The World Bank and the Language of Development : India's National Agricultural Innovation Project

A few examples from the Bank’s latest reports in India show how the language of development ignores the ground reality and make suffering sound like progress. The latest World Bank project in Indian Agriculture (of 203 projects going back to 1949) is called the National Agricultural Innovation Project. Its objectives are to

"contribute to the sustainable transformation of Indian agricultural sector from food self-sufficiency to one in which a market orientation is equally important for poverty alleviation and income generation. The specific objective is to accelerate the collaborative development and application of agricultural innovations between public research organizations, farmers, private sector and other stakeholders….The proposed project contributes to the Bank’s objectives, as expressed in the Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) 2004, to increase its lending in support of rural livelihoods and accelerating rural growth."

In a country where 49% of children are malnourished, a context where privatisation has been occurring in the sector for the past 40 years, and most tragically where farmers are committing suicide, what is the meaning of these objectives? Is a market orientation as equally important as food self-sufficiency? How exactly is the market important for poverty alleviation and income generation? The Bank’s key indicators of the success of this project will be

"the increased availability of knowledge products and public awareness messages of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS), increased collaboration with farmer, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and private sector organizations, increased availability and use of technologies that have been jointly developed between consortia partners in support of strengthened production to consumption systems and enhanced rural livelihoods, and a strengthened capacity for basic and strategic research"

This project is about increasing the existing privatization of agriculture by creating a knowledge network between the private sector, agriculture research institutes and a small number of NGOs to promote the use of corporate technologies such as genetically modified food. This project is neither about farmer livelihoods nor about food security.