Friday, December 30, 2011

It’s a man’s world!

If the sex selective abortions were to continue, it will indeed be a man’s world in the next two decades. With 121 boys for 100 girls in China and corresponding 112 in India, the number of missing females from the region’s population would soon be a staggering 200 million. It will be an evolutionary chaos where millions of men would be unable to find local wives.

In many parts of the country bride search has indeed become frenetic, providing short-term relief from social ills like dowry. But ‘missing girls’ syndrome is more than temporary, stretching across areas like evolution, gender relations and geopolitics. ‘The implications of ‘surplus males’ have yet to fully fathomed,’ argues writer Maria Hvistendahl.

Unnatural Selection is a work of investigative writing; revealing and engaging. The population hysteria through the 1960s and 70’s had led agencies like the World Bank, the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation to funnel grants into population control efforts – no less than a conspiracy that sex determination was promoted as an effective method of population control in the process.

It is however another matter that since then sex determination has popped up as a multibillion-dollar industry. In market-driven globalization gender selection has become a commodity for purchase - if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Through emerging techniques like pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, parents can literally design ‘babies’ with choicest features.

Maria Hvistendahl raises questions on this disturbing trend of prioritizing the needs of one generation over other. A woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy, she contends, but should not have the right to shape the individual represented by that pregnancy to her own whims. Surplus males can trigger a period of violence and instability.

Unnatural Selection is a must read book, a classical work on non-fiction story telling format on a subject that is not only compelling but should be morally binding as well....Link

Unnatural Selection
by Maria Hvistendahl
Public Affairs, USA
314 pages, US$ 27

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Retail Therapy

Current debate on foreign direct investment in ‘big retail’ is driven by a conviction that large chain retailers boost employment and expand the economy. In growing economies like India, big retail is further tagged to lowering of inflation alongside remunerative prices for farmers by elimination of middlemen. It is one political stone that kills many dissenting birds.

The reality is far in contrast to the tunnel view that politicians and planners hold dear. Multi-brand retailers like Wal-Mart squeeze profit out of local communities and load them with numerous hidden societal costs. It is a colonization of the kind that impinges on local self-reliance and dispersed ownership. In broader sense, big retail undermines democratic self-governance.

Big-Box Swindle is by far the most authentic indictment of big retail. In her incisive analysis, Stacy Mitchell has laid bare hidden dimensions of mega-retail proliferation in the United States. Big-box retailers squeeze the middle-class, fuel suburban sprawl, undercut local businesses and strip citizens of an enriched community life.

Using real-life examples from 49 states, Mitchell contends that mega-retailers are fueling many of America’s most pressing social, environmental and economic problems. Studies reveal that communities, where a larger share of the economy is in the hands of locally owned businesses, have lower rates of crime, poverty and infant mortality.

While taking a well-researched dig at big retail, Mitchell also provides inspiring lessons from places that are turning the tide. ‘Buy Local’ and ‘Break the Chain Habit’ campaigns are encouraging local businesses in several states that, taken together, provide a detailed road map to a brighter, prosperous and sustainable future. Across US, two-hundred big retail projects have been halted by such groups since 2000.

Prodigiously researched and lucidly written, Big Box Swindle is a must read for those who draft public policy. Any policy decision that doesn’t take into account the arguments by Stacy Mitchell is likely to be unconvincing and inconclusive....Link

Big Box Swindle
by Stacy Mitchell
Beacon Press, Boston
318 pages, $15