This document discusses alternatives to industrial agriculture in India that are more sustainable and beneficial for small farmers. It notes that most Indian farmers have very small land holdings and face issues like debt, crop failures from lack of water, and health problems from unsustainable farming practices. As alternatives, it proposes agroecological practices like using native seeds, intercropping, livestock integration, and natural fertilizers which have led to increased yields, incomes, and self-sufficiency for farmers in India while improving the environment. Specific examples highlighted include Zero Budget Natural Farming and rural producer collectives. The key messages are that external costs of industrial agriculture should be accounted for, technologies should be developed participatorily with farmers rather than corporations, and ag
2. 1. 180 million hectares but 70% < 2ha & 65% is rain-fed
2. 253 million tonnes of Food grain production (Ministry of
Agriculture, 2016)
3. 90 million agricultural households
4. 52% indebted, earning US $100, $97 (NSSO, 70th
round)
5. 40% increase in farmer suicides (NCRB, 2016)
6. Ranked 114 out of 132 countries (UNICEF, 2016)
3. Not just Drought or ‘Yield per Acre’
Shift from state to the market (Reddy & Mishra, 2012)
Only 35% of small farmers get institutional credit
(Agarwal, 2011)
Significant soil degradation, over exploitation of
ground water & water pollution (Singh, 2000, Shetty, 2004,
Kochar, 2006, etc.)
Punjab’s cancer train (Mishra, 2007, Zwerdling, 2009, Mittal
et. al., 2013, etc)
4. Biotechnology & not GMOs?
Concentration of corporate power
“Resistance is a natural, evolutionary process” – MMBL
on the failure of Bt Cotton against Pink Bollworm,
resulting in rocketing incidences of suicide (Gutierrez et
al. 2015)
GM Mustard currently being pushed. But no scientific
evidence that dmh-11 out-yields existing best
performing varieties and hybrids in India (Kuruganti, 2017)
IAASTD, 2009 warning against transnational
corporations
6. Farmer & Farm autonomy
Seed - native, abundant, diverse and perfectly
adapted to the local ecosystem
Cropping – no monoculture but mixed, multiple &
inter cropping followed
Livestock – income, inputs
Inputs – farm ‘waste’, farm-made micro-nutrient rich
fertilizers, IPM instead of pesticides, labour
Water – Rain-water harvesting, micro-irrigation,
community water-bodies
7. The Results
1. More food at the BOP
2. Higher farmer incomes
3. Low costs, low risk
4. Sharing of seeds & labour
5. Rejuvenation of natural resources & higher
ecosystem services for climate resilience
FAO, 2015, IAASTD, 2009, Barrios, 2007, Eltun et.al., 2002,
Parmentier 2014; De Schutter 2010; Varghese and Hansen-Kuhn
2013; Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2012; Altieri and Nicholls 2008;
Badgley et al. 2007; Pretty, Morison, and Hine 2003; Altieri and
Koohafkan 2008; Van der Ploeg 2008; IAASTD 2009; Altieri and
Toledo 2011, Rosset, 2015, etc
8. Zero Budget Natural Farming
Exploits nature’s hi-tech processes for self-resilience
ZBNF relies on local ingredients to create microbial mixtures
100,000 farmer-innovators
79% higher yield 88% household food autonomy
94% soil conservation 86% greater income
93% seed autonomy 93% reduced need for credit
Khadse, 2017
9. Rural Producer Collectives
Collective agroecological farming, land banks, healthcare,
marketing, micro-enterprise support
430,6976 women farmers
64,000 hectares
$350 million turnover
6,000 joint liability groups
(Arun et. al., 2011,
Raghavan, 2009, Kadiyala,
2004, Devika & Thampi,
2007, etc.)
10. Rural Producer Collectives
300,000 farmers
550,372 hectares
$52 million saved
Develop tools & equipment
Decentralized extension system leading to multiple self-
sustainable livelihood options
Community Managed
Sustainable Agriculture
CMSA
The World Bank, 2009
11. Key Messages for FAO
Internalize all external costs (full-cost accounting) to
measure real impact of agricultural systems
Transnational corporations must not define and guide
India’s agricultural technologies or public institutions,
instead it should be the actual small farmers and their
organizations who should be at the heart of this process,
and technologies must be developed in a participatory
manner.
Embrace agroecology + rural development models like
Kudumbashree as the way forward to build participatory
sustainable agro-ecosystems which can easily feed the
world
Respect farmers as true in-situ innovators
The Green Revolution brought with it the abundant food production and abundant hunger. Consider the following facts:
India holds the second largest agricultural land in the world but over 70% of land holdings are less than 2 ha, meaning 70% of our farmer-land-owners are small and subsistence farmers. Hence any technology has to be relevant and profitable to this group.
Among the top 5 food producing nations of the world
So who produces this vast amount of food? 52% are indebted. we dont want to add further input costs in the form of technologies which will further them into deeper debt but instead, making farmers debt free should be a key aim of agriculture solutions and technologies
The average monthly income of the Indian farm household was estimated to be about $100 by the Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households in its NSS 70th round. This included net receipts from cultivation, farming of animals, non-farm business and income from wages. During the same period, the average monthly consumption expenditure per agricultural household was $97. What this shows is that most of the earnings of the average farm household were spent in meeting consumption expenditures. In fact only 50% of their earnings came from cultivation after using heavy quantities of expensive inputs. No wonder that our farmers are neck deep in debt.
This despite innovative methods by the Government to disguise data or put them under different categories. For eg. Majority of Indian farmers are women. But their suicides are counted as those of farmers’ wives and not of farmers. Even NCRB officials admitted that the data is not being accurate. Sadly, my home state of Karnataka saw the sharpest spike in suicides – 3 fold.
India ranks 114 out of 132 in stunting prevalence, 120 out of 130 in wasting prevalence and 170 out of 194 in anaemia among women of reproductive age in the UNICEF’s Global Nutrition Report for 2016.
These are extremely disturbing parameters for one of the world’s fastest growing economies
Both aspects of the food crisis, the agrarian crisis on the one hand and the malnutrition crisis on the other are related to the fact that food production has become chemical intensive and is focused on “Yield per Acre”.
The Green revolution followed by the economic reforms of 1991, led to a significant withdrawal of the state from agriculture and the entry of transnational corporations, wanting to capitalize on the massive market India offered. Seeds and other inputs were deregulated. The state drastically reduced agricultural investments.
Less than 35% of agricultural credit reaches small and marginal farmers. The large farmers and agribusinesses eat up the lion’s share of credit.
Monoculture and excessive use of chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides became the norm. This resulted in rapid loss of soil organic matter, salinity, water-logging leading to floods. Eutrophication in water bodies due to run-off from excessive use of chemical NPK fertilizers - Environmental consequences of agricultural development: a case study from the Green Revolution state of Haryana, India (Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 82 (2000) 97–103)
3300 Metric Tonnes in 1975 to 6900 Metric Tonnes in 2005. Carries 60 patients every night from the Green revolutionized villages of Punjab, India’s poster state of record food production to the Cancer Hospital. Effects of Environmental Pesticides on the Health of Rural Communities in the Malwa Region of Punjab, India: A Review (Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal Volume 20, 2014 - Issue 2).
Despite these horrors, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry is all set to usher in the 2nd Green Revolution with evermore chemical inputs
This should send out a clear warning sign to all manufacturers of GMOs, governments and international institutions like the FAO. I’m tempted to compare them to steroids. Incredible short term results but causing irreversible long term damage
Agrarian crisis – 2,000 farmers leave agriculture every day, searching for jobs that are not there. 58% of India’s farmers sleep hungry. Agricultural policy continues to focus on production and not the living condition of farmers or how many of their children are malnourished.
When such is the situation, can we do more of the same?
Of course there are GM and non GM forms, very old and modern forms. But no other biotechnology has the lobbying power of the GMO industry. The famous or infamous Big 4 companies control 75% of the world’s agrochemical market & 63% of the seeds. How can we hope for any diversity in either the seeds themselves or competition in pricing. There is no free market in seeds. This brings us to the question of how can a handful of executives sitting in one corner of the world control the food eaten by 6 billion people? Imagine the concentration of power.
Bt Cotton was introduced in 2002. Though insecticide use declined initially, the year 2013 insecticide use is at 2000 levels. Most of them being neonicotinoid, wiping out bee populations. The Indian Government has officially declared that the efficacy of genetically modified Bt cotton in resisting pest attacks has declined over the years and hence reduced the royalty paid to Monsanto by 70%
Mustard is widely used in all Indian cuisines. Trial protocols were rigged for favourable results. Important information is being kept out of the public domain. Supposed to be herbicide tolerant, increasing the use of herbicides, and also the male sterility trait which will spread among Indian mustard, causing yield losses.
No liabilities in place. No redressal mechanism.
Any lab testing/confined field trial/open field trial takes place over a few years – 5,10,20, ok 50. While natural selection and careful breeding of select varieties were being undertaken since 10,000 BC, when man is supposed to have started farming for food. Traditional seeds and practices have withstood innumerable droughts, floods and other natural disasters and fed the world. Why spend billions of dollars trying to tweak one gene in one crop?
The Way Forward is a paradigm shift from monocultures to diversity, from chemical intensive agriculture to ecologically intensive, biodiversity intensive agriculture, from external inputs to internal inputs, from capital intensive production to low cost, zero cost production, from yield per acre to health and nutrition per acre, from food as a commodity to food as a source of life and nourishment.
Ramrati grows as many as 32 different varieties of crops that include wheat, mustard, sugarcane, garlic, coriander, spinach and potatoes for her family’s daily consumption. Hers is a large family of 12, all-living off a 1 acre farm.
India had over 100,000 varieties of rice have flood/drought/salinity/pest tolerant varieties of rice until the Green Revolution was unleashed on them. Now we have less than 3,000 varieties, which if left to market forces, might reduce to 3.
Such cropping patterns will continually enhance soil fertility, make it rich in organic matter, build plant immunity and help the soil’s micro climate
Muscle power – While this may sound strange, over 70% of farms in India are less than 1 hectare. The cost of mechanizing these farms will push already distressed farmers into an abyss of debt. Also, most farm machines, threshers, weeders, harvesters, pesticide sprayers are manufactured for monoculture & literally bulldoze their way through our precious food. Traditionally, farmers and local labourers, work on the farms, carefully and lovingly tending to the diverse needs of every crop.
The Green Revolution’s High Yielding Varieties focused only on our irrigated areas. But Nearly 60% of India’s land is rain-fed. So these localised water sources provide farmers with enough water to grow traditional crops. No large dams which submerge and displace millions of people, and no flood irrigation which is the most inefficient use of water.
Like more carbon and nutrient cycling, soil structure modification, increased amounts of organic matter in the soil, leading to greater robustness and higher adaptability (Soil biota, ecosystem services and land productivity - E C O L O G I C A L E C O N O M I C S 6 4 ( 2 0 0 7 ) 2 6 9 – 2 8 5
A comparison of environmental, soil fertility, yield, and economical effects in six cropping systems based on an 8-year experiment in Norway (Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 90 (2002) 155–168)
77.3 percent of all agricultural households in Karnataka are indebted, which is higher than the national average of 50.1.
Reducing the cost of production and escaping the debt trap was one of the main reasons that interviewees entered ZBNF
Primary research conducted on 97 ZBNF farmers in the state of Karnataka
Aren’t these results so full of hope?
ZBNF relies on only locally available ingredients to create microbial mixtures like jeevamruta that are very very popular and effective. Nothing needs to be purchased from outside and farmers report long term yield increases. no scientific studies are being carried out on such local technologies. The FAO should support scientific research and study into such endogenously developed technologies.
Ashlesha Khadse, Peter Michael Rosset, Helda Morales & Bruce G. Ferguson (2017): Taking agroecology to scale: the Zero Budget Natural Farming peasant movement in Karnataka, India, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2016.1276450
‘‘Kudumbashree”, meaning prosperity of the family, is the state poverty eradication mission initiated in 1998 by the Government of Kerala and is oriented towards women's empowerment. Multiple case studies have been documented about the success of Kudumbashree.
It primarily started off with leasing unused land for cultivation by women
Host of services
No high-tech, bio-tech, corporate power, etc. Just a super dynamic bottom-up approach to all-round rural development
This Producer Collective is in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh where 82% of farmers were under debt. CMSA started in 2004 in 12 villages. Now covers 18 out of 23 districts.
These are just some examples and that India is home to many many agroecological solutions.. Which can be scaled up to the rest of the country and other countries too
Let us move away from short-sighted short-term spurts of quarterly yield increases. The lifetime of man is about 70-80-90 years but the lifetimes of societies are 100’s and 1000’s of years. Let us create a system that is like nature – abundant, beautiful and life-giving.