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Food Sovereignty and the Right to Food

Civil Society’s Alternative Discourse to the Liberalisation of Agricultural and Feeding Policies in India

Camille Parguel

5th International Conference on Public Policy

Panel ‘Food policy: crises and responses’

1 Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had dramatic impacts on livelihoods in developing countries, including India where food insecurity and economic vulnerability have reached alarming levels (Azim Premji University 2020, 1). In response to the crisis, both the central and state governments of India have strengthened existing health-related feeding policies (‘COVID-19 Government Order Tracker’, n.d.). At the same time, India’s parliament has undertaken reforms to liberalise the agricultural sector, generating a long-term mobilisation of farmers, who fear the demise of the government’s guaranteed purchase of agricultural commodities (Parija and Prakash 2020). This situation implies a conflict of discourses around food security. The agricultural reforms supported by Narendra Modi concur with the dominant narrative of global trade ‘as an opportunity for food security’ (Clapp 2015), whereas civil society actors advocate ‘the re-empowerment of the nation-state’ (Said and Desai 2003, 68) as a way to preserve food policies from liberalisation. The paper analyses to what extent activists are able to challenge the dominant discourse about agricultural liberalisation and food policies in India. By doing so, it brings a contribution to existing studies on alternative, community-led agri-food governance (Jha 2009; Renting, Schermer, and Rossi 2012) and to the literature on activism against free trade agreements, in which Asia and its ‘vibrant civil society’ (Kingston 2017, xx–xxi) has been overlooked (Choudry 2014). Building on critical discourse analysis, I argue that civil society actors exercise a diffuse form of power with regard to food policymaking in India. They do so in particular by (1) campaigning outside of food policymaking arenas, (2) framing an alternative narrative about agricultural liberalisation and food policies and (3) assigning new roles to participants in the food policymaking process. The analysis focuses on La Via Campesina – a farmer movement including 182 organisations around the world, the Right to Food Campaign – a coalition committed to the realisation of the right to food in India, and the Forum against Free Trade Agreements – a discussion platform on free trade agreements. It explores activists’ discourse (1) in the context of free trade agreements negotiations involving India (2007-2017) and (2) within the framework of the agricultural reforms recently undertaken by the Indian parliament (2020-2021). Civil society actors have continued to exercise discursive power in the face of the COVID-19

2 pandemic, a finding suggesting that the crisis ‘could also provide an opportunity for traditionally less powerful actors to reshape the global food system in ways that bolster their own resilience within it’ (Clapp and Moseley 2020, 1409).

Keywords activism, agricultural liberalisation, civil society actors, critical discourse analysis, food security, free trade agreements, India

3 1 Introduction

Hundreds of thousands of farmers have converged on Delhi since September 2020 to protest against a legislative reform adopted by India’s parliament to liberalise agriculture (Mahajan 2020). Above all, demonstrators fear the demise of the government’s guaranteed purchase of agricultural commodities (Parija and Prakash 2020). Despite several rounds of talks between farmer representatives and government officials, no agreement could be reached (Dasgupta 2021) and the mobilisation has continued until now.

Civil society actors in India have long been committed to opposing agricultural liberalisation. During the 9th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Bali in 2013, farmers and right-to-food activists from India attended the street demonstration and lobbied the Indian delegation. Deadlocks in multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization prompted a global surge in bilateral and regional free trade agreements (Urata 2016, 235–36). In turn, civil society actors also started targeting this new generation of partnerships. For example, 500 farmers, Dalits, women and actors from diverse grassroots groups joined a mass rally held in Hyderabad in 2017 in parallel to the 19th negotiating round for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement between 16 Asian and Oceanian countries (The Times of India 2017). The demonstrators called for a halt to the negotiations, which they considered as ‘an onslaught on the lives, livelihoods and rights of the majority of Indians’ (‘Declaration from the People’s Convention against FTAs and RCEP’ 2017).

More recently, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had dramatic impacts on livelihoods in developing countries, including India where food insecurity and economic vulnerability have reached alarming levels (Azim Premji University 2020, 1). In response to the crisis, both the central and state governments of India have strengthened existing health-related feeding policies (‘COVID-19 Government Order Tracker’, n.d.). At the same time, India’s parliament has undertaken reforms to liberalise the agricultural sector, generating a long-term mobilisation of farmers, who fear the demise of the government’s guaranteed purchase of agricultural commodities (Parija and Prakash 2020). This situation implies a conflict of discourses around food security.

4 The agricultural reforms supported by Narendra Modi concur with the dominant narrative of global trade ‘as an opportunity for food security’ (Clapp 2015), whereas civil society actors advocate ‘the re-empowerment of the nation-state’ (Said and Desai 2003, 68) as a way to preserve food policies from liberalisation.

The paper analyses to what extent activists are able to challenge the dominant discourse about agricultural liberalisation and food policies in India. By doing so, it brings a contribution to existing studies on alternative, community-led agri-food governance (Jha 2009; Renting, Schermer, and Rossi 2012) and to the literature on activism against free trade agreements, in which Asia and its ‘vibrant civil society’ (Kingston 2017, xx–xxi) has been overlooked (Choudry 2014). Building on critical discourse analysis, I argue that civil society actors exercise a diffuse form of power with regard to food policymaking in India. They do so in particular by (1) campaigning outside of food policymaking arenas, (2) framing an alternative narrative about agricultural liberalisation and food policies and (3) assigning new roles to participants in the food policymaking process. The analysis focuses on La Via Campesina – a farmer movement including 182 organisations around the world, the Right to Food Campaign – a coalition committed to the realisation of the right to food in India, and the Forum against Free Trade Agreements – a discussion platform on free trade agreements. La Via Campesina has always opposed agricultural liberalisation as promoted by the World Trade Organization and campaigned for ‘food sovereignty’. For its part, the Right to Food Campaign attempted to influence the drafting of a National Food Security Act between 2009 and 2013. The Forum against Free Trade Agreements has been highlighting free trade agreements’ consequences for civil society in India since 2007.

The analysis explores activists’ discourse (1) in the context of free trade agreements negotiations involving India (2007-2017) and (2) within the framework of the agricultural reforms recently undertaken by the Indian parliament (2020-2021). Civil society actors’ engagement against free trade agreements is analysed in the context of negotiating processes for the Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) between India and the European Union and for the RCEP. Both agreements are particularly important for India as the European Union is India’s main trading partner (13.5% of India’s global trade) (European Commission 2018a) and in 2016, the RCEP would have covered 25% of global

5 gross domestic product, 30% of global trade and 45% of the world’s population (Priya 2016). As for the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest, it began in Punjab in August 2020, gradually spread across the country and has continued until now.

Activists continued to exercise discursive power in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a finding suggesting that the crisis ‘could also provide an opportunity for traditionally less powerful actors to reshape the global food system in ways that bolster their own resilience within it’ (Clapp and Moseley 2020, 1409). After a first section explaining analytical and methodological choices, the paper explores this assumption through an analysis of civil society actors’ power conceptualised as ‘discursive practices’ (Fairclough 2003, 26; Del Felice 2014, 151).

2 Analysing activists’ power as ‘discursive practices’

A great deal of civil society actors’ power results from their discursive practices. In the wake of Del Felice (2014, 151), I draw on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) to develop my analytical framework. This allows me to appraise the discursive power that civil society actors are likely to have on food policymaking. From the assumption that language is an essential part of social life, Fairclough (2003, 26) has disentangled discursive practices in three distinct ways in which social practices evolve.

First, ‘genres’ or ‘ways of acting’ consist of how a discourse is part of a wider action and can take different written and oral forms. Regarding the case discussed in this study, ways of acting are about the individual actions taken by activists against agricultural liberalisation – through free trade agreements and agricultural reforms – which are likely to be characteristic of particular textual genres.

Second, Fairclough uses the notion of ‘discourse’, not only in its abstract sense of any semiotic meaning but also in its more concrete understanding of particular ‘ways of representing’; this refers to the assumption that representations ‘are always a part of social practices – representations of the material world, of other social practices, reflexive self-representations of the practice in question’ (Fairclough 2003, 26). We will see that such ways of representing help appraise civil society actors’ narrative on agricultural liberalisation and agricultural/feeding policies.

6 Finally, the author describes as ‘style’ the manner in which discourse also constitutes ‘ways of being’, as the use of language is intrinsically linked to ‘particular social or personal identities’. Such ways of being will here be understood as social identities characterised and positioned in relation to other subjects through civil society actors’ narrative.

Activists’ discursive practices are coded according to the operationalisation described in Table 1.

Table 1 – Activists’ discursive practices

Discursive practice Operationalisation

‘Genres’ or ‘ways of acting’ Actions taken by activists (1) in formal spaces (consultation mechanisms) by means of formal texts (technical reports, statistics, legal texts) and (2) in non- formal spaces (parallel activities, protests, the production and dissemination of critical knowledge, campaigns targeting other governance institutions, lobbyism, media work) by means of non-formal texts (posters, pamphlets, declarations)

‘Discourses’ or ‘ways of representing’ Policy paradigms adopted by activists about (1) the link between agricultural liberalisation and food security and (2) alternative frameworks in order to ensure food security

‘Styles’ or ‘ways of being’ Identities (1) formed through activists’ discourse (civil society and farmers, the government, foreign countries and

7 agribusiness) and (2) positioned in relation to each other

Such ‘ways of acting’, ‘ways of representing’ and ‘ways of being’ prompt the following three hypotheses that guide the analysis.

• The discursive power of civil society actors is weak when their ‘ways of acting’ are confined to ‘outside spaces’ and informal textual genres (H1). • The discursive power of civil society actors is strong when their ‘ways of representing’ are alternative discourses to the dominant narrative on agricultural liberalisation (H2). • The discursive power of civil society actors is strong when their ‘ways of being’ are associated with claims for new roles for actors engaged in food policymaking arenas (H3).

Activists’ discursive practices are analysed (1) in the context of free trade agreements negotiations involving India (2007-2017) and (2) within the framework of the agricultural acts recently passed by India’s parliament (2020-2021). A corpus of 10 appeals and declarations issued by civil society groups (2008-2017) and 12 face-to-face and phone interviews with activists (2018) allowed me to analyse civil society actors’ discourse about free trade agreements. Activists belonging to La Via Campesina South Asia and/or the Forum against Free Trade Agreements appear among the signatories of the 10 appeals and declarations (Mital et al. 2008; ActionAid - India et al. 2010; Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010a; 2010b; ‘Appeal to Manmohan Singh’ 2012; Anthra et al. 2013; Adivasi Aikya Vedika et al. 2014; People’s Resistance Forum against Free Trade Agreements and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership 2017a; 2017c; ‘Declaration from the People’s Convention against FTAs and RCEP’ 2017). Among the 12 interviews, four of them were conducted with activists from La Via Campesina (Anonymous 2018; Dube 2018; Y. Singh 2018; Subramaniam 2018), three with individuals engaged in the Right to Food Campaign (Shrivastava 2018; Sinha 2018; Srivastava 2018) and five with members of the Forum against Free Trade Agreements (Barria 2018; Bhutani 2018; Gupta 2018; Sengupta 2018; Vissa 2018). This first corpus was compiled

8 as part of an analysis conducted for a forthcoming article (Parguel and Graz forthcoming).

Another corpus of six appeals and declarations (2020-2021) allowed me to explore civil society actors’ discourse on the agricultural acts recently passed by India’s parliament. Activists from La Via Campesina South Asia or the Right to Food Campaign issued the six appeals and declarations (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b; Hunusuru and Akki 2020; La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a; Right to Food Campaign 2020; ‘Scrap Farm Bill Act, 2020’ n.d.; Malik 2021).

3 Acting

‘Genres’ or ‘ways of acting’ are actions associated with different genres of discourse (Fairclough 2003, 26). Del Felice (2014, 151) has distinguished ‘between genres commonly used within formal governmental structures, that is, used by governments, and those that are used outside of them’, i.e. ‘between texts of formal spaces (technical reports, statistics, legal texts) and texts of non-formal spaces (posters, pamphlets, declarations)’. Formal genres are thus linked to formal arenas, and non-formal genres are related to non-formal arenas. According to Cornwall (2002, 17), activists can enter ‘invited spaces’, i.e. ‘spaces … into which people (as users, citizens or beneficiaries) are invited to participate by various kinds of authorities, be they government, supranational agencies or non-governmental organisations’. But civil society actors can also build ‘created spaces’, i.e. ‘spaces that emerge more organically out of sets of common concerns or identifications [and] may come into being as a result of popular mobilisation, such as around identity or issue-based concerns, or may consist of spaces in which like- minded people join together in common pursuits’ (Cornwall 2002, 17). Building on Del Felice (2014, 151), I consider ‘invited spaces’ as a category belonging to formal arenas and ‘created spaces’ as an equivalent to non-formal arenas. Combining activities in both formal and non-formal arenas allows ‘a broader politicization of the negotiations’, as well as ability to diversify genres of text (Del Felice 2014, 155). Activists engaged against agricultural liberalisation in India could not associate formal and non-formal arenas of mobilisation due to their almost complete exclusion from formal policymaking spaces.

9 Also, their access to documents from formal arenas was extremely limited, which hampered their capacity to combine formal and informal genres of text.

3.1 Acting on the margins of free trade policymaking

Activists’ access to formal arenas generally takes the form of involvement in consultation mechanisms (Goetz and Gaventa 2001; Cornwall 2002; Gaventa 2006). A consultation for the BTIA was held by India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry after the beginning of the negotiations in 2007: among the participants in the event taking place in Kerala, fish workers asked for the exclusion of 40 fish subspecies from the agreement (Pillai 2007). As regards negotiations for the RCEP, a number of consultation sessions with civil society actors were held during the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th rounds of trade talks (New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2016; 2017a; 2017b; 2017c). Activists ‘coordinated’ the consultation of the 19th negotiating round for the RCEP in Hyderabad in July 2017: after asking for such a meeting to be organised, they provided a list of civil society actors interested in attending the event and communicated in advance the concerns that they wanted to debate (Gupta 2018). Twenty-eight civil society actors participated in the consultation in Hyderabad on 25 July 2017 (India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry 2017). Yet, as soon as the consultation began, many country delegates left the room (Sengupta 2013) when each civil society organisation had three minutes to ask questions to negotiators, who for their part had 15 minutes to respond (Gupta 2018). Activists were also confronted with the lack of access to formal documents such as draft chapters of the agreements and impact analyses.

According to Gerard (2014, 12), activism against the Association of Southeast Asian Nations can take place in four created spaces: ‘parallel activities, protests, the production and dissemination of critical knowledge, and campaigns targeting other governance institutions’. A fifth created space – ‘lobbyism’ – has also been identified in the case of advocacy against the free trade agreement between the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (García 2017). Activists engaged against the agreements between the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the European Union engaged in a sixth created space: ‘media work’ (Del Felice 2014, 155). Although civil society actors in India relied on parallel activities, protests and media work, they did

10 not – or only occasionally – produce and disseminate critical knowledge, conduct campaigns targeting other governance institutions or lobby negotiators.

As explained by Gerard (2014, 138), parallel activities ‘mimic a variety of official events, including workshops, forums and even the drafting of agreements’ and ‘are intended to make officials aware of the perspective of CSOs [civil society organisations] relative to official proceedings, in the hope that these activities may influence policymaking’. A number of parallel activities were held after the beginning of negotiating rounds for the BTIA in 2007. Activists for example organised a ‘round-table on RTAs [regional trade agreements] and FTAs [free trade agreements]’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2008), a ‘Briefing meeting on EU-India FTA’ with a member of India’s parliament, D. Raja, and the European parliamentarian, Franziska Keller (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010c) and a conference entitled ‘Impact of India-EU FTA on Indian Economy’ with representatives of different Indian political parties (Sengupta 2013). Activists also organised a ‘People’s summit’ in Hyderabad in parallel to the 19th negotiating round for the RCEP. A ‘Round-table on IP [intellectual property] and access to medicine’, a ‘Dalit consultation’, a ‘People’s convention’ and different thematic workshops – about agriculture, labour, e-commerce, public services, fisheries and global trade – thus took place from 22 to 26 July (People’s Resistance Forum against Free Trade Agreements and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership 2017b). Six hundred civil society actors attended the People’s convention in Hyderabad on 23 July and agreed on a ‘Declaration’ (2017) containing common claims.

A number of protests against the BTIA and RCEP were also held by activists. Civil society actors demonstrated in New Delhi (and surrounding areas) during the 6th, 9th and 12th negotiating rounds for the BTIA (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2009; News Worms 2010; Shankar 2012) and in parallel to the 6th negotiating round for the RCEP (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2014). Five hundred activists also attended a mass rally in Hyderabad on 24 July 2017 (Indo-Asian News Service 2017). A particular genre of text corresponded to those demonstrations: the banner or placard displaying a slogan.

11 Another created space consists in the production and dissemination of critical knowledge that challenges current policies (Gerard 2014, 145). A few members of the Forum against Free Trade Agreements were engaged in such activities. For example, R. Sengupta, a researcher at the Third World Network – an international research and advocacy organisation – is (co-)author of papers about the BTIA’s consequences on development issues such as gender (Sengupta and Gopinath 2009; Sengupta and Jena 2009; Sengupta and Sharma 2009; R. Singh and Sengupta 2009) and government procurement (Sengupta 2012).

Activists did not count on campaigns targeting other governance institutions in their fight against the BTIA and RCEP. A call for action headlined, ‘Last chance to prevent onslaught on people’s rights and livelihoods’ (ActionAid - India et al. 2010) constituted an exception to that observation. It consisted of a joint declaration issued after the 8th Asia-Europe People’s Forum, which took place in Brussels from 2 to 5 October 2010. Asian and European civil society actors addressed the letter against the BTIA to the European Commission and the government of India, in anticipation of the 11th EU - India summit planned for 10 December 2010 in Brussels.

A similar comment can be made in the case of lobbyism since activists almost never relied on it. The only case of lobbying activities that I am aware of dates back to 2009, when Danièle Smadja, ambassador and head of the delegation of the European Commission to India, Nepal and Bhutan, agreed to meet three members of the Forum against Free Trade Agreements after the demonstration against the 6th negotiating round for the BTIA in New Delhi (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2009).

Activists, however, engaged in media work fairly frequently. Civil society actors’ parallel activities and demonstrations were generally accompanied by a press conference and/or a press release. Also, they drew on alternative channels of information, a strategy regularly adopted in order to compensate for a weak coverage in mainstream media (Bennett 2005, 222). Besides benefiting from the visibility given by social media like Facebook and Twitter, activists could count on reports from Newsclick, a channel of video news defining itself as ‘an alternative to the corporate media’ (‘About Us’ n.d.).

12 3.2 Acting on the margins of agricultural and feeding policymaking

During the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest, eleven rounds of discussion between farmer representatives and government officials took place from 14 October 2020 to 22 January 2021 (Ravi 2020; Dasgupta 2021). During the consultations, farmers asked for the agriculture acts to be repealed. On 22 January 2021, the government delegation led by the Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare offered to suspend the bills for 12 to 18 months, before a resolution is made. As farmers refused such a compromise, the talks stopped. A farmer delegate deplored that although the last meeting lasted several hours, the two sides only sat face to face for 15 to 30 minutes (Dasgupta 2021).

A number of parallel activities accompanied the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest. On 3 September 2020, a webinar about India’s minimum support price (a market price subsidy for 25 agricultural commodities granted to farmers) featured Devinder Sharma, a food and trade policy analyst, as well as farmer leaders such as Rakesh Tikait, spokesperson of Bharatiya Kisan Union (Radhakrishnan 2020). On 11 September 2020, the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (n.d.) organised another webinar entitled ‘3 agriculture reform ordinances - whither farmer?’ Among the speakers was the general secretary of the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements, Yudhvir Singh. At the beginning of 2021, eight ‘mahapanchayats’ (gatherings of village councils) also took place in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh as part of the farmers’ protest (La Via Campesina South Asia 2021b).

After demonstrations against the agriculture acts began in Punjab in August 2020, the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements (2020a) called for a bandh across India on 25 September 2020. Farmers from different federated states subsequently converged on Delhi to ask for the annulment of the bills and the protest has continued until now. On 8 December 2020, farmers called for a nationwide strike (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a). On 26 January 2021, India’s ‘Republic day’, farmers held a tractor parade in New Delhi (La Via Campesina 2021). Besides appeals by farmer leaders, the farmers’ protest also featured activities such as community kitchens, art and cultural shows (La Via Campesina South Asia 2021b). Demonstrators reported having to

13 deal with restricted internet access at sites of protest, concrete or barbed wire fences along arterial roads, and blocked water supply (La Via Campesina South Asia 2021b).

Activists also engaged in campaigns targeting other governance institutions. A group of five lawyers sent a letter to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations denouncing abuses of arrested demonstrators by the police (Kukreja et al. 2021).

Additionally, activists relied fairly frequently on media work. Alternative channels of information covered the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest. Dhruv Rathee, a YouTuber and social media activist, issued a video entitled ‘Why are farmers protesting? Ordinances explained’ (2020). Furthermore, Gaon Connection, a media platform about rural India, issued a report on ‘The Indian Farmer’s Perception of the New Agri Laws’ (Misra et al. 2020). A bi-weekly newsletter entitled Trolley Times, by and for the demonstrators, was even launched in December 2020 (Deol 2020). Activists also engaged on social media. At the end of September 2020, the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements (2020b) circulated a document with 60 proposed tweets in English and 16 proposed tweets in Tamil for a Twitter action on 25 September. Each tweet featured the hashtags ‘#AntiFarmerBills’ and ‘#CorporateBhagaoKisanBachao’ (‘eliminate corporate – save farmers’). On 8 December 2020, La Via Campesina South Asia (2020a) ‘call[ed] upon all peasant organisations around the world to send messages of support and solidarity to the protesting Indian farmers and echo their demands’ using the hashtags ‘#SupportIndianFarmers’ and ‘#PeasantForPeasantSolidarity’. Activists from Portugal, South Korea, Indonesia, the United States of America, Brazil, Kenya, Canada, the United Kingdom, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh joined the action (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020b). In January 2021, La Via Campesina (2021) called for farmers around the world to light a candle of solidarity for India’s farmers on 26 January, India’s ‘Republic day’. Participants were invited to post images and messages on social networks with the hashtag ‘#ShineOnIndiaFarmers’. Activists from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Republic of the Congo, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, France, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Canada, the United Kingdom, Central America and Thailand participated in the campaign (La Via Campesina South Asia 2021a).

14 4 Representing

After analysing activists’ ‘ways of acting’, I move to the ‘discourses’ or ‘ways of representing part of the world’ that they adopted. This section focuses on the narrative produced by civil society actors on agricultural liberalisation and agricultural/feeding policies. As Del Felice (2014, 151) has pointed out, ‘discourses draw from economic theories and move through policy paradigms which guide decisions’. As we will see below, activists engaged against agricultural liberalisation in India mainly adopted what Said and Desai (2003, 66–72) have described as an ‘isolationist’ approach based on the necessity to re-empower the state and abolish the World Trade Organization. After highlighting that agricultural liberalisation harms both food producers and consumers in India, civil society actors proposed to focus on Indian food policies.

4.1 Preserving food policies from free trade agreements

Activists engaged against the BTIA and RCEP conveyed a ‘counter-discourse’ (Sharma 2007, 48) to a dominant narrative presenting agricultural liberalisation ‘as an opportunity for food security’ (Clapp 2015) as they considered the BTIA and RCEP as threats to food security. According to activists from La Via Campesina, the BTIA and RCEP would bring a massive reduction of import tariff on agricultural commodities, an introduction of intellectual property protection that prevents peasants from saving seeds between two sowings, and access to government procurement for foreign companies, that compromises Indian food policies (‘Appeal to Manmohan Singh’ 2012). Farmers especially feared that the opening of government procurement endangers India’s minimum support price and public distribution system (a national scheme offering subsidised agricultural commodities to households below the poverty line) (‘Appeal to Manmohan Singh’ 2012; Banik 2016, 32, 36). ‘India’s rural livelihoods’, considered as ‘the mainstay of Indian people’, were thus viewed as threatened by agricultural liberalisation (‘Appeal to Manmohan Singh’ 2012). With two-thirds of the Indian population rural and more than 40% of employment belonging to the agricultural sector (The World Bank 2017), a number of interviewees (Dube 2018; Y. Singh 2018; Subramaniam 2018) highlighted farmers’ vulnerability to economic liberalisation. Activists thus drew attention to the ‘agrarian crisis’, a situation in which small producers

15 are no longer able to practise farming in a cost-efficient way (Mazoyer and Roudart 2002, 583).

According to activists from the Right to Food Campaign, the BTIA and RCEP would cause a shift to cash crops for export and food imports of low nutritional value (Sinha 2018). A number of interviewees (Shrivastava 2018; Srivastava 2018) affirmed that liberalisation can even compromise food policies and thus demonstrated a strong commitment to Indian public programmes.

Accordingly, activists advanced alternative frameworks to agricultural liberalisation, that they considered as more appropriate in order to ensure food security. ‘Food sovereignty’ was defined by farmers from La Via Campesina as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements n.d.). Farmers here refer to the internal dimension of food sovereignty – ‘the right of a people to freely choose its own political, economic and social system’ – and its external dimension – ‘southern countries[’] right to develop their agriculture’ (Claeys 2012, 849). Although La Via Campesina ‘started claiming food sovereignty as a human right, to be held by communities, peoples, or regions’ (Claeys 2015, 455), farmers in India continued to expect the state to support them in achieving food sovereignty.

For their part, members of the Right to Food Campaign promoted the ‘right to food’ as ‘[everyone’s] fundamental right to be free from hunger and undernutrition’ (Right to Food Campaign 2001). As a constitutional entitlement, the right to food has to be ensured through India’s existing food and nutrition policies (Sinha 2018).

4.2 Restoring food policies prior to the agriculture acts

According to farmers demonstrating against the agriculture acts, such bills accentuate agricultural liberalisation in a problematic way. They expressed specific concerns for each law. First, the ‘Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance’ (2020a) deregulates the supply of food products such as cereals, pulses, potato, onions, edible oilseeds and oils, and puts an end to the imposition of stock limits of agricultural produce. Farmers argued

16 that ‘the Essential Commodities Bill 2020 will allow hoarding and market manipulation by private players who can also import and hoard instead of buying from local farmers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Second, the ‘Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act’ (2020b) provides for a national framework on farming agreements between farmers and agri-business firms entered into prior to the production or rearing of any farming produce. Farmers considered that it created a ‘huge power imbalance between farmers and corporates’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) due to the absence of any regulation of contract farming. Finally, the ‘Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act’ (2020c) promotes inter-state and intra- state trade and commerce of farmers’ produce outside the physical premises of markets notified under state agricultural produce market legislations. Farmers criticised such a legal provision for ‘creat[ing] two unequal markets. One APMC & the other unregulated market. Private players will prefer the latter, making the APMCs [Agricultural Produce and Livestock Market Committees] redundant over time’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Here, farmers refer to agricultural produce and livestock market committees, i.e. marketing boards dependent on federated states (India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare 2017). All in all, the agriculture acts would ‘cause financial breakdown of farmers’, lead them to commit suicide, ‘finish Indian farmer’ and be especially detrimental to ‘marginal farmers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Farmers also highlighted that the agrarian crisis had already been accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic:

‘For months during the lockdown we sold onions at a loss, and just when prices were looking up, exports were banned. It was like, the government removed our hand- cuffs (promising unfettered market access) and then put shackles on our feet.’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b)

Activists added that besides endangering farmers’ livelihood, the agricultural acts ‘w[ould] hurt consumers as well’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and ‘[were] against … food security for all’ (Right to Food Campaign 2020). Accordingly, they deplored ‘that the state is withdrawing from its regulatory role, and even gave up its powers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements

17 2020b) and asked for the annulment of the farm bills (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a).

Farmers called instead for the restoration of food policies prior to the agriculture acts. First, they demanded that the minimum support price be ‘embedded in law’ as ‘MSP is a legal right of the farmer’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Second, farmers claimed that ‘instead of making APMCs [agricultural produce and livestock market committees] redundant, govt [government] should work to resolve shortcomings’ since ‘at least in APMCs, we farmers could organize & defend ourselves against exploitation’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Activists from the Right to Food Campaign (2020) also highlighted that ‘Schedule 3 of the NFSA [National Food Security Act] 2013 states that the government should make provisions for advancing food security through measures that protect rights of small and marginalized farmers by bringing in land reforms, developing minor and small irrigation systems, providing remunerative prices, power and crop insurance. It also includes provisions for procurement, storage and movement related interventions that will help in promoting decentralised procurement.’ Additionally, they required that the government extends the public distribution system to ‘coarse grains, pulses and edible oil’ (Right to Food Campaign 2020). Finally, members of the Right to Food Campaign (2020) ‘demand[ed] that the Government of India should provide adequate budget to strengthen the system of FCI [Food Corporation of India] and should ensure that private companies and corporates should not interfere in the functioning of FCI’. Here, activists refer to the Food Corporation of India, a national statutory body that undertakes the purchase, storage, movement, transport, distribution and sale of food grains (‘Food Corporations Act’ 1964).

Agricultural liberalisation thus appeared as a danger to food security, which food policies prior to agriculture acts are better able to ensure. Such a point of view differed from the position of La Via Campesina (2020a) that ‘now is the time to transform and build a better society’ since ‘the current COVID 19 pandemic has shown us the importance and the resilience of local food systems that keep many people from hunger and starvation’. According to La Via Campesina (2020b), agricultural liberalisation caused an increase in zoonic diseases such as COVID-19, before the pandemic revealed the limits of ‘this

18 industrial food complex’. The international farmer movement (2020b) considers ‘food sovereignty’ as the solution since it ‘guarantees the most basic needs of the human society at all times – food. Pandemic or any other disruptive shocks that the world may witness can be withstood and survived if food is guaranteed to all people.’ La Via Campesina (2020c) asks for ‘genuine agrarian reform’ based on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas as it ‘provides a framework to build public policies that are diverse, resilient and rooted in the wisdom, culture and customs of local communities, and their visions for food sovereignty’. Conversely, the COVID-19 pandemic was almost absent from Indian activists’ discourse. Although they highlighted that ‘[farmers’] hard work ensured that food supplies were not affected even during the pandemic’ (‘Scrap Farm Bill Act, 2020’ n.d.), the priority was not to ‘take advantage’ of the crisis to develop a more resilient agricultural system. Farmers instead asked for India’s subsistence agriculture to be preserved from liberalisation through the restoration of earlier food policies.

5 Being

Having examined activists’ ‘ways of acting’ and ‘ways of representing’, I now turn to the ‘identities’ or ‘ways of being’ appearing in civil society actors’ discourse. Activists’ ways of being are operationalised as (1) ‘identity formation’ and (2) ‘subject-positioning’ (Del Felice 2014, 151). Identity formation consists in shaping identities for the different subjects mentioned in civil society actors’ narrative. Subject-positioning refers to how activists consider the relations of opposition and partnership between the subjects mentioned in their discourse. Civil society actors engaged against agricultural liberalisation in India shaped three social identities in their narrative: (1) civil society and farmers, (2) the government and (3) foreign countries and agribusiness. We will see below that activists’ ways of being were associated with claims for important and new responsibilities for civil society and the government. In contrast, foreign countries and agribusiness were depicted as too influential actors and were asked to give more room to activists and the government. By suggesting new roles for actors engaged in food policymaking arenas, civil society actors clearly exercised a strong discursive power.

19 5.1 Civil society, the government and foreign countries

Activists engaged against the BTIA and RCEP defined themselves as ‘civil society’ understood as ‘various sections of the society; civil society organisations, farmers’ organisations, trade unions, academics, industry associations, students, and others’ (Anthra et al. 2013). Above all, they spoke for ‘the most vulnerable sections such as Dalits, adivasis, small farmers, unorganised workers, denotified tribes, minorities, women and children’ (‘Declaration from the People’s Convention against FTAs and RCEP’ 2017), a range of actors especially affected by the BTIA and RCEP. As a diverse group, civil society was no less united under banners such as the ‘Forum against Free Trade Agreements’ and the ‘People’s Resistance Forum against Free Trade Agreements and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership’. Activists addressed their appeals to government officials such as Anand Sharma and Nirmala Seetharaman, successive commerce ministers, and Manmohan Singh, prime minister. As observers of a process over which they did not have any control, they ‘call[ed] for’, ‘demand[ed]’ (Mital et al. 2008), ‘request[ed]’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010b) and ‘appeal[ed] to’ (‘Appeal to Manmohan Singh’ 2012; Anthra et al. 2013) government officials to act and improve such a critical situation.

Civil society actors considered that ‘the GoI [government of India] has ignored and sidelined the parliament, state governments, citizens of India … . No consultations, public discussion of the pros and cons, release of government studies, government positions and submissions have taken place with these constituencies. This makes a mockery out of the federal polity and the democratic ethos of India’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010b). By bypassing core democratic institutions, the government found itself in a position where it was unable to defend India’s developing economy at the negotiating table (ActionAid - India et al. 2010; Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010a).

Activists depicted foreign countries as a bloc of developed economies allied to ‘multinational companies [that] dominate global services trade and investment’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010a) and ‘supermarket giants’ (ActionAid - India et al. 2010). Action verbs were used to describe foreign countries’ initiatives at the negotiating

20 table: they ‘[were] pushing for’, ‘demanding’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010a), ‘insisting’ (Forum against Free Trade Agreements 2010b), ‘refus[ing]’ (Anthra et al. 2013) and ‘ask[ing] for’ (Adivasi Aikya Vedika et al. 2014). A ‘moral responsibility’ was attributed to foreign countries ‘to open up the “secret” talks’ (People’s Resistance Forum against Free Trade Agreements and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership 2017c) in a way to better include civil society actors in the negotiating process.

5.2 Farmers, the government and agribusiness

During the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest, farmers defined themselves as ‘the people who [are] feeding you’, the ‘backbone of our country’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and even ‘the communities who feed a majority of the world’s population’ (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a). They claimed that they belonged to ‘Bharath (rural India)’ (Malik 2021) and presented themselves as the spokespersons of the agricultural world in its diversity. For example, the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements campaign on Twitter (2020b) featured a ‘maize farmer from MP [Madhya Pradesh]’, an ‘onion farmer from Nashik’ and a ‘farmer in Rajasthan’. Among the demonstrators in Delhi, there were also women (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and elderly farmers (Malik 2021). Farmers highlighted their various geographic origins:

This movement has people from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat. … In Maharashtra protests are taking place. In Tamil Nadu rallies were organized. Bangalore saw a huge demonstration. It’s clear that farmers around the country are part of the movement. Those who can’t be here in person – those farmers and workers who can’t join in Delhi – are protesting in their region. (Malik 2021)

Although they came from different federated states, farmers were able to ally and form one united group (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a; ‘Scrap Farm Bill Act, 2020’ n.d.). They were ‘resolute’ despite the cold weather and police crackdowns (La Via Campesina South Asia 2020a). Dharmendra Malik (2021), a farmer leader belonging to Bharatiya Kisan Union, presented the suicide of several peasants as the ultimate form of commitment to the cause. Farmers addressed their appeals and declarations to two recipients. First, they called on their ‘friends’, ‘brothers’, ‘young friends’, ‘fellow farmers,

21 youngsters, intellectuals’ and ‘fellow people’ (Malik 2021). The use of imperative verbs underlined the importance of reacting quickly to the situation. Activists invited citizens to ‘sign this petition asking for an effective annulment of these Acts’ (‘Scrap Farm Bill Act, 2020’ n.d.). Dharmendra Malik (2021) also urged Indian people to act:

My brothers, this is the time. We have to get out of our homes, and break the arrogance of the government. I appeal with folded hands, take this movement as forward as you can.

…

Join this struggle in large numbers!

The call for action extended to social movements outside India. La Via Campesina South Asia (2020a) asked its supporters to ‘mobilise in your region’, ‘write letters to Indian High Commissions in your country’, ‘issue statements of solidarity with Indian farmers’ and ‘share your messages of solidarity on social media’. Second, farmers spoke to government officials. The All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements campaign on Twitter (2020b) targeted the Prime Minister of India (and its office), the Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (and the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare), the President of India and the National Institution for Transforming India. The letter by the Right to Food Campaign (2020) was also addressed to the President of India and the petition ‘Scrap farm bill act’ (n.d.) to the central government. Activists ‘[were] worried’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and ‘concerned’ (‘Scrap Farm Bill Act, 2020’ n.d.). Accordingly, they ‘urge[d]’ government officials to improve the situation (Right to Food Campaign 2020).

According to farmers, ‘the govt [government] misused its emergency powers to bring in #AntiFarmerBills via ordinances, in a undemocratic manner, without any parliamentary discussion, standing committee deliberation, or consultation with farmers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Activists also complained that federated states had not been consulted although agriculture belongs to their prerogatives (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b; Right to Food Campaign 2020). By bypassing core democratic institutions, the central

22 government revealed its ‘totalitarian nature’ (Hunusuru and Akki 2020). Besides accusing the government of acting autocratically, farmers criticised that it hid its real intentions. The All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements campaign on Twitter (2020b) included a series of tweets contrasting a ‘lie’, ‘hype’ or ‘myth’ by the government about the agriculture acts with a ‘truth’. Farmers also expressed their ‘distrust’ of the government because of ‘the … betrayal and reneging that happens repeatedly on promises made’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). According to them, ‘the bills hide more than they reveal’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and there are ‘hidden agendas behind these laws’ (Hunusuru and Akki 2020). Consequently, farmers asked the government to ‘stop this dystopia’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). In adopting the agriculture acts, the government behaved ‘against the rights of farmers’ and took ‘a disastrous anti-people decision’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). It flouted ‘respect for farming’ and made ‘victims’ of the farmers (Malik 2021). But farmers reminded the government of the danger of underestimating them:

A word for the government. People always throw out an arrogant government. Don’t think farmers are weak. They can also put you out of power. These are the same farmers who also dismantled earlier governments. It’s the farmers who brought this government to power and if you don’t work for farmers, they will throw you out too. (Malik 2021)

Agribusiness is the real beneficiary of the agriculture acts, from the farmers’ perspective. Farmers mentioned companies headquartered in India such as Adani, ‘foreign moneybags’ and ‘traders’ as part of the ‘big corporates turning agriculture into neoliberal agribusiness’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Additionally, they argued that ‘though there is a very clear pro-corporate intent behind the Bills, they may enable middle-men to wring an even harder grip on the farmers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). A link was also established between corporate actors and the ‘25 years of #neocolonial agenda’ of the World Trade Organization (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Farmers deplored that ‘these bills are the solution [at the World Trade Organization] to ending farm subsidies’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers

23 Movements 2020b). As farmers claimed, ‘pvt [private] players will first lure us; and then will make us dependent on them’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b). Because of the agriculture act on contract farming, ‘private players [gained] greater freedom to exploit our farmers’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b) and a farmer can ‘become … slave of the big corporate for her or his entire life’ (Hunusuru and Akki 2020). Besides manipulating farmers, private companies also ‘put pressure on government’ for liberalising agriculture (Malik 2021). Generally speaking, farmers called the agriculture acts ‘a corporate feast in the garb of reform’ (All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements 2020b).

6 Conclusion

The exclusion of civil society actors from formal policymaking arenas did not mean that such engagement is powerless. This has led me to emphasise activists’ discursive, rather than decisional power. I analysed such a power by drawing from Fairclough’s (2003) and Del Felice’s (2014) concept of ‘discursive practices’ and their various dimensions understood as ‘ways of acting’ (spaces and textual genres), ‘ways of representing’ (the discourse about agricultural liberalisation), and ‘ways of being’ (how particular social entities are characterised and positioned in relation to other subjects through such narrative). The findings prompt me to make the following responses to my three hypotheses.

• Activists’ ‘ways of acting’ are confined to ‘outside spaces’ and informal textual genres. Accordingly, the discursive power of civil society actors is weak (H1). The findings show the difficulties that activists have to access ‘inside spaces’, through inclusion in consultation mechanisms, and that compel them to remain almost exclusively in ‘outside spaces’, such as parallel activities, protests and media work. Civil society actors are similarly denied access to formal documents – legal and other technical texts – and can only draw on informal textual genres, such as declarations, banners and press releases. • Activists’ ‘ways of representing’ are alternative discourses to the dominant narrative on agricultural liberalisation. Accordingly, the discursive power of civil society actors is strong (H2). Activists adopt a discourse in which agricultural

24 liberalisation appears as a threat to both food producers and consumers as it endangers India’s food security. This clearly constitutes an alternative to the dominant narrative on agricultural liberalisation ‘as an opportunity for food security’ (Clapp 2015). Activists advance frameworks that they consider as more appropriate in order to ensure food security than agricultural liberalisation: farmers from La Via Campesina promote ‘food sovereignty’, whereas members of the Right to Food Campaign refer to the ‘right to food’. Both alternatives coincide with ‘isolationist’ anti-capitalist activism, relying on ‘the re- empowerment of the nation-state’ and arguing for state control over food and public services (Said and Desai 2003, 68). Civil society actors are thus able to politicise food policymaking through their discourse. • Activists’ ‘ways of being’ are associated with claims for new roles for actors engaged in food policymaking arenas. Accordingly, the discursive power of civil society actors is strong (H3). Activists shape three social identities in their discourse: (1) civil society and farmers, (2) the government and (3) foreign countries and agribusiness. The analysis shows that activists assign important and new responsibilities to civil society and the government. Both actors are considered as excluded from or insufficiently included in food policymaking arenas, in which they should legitimately have a central role. Accordingly, activists ask foreign countries and agribusiness to give more room to civil society and India during food policymaking processes. A rebalancing of forces between participants in support of civil society and the state thus appears necessary for activists.

To sum up, the power of activists’ discourse is relatively weak in their ways of acting (H1), in contrast to their relatively strong ways of representing (H2) and of being (H3). Civil society actors continued to exercise discursive power in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. But their narrative did not ‘provide an opportunity … to reshape the global food system’ by means of initiatives such as community supported agriculture, which has grown in the Global North (Clapp and Moseley 2020, 1409). Although activists from India highlighted that farmers had ensured food supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, they did not go as far as La Via Campesina that called for ‘transform[ing] and build[ing]

25 a better society’ (2020a) through ‘genuine agrarian reform’ (2020c). Farmers instead asked for India’s subsistence agriculture to be preserved from liberalisation through the restoration of earlier food policies. This finding suggests that civil society mobilisations for food security, promoting alternative discourses such as food sovereignty and the right to food, can differ considerably between the Global North and Global South. If building a more resilient agricultural system appears necessary, preserving the livelihoods of India’s farmers, and more generally of communities in the Global South who are particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, is equally urgent.

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