agenda INFOCHANGE ISSUE 19 2010 New Agriculturist With roughly 45,000 certified organic farms operating in India, there is finally a rejection of resource-extractive industrial agriculture and a return to traditional, sustainable and ecologically safe farming FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION RECENT BACK ISSUES agenda agenda INFOCHANGE ISSUE 17 2009 We, the people Exploring the role and impact of civil society in India FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION Coastal communities Civil society Intercultural dialogue Reporting conflict © Infochange News & Features, Centre for Communication and Development Studies, 2010 Infochange Agenda is a quarterly journal published by the Centre for Communication and Development Studies, a social change resource centre focusing on the research and communication of information for change To order copies, write to: Centre for Communication and Development Studies 301, Kanchanjunga Building, Kanchan Lane, Off Law College Road, Pune 411 004 Suggested contribution: Rs 60 (1 issue); Rs 240 (4 issues); Rs 480 (8 issues) DDs/cheques to be made out to 'Centre for Communication and Development Studies' Infochange Agenda content may be cited, reproduced and reprinted for purposes of education and public dissemination with due credit to the authors, the journal and the publishers Contents Introduction: Towards a new agriculture by Rahul Goswami 2 An evolutionary view of Indian agriculture by A Thimmaiah 5 Tamil Nadu’s organic revolution: Interview with G Nammalvar by Claude Alvares 9 Return to the good earth in Sangli: Interview with Jayant Barve by Claude Alvares 12 The new natural economics of agriculture by Subhash Sharma 15 Climate change and food security by Suman Sahai 18 Local solutions to climate change by Sreenath Dixit and B Venkateswarlu 21 Tackling climate change in Gorakhpur by Surekha Sule 25 Agriculture at nature’s mercy by Sukanta Das Gupta 28 Resilience of man and nature by Santadas Ghosh 30 Animal farms by Nitya S Ghotge and Sagari R Ramdas 32 Women farmers: From seed to kitchen by Kavya Dashora 36 Empty claims of financial inclusion by P S M Rao 39 Natural farming, tribal farming by Vidhya Das 42 The home gardens of Wayanad by A V Santhoshkumar and Kaoru Ichikawa 46 Small farmer zindabad 49 The tired mirage of top-down technology by Rahul Goswami 52 The gap between field and lab by Anitha Pailoor 55 Kudrat, Karishma and other living seeds by Anjali Pathak 58 This issue has been guest-edited by Rahul Goswami Cover photograph by Sudharak Olwe Editors: Hutokshi Doctor, John Samuel Production and layout: Gita Vasudevan, Sameer Karmarkar Infochange team: Anosh Malekar, K C Dwarkanath, Philip Varghese, Ujwala Samarth, Vijay Narvekar, Vishnu Walje 2010 ISSUE 19 1 Agricultural revival Towards a new agriculture All over India rural revivalists are rejecting the corporatised, programmatic, high- input model of agriculture and following agro-ecological approaches in which shared, distributed knowledge systems provide ways to adapt to changing climate and a shrinking natural resource base RAHUL GOSWAMI THERE ARE TWO SCHOOLS of practice that are used to describe agricultural activity in India. One is the ‘industrial’, corporate view, developed by a sprawling and overweening bureaucracy that functions through a bewildering range of programmes, missions, campaigns and initiatives. India’s agriculture officialdom sees the natural produce of its land and people as distilled into a few powerful equations. At the top of this reductionist, year-on-year corporate view reigns the APY equation — area, production, yield. There are others, some just as old and some new — for example ‘logistics’ and ‘public-private partnership’. In this school of practice, the kisan and the cultivating household are treated as human collateral, ultimately incidental to the great task of feeding the nation, useful only to the extent that it obeys instructions. with the modern, hermetic understanding of ‘food security’ The other school of practice and method is diffuse and as it has to do with the post-1960s, western-dominated independent. Its practitioners come from a variety of definition of organic agriculture and food. Humans, backgrounds and some may even have been a part of animals, trees (including grasslands) and agricultural fields the bureaucracy mentioned above. Others have been and were inseparable and harmonious components of a single are part of social movements whose origins lie in India’s system. The village household looked after the trees on freedom struggle. They confound measurement, yet in their their fields and also contributed to the maintenance of the intellectual and practical independence lie the answers to community grazing land. They looked after animals owned many of India’s right to food questions. by them, sometimes with the assistance of a grazing hand, and cultivated their fields with or without hired labour or Generations of our farmers and herders have developed sharecroppers. complex, diverse and locally adapted agricultural systems, managed with time-tested, ingenious combinations of Writing in The Ecologist 27 years ago, Bharat Dogra techniques and practices that lead to community food sketched out the harmony: “The trees provided fodder for security and the conservation of natural resources and the cattle. They also provided fuel for the villagers. The biodiversity. These microcosms of agricultural heritage exist leaves that fell were put to uses beneficial to the agricultural all over India, providing ecological and cultural services and fields. Meanwhile, their soil and water conservation preserving traditional forms of farming knowledge, local properties were beneficial for the villagers and contributed crop and animal varieties, and socio-cultural organisation. to maintaining the fertility of agricultural fields, as well as These systems represent the accumulated experiences providing shade during the scorching summer. Certain trees of peasants interacting with their environment using provided edible fruits, medicines, gum, toothpaste and a self-reliance and locally available resources. These agro- host of other commodities of everyday use. Cattle provided ecosystems have allowed our traditional farmers to avert milk and milk products and contributed to the nutritional risks and maximise harvest security even in uncertain and content of the villagers’ diet. Cattle dung provided organic marginal environments, using low levels of technology fertilisers for the fields, while the poultry provided eggs and inputs. and meat. Not least, bullocks ploughed the fields. The fields produced foodgrain, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables for the It is a system (taken as a whole but including its many villagers. The residues of those crops, of no direct use to 2010 geographical and cultural variations) that has as little to do man who could not eat them, were fed to the cattle. Poultry ISSUE 19 2 Introduction birds scavenged the wasted scattered grain.” ‘mitigation’ and seek to build such laboratory ‘solutions’ into modified central programmes, all the while refusing to Alas, India’s agricultural bureaucracies of 30 years ago, still cede control of crop production to those who know it best, fat on a diet of Green Revolution instruction provided by and all the while supporting the vast network of businesses the massive and powerful agricultural colleges of the USA and interests surrounding foodgrain at the heart of which and their agro-industrial partners, chose not to recognise throb the chemical fertiliser complexes. our invaluable agro-ecological heritage. From that time on, those who converted to the corporatist mode of agricultural All the while, the evidence at both national and meta- thought (and the defining APY equation) were India’s national levels has been growing and becoming compelling. ‘progressive’ farmers, and to them partly was the ‘Jai Jawan, The horrendously long sequence of farmer suicides in Jai Kisan’ slogan raised. Harmonious agro-ecologies were Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and other states exposed swept aside by the bureaucracy-research-network combine, the tragic, needless human cost of India’s corporatised and the justification for such steady and deliberate ecocide agricultural control structures; the discovery that was held out to Indians in the form of rising yield and groundwater extraction rates in Punjab and Haryana were production curves. We have many mouths to feed, said the amongst the highest in the world exposed the appalling agricultural bureaucracy, and who could argue? true cost of high-input cultivation techniques; the steady tide of migration to towns and cities by households all over It took the gathering global alarm over climate change — the country revealed the millions forced to abandon their revealed by a new and nervous scientific method — for us lands in the face of rising input costs and debt burdens. All to turn back to agriculture and take a long look at what these pointed directly at the core of the State’s approach to two decades of the reckless pursuit of GDP growth had agriculture and its utterly misplaced ends. wrought. Within India, such scrutiny was discouraged, for agricultural research and bureaucracies brook no falling Outside, systematic study of why industrial agriculture out of line, even in the obvious face of yield plateaus and was failing was driven by deep alarm at the staggering the growing evidence of widespread ecological damage human costs, costs that were often unseen and unmarked. caused by soil abuse. Within India, it was in those pockets “The evidence