Punjab is not alone in experiencing this ecological and social disaster. last year I was in Warangal, Andra Pradesh, where farmers have also been committing suicide. farmers who traditionally grew pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed companies to buy hybrid cotton seeds - referred to by the seed merchants as "white gold" - which were supposed to make them millionaires. Instead they became paupers.

Their native seeds have been displaced with new hybrids which cannot be saved and need to be purchased every year at high cost. Hybrids are also vulnerable to pest attacks, and spending on pesticides in Warangal has shot up 2,000% since 1997. Now farmers are consuming the same pesticides as a way of killing themselves so that they can escape permanently from unpayable debt.

Experiences such as these tell me that we are wrong to be smug about the new global economy. It is time to stop and think about the impact of globalisation on the lives of ordinary people. this is vital to achieve sustainability. What we are doing in the name of globalisation to the poor is brutal and unforgivable as we witness the unfolding disasters, especially in food and agriculture.

Who feeds the world? It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food providers in the third world. And, contrary to the dominant assumption, their biodiversity-based small farms are more productive than industrial monocultures. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre, and from the perspective of biodiversity, the "high yields" of industrial agriculture or industrial fisheries do not imply more production of food and nutrition. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields of individual crops, but will have high total output of food.

Research done by the Food and Agriculture Administration has shown that small biodiverse farms can produce thousands of times more food than large, industrial monocultures. And diversity, in addition to giving more food, is the best strategy for preventing drought and desertification.

What the world needs to feed the world sustainably is biodiversity intensification, not the chemical intensification or the intensification of genetic engineering. Yet we are repeatedly told that without genetic engineering and globalisation of agriculture the world will starve. This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature's production, production by women, production by third world farmers allows destruction nd appropriation to be projected as creation.

Women who produce for their families and communities are treated as "non-productive" and "economically" inactive. The devaluation of women's work and of work done in sustainable economies, is the natural outcome of a system constructed by capitalist patriarchy. this is how globalisation destroys local economies - and destruction itself is counted as growth. Because many women in rural and indigenous communities work co-operatively with nature's processes, their work is often contradictory to the dominant market-driven "development" and trade policies. and because work that satisfies needs and ensures sustenance is devalued in general, there is less nurturing of life and life support systems.

Everywhere, food production is becoming a negative economy, with farmers spending more to buy costly inputs for industrial production than the price they receive for their produce. The consequence is rising debts and epidemics of suicides both in poor and rich countries. Capital-intensive, corporate controlled agriculture is being spread into regions where peasants are poor but, until now, have been self-sufficient in food. The globalisation of non-sustainable industrial agriculture is evaporating the incomes of third world farmers through a combination of devaluation of currencies, increase in costs of production and a collapse in commodity prices.

While farmers earn less, consumers pay more. In India, food prices doubled between 1999 and 2000, and the consumption of food grains in rural areas has dropped by 12%. Increased economic growth through global commerce is based on pseudo surpluses. More food is being traded while the poor are consuming less. When growth increases poverty, when real production becomes a negative economy and speculators are defined as "wealth creators", something has gone seriously wrong.

Global consultants fail to see the 99% food processing done by women at household level, or by the small cottage industry, because it is not controlled by global-agribusiness. In India 99% of agro-processing has been intentionally kept at the small level. Now, under the pressure of globalisation, things are changing.

In august 1998, small scale local processing of edible oil was devastated in India through a "packaging order" which required all oil to be packaged in plastic or aluminum. This shut down tiny "ghanis", or cold pressed mills. It destroyed the market for our diverse oilseeds - mustard, linseed, sesame, groundnut, coconut.

The takeover of the edible oil industry has affected 10 million livelihoods. The takeover of flour or "atta", by packaged, branded flour will cost 100million livelihoods. These millions are being pushed into new poverty, while the forced use of packaging will increase the environmental burden with millions of tonnes of waste.

A global monoculture is being forced on people by defining everything that is fresh, local and handmade as a health hazard. Human hands are being defined as the worst contaminants, and work for human hands is being outlawed, to be replaced by machines and chemicals bought from global corporations. these are not recipes for feeding the world, but stealing livelihoods from the poor to create markets for the powerful.

The US Centre for Disease Prevention in Atlanta has calculated that nearly 81m cases of food-borne illnesses occur in the US every year. Most of these infections are caused by factory farmed meat, but now the giant US meat industry wants to dump contaminated meat produced through violent and cruel methods on Indian consumers. The waste of the rich is being dumped on the poor.Moreover, the wealth of the poor is being violently appropriated through new and clever means like patents on biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Basmati, neem, pepper, bitter gourd, turmeric....every aspect of the innovation embodied in our indigenous food and medicinal systems is now being pirated and patented. the knowledge of the poor is being converted into the property of global corporations, creating a situation where the poor will have to pay for the seeds and medicines they have evolved. sharing and exchange - the basis of our humanity and of our ecological survival - has been redefined as a crime.

In 1992, when Indian farmers destroyed Cargill's seed plant in Bellary, Karnataka, to protest against seed failure, the Cargill chief executive stated: "We bring Indian farmers smart technologies which prevent bees from usurping the pollen". When i was participating in the UN biosafety negotiations, Monsanto circulated literature to defend its herbicide resistant Roundup Ready crops on grounds that they prevent "weeds from stealing the sunshine". But what Monsanto calls weeds are the green fields that provide Vitamin A rice and prevent blindness in children and anaemia in women.

When giant corporations view small peasants and bees as thieves, and through trade rules and new technologies seek the right to exterminate them, humanity has reached a dangerous threshold. Sustainability, sharing and survival is being outlawed in the name of market competitiveness. In giving food to other beings and species we maintain conditions for our own food security. In feeding earthworms, we feed ourselves; in feeding cows, we feed the soil; and in providing food for the soil we provide food for humans.

The sustainability challenge for the new millennium is whether global economic man can move out of the world view based on fear and scarcity, monocultures and monopolies, appropriation and dispossession and shift to a view based on abundance and sharing, diversity and decentralisation, and respect and dignity for all beings. Economic globalisation has become a war against nature and the poor. But the rules of globalisation are not god given. they can be changed. They must be changed. We can survive as a species only if we live by the rules of the biosphere.