We are pleased to welcome Barun Shankar Mitra (New Delhi) as ISIL's official rep for India.

     Mitra (43) is a writer and commentator on public policy with a special interest in development, the environment, trade and technology-related issues. He has been published in a wide range of national and international newspapers and magazines such as The Economic Times, and The Wall Street Journal and has also contributed essays for books published by the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and others. Most recently he contributed a chapter – "Sustainable Development vs. Sustained Development" – to Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, a book edited by Ron Bailey (Prima Publishing, September 2002).

     He is founder and director of the Liberty Institute www.libertyindia.org – a non-profit, independent public-policy research and educational organization. He edited a volume Population: The Ultimate Resource, published by Liberty Institute, which was awarded the 2001 Sir Antony Fisher Memorial International Prize for the best book from a new think tank.

     Prior to founding the Liberty Institute, Mr. Mitra was a freelance journalist and had graduated as an electrical engineer in 1981. He also has a post-graduate degree in Marine engineering, and had sailed as a marine engineer on merchant ships for some years. In the late 1980s, he spent three years on a project in a remote village in coastal districts of West Bengal state in Eastern India, where he experienced rural poverty directly and as a result came to develop an understanding of agricultural issues.

     He has written widely on environment, development, trade, and technology-related issues. One issue that is of current interest to him is the informal sector and spontaneous development of the institutions of the market among large sections of populations who have little access to the formal institutions of society. He is also working on a range of environmental issues looking at ways of harnessing the power of the market to improve environmental quality. Another important area of interest is agriculture. Mitra has been studying the impact of agricultural trade and technology in improving productivity and alleviating rural poverty. He is also attracted to the idea of freedom of choice for individuals and is particularly keen to explore the relationship between democracy in the political domain and the market in the economic domain.

     The Liberty Institute is dedicated to promoting market-based responses to contemporary social and economic and environmental issues with the aim of promoting awareness of the institutional pillars of a free society – individual rights, the rule of law, limited government and free markets.

     The basic objective of the Institute is premised on the fact that political and economic freedoms are indivisible, and together form the core of human rights – and that one can not be sustained without the other. The Institute undertakes research, has a growing publications programme, conducts seminars and conferences and has a range of activities aimed at the youth.

     His seminars have had direct influence on individuals from both India and African countries. ISIL rep James Shikwati (Kenya) and ISIL member Thompson Ayodele (Nigeria) are members of his network of individuals working to break the bonds of poverty in their countries - and both have attended Liberty Institute seminars in New Delhi.

     Among the current areas of research are the various trade and WTO-related issues, economic impact of environmental policy, impact of new technologies, risk assessment and affordable levels of safety, development economics, agriculture, intellectual property rights, sustainable development and various multilateral environmental agreements, natural disasters. In the coming months the Institute plans to focus on some new areas like the relationship between political rights and economic freedom. It also intends to highlight the spirit of enterprise exemplified by people in the informal sector, and build grassroots support for the institutions of the market.

Challenging Anti-Free Trade
Activists in Australia

     Last November Mitra visited Sydney, Australia to attend a WTO rally/demonstration. Miranda Devine of the Sydney Sun-Herald provided an accurate and insightful coverage of the demonstration – particularly regarding Mitra's participation. She observed that Mitra had a genuine interest in debating these "well-fed children of the West". He had made the observation that Sydney's WTO protestors were "a lot better behaved and more friendly" than those he saw at Seattle. "But," he added, "they were no less misguided."

     The following is excerpted from a report in the November 17th issue of the Sydney Sun-Herald.

     Mitra burst into the media spotlight last year at the Earth Summit, aka the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, a talk fest aimed at eradicating world poverty in a green way.

     He gathered street hawkers and African and Indian farmers to protest what he called the "sustainable poverty" agenda of environmentalists who want to retard economic development in the Third World "in the name of the poor".

     He made CNN after he presented a plaque adorned with cow dung, the "BS award for sustaining poverty" to an environmentalist who was trying to ban modern farming techniques in India. Mitra's point is that environmental protectionism is just a new way to keep developing countries down. What countries like India need, he says, is "trade, not aid".

Barun Mitra unveils the "BS Award for Sustaining Poverty" (cow dung for an environmentalist who wanted to ban modern farming in India).

     Inside the WTO, the European Union, echoing green protesters outside, is trying to change the rules to block exports from countries that don't live up to certain environmental standards. These are just trade barriers in a new guise, and the EU's "eco-imperialism" is motivated by self-interest, Mitra says.

     "Developing countries suffer from environmental degradation, not because people consume too much, but because they consume too little."

     In India, for instance, 50 to 60 per cent of people do not have electricity – so instead they burn firewood and cow dung, which damages the environment, not to mention their health.

     The tendency for the developed world to think it knows what is best for developing countries struck Mitra on Friday as he listened to WTO ministers talk endlessly at Homebush Bay about access to medicines.

     "It sounds quite humanitarian," he said. "But in practice donated drugs will rot in warehouses without doctors, hospitals, diagnostic services and proper methods of delivery.

     "It just makes them [Western nations] feel good. It becomes a symbolism, but in the developing world, where we're dealing with life and death, symbols mean little."

     Meanwhile, agriculture, the most important issue for economic growth in the developing world, had just one hour's attention.

     Mitra knows what he's talking about, having spent three years in a remote village in the Bay of Bengal with no electricity or sanitation, trying to start a shrimp farming business. Every weekend ee escaped to Calcutta for a warm bath, but will never forget his immersion in poverty.

     At the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, when the anti-globalisation movement broke into the world's consciousness, he found himself arguing with a British protester about GM crops, which, of course, she opposed.

     "I've lived in India, and I know what it's like," she finally told him.

     "But I AM Indian and I've lived there all my life," he replied, incredulous.

     The facts don't even register on the protesters' radar. They are too wrap-ped up in the self-importance of being part of a global "movement" to notice that it is utterly meaningless.

     Their grab-bag Satan is capitalism. Logic doesn't rate.

     Barun Mitra, a regular at ISIL conferences, is scheduled to speak at the world conference to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania (July 6 to 11th).

     For more information about the Liberty Institute and Mitra's writings, please visit the following URL http://www.libertyindia.org/

Barun S. Mitra
Liberty Institute, J-259 Saket (2nd floor),
New Delhi 110017. India
Tel: +91-11-26512441
Fax: +91-11-26532345
Email: liberty@nda.vsnl.net.in