Life of Western Cow Compared with that of the Third World Farmer:
Inequalities Abound

DEVINDER SHARMA / The Ecologist 22mar02

It is a strange world. It is also an unequal world, and perhaps the most debasing and demeaning of all this world’s inequalities is the manner in which even the cattle of the rich nations are pampered to the cost of several hundred million farmers in developing countries.

It certainly is a great cultural shock for any visitor from the rich and industrialised countries to see stray cattle on Indian roads. Outside India’s metropolitan cities you will invariably see a hard-working farmer toiling in his crop field with a mud-plastered house in the background. In addition to the smiling farmer, you are likely to see his wife – clad in a ghagra-choli, cutting the grass and tending the cows.

This is the Third World farmer, who on average owns not more than two acres of land and still continues to feed himself and his family of five, year after year. He lives under a thatched or a tin roof, and has never had the luxury of central heating or air-conditioning. In fact, a majority of these small farmers do not even have electric fans, have little or no sanitation facilities and have never received any government support in the form of subsidies.

Now consider the western farm. Amid sprawling crop fields, whether in the US, the European Union or Australia, you are likely to see a cattle farm. The cattle are well-fed and huge, with big dangling udders. Take a peep inside the cattle sheds, and you will see a well-designed concrete structure fitted with tube lights, fans and showers. At most places, especially in the US and the European Union, these barns are centrally heated. Computer chips worn around the cows’ necks enable feeding machines to meet the exact nutritional requirement of each animal. And on average each cow gets about 25 acres of land for its feed and nutritional needs – enough to enable 10 farming families from the Third World to earn their livelihood.

The inequality between the man and the beast doesn’t end here. For the amount of subsidies a cow in the developed world receives is almost twice the annual income of an average Third World farmer.

In the European Union, for instance, the annual support for an estimated 300 million dairy cattle in the year 2000 was to the tune of 2,735 million euros for milk and milk products and another 4,465 million euros for beef and veal. Much of the support is in the form of direct payment to farmers and falls within the purview of the WTO’s ‘green box’ and ‘blue box’ stipulations. These are the subsidies that have got to be reduced under the phase-out of market distorting support mechanisms. In the Third World, however, the WTO deems that all subsidies provided to farmers – the indirect as well as the direct – are considered to be market-distorting and must, therefore, be removed or drastically pruned.

In the dairy sector, the aggregate of subsidies as a percentage of the value of the milk produced is measured in terms of a Producer Subsidy Equivalent (PSE). In 1997, the PSE index stood at 82 per cent in Japan, 59 per cent in Canada, 54 per cent in the European Union, 47 per cent in the US and 23 per cent in Australia. Such has been the high level of protection provided to milk producers by the developed countries that even with the stipulated reduction in subsidies, the EU and the US will continue to flood and dump its highly subsidised milk and milk powder on the Third World.

In the meantime, while dairy subsidies continue on the upswing, the PSE index indicates that farmers in India and in most developing countries were negatively taxed all these years. For India, which alone has a quarter of the world’s farming population, the PSE index stood at minus 2.33 per cent in 1997. And in Colombia the figure was minus 60 per cent.

Still more shocking and shameful is the fact that while the world makes no effort to feed the estimated 800 million people – living almost entirely in the Third World – who go to bed hungry every night, no effort is spared to feed the cattle in the rich western countries. The system introduced in 1992 of direct payments to farmers in the European Union has led to an increase in the consumption of cereals in Europe from 134.8 million tonnes in 1993 to 178.2 million tonnes in 2000. This growth has largely resulted from the increased use of EU-produced cereals for animal feed. Even though the feeding of cereals to animals and those animals’ subsequent slaughter for human consumption requires six times more grains than would be needed for the world’s average human dietary intake, there is no regret.

The number of cattle that are reared in such conditions in the rich and industrialised countries (including the OECD countries – the world’s richest trading block) does not exceed 1.5 billion. Coincidentally, the number of small farmers who live in penury and are faced with further marginalisation does not exceed 1.5 billion either. The clash of civilisation, therefore, is too apparent, too loud and clear. Under such circumstances, to be amused at the abundance of stray cattle on Indian roads is a folly. When the conflict for suvival between western farmers and their Third World counterparts reaches such extremes, the latter’s cattle pay a price. It should be no wonder, then, that it is not unusual to find in India stray cattle battling for life with over 20 tonnes of polythene in their stomachs.

But then, with apologies and due respect to George Orwell, all animals are equal but some are more equal than even humans.

Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. Responses can be emailed to: dsharma@ndf.vsnl.net.in