How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation

13 July 2021
A farmer burns a pack of Jio SIM cards at a protest against the agricultural laws, at the Devi Dass Pura village, about 20 kilometeres from Amritsar, on 30 September 2020. Protestors believe that the laws could allow corporations such as Reliance to monopolise agriculture and retail, putting them at the mercy of big business.
RAMINDER PAL SINGH / EPA
A farmer burns a pack of Jio SIM cards at a protest against the agricultural laws, at the Devi Dass Pura village, about 20 kilometeres from Amritsar, on 30 September 2020. Protestors believe that the laws could allow corporations such as Reliance to monopolise agriculture and retail, putting them at the mercy of big business.
RAMINDER PAL SINGH / EPA

On 17 December 2020, a group of mostly Indian American protestors gathered outside Facebook’s headquarters in the United States. A pair of turban-clad men held up a banner telling the company to “STOP the suppression of freedom of speech.” Another protestor carried a poster exhorting passers to “honk for human rights.” Yet another waved a sign declaring, “We stand with farmers.” Three days later, demonstrators rallied outside Facebook’s Vancouver office, in Canada, with similar posters. “No Farmers No Food,” read several of the signs.

In recent years, protests in America against Facebook, one of the most controversial companies in the world, have become commonplace. But this was not a typical anti–Big Tech demonstration. The Indian Americans and Canadians gathered at the company’s gates were not there because of Facebook’s usual controversies—its surveillance of users or its role in spreading political misinformation. Instead, the immediate cause of their anger was that Facebook had suspended pages protesting the farm laws enacted in India, earlier in the year.

The new laws, hastily passed in September 2020, allowed farmers to sell outside government-regulated mandis, or markets, directly to corporate buyers. In theory, this change could help farmers by generating more competition for their products. But in practice, farmers and liberal economists believe that the laws, once fully implemented, will kill the mandi system altogether. Farmers will then have to sell directly to corporations. This, they warn, will not look like a utopia of competitive bidding. India’s biggest food companies have tremendous market power, which they could use to force farmers to accept even lower prices. This could push many independent farmers out of business. It’s a possibility that has driven more than two-and-a-half crore people around the world to strike, march, or otherwise demonstrate—making the movement, according to many observers, the largest protest in world history.

Daniel Block is an editor with Washington Monthly. He was formerly a Luce scholar working for The Caravan from 2017 to 2018.

Keywords: farm laws 2020 Facebook Reliance Jio Reliance Group agriculture Mukesh Ambani
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