Consortium Conferences Tackle Contemporary Issues in South Asia
Spring 2012 Conference: Food, Health and Agriculture in South Asia
Each year the Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium
organizes a conference that addresses contemporary issues in South Asia. During
this grant cycle, the themes of these conference range from water to food to
textiles, but each hopes to highlight interdisciplinary work and their
intersections of the physical and social sciences. Last spring, SAC hosted the
conference which focused on “Food, Health and Agriculture in South Asia:
Contemporary Issues and Future Trends.” 
This two day event kicked off on March 30, 2012 with a
screening of the film, Still, the Children are Here, directed by Dinaz
Stafford. This poignant film looks at the plight of the Garo people of
Northeastern India, whose traditional agricultural practices and the crops that
they grow are quickly becoming obsolete. We were able to have a Q & A
session with Ms. Stafford, who was in London, over Skype.
On April 1, we hosted a number of scholars that addressed
different aspects of health and nutrition in South Asia. Our opening keynote
address by Dr. Krishnendu Ray, Professor of Food Studies at NYU examined the
ways in which food and cultural identity are linked both in South Asia and in
the diaspora. The conference ended with an engaging, humorous and thought
provoking talk by Rema Nagarajan, journalist for the Times of India and
visiting scholar at Harvard University, on the role of technology and policy in
combatting hunger in the developing world.
Several Syracuse University graduate students participated
in the conference on the panel concerning the intersections of health, food and
medicine as well as our Fulbright Scholar, Chandani Liyanage.
None of this would
have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the conference
organizers-- Syracuse University’s Professors Tim Dye and Sudha Raj and Cornell
University’s Saurabh Mehta, Assistant Professor of Global Health, Epidemiology,
and Nutrition.
Spring 2013 Conference: Agrarian Crisis? Seed and State in India
The next Consortium conference, “Agrarian Crisis? Seed and
State in India” will be held at Cornell on April 5-6, 2013 and will engage the
current state of the agrarian sector India through the lens of “crisis.”
Characterizations and causes of the current agrarian crisis in academic and
popular studies are multiple and divergent, but cotton receives the most
prominent media coverage. Debt resulting from liberalization of farm credit
runs through others. Crop failures figure prominently, whether from failure of
government monitoring of counterfeit or risky seeds or biological changes in
specific agro-ecologies. Water shortages are held to reflect some combination
of climate change and a tragedy of the commons built by populist political
competition. The rate of growth in factor productivity has declined sharply,
even as cuts in input subsidies have narrowed the margin between costs of
production and value of output. State acquisition of farmland by eminent domain
works with market diversion of land from farm to consumption in some accounts.
Running through these multiple causes for crisis is absence or misdirection of
state response. How should we understand the framings of crisis? If there is
crisis, how do we understand the political impotence of those afflicted in a
vigorous democracy? For more information on the upcoming conference, check out
the conference website: sap.einaudi.cornell.edu/node/8371.