[Reader-list] Reg: Set - 11

[Rakesh Iyer]

Hi all

The final article has a conversation based on mails behind it. The article
is given below. I will post the conversation below it.

Rakesh

Article Theme: Agriculture

Source: Infochange

Link:
http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/Agricultural-revival/Towards-a-new-agriculture.html

Article:

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* explains

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.

The other school of practice and method is diffuse and independent. Its
practitioners come from a variety of backgrounds and some may even have been
a part of the bureaucracy mentioned above. Others have been and are part of
social movements whose origins lie in India’s freedom struggle. They
confound measurement, yet in their intellectual and practical independence
lie the answers to many of India’s right to food questions.

Generations of our farmers and herders have developed complex, diverse and
locally adapted agricultural systems, managed with time-tested, ingenious
combinations of techniques and practices that lead to community food
security and the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity. These
microcosms of agricultural heritage exist all over India, providing
ecological and cultural services and preserving traditional forms of farming
knowledge, local crop and animal varieties, and socio-cultural organisation.
These systems represent the accumulated experiences of peasants interacting
with their environment using self-reliance and locally available resources.
These agro-ecosystems have allowed our traditional farmers to avert risks
and maximise harvest security even in uncertain and marginal environments,
using low levels of technology and inputs.

It is a system (taken as a whole but including its many geographical and
cultural variations) that has as little to do with the modern, hermetic
understanding of ‘food security’ as it has to do with the post-1960s,
western-dominated definition of organic agriculture and food. Humans,
animals, trees (including grasslands) and agricultural fields were
inseparable and harmonious components of a single system. The village
household looked after the trees on their fields and also contributed to the
maintenance of the community grazing land. They looked after animals owned
by them, sometimes with the assistance of a grazing hand, and cultivated
their fields with or without hired labour or sharecroppers.

Writing in *The Ecologist* 27 years ago, Bharat Dogra sketched out the
harmony: “The trees provided fodder for the cattle. They also provided fuel
for the villagers. The leaves that fell were put to uses beneficial to the
agricultural fields. Meanwhile, their soil and water conservation properties
were beneficial for the villagers and contributed to maintaining the
fertility of agricultural fields, as well as providing shade during the
scorching summer. Certain trees provided edible fruits, medicines, gum,
toothpaste and a host of other commodities of everyday use. Cattle provided
milk and milk products and contributed to the nutritional content of the
villagers’ diet. Cattle dung provided organic fertilisers for the fields,
while the poultry provided eggs and meat. Not least, bullocks ploughed the
fields. The fields produced foodgrain, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables for
the villagers. The residues of those crops, of no direct use to man who
could not eat them, were fed to the cattle. Poultry birds scavenged the
wasted scattered grain.”

Alas, India’s agricultural bureaucracies of 30 years ago, still fat on a
diet of Green Revolution instruction provided by the massive and powerful
agricultural colleges of the USA and their agro-industrial partners, chose
not to recognise our invaluable agro-ecological heritage. From that time on,
those who converted to the corporatist mode of agricultural thought (and the
defining APY equation) were India’s ‘progressive’ farmers, and to them
partly was the ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’ slogan raised. Harmonious
agro-ecologies were swept aside by the bureaucracy-research-network combine,
and the justification for such steady and deliberate ecocide was held out to
Indians in the form of rising yield and production curves. We have many
mouths to feed, said the agricultural bureaucracy, and who could argue?

It took the gathering global alarm over climate change -- revealed by a new
and nervous scientific method -- for us to turn back to agriculture and take
a long look at what two decades of the reckless pursuit of GDP growth had
wrought. Within India, such scrutiny was discouraged, for agricultural
research and bureaucracies brook no falling out of line, even in the obvious
face of yield plateaus and the growing evidence of widespread ecological
damage caused by soil abuse. Within India, it was in those pockets where
traditional agro-ecologies had been safeguarded that the answers lay, and
the practitioners of such forms of cultivation (whether low-input,
zero-chemical fertiliser, *rishi-kheti* and others) organised themselves
into thriving sub-cultures. Cut off from official funding sources and still
needing to find consumers who valued their produce, some cautiously reached
out to the western ‘organics’ networks whose institutional strengths were
superior. Outside India, new forms of rigorous enquiry into the impacts and
effects of a globalised economy on climate were steering the focus towards
industrial agriculture and its excesses.

For much of the 2000-2009 decade, even grudging official recognition that
industrially-organised, centrally-programmed agriculture in India was
falling short in delivering ‘food security’ came slowly. Conceptually ahead
by a magnitude were the tradition-oriented sub-cultures -- groups such as
Deccan Development Society, Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, Gurukula
Botanical Sanctuary, Raitateerpu; and individuals such as G Nammalwar,
Subhash Sharma and Suman Sahai -- that were strengthening through practice
and dialogue the concepts that are easily understood as ‘community
resilience’ and ‘food sovereignty’. The foodgrain and food staples price
shock of 2008, which had grown from a year earlier and returned in
late-2009, forced our government and its agencies to act. They have done so,
but their response has been damage containment (as they see it), not a
phased rollback of industrial agriculture through a recognition of
sub-continental agro-ecologies. They adopt and freely use the common
parlance of climate change negotiation, such as ‘adaptation’ and
‘mitigation’ and seek to build such laboratory ‘solutions’ into modified
central programmes, all the while refusing to cede control of crop
production to those who know it best, and all the while supporting the vast
network of businesses and interests surrounding foodgrain at the heart of
which throb the chemical fertiliser complexes.

All the while, the evidence at both national and meta-national levels has
been growing and becoming compelling. The horrendously long sequence of
farmer suicides in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and other states exposed the
tragic, needless human cost of India’s corporatised agricultural control
structures; the discovery that groundwater extraction rates in Punjab and
Haryana were amongst the highest in the world exposed the appalling true
cost of high-input cultivation techniques; the steady tide of migration to
towns and cities by households all over the country revealed the millions
forced to abandon their lands in the face of rising input costs and debt
burdens. All these pointed directly at the core of the State’s approach to
agriculture and its utterly misplaced ends.

Outside, systematic study of why industrial agriculture was failing was
driven by deep alarm at the staggering human costs, costs that were often
unseen and unmarked. “The evidence from various developing countries reveals
that sustainable agricultural practices, anchored in local knowledge, are
the most effective in developing resilient food production systems,” stated
the bottom-line conclusion of one of the largest studies to analyse how
agro-ecological practices affect productivity in the developing world. It
was conducted by researchers at the University of Essex, in Britain, who
analysed 286 projects in 57 countries. Among the 12.6 million farmers
followed, who were transitioning towards sustainable agriculture,
researchers found an average yield increase of 79% across a wide variety of
crop types. These farmlands averaged 3 hectares, located in a variety of
farming systems -- irrigated, rainfed, wetland, humid, highland, mixed and
urban. The 2006 study bluntly said: “Sustainable agriculture is driven by
local knowledge and resource-conserving techniques, making the best use of
nature’s goods and services without damaging those assets. Investing in the
capacities of small farmers to adopt sustainable practices will help secure
higher yields and profits, and will promote local food consumption.”

Thereafter came the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to
date, with a consortium of United Nations, and the World Bank too, engaging
more than 400 scientists and development experts from 80 countries over four
years to produce the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge,
Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD). The boldface conclusion?
That our “reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is risky
and unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy,
and water crises”. The IAASTD was ground-breaking in its ability to address
agriculture for what it is, an all-inclusive human activity. It also said
that achieving a sustainable agro-ecosystem will take some time, especially
since we have built up a tremendous debt in our agricultural soils and
ecosystem services from the long-standing industrial abuses and historically
poor practices in many subsistence agro-ecosystems. Typically, the insights
contained in the IAASTD and the import of the study have been ignored by our
Ministry of Agriculture, our National Agricultural Research System, and by
the many agencies tasked with delivering ‘development’ to rural cultivators.

What are the reasons for this chronic unwillingness to see?

First, agro-ecological systems cannot be defined in terms of the adoption of
any particular technologies or practices -- there are no ready blueprints
and off-the-shelf templates. Second, sustainable agricultural systems
contribute to the delivery and maintenance of a range of public goods such
as clean water, carbon sequestration, flood protection, groundwater
recharge, and soil conservation. Few of these processes and outcomes -- to
borrow managerial terminology -- have ‘market’ value quantifiable in terms
understood by those advocating public-private partnerships (PPP), for
example. Third, the cost benefit of conservation of resources can be
determined by the scarcity value of those resources (will urban food
consumers be willing to pay for watershed protection in a district they
import food from?). But this mechanism can be used only after investing in
public education -- so that the connections are made in minds -- and by
building it into public policy at an institutional level, where it
immediately runs into political and business interests.

Yet the pressure is mounting. Technological breakthroughs have been
neutralised by unfavourable, declining, degrading soil-water ecosystems, by
enhanced biotic and abiotic stresses, large post-harvest losses, dwindling
national and global funding support to agriculture in general and
agricultural research and education in particular, restrictive
knowledge-sharing opportunities, stagnating capacity and skills, uncertain
policy support, collapsing public service and support systems, and
indifferent and inefficient governance. Expanding the area used to cultivate
crops is curtailed on the ground directly by urbanisation, on the one hand,
and creeping environmental degradation on the other. When climate change
impacts are added to this medley of obstacles -- extreme weather events that
make sowing or harvesting impossible, seasonal shifts in the entire crop
calendar -- cultivation as an income for rural households becomes less
feasible.

“Less immediate, but possibly even more significant impacts are anticipated
because of changes in mean temperatures and rainfall and increasing weather
variability,” said a 2009 Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report
entitled ‘Agricultural reforms and trade liberalisation in China and
selected Asian countries’. “Climate change is thus likely to have
significant impact on a wide range of factors essential to human wellbeing,
including employment, income, health and prices for water, energy and food.
Climate change will affect the extent and nature of agro-ecological zones in
Asia and elsewhere, the estimates of areas with potential for crop
production and the projections of maximum attainable yields.” These
projections and estimates have for 50 years been calculated for India by
first, a research bureaucracy wedded to the mechanics of a centrally planned
economy and, later, a research bureaucracy allied to a merchant network that
has grown in power and influence.

Today’s biotech-oriented PPP models of industrial agriculture -- linked
intimately to financial and commodities markets -- rely on petroleum-based
chemicals for pest and weed control, and rising amounts of synthetic
fertiliser in an ultimately futile attempt to compensate for soil
degradation. The inputs trap can simply not be disguised by any amount of
financial and technological scheming. In stark contrast are the tenets of
the agro-ecological system (for which, in this issue of *Agenda*,we shall
use ‘organic’ as a synonym). These practices are defined by much more than
just the absence of industrial inputs and the functioning of market
mechanics. It is knowledge-intensive farming in which -- to borrow a modern
term -- open source knowledge networks proliferate and thrive.

Organic farmers improve output by tapping a sophisticated understanding of
biological systems to build soil fertility and manage pests and weeds
through techniques that include intercropping, composting, manures, cover
crops, crop sequencing, and natural pest control. The contrast is
frightening both because of its crippling weaknesses and because of the
disinformation used to disguise those weaknesses: herbicide-resistant weeds
and pesticide-resistant pests, both contributing to reduce crop
biodiversity. As commercial crop biotechnologies have oversimplified and
industrialised simultaneously, they have made agriculture more vulnerable to
the next problem. And that problem -- climate change -- has already stepped
over our ecological threshold.

That is why the medium-term future of conventional agriculture (and the
massive State- and industrial-sponsored systems which sustain it) seems
unsuitable or even implausible. There is, in addition, a major external
factor, and that is oil. Conventional industrial agriculture, pursued in the
corporate mode, researched as an adjunct to the global seed-pharma MNCs and
distributed as a function of the financial markets, is utterly dependent
upon oil. The future of fossil fuels is now known, and there again, while
the central government pursues its GDP algorithms, it ignores the
inevitability of that future. Local organics steps out of that doomed
mathematics entirely, and there alone lies the importance of its role in the
future of India’s myriad agro-ecologies.

*(Rahul Goswami is an agriculture systems researcher and a social sector
consultant with the National Agriculture Innovation Project)*

*Infochange News & Features, July 2010*


*Note: *

The link you can all check out for articles on Agriculture in Infochange:

http://infochangeindia.org/Agenda/Agricultural-revival/**
*
**
The Conversation Linked:
*


(After my 1st mail on Set - 11)

Please see the latest infochange Agenda on www.infochangeindia.org for
related articles.

Ujwala Samarth

My reply:

Thanks Ujwala. But unfortunately, not all farmers are rich to switch over to
organic farming. While I am happy for those who are doing, we need govt.
subsidies to do that. I will certainly put a happy story in this area though
from the magazine you had put. And put the link as well with your mail.

Ujwala's Reply:

!!! It's not a question of 'happy stories, Rakesh. Although yes, we did get
a little tired of all the grim stories that infochange keeps carrying which
are of course unavoidable. I think the point is that organic farming is not
actually a 'rich man's thing' any longer, as some of the stories point out,
but a way of eventually re-linking the small farmer and his land and his
produce to the small consumer. Seed coops etc. run by women are happy
stories as are stories where people have reclaimed their land -- and all
this is happening in the same social milieu as the suicides etc.

My reply:

I hope I have your permission to post this conversation we had amongst
ourselves on Sarai.

Ujwala's reply:

of course.