Obituary of M. S. Swaminathan: The Proliferation of Death Industry

Posted on 17/02/2024 (GMT 09:05 hrs)

Corpse, Corporeal…

Hitler tried to start a business with the abandoned corpses collected from the concentration camps– the political economy of flesh turned into the fiscal auditing of deceased corporeal–a profitable business.

It was heard that Jean Luc Godard wanted to make a film on this very business of the “raw material”: the “breathless” human corporeal, which were said to be utilized in manufacturing different ostentatious commodities for the free market. Godard told that in the case of filmmaking, the dictum is: “Time is Money“. In the case of Hitler, the human corpse is a commodity: the money-signifier. Godard could not find a producer to make this violent (?) film.

However, there was another plan in the minds of the business tycoons. They utilized the residual waste created due to the Second World War for making Pesticides, Chemical Fertilizers etc., for the new brand of “Chemical Agriculture” or inorganic/”scientific” agriculture.

How Leftover Bombs From World War 2 Became ‘Fertilisers’ for Agricultural Use VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 4th May, 2021 ©Pure & Eco India)

Postwar Fertilizer Explodes VIEW HERE ⤡ (©Wessels Living History of Farms)

The Genome project is the biggest funded project after the Manhattan. The seeds are modified by deploying technical means to produce more and more for the embryo-eaters (embryo as an objectified or reified being): the “hungry generation” or solely for business gains. The venom of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, non-acclimatized lab-made seeds or otherwise embryo were uniformly manufactured in the lab without considering the planet’s heterogeneous climactic conditions. These “new foods” have also contributed in the proliferation of the drugs and pharma industry as well.

Thus, the violent organized science has turned the body of the embryo as a mere ‘being’ (a mere appendage, a reductive unit) by aborting the being-in-itself! Hence, the beings of seeds have no scope to be a being-for-itself…

Compare this consequences of metamorphosis of embryo with the movie, Monsieur Verdoux (1947, directed by Charles Chaplin), where the protagonist, an anti-hero, initiated a business of heterosexual relationships to make profits from the institution of marriage by killing his partners to grab their private property. Statistically speaking (Keeping in mind the state-statistics nexus), Monsieur Verdoux, in the trial room, stated a significant comment on the notion of “killing”, when he was brought into the court of law: “One murder makes a villain…millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good friend”.

At the time of trial, when Verdoux was asked whether he pleads guilty as a killer of his wives, he turned his head and looked behind him, where the jury was seated. He turned back his head to make a rhetorical point to signify: who is the actual murderer? Him, or the state machinery?

We are writing this piece at a time when the world of organized, institutionalized, funded science (hyphenated with technology) is mourning for a man, viz., M. S. Swaminathan, for his timely demise, whereby his “contributions” are being celebrated. However, the mission of Mr. Swaminathan has made us remember the last chapter of Foucault’s book: “History of Sexuality” (Vol. I), where he talked about the Malthusian (without mentioning his name) depopulation project of the (corporate-sponsored) state:

“The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.”

Quite in line with the post-Second World War planning to set up agricultural universities/institutes all around the world (the subjectification of farming, entailing the subjection as well as objectification of ‘nature’ the “free gift” as a means to the ends of capitalism) to encroach upon the traditional, indigenous means of farming with the aid of technocratic rationality, M. S. Swaminathan entered the stage as an “agronomist” in India and introduced High Yielding Varieties (HYVs), Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) as well as highly toxic chemical fertilizers, spurious gases and pesticides— all for conducing to the needs determined by the “market” as “natural law” (fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the hegemony of overproduction within the arena of speed capitalism. It was called, as we all know it, the “Green” revolution, which is in fact anti-green at its very core.

“In the 1970s, a scientific paper in which Swaminathan and his team “falsely” claimed to have produced a mutant breed of wheat by gamma irradiation of a Mexican mutant breed variety (Sonora 64) resulting in Sharbati Sonora, claimed to have a very high lysine content, led to a major controversy. The case was claimed to be an error made by the laboratory assistant. A commission was set up to scrutinize the issue The episode was also compounded by the suicide of an agricultural scientist. It has been studied as part of a systemic problem in Indian agriculture research.” (Source: Wikipedia⤡).

Moreover,

“In October 1975 Dr. Silow stated that he had repeatedly warned the FAO Administration that Dr. M. S. Swaminathan, a leading adviser to FAO and the U.N. System in Food Science and Agricultural Development, was presenting to the UN System data and claims widely known to be false leading to the wastage of much manpower and money intended by member governments for economic development. Dr. Silow also claimed that though it was said within the FAO that Swaminathan had cleared himself, recent evidence showed that Swaminathan’s misleading of his Government and the FAO culminated in the falsity of his defence in August 1973 against the criticisms levelled against him by the Official Committee in India that enquired into the suicide in May 1972 of Dr. Vinod H. Shah, one of Swaminathan’s scientific staff, in protest against the irregularities in science at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi where Swaminathan was Director. Swaminathan had claimed that he had bred a new variety of wheat with 15©25% more protein and 148% more lysine in that increased protein than in its parental variety.” (Source: RONALD ALFRED SILOW COLLECTION 1908-1990⤡)

This sounded the death knell to all the existing modes of traditional farming (parampara cas or age-old empirically verified traditional farming! often wrongly translated as “organic/alternative/scientific” farming by the Green Capitalist lobbies, who have introduced environmental, social and governance or ESG fund within the chaosophic stock market economy) in harmony with nature’s processes, including the preservation of a wide varieties of seeds, which was done away with by a stipulated, market-oriented monoculture that is in contradiction with nature’s own diversified method of working.

Dr. Richharia, a noted agriculturalist, worked all his life to collect 19,000 indigenous varieties of rice in Madhya Pradesh, India alone, but was later targeted by the crony Government!

Dr. Richharia’s Story – Crushed, But Not Defeated VIEW HERE ⤡

Without going by this variety, a handful of high-yielding rice varieties, Taichung, IR-8, Ratna Swarna etc. were dumped into the Indian market, which were completely unsuitable to the diversified Indian climactic conditions, and were prone to fungal diseases and pests. Their extended use in every field annihilated the ecological niches once occupied by the indigenous varieties of rice-seeds. This type of agro-business led to the extinction of all these nature-produced seed varieties, which are at least 50,000 (as enumerated by Ratan Lal Brahmachary, personal correspondence) in India alone. (Source: Alvares, Claude. “Science, Colonialism and Violence: A Luddite View”, in Science, Hegemony and Violence, 1988, Ed. Nandy, Ashis).

By means of different institutional scholarships, such as the Fulbright offered by the USA-based mercantile organizations as well as the Ford Foundation (CIA-controlled academic institute), the big MNCs of chemical agriculture first got hold of the seed varieties from the South-East Asia and then they poured it into the Latourian laboratory state in loci such as the Malaysian Nature Society (“MNS”) Seed Bank Project. While completely ignoring the GI (geographical index), all these varieties have become packaged commodities, which are to be sold in the market of those indigenous farmers. Moreover, genetically engineered seeds that are so-called “super-resistant” to all weeds have led to the rise of super-weeds. (Cf. Rosen, B. 1985. Western Economists and Eastern Societies: Agents of Change in South Asia, 1950-70. The John Hopkins University Press. & Wise D. & Ross T. B. 1964. The Invisible Government. Random House)

The agri-business companies like Monsanto dominates this affair. In addition to that, such big businesses are making profits from “legal” copyright acts (as conceived in the Dunkel draft): when, due to pollination, the branded, patented seeds are transported off or carried over to another non-branded seed field, Monsanto files a legal complaint against the tiller of the latter land. It is to be noted that Monsanto is profiting not only by selling copyrighted seeds, but also are over-profiting from the phenomena of “flying seeds”.

Swaminathan’s project meant long-term infertility of soil (turning the soil into unyielding cement), destruction of symbiotic weeds/pests that aid the growth process of plants in conjunction with other ecosystems, non-adaptable/un-acclimatized plants artificially placed that cannot effectively interact with the surrounding environment and so on. The pest-control mechanisms used in such chemicalized agriculture seep into the constituting cells of the plants, making all its way up to the food chain to reach all the living organisms, including humans.

This causes the robbery of the soil by preventing the soil a return to its constituent nutrients, which results into the metabolic rift, a sort of divorcing alienation, amidst humans and nature, as well as between humans themselves. All relations are jeopardized, paving way to the profits of big business alone, at the cost of the life of the soil, the lives of the farmers, the lives of all humans and non-humans as components of nature!

This created our pesticide generation as well as nuclear radioactive generation: those who are suffering from different diseases related to kidney failure (note the proliferation of Kidney Dialysis Centres in the past decades, which was unprecedented before the Green Revolution) and rising rates of different types of cancer. We now have transformed our bodies into the contaminated, docile corporeal, heartiest thanks to the “greats” like Swaminathan!

One might have heard about the “Cancer Train” of India, the nomenclature being the result of slow poisoning of pesticides etc., soon after the consolidation of “Green” revolution aims. The train was used by ailing cancer patients from Punjab to Bikaner for getting treatment at the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Prince Bijay Singh Memorial Hospital:

The shocking tale of India’s ‘Cancer Train’ VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 10th June, 2016 ©Business Insider)

Concomitantly, the pharma-business: the nemesis of Medical Science, has proliferated following the infamous Summers’ Memo, where the crises is deliberately manufactured first in order to “sell” the remedy-as-commodity for profits:

LET THEM EAT POLLUTION VIEW HERE ⤡

Thus, Swaminathan can only be deemed as a villain, not as a Bharat Ratna deserving laurels of praise in his name.

One interesting event that deserves consideration (that was hinted at before) at this point is given as follows:

“…data falsification committed by geneticist, agricultural scientist, and key figure in India’s green revolution, Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan. Since October 1967, his research group at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, had consistently made false claims about a new strain of dwarf wheat, Sharbati Sonora. American and Mexican scientists refuted their claims in 1968 and 1970, but Swaminathan’s group reiterated them in a 1971 publication. Soon thereafter, Swaminathan was appointed director-general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the entire episode was buried.

But in May 1972 India’s Parliament witnessed a tumultuous discussion over reports about the suicide of an IARI agronomist, Vinod H. Shah, who complained about ICAR promotion policies in his suicide note. The note further pointed to “unscientific data” and “exaggerated claims” put forth by the ICAR, including the case of the Sharbati Sonora wheat strain. The government’s response was to appoint an official inquiry committee whose final report concluded that the claims made regarding Sharbati Sonora were not substantiated; Swaminathan and his group had generated “unscientific data” and made “exaggerated claims.” While Shah’s protest by suicide, as Nature termed it, thereby brought the IARI case to public attention, Swaminathan’s influence succeeded in relegating it to a minor affair.”

SOURCE: Historicizing the crisis of scientific misconduct in Indian science VIEW HERE ⤡

Dr Vinod Shah’s Protest by Suicide VIEW HERE ⤡

To meet up the costs for the MNC-produced HYVs, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, GMOs and other agricultural implements of “industrial farming” (forgetting ecological entitlements)— the farmers are compelled to take huge loans with high rates of interest from rural moneylenders as well as from the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD). Following meteorological factors (which have increased seasonal discrepancies due to anthropogenic glocal heating), if the loan is not paid in time, the burden causes the farmers to choose the path of the noose.

One farmer/farm labourer dies by suicide every hour in India: NCRB data VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 4th December, 2023 ©DownToEarth)

Average 30 Farmer Suicides Per Day in Modi Govt Years Points to a Systemic Apathy VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 18th December, 2023 ©The Wire)

This has obviously led to a plethora of farmers’ protests, agitations and collective uprisings against the Government of India in various parts of the country, especially in Punjab, in the past few years. (The sequel of this article will be on the contemporary farmers’ movements)

Let us thus sale-brate Swaminathan’s death!

We are deeply mourning for our farmers—- the dead bodies!

POLYCULTURE: DEFEATING THE MODERN LAB STATE VIEWHERE ⤡

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