Impact of Neoliberal Economics on Natural Resource Management

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Capitalism : the free

lunch?• Nature is the mother and labour is

the father of all commodities

• Capital /vs/ labour • Capital /vs/ nature(“the free gift”)

• Capital has vampire-like relation to

nature- i.e., a kind of living deathmaintained by sucking the bloodfrom the world



The limit to capital is

the capital itself • Climate Change

• Global economic crisis and

Austerity (TAXING THE POORTO RESCUE THE RICH)

• Energy Crisis

• Food Crisis

• Rolling Rebellions



World History in a

nutshell• Old style Colonialism• Capitalism – Imperialism• WW 1-Great Depression(1930)-WW 2• Post-war boom and neo-colonialism• 1970 onwards-general stagnation• Thatcherism-Reagonomics

• Word Bank-IMF-WTO• Structural Adjustment• “Disaster Capitalism” -Naomi Klein



Neoliberal Economics inIndia: First Generation

reforms• IMF Memorandom on India-1989

• WB Report on India

• Manmohan Singh• PC Chidambram-GATT-WTO

• Structural Adjustment

• Foreign-Friendly approach• Export-led growth

• Privatisation-disinvestment



Second generation

Reforms• >600 SEZs

• Mining

• MOUs• Real estates

• India a huge market?

• Biggest land grab since the days of Columbus

• Jobless growth



“Financial capital is hungry for investmentsand returns on investments. It mustcommodify everything on the planet - land

and water, plants and genes, microbes andmammals. The commodification of land isfuelling the corporate land grab in India,both through the creation of SpecialEconomic Zones and through foreign direct

investment in real estate.“

Vandana Shiva



How to get land?

• Forests-tribals-minerals

• Forest Conservation Act- a hurdle?

• Forest Rights Act- the facts andfantasies

• Land acquisition Act

• What is the problem? Left WingExtremism of the maoists or RightWing Extremist Policies?



“Colonisation was based on the violenttakeover of land. And now, globalisation asrecolonisation is leading to a massive land

grab in India, in Africa, in Latin America.Land is being grabbed for speculativeinvestment, for speculative urban sprawl,for mines and factories, for highways andexpressways. Land is being grabbed from

farmers after trapping them in debt andpushing them to suicide.“

Jan Myrdal , 12 June, London



The Conflict?

• The conflict is rooted in resource grabbingby corporate capital, in the form of largeprojects, SEZs, mining, etc.

• Such resource grabbing leads people totake up arms to defend themselves,resulting in the ongoing conflict.

• The conflict thus consists of a state driveto grab people's homes and resources,with people resisting by taking to arms asself-defence.



The War

• why are forest areas the mainbattleground in this war? While theconflict is not coterminous with the

forests - most of India's forest areasare not part of this war, and theconflict extends outside the forestareas in some regions - forests areboth politically and geographically at

its heart.• Salwa Judum?• Operation Green Hunt?



“What are we to make of the fact that just around thetime Prime Minister Singh began to call the Maoiststhe “single largest internal security threat” (asignal that the government was getting ready to go

after them), the share prices of many of the miningcompanies in the region skyrocketed ?The mining companies desperately need this war.

They will strike it rich, very rich, if the Indiangovernment’s counterinsurgency operationssuccessfully evict the tribal people who have so far managed to resist the attempts to drive them from

their ancestral lands.”

To justify a land grab, Delhi has a new enemy : the Maoists.

par Arundhati Roy

(27 janvier 2010)



“Neo-robber baron capitalism is based on the exploitation --appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others -- of human beings, the pillage of nature and theexpropriation of social property by any and all availablemeans, these in the context of a close nexus between

business and politics. As a specific form of monopolycapitalism, business strategy/tactics of the larger enterprises in the more monopolistically structuredsectors focus ever more on ways and means of 'snatching' the surplus from relatively smaller enterprisesin the more competitive sectors (the latter will beprotected in a 'new democratic' regime). “

Spring Thunder Anewby Bernard D'Mello

Impact of Neoliberal Economics on Natural Resource Management

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