future course of agriculture as it is a board member of the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. The KIA was the deal signed in 2005 by the US and India to usher in the next “Green Revolution” in India.

Resistance is Fertile – Vol 1

 

After finishing our 4 day holiday, we thought we would throw ourselves right back into the mix, i.e. incredibly stressful, sleep deprived, exposures to the true horrors of India, etc…

Things started as they would go on – frustratingly and difficult. Due to our limited mathematical skills, we had wrongly worked out when we would arrive in Bhubaneswar (BBS) – which would form our jumping base for the next week. As a result, we turned up there 2 days early cutting short our holiday completely unnecessarily. We had been in touch with our contact in BBS and told him that we had made a mistake and would it be ok to come a few days early. He reassured us it would be fine, but when we arrived it turned out that he wasn’t going to be there for two more days. Oops. Minus one Basic Communication Point…

No matter. He told us that we could go to the office and do some research. After the hassle of trying to get to Puri, we also thought we would book our train tickets earlier this time. We found a train for the 5th (the only train that wasn’t Wait –Listed [1]). This was a few days before we had wanted to leave, so we phoned our contact to check if he thought we would be able to get everything done in this shorter time. “No problem,” he told us. “Go ahead and book it.” 2 days later, he asked us if we were going to still be in BBS on the 5th as there was a very big meeting taking place which we should attend..! Minus 3 Basic Communication Points.

After booking the train, we headed for the office to do some much needed research. Unsurprisingly, when we arrived no-one knew what information we were after, and we didn’t have specific requests as we’d been assured there was loads of stuff we would be given. But with some help we found more than we could digest and got stuck in. The scale of the agricultural crisis in India is phenomenal, but this will be discussed in further blogs…

After meeting our contact on the 30th, we had our itinerary for the next week. Stop 1: an interview with a toothless man who has been involved with fight against ‘modern’ (non-sustainable market driven – chemical pesticide and fertiliser heavy) farming techniques and the struggle for the promotion of traditional (sustainable, organic, farmer led) methods. He also is in charge of a seed sharing project – they have collected 350 varieties of indigenous rice (a tiny proportion of the original amount). Apart from the fact that he did not directly answer any of our actual questions, he was amazing. He talked virtually non-stop for an hour, covering a variety of topics from the birth place of rice, climate change, dams, multi-national corporations and alternative agriculture.

Stop 2: North Orissa and a farming community promoting sustainable farming. We had to wake up at 5.45am to get here so we hoped it would be worth it. We were told there would be someone to meet us at the train station; they would know who we were because we would be the only white people. A ricksaw didn’t seem possible, so all 3 of us climbed onto our guide’s motor-bike (a common sight in India) and made our way to the meeting hall. “Don’t worry,” our contact had said when we asked how exactly we are supposed to interview 45 people all at once, “we wouldn’t put you in a difficult situation.” Luckily, as it turns out, it not that difficult to interview 45 people all at once (minus one Basic Communication Point)…

We got ushered into a meeting, being greeted with lovely flowers, and were told to sit at the head of a growing group of people. We sat and we sat and we sat and nothing was said – people seemed content just to stare at us – and then we were beckoned to leave and were given a bunch of food, then invited back to the meeting. We spent the next 2 hours doing a QandA with the group. We were then treated to local organic lunch on plates made of leaves. Embarrassingly, I was unable to finish mine. It seems that desperate “no” signals when offered a second enormous portion of rice, only drives them to give you more!

After lunch, we interviewed 3 farmers back-to-back. Concepts of a break don’t seem to exist. On top of this the interviews took 3 times as long as most interviews I’ve conducted as we did not share a common language. The farmers discussed how they had either always used traditional methods because it was what their forefathers had done, or how they had tried to use intensive methods but had found they didn’t work – they did not have the funds for the fertilisers, the pesticides, the seeds themselves and the irrigation, plus they didn’t really like the taste of hybrid crops.When we had bought the train tickets to this destination, our contact had told us to book returns (in India you can’t get returns so you get two singles) so we did. We were therefore confused when we headed to a town an hour and a half away to sleep… We ended up getting ‘top-up’ train tickets. Minus 2 Basic Communication Points.

The following day was always going to be grim, but it started much earlier than we had expected. “Josh, I think that’s the fire alarm!” Lucie squawked at 5.05am. “Don’t be silly, they don’t have firm alarms in India,” I replied. But she had a point. There was the constant ringing of a bell, which was accompanied by terrible and very loud music. Still believing this had to be something other than absolute stupidity, Lucie got up to see what was happening. It turned out there was a man in a yellow robe ringing a bell in the lobby of the hotel – which was opposite a temple blaring out tunes from its loudspeakers straight into the hotel. The music went on till 6.30am!

In the morning, I asked what the music was about. “For the temple,” responded the hotel manager. “Does this happen every morning?” “Oh, yes,” he said smilingly, utterly oblivious to the fact that some people who pay to stay in his hotel might not find this an endearing feature.

We had planned the day before to meet up with the secretary of the farmers’ community group and discuss stuff at 9am. At 9.30am he still hadn’t turned up. We called him and were told someone would come and pick us up “immediately”. At 10.30am someone turned up with a note saying that the secretary was sorry he couldn’t meet us, but something urgent had come up and he had had to go, but someone would come and pick us up at 11am and take us to their office, where we could do some research. Grrrr….We went to the office, but no one had a clue what we wanted. “What documents do you want?” “We don’t know, we were told there was stuff we could look at, we thought the secretary would be here, he was going to chat to us…” I think the people we met through-out those few days thought we were a bit stupid because we would turn up at a resource centre and not know what we wanted. The problem was, we were told (every time by someone who wasn’t there when we arrived) that the people at the centre would know what we wanted and we should just ask. FRUSTRATING.

After getting some documents, we caught the train back to BBS. We had a night bus to catch at 9.30pm. Our contact had told us “it might not be like UK night buses, but you get a good night’s sleep. I catch it all the time. You can wake up in the morning and get on with work”. I admire him for being able to do this. “Sleep” is not the correct word to describe what I had to go through that night. Cold, uncomfortable and stressed, we “woke” at 4.30am and stumbled of the bus. Yes, the bus arrived at 4.30am. A hotel had been booked for us, which a rickshaw driver took us to. You can check in in a few hours, we were told. “What!? Fine we’ll sleep on your sofa.” The hotel manager both took pity on us and achieved some amount of rationality and so let us move into our room a couple of hours early.

The next day (6 hours later, though Lucie had to wake up at 9am to ask the interviewees if they could come at midday instead of nine thirty…) was by far the hardest. Of course, no-one was there to meet us at midday. At 1.30pm a farmers’ trade union leader finally appeared in our hotel. It seemed he didn’t want to be seen with us (understandable as people on the front line of challenging the state and multinationals regularly end up face down in ditches or just banged up in prison under false charges) so we went to our hotel room. 5 hours later we were able to leave this room. In the meantime several people had entered it and expunged the entirety of their thoughts on the agricultural crisis in India upon us. We emerged shaken and exhausted having had to refuse a late comer: “No, I’m sorry, but no, no more interviews!”

Our work was done, but our endurance had to be stretched a little further the following day when a train which was meant to take 6 hours ending up taking (including waiting for it) 9. Pretty standard, but a long day… Luckily, there’s nothing I like more than reading in a train station and occasionally getting shat on by pigeons…

We are now officially going on holiday again (Tamil Nadu and Kerala), but will fill you in in much more detail on everything we have learnt in the past week.

One final point, while our contact’s communication skills were somewhat lacking, it should be said that this was made up for by all his hospitality, political insights, passion and commitment to this cause.

[1] The train system in India is, when you first arrive, excruciatingly complicated and confusing – the train stations moreso. Once you know it, it’s just irrational and frustrating (the stations remain totally confusing whatever you do, it seems). Tickets are available, wait-listed (meaning you can hope that the tickets the big travel agents have bought will be sold back to the train service), or RAC (dependent on someone’s cancellation). Available is obviously the best option. You can also opt for TATKAL, an emergency (not really an emergency) option 48 hours before departure, or FTQ (foreign tourist quota) if you’re lucky enough to be in a “metropolitan” capital (not Bhopal!) from which they can book them. This complicated system is saturated in bureaucracy, and you will probably have to fill in at least 2 forms just to get to the ticket counter! On top of all this, you can no longer book tickets online if you don’t have an Indian debit card…