Joining Hands with our Chethana Partners in South India

by Wilma White

Solidarity Volunteer Sacramento Presbytery

Member of Westminster Presbyterian Church

As the first Solidarity Volunteer to represent the Sacramento Presbytery JH among our Joining Hands partners in India, I have just returned from a three-month period of traveling by train and by car to many small outlying villages.

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Facilitator Thomas John

Over this timespan my journey brought me first from Bangalore, Karnataka in the middle of South India to Aluva, Kerala on the western coastline of the Arabian Sea. Next I went on up to Hyderabad in the state of Andrha Pradesh and then I traveled to Chennai, Tamil Nadu at the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal. Everytime I returned back to my “home base” in Bangalore.

There are far too many stories to share in one newsletter, but here are a few of my experiences with marginalized groups. They were all enriched by the length of time I could spend with the communities, which allowed me to become engulfed in the multi-faceted culture of India.

Dalits

I spent much time face-to-face with Dalits. These poorest-of-the poor were once referred to as the untouchables, but this designation was outlawed 50 years ago. Since then they have chosen to be called Dalits.

Over the centuries the Dalits have been a repressed segment of society. They were denied the right to own land and the right to clean water, and have been relegated to the most menial of jobs in society. Access to land would allow them to grow their own produce and feed their family – just one solution to solve hunger and work toward a sustainable livelihood.

The Dalits are now learning new approaches to solve issues such as the right to claim the land that is legally deeded to many of them.

One day, for example, we hiked down a rocky ravine to meet 5,000 families, who had been camping out on a rubber plantation for over half a year. This was a protest to try and bring the authorities of Kerala to hand them the land, which had been promised to them by the Kerala state government.

Bamboo artisans

Farming is the largest activity of the Dalit communities, followed by hand-loom weaving. In my travels I also met with the leaders of the bamboo workers and listened to their struggles in preserving their way of life. Besides trying to make a sustainable livelihood, bamboo workers see their trade as an art form. But globalization has allowed large multi-national companies to glutter the markets with plastic baskets. This has created a problem for the bamboo workers, who are looking at how to come up with other marketable items such as chairs, small lamps, wall hangings etc.

The attempts by bamboo artisans to sign up with the authorities as a registered trade union have been unsuccessful thus far, since they are not recognized by the government as a legitimate category of workers.

Women

Women have been organized in so-called sanghas to become more self-assertive in claiming their rightful place in decision-making processes within the home and the community. This is a huge step, since the cultural practices towards women in this patriarchal system has ranged from marriage dowry practices and female feticide - which continues to pop up in isolated stories even today -, to beatings by husbands and their family. Substance abuse is further becoming more and more an issue in the family dynamic.

A woman in an agricultural area discussed the inequality of wages paid to men versus women for the same work. She was contemplating walking two miles one-way to do road work to increase her income. By necessity women arise at 4AM to tend to their families and then go to full-time work in the fields returning home at days end to tend to their family and housework. This was also a fact of life among the women in Chennai. They often walk several miles to town to sell the fish their husbands caught.

By the way, all the women’s groups said that education for their children was very important to them. In their communities, the drop out rate is 65% by fifth grade and the average class size in a public school is 70.

Joining Hands partners of the Chethana network

For ten years our partners of Chethana have been working to change one village at a time. To transmit through words how I have seen education and training make a real difference in the lives of so many Dalits is nearly impossible. It is like witnessing the miracle of transformation.

Financially all of Chethana's work relies on our denomination's support through One Great Hour of Sharing and Presbyterian Women, and on individual donations.

Rising Food Prices: A Cruel Joke

by Thomas John, JH Companionship Facilitator

At an interactive session on the economy in Missouri, the President of the US argued that prosperity in countries like India has triggered increased demand for better nutrition, which in turn leads to higher food prices. “There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up,” Bush said. A few days before that, the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice blamed the “growing Indian and Chinese appetite in contributing to the global food crisis.”

A reality check

For many in India this statement seems a cruel joke. What about the 650 million people in India whose daily intake of food and nutrients are declining day by day? Total food grain consumption — wheat, rice, and all coarse grains like rye, barley etc — by each person in the US is over five times that of an Indian, according to figures released by the US Department of Agriculture for 2007. Each Indian gets to eat about 178 kg of grain in a year, while a US citizen consumes 1,046 kg. There is an acknowledgement in this statement and a perspective that if the rest of the world catches up to the present level of consumption of the Western world, the world would face a crisis of a cataclysmic proportion. The US does not want that to happen. That raises fundamental questions about the way we conceive and work toward development. Are we prepared to squarely face this issue?

Global dynamics

Four major trends are affecting supply conditions and give therefore rise to the global inflation for food crops:

1. Rising oil prices increase agricultural costs because of the significant energy input in the cultivation process through fertilizer and irrigation costs, as well as in the transportation of the food itself.
2. Rising oil prices and government policies in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and elsewhere have promoted bio-fuels as an alternative to petroleum. This has led to significant shifts in acreage and usage of certain grains.
3. Negligent agricultural policies over the past two decades are finally starting to bear down on food production. The prolonged agrarian crisis in many parts of the developing world; the shifts in acreage from food crops to cash crops relying on purchased inputs; the excessive use of groundwater and the inadequate attention paid to preserving or regenerating land and soil quality; the lack of attention to relevant agricultural research and extension; the overuse of chemical inputs that have long-run implications for both safety and productivity; the ecological implications of both pollution and climate change, including desertification and loss of cultivable land: all of these are issues that have early on been highlighted by analysts but largely ignored by policymakers in most countries.
4. Changes in market structure make for greater international speculation in commodities. It is often assumed that rising food prices automatically benefit farmers but this is far from the case, especially as the global food trade has become more concentrated in the hands of a few multinationals. A small number of agribusiness companies worldwide increasingly control all aspects of cultivation and distribution, from supplying inputs to farmers to buying crops and, even in some cases, to retailing food distribution.

Influences from International Financial Institutions

Looking particularly at the India reality, the roots of the present inflation do not lie in the global inflation alone. In its fervor to please International Financial Institutions and implement their neo-liberal economic policies, the Indian government took a number of measures that undermine the basic needs of the population. It stopped agricultural subsidies to farmers and lowered subventions on food prices. Meanwhile, food grains were bought from external markets for prices much higher than the financial support provided to India's own farmers.

Also under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Public Distribution System (PDS) was dismantled. The government re-defined the poverty line in terms of abysmally low food intake, such that only a very small percentage of the poor masses would fall in that category, and it made new rationing policies applicable to that category of the population only. At the same time private players were being allowed into the procurement of grains and other food crops.

The role for Chethana

This is the context in which Chethana is defining its role in the coming days and months. The network already promotes sustainable agricultural initiatives and sound water and soil management practices as an answer to the negligent agricultural policies. But in light of the current food crisis it will also need to start developing mechanisms to deal with the kind of market interventions described above, and create alternative markets.

Joining Hands in the US through the Presbytery of Sacramento

If your church or group would like to learn more about Presbyterian Hunger Programs work in India please contact Joining Hands Sacramento, garrycox@westminsac.org and we will be happy to arrange a slide presentation and discussion on this important mission project. You may also call Garry Cox at 916-442-8939.