Page:Sharad Joshi - Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage.pdf/70

 the clothes, food and overall lifestyle. In seminars these representatives of the developing countries talked as if they were representing views of their starving millions, but in their own daily life they lived in great luxury. Joshi was disgusted with that hypocrisy. He also realized that even in his own job he was doing very little in a real sense to benefit poor nations. From what he read he was convinced that it was agriculture alone, which created the first surplus in the world and thereby began the process of wealth creation. He concluded that the history of man is primarily the history of ways in which the farmer and what he produced was plundered by aggressors – whether from cities or other countries. He kept studying the problems of poverty particularly in India and realized that it was caused primarily by very meager prices the farmer was getting for his crops and that aspect was never getting discussed at the grand conferences of the UN. He wrote, ‘I also realized that nobody has really tried to seek answers to poverty. When I began to read different reports I realized that they avoided the root cause of poverty and instead wrote complex but bogus theories about ‘development techniques’, ‘linear programming’ and all such mumbo jumbo which was totally dishonest. I did not have the slightest doubt that these people are basically thriving on the poverty of poor. I was convinced that I should return to India and start dry-land farming because I knew that the roots of poverty lay there and I wanted to learn about it firsthand.’ Even at a personal level gradually bitterness was growing in Joshi’s mind. He once said, ‘Most westerners have a couple of stereotype ideas about an Indian. He is either very religious, traditional, old-fashioned living in the past, or one who constantly abuses western capitalism. I was not fitting in either of these images. Most highbrow Indians who went to the West acted in a manner that Years in Switzerland

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