India knows how to avoid collapse

India is a country that is set to face huge social tensions.

Not only will Climate Change make life more precarious for the

poor, but the suggested solutions to climate change will de-

stabilise them yet further. However, India also contains the

seeds to a solution to this, especially amongst its activist

struggles.

Jared Diamond’s book Collapse is a chilling read, considering

how closely its account of the implosion of civilisations past

also traces out the arc of our current global predicament (Dia-

mond, 2005). He teases out the implications of population and

consumption growing exponentially: It means that consumption

hits natural resource limits at a very great speed, and that the

moments before that collision are a huge party for those at the

top, since consumption is at its absolute peak. This leads to a

situation where the rich are living such a high-life that it is

near impossible for them to imagine the plight of the poor, who

are the first people to be hamstrung by the dwindling of re-

sources. This gap is what disables the early warning systems of

failing societies, and it is precisely this gap that we see

opening up around climate change. Right here, right now, in In-

dia, but also even more so globally, this fatal gap in under-

standing between rich and poor is stark and growing.

No issue exemplifies this gap and the dangers it represents

better than climate change. The Darfur Crisis was called a taste

of things to come with climate change (Moon, 2006) occurring in

one of the most population dense parts of the world, in the face

of a shifting climatic regime. However commentators on the area

pointed out that at the same time as food became scarce in Dar-

fur due to the shifting climate regime, the value of land rose,

especially as it was already being bought up by capital inten-

sive schemes from the World Bank and IMF to reform agriculture.

Effectively what kicked off the civil war in the area was Urban

Elites coming in and speculatively buying up the land that had

started rising in value, and thus increasing its value further

in a positive feedback, a kind of Gold-rush (Polgreen, 2007). It

was this gap, between speculation and subsistence, that was the

spark that set the area on fire.

This is a problem not just for Darfur but for the world at

large, and no-where illustrates this better than India. By dint

of its huge population and very high levels of land pressure

(see figure 1), like Darfur, Asia is highly vulnerable to cli-

mate change. Asia lacks huge areas of free land for people to
 Figure 1: World map with area adjusted by population.

move into, and it is also nuclear-armed (China, India, Paki-

stan and so on). So in security terms, the whole world needs so-

Figure 2: World Map with area adjusted by Nuclear Weapons holdings.

cial solutions under climate change that will create stability

in densely populated areas. This applies to Asia as a whole but

especially to India which holds the most poor people of any

country on earth (some 30% of all people below a dollar a day).

You can see this gap between subsistence and speculation

opening up in India right now. India is to date in receipt of

over 2 Billion USD of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding,

which is designed to let developed countries emit by paying de-

veloping countries for making cuts. The CDM funds are going to

the industrial interests already involved in marginalising local

people, as well as corrupting local politics. By this mechanism,

India as the second largest receiver of CDM funds is already

leading the way in practicing mitigation as a way of displacing

people.

Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, in their upcoming book on

Aluminium Mining in Orissa, will explain the enormous resource

and energy intensity of the Minerals industry, to the extent

that ore refineries often have Coal-powered plants attached to

them. Yet these industries, that also displace huge numbers of

people and divert huge areas of Forest lands, are also to be

subsidised in the name of Clean Development. The processes of

displacement by Mining are accelerating fast: More than twice as

many diversions of Forest for mining were granted from 1997-2007

than for the previous ten years (Nayak, 2008). So again India is

forging ahead in the displacement sector.

I would like to look at a case in depth to tease out how the

economics of resource shortage drive these issues. Since Felix

and Samarendra have covered the Gold Rush that is chasing dwin-

dling minerals, let’s instead look at the links between Oil

prices, demand for bio-fuels and food prices. The food price

spike in 2008 was attributed by the World Bank as being 75% down

to the growth in bio-fuels1. Cultivable land, instead of produc-

ing stuff to feed humans, was turned over to feed energy mar-

kets. Food markets are dominated by the poor, in terms of sheer

weight of numbers, although their pitifully low purchasing power

confounds that to a great extent. This is what lets countries

export food even as people starve.

Energy markets are by stark contrast utterly dominated by the

rich, since energy consumption and income track each other very

closely (Strahan, 2007). When energy markets become tight, for

instance in 2008 when demand for oil out stripped supply, it is

very easy for purchasing power to cascade, through linkages like

bio-fuels, into food markets and so hit the poor very hard. In

other words the scarcity of oil leads to a rise in the cost of

1 Jenn Baka, who works on Bio-fuels at Yale, is skeptical of the 75% figure “ I don't agree with Mitchell's
assessment as it lacks rigour -- he arrives at 75% basically by subtracting from 100 what he thinks is the
significance of other impacts such as the Australian drought.” However, somewhere between 30% to 75%
of the rise is likely to be down to bio-fuels, which is more than enough to cause a crisis.
energy, and this is passed on into a rise in the cost of food.

Does this sound like Collapse?

In 2008 the oil price went to $100 dollars a barrel. Even the

International Energy Agency now admits that it is just a ques-

tion of when conventional oil production peaks and they say 2020

(Macalister and Monbiot, 2008). Then the price could go as high

as $300 a barrel (Strahan, 2007). Just imagine the impact on

food prices. A chilling footnote to this discussion is that in

February 2009, just before predictions regarding this summer’s

drought were first taking shape, a US-India deal was brokered to

increase bio-fuel production (Taragana, 2009). Coming up is the

budget for carbon offset in the new US Climate Bill, which is

talking of figures of 2 Billion tonnes of Carbon offset per

year, three times the size of any previous national carbon trad-

ing proposal. To put this in context only 7.5 million tonnes of

Forest Carbon were traded in 2007, so we are talking orders of

magnitude of potential growth in this trade, that is orders of

magnitude of pressure on forest land (Baka, 2009 personal commu-

nication).

Behind each of these stories there was a dwindling resource

(carbon air-space or minerals), and then a move by the rich to

corner that resource, often by enclosing what was formerly a

commons, and carving it up amongst themselves and trading it. It

is a sobering fact of life that as a resource becomes scarce its

value increases. It follows that as something becomes expensive,

then those with money tend to circle in. As we can see happen-

ing, Climate Change is already turning into a politics of land

control, and toxic financial products like the Clean Development

Mechanism are already starting processes of displacement.

When you consider that natural resource consumption is grow-

ing exponentially across the board, it becomes clear resource

shortage, around minerals, around carbon commons with CDM, in-

creasingly around fresh water (Barlow and Clarke, 2002) and also

around oil (David, 2007), will be followed up by gold-rush after

gold-rush of purchasing power seeking out quick and lucrative

fixes to the problems of over-consumption. With bio-fuels, this

is exactly what is being seen all over the world, from Madagas-

car, where a deal to grow Palm Oil as a bio-fuel precipitated a

coup, to Sudan where South Korean companies have bought up

690,000 Hectares of land (Vallely, 2009).

Financialisation is clearly not such a solution.

So why is it so popular as an approach? It is remarkable to

see how policy-makers really start to take an issue on board.

The Stern Report marked a sea-change in climate debates, bring-

ing the economics of it into public focus2. Crudely put, instead

of considering how many people climate change might kill, some-

one came up with figures about how much it would cost. This

seems deeply sick (Monbiot, 2008 - and at a collective level it

is) but it is understandable when you look at how people get

things done in big organisations. These organisations see the

world and act on it through budgets and statistics, this is the

language of action in a policy context (Hacking, 1983). Under-

standable though this is, it makes it no less dangerous. The

biggest impacts of climate change will be in the non-cash econ-

omy, amongst those whose environmental problems are already

under-recorded through state pollution control boards, or state

below poverty line registers.

These marginal groups are the humans who most often rely on

the commons that are being enclosed, such as forests and “waste-

land”. However being drawn into the cash economy will only ex-

pose them further to the economic forces likely to be their un-

doing under conditions of scarcity. They simply cannot secure

access to a livelihood by cash-means when in competition with

rich world purchasing power for a dwindling resource base. So

the language of large institutions leads to financialised ap-

2 Within the dismal science Stern put a fire under the climate-costing debates by rallying against the
“Jam-now-pay-later” school. He did this by using a 0% discount rate on the future, taking responsibility in
this way being somewhat radical amongst the Professors of prudence. Thanks to Jenn Baka for flagging
this.
proaches to climate change which heighten the crisis for those

actually facing shortage in a life-threatening sense. This is

Jared Diamond’s gap written across the face of the earth.

It is possible to protect livelihoods by non-market means,

but to do so you need to secure non-tradable access to those

livelihoods, preferably with a certain amount of local demo-

cratic control in terms of how that access is managed. Amartya

Sen and Jean Dreze put forward the useful idea of “entitlements”

to help economists to understand famines (Drèze and Sen, 1989).

In their analysis it carries two burdens. One is to point out

that people obtain things from outside the cash economy. The

second is to show how famine can be driven by a collapse in pur-

chasing power, and not necessarily directly by food shortage.

This helps to explain, for instance how their can be famines in

times of increased food production, where there is a collapse in

both direct entitlements to food (from the environment, without

a cash nexus) in a certain area, alongside a collapse in pur-

chasing power to bring food in, via economic entitlements, from

the high production areas, as happened in the Bengal Famine.

This also explains how India can export food even as people

starve (Patnaik, 2007)3 .

Climate change is likely to create a crisis both of direct

entitlements to food from the environment, due to unpredictable

weather and displacement by sea-level rise, but also a crisis of

purchasing power, with the Gold Rushes described above likely to

be a major factor in that. So what you need in order to deal

with this combination is some kind of protected non-tradable en-

titlement that is immune to these gold rushes and that gives

some buffer against climatic unpredictability.

One possible way forward is “targeted benefits” like the

NREGA scheme, coming from central government. But this makes lo-

cal communities dependent on political will at the center. How

long will such political will last when chemical agricultural

inputs and petrol become very expensive, when food price infla-

tion sets in? At what level of financial pressure does the Gov-

ernment cave in and leave the poor to their fate? There were

suggestion in 2008 that the relatively small food price rise

then was placing financial strain on the government, and this

with oil at $100 a barrel, what of $300?

3 It is important to note that this mechanism can also occur where purchasing power chasing a given re-
source increases, thus driving up prices, bringing about an effective collapse of a local cash-entitlement
without necessarily seeing a decrease in local purchasing-power, at least as expressed in cash terms.
 There is an alternative approach to social security that has

emerged in another area, that of Forests. Forests have also be-

come caught up in the process of trying to trade for space in

the Carbon Cycle. Forests are to be brought into the CDM regime

via a scheme called reductions in emissions from deforestation

and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD)(UN, 2008).

The move towards this process has caused a great stir amongst

Indian policy makers, who have latched on to the statistic that

India’s Forests absorb 11% of India’s emissions, a major bar-

gaining chip for them in the Global Carbon Countdown. Judging by

CDM, and the expensive procedures involved in verifying Carbon

Credits, these schemes look highly unlikely to involve local

communities and much more likely to displace them. However,

there is little need for speculation on this point, by a happy

coincidence India already has a mechanism for trading Forest

that looks remarkable similar to the Trees-as-Carbon-Credits ap-

proach of REDD.

In an attempt to enforce the Forest Conservation Act of 1980,

to limit State Government diversion of Forest lands, the Supreme

Court case known as Godarvarmen mutated into the ongoing Manda-

mus of “The Forest Case” over-seeing all clearances for diver-

sion of Forest (Dutta and Yadav, 2007). Ironically, and perhaps

unsurprisingly, this centralised clearance process had begun to

resemble the “Single Window Clearance” process desired by the

World Bank and other business lobbies to simplify investment ac-

cess to natural resources (Gopalakrishnan, 2008). This political

process took an even more unusual turn when the Supreme Court

decided that in order to protect Forest Land from diversion it

should effectively be put up for sale. The scheme was to force

parties diverting Forest land to pay both the Net Present Value

of the land, supposedly calculated to reflect market rates, and

also to pay a compulsory afforestation fee (CAMPA), which repre-

sented the cost of reforesting twice the area of the land to be

cleared. Admittedly these measures were to prevent State Govern-

ments diverting land to their-friends-in-business on the cheap,

but they morphed into a mechanism where powerful parties could

buy their way into Forest land. Any observer of Indian politics

would not find it hard to answer the following question: Where

is Carbon best stored, as a tree in the ground or as money in a

political pocket?

Despite Condemnation from the Parliamentary Standing com-

mitee, central agencies have kept hold of the funds from CAMPA,

allocating only 1000 out of 11,000 crores of the fund to plant-

ing trees, and none of it to supporting local governance of

natural resources, contrary to the Standing Committee’s recom-

mendations (CSD). It is precisely this fund that is being touted

as India’s new 2.5B USD afforestation program in the run-up to

Copenhagen (Mohuiddin, 2009). Clearly this is not a scheme that

will lead to local empowerment of communities, to more social

security, to adaptation, and judging by the way the funds have

gone so far, it is unlikely to help mitigation either. What it

is likely to do is further open the door of a single window

clearance model for forest diversion based on the principle of

who pays wins. In other words yet another Gold-rush that will

undermine livelihoods.

This amounts to a very potent recipe for Collapse. Consider

that the request from the developed world towards countries like

India is that they re-jig their entire energy infrastructure

away from cheap and dirty solutions like coal. India is a coun-

try with a severe social unrest problem, as the current problems

in Chattisgargh illustrate. This has been worsened by the pres-

sures of liberalisation upon the poor, which have reduced per

capita calorie intake as well as increased indebtedness and

farmer suicide rates (Patnaik, 2007). A financialised approach

to climate change, far from helping the vulnerable 40% who de-

pend on the rains for their food (Briscoe and Malik, 2007), is

likely to further displace them from their livelihoods. It seems

clear that in order to have the resources and social stability

required to re-jig your energy system, you cannot be engaged in

a war with your own people. Bear in mind that India is lining up

for an offensive on Maoists in its central Forest Belt, in an

operation called, with the upmost in unintentional irony, “Green

Hunt”. This is in order to secure those areas for investment

(Democracy Now, 2009). In other words something has to give.

What is it that can provide a buffer to rich-world purchasing

power in the face of dwindling resources? The earlier discussion

of the Food Crisis shows that centralised schemes like NREGA are

not necessarily to be relied upon. Apart from it being unclear

if the government can afford them, they also have a tendency to

descend into corruption and to bring about patron client rela-

tions between the givers and receivers of assistance.

This is very much the view of groups like the Deccan Develop-

ment Society, working with food security, or rather as they put

it Food Sovereignty. The contention is that climate instability

can be met by traditional crops such as Millets, which can grow

under dry conditions. However Millet cultivation is looked down

on as backward and not at all lucrative, and so can only take

place where communities have control of their own land and some

sort of autonomy from local political and economic processes. It

is a picture that every activist here will recognise - any rela-

tion with a government or business body tends to turn exploita-

tive, based on political and economic purchasing power. This is

a situation already being worsened in the emerging natural re-

source Gold rushes. So the answer is local autonomy over natural

resources, a return of control over the commons as Anna Pinto

puts it (Pinto, 2009).

This is pretty much exactly what the Forest Rights Act (FRA)4

attempts to put in place. It is such measures, that secure live-

lihoods regardless of the flows of purchasing power. This ap-

proach is already being discussed in the context of extending it

within India towards fisher communities, partly via the context

of Mangroves, with the notion of “Sea-Tribal” being mobilised to

describe the traditional and direct relationship with nature of

those communities (Sridhar and Shanker, 2007).

The Marine example illustrates the crux of the issue: The

lack of natural boundaries at sea makes a co-existence regime

with nature much more self-evident than the land-based human ex-

clusion models that have dominated wildlife and forest law to

date. That fisher communities also tend to be autonomous and in-

ternally democratic also speaks to the provisions in the FRA for

Community Forest Resources, where collective control and polic-

ing of natural resources locally becomes the basis of Forest

4 The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill 2006
Governance in inhabited areas. It is this innovation, of de-

centralised local natural resource governance overseeing the al-

location and maintenance of both Forests and rights to them,

which forms the kernel of the political project behind the act.

This is a response to the historical injustices of Adivasi dis-

possession which went on under existing closed and bureaucratic

systems of rights allocation (Bijoy, 2008).

There are ongoing debates raging about how successful such

de-centralisation of control is likely to be, from the failures

of meaningful participation under JFM to anxieties about lack of

local environmental knowledge (Ghost, 2009). However, none of

this explains away the need for a local democratising project in

relation to natural resources to provide the autonomy required

for resilience in the face of climate and financial instability.

With resource pressures mounting across the board, and the

need for a stable transition to low-carbon economies becoming

ever more pressing, these kinds of approaches need to be broad-

ened to become an inclusive safety net for the poor in the face

of a rapidly changing world. The bottom line is that there are

emerging models for local democratic non-financialised control

of natural resources out there for all crucial livelihood areas,

and there is an existing model in law (the FRA) showing how to

start creating a legal framework for this, one based around lo-
cal autonomy and democratic governance of natural resources.

This is an approach that could be applied to things like the

right to water (Grönwall, 2008) and the right to food (Saxena et

al., 2008), as well as to agricultural development. This is an

area that is ripe for further study and policy work, to move In-

dia further towards an integrated regime of democratic natural

resource management. What India really needs to move in this di-

rection is the political will to make it so. This may be born of

the understanding that there is nowhere else to go, but it is

also only really likely to happen via political pressure. In

bringing this about, India, and by this I mean activist India,

could lead the world.

N.B. My ethnographic work and wider analysis will be looking

at the possibilities for implementing such an act, via an in-

depth ethnography of one such implementation struggle, and the

implications of this within this wider debate, through my ongo-

ing engagement with the activist struggles dealing with these

issues. I wish to turn this work into a book, but one dealing

with these wider issues, and using the ethnographic work to sup-

port the argument.

 Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jenn Baka for her comments on this piece. Of

course the errors are mine.

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