The Age of Inequality

After asking for a moment of silence to acknowledge the recent tragedy in Mumbai, Palagummi Sainath began his lecture by explaining the meaning of pictures that played in a slideshow before he spoke. “They are portraits of farmers who have committed suicide and the families they have left behind.”

The number of audience members far exceeded the number of seats in room 200C of the Geography Building, but those without a seat were content to line the walls or sit on stairways to listen to Sainath speak about the farm and food crisis facing India and the role the media played throughout the turmoil.

Sainath, 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, spoke at the event sponsored by the Geography Department. He has chosen to focus his work on the economically underprivileged of India and had a simple explanation for the resilience of the general population of Mumbai after last week’s terrorist attacks. “For 65% of the population, if you don’t go to work that day, you don’t eat.” That startling statistic, he explained, shows the growing distance between the rich and poor of India.

While the country has the fourth highest number of billionaires according to Forbes magazine, a United Nations survey ranks India at 128th in human development. In fact, India has set the poverty line at 24 cents a day. 200 million Indians no longer seek medical attention of any kind because they cannot afford it. It seems that as the number of billionaires grew, the quality of life for the majority of citizens declined. “There is astonishing disparity,” Sainath explained. “53 people, those Forbes billionaires, make up 31% of India’s GDP.”

Sainath believes that modern governments choose to intervene on behalf of the rich and the elite, citing the Wall Street bailout as evidence of such. “There has been an unprecedented rise of corporate power, and they wield incredible influence.” Using California’s 11 billion dollar deficit as an example, he predicts there will be cuts in social welfare and education among other things. “All across the world there is a transfer of resources from poor to rich, it just happens in different ways.”

Because of the world food price crisis, even middle classes families had to start worrying about food prices for the first time, according to Sainath. He attributes the price increases to corporations overtaking the agricultural industry not only in India but also across the world. He explains this is because corporations have taken control of pesticide and seed sales, and over the past few years companies have increased the price of such goods by as much as 700%.

These price increases have made it very difficult for farmers to make any profit. In the past, the vast majority of Indians made their living off agriculture and food crops. But between 1991 and 2006, 8 million people quit farming. Those who continue farming are incredibly impoverished and often times can’t even get a small crop loan from the bank.

According to Sainath, every 30 minutes another farmer in India commits suicide. In fact, over 166,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1991. “Most of the suicide households are neck-deep in debt and the farmer sees no other way out,” Sainath explained.

“But has the media shown much interest in this?” Sainath asked. He believes they did not. Sainath lamented the media’s lack of interest in such troubling issues and cited them as being part of the problem. “The media has been a part of that incredible rise of corporate power. Where we should have told stories, instead we sold products.”