• by IPS Correspondents (london)
• Saturday, December 24, 1994
• Inter Press Service

LONDON, Dic 24 (IPS) - A nine million dollar agricultural scheme designed to boost the grain harvests of Tibetan farmers and raise their standards of living, may have the reverse effect by turning independent farmers into landless labourers, say Tibet observers.

The European Union (EU) project will threaten the centuries-old tradition of barter trading and create dependency on cash crops, fertilisers and expensive machinery, says the London-based monitoring service, the Tibet Information Network.

According to observers here, the project will cause a rapid shift from a subsistence economy to a cash-driven market economy in the Panam County, 124-miles south-west of the capital, Lhasa, resulting in the farmers falling prey to price shifts and inflation pressures in mainland China.

They will become dependent on cash to pay for farm provisions and "as one of the lowest income groups, they will be enormously vulnerable to debt", says the Network's Robert Barnett.

"Once trapped in debt, they will be forced to sell their land rights to Chinese-controlled local authorities, who tend to distribute them as 10-year leases to ethnic Chinese," he added.

Although the farmers' land is common land, the usage rights have been handed down from generation to generation. "They may not be formalised on paper, but they are regarded as ancestral," points out Tim Nunn, general secretary of the Tibet Support Group (UK).

He and other observers are of the opinion that the Panam County Integrated Rural Development Project is really part of Beijing's attempt to colonise the area.

Both point out it is quite possible that Tibetan farmers who at present own an independent small holding, once hit by debt, could end up as labourers on Chinese farms. Alternatively, many could leave the land altogether and swell the migration to towns where they would eke out a miserable existence on the margins of society.

China has been struggling to crush Tibetan opposition to its rule since it annexed the remote Himalayan region in 1950, claiming it to be an indivisible part of its territory.

About six million Chinese have moved into Tibet in an attempt to change the demographic structure of the region, according to the government-in-exile, based in India.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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