Natwarbhai by his beloved rice fields
The small farmer is increasingly getting the short shrift, and
control over farming is moving into the hands of the private corporate
sector. This does not paint a happy picture.
Natwar Sarangi could eat a new variety of rice every day
of the year. None of it bought in the market. When I met this
remarkable farmer in a small village in Odisha, I realised the magical
potential of India’s ‘ordinary’ peasants. A potential sadly neglected by
our agricultural bureaucracy and ‘development’ planners.
Natwarbhai,
80+, is a resident of Narishu village, near Niali in Cuttack district. A
retired schoolteacher, he has been practising organic farming for the
last decade or so, and swears by its potential to feed India’s
population. He says some of the varieties he grows yield over 20
quintals per acre, higher than the so-called ‘high-yielding’ varieties
that farmers around him get after using chemical fertilizers and
pesticides. And he spends much less, since his main inputs are gobar,
natural pesticides when occasionally needed, and labour.
Natwarbhai
was earlier a ‘modern’ farmer, lured into it by officials and traders,
involving high-yielding varieties, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.
One day, while watching a labourer spray Carbofuran (a highly toxic
pesticide), he was horrified to see him stagger and collapse. Rushed for
treatment, the worker survived, but not Natwarbhai’s faith in the new
agriculture. Especially after the labourer told him: “I could not
breathe, my head was reeling”; and especially after, having buried the
remaining stock of Carbofuran in a pit in his fields, Natwarbhai “saw
dead snails, snakes, and frogs floating in the water that had
accumulated there; I immediately wondered what would be happening to the
earthworms and micro-organisms that I knew kept the soil alive.”
Natwarbhai
switched to organic inputs, but with the high yielding varieties that
the agricultural establishment had distributed. His son Rajendra, by now
having become involved in a number of environmental movements, advised
him to try traditional crop varieties. The problem was, most such
varieties had gone out of cultivation in the area.
Around
this time (1999), along with Rajendra another young man of the village,
Jubraj Swain, had been active with relief and reconstruction work after
a super-cyclone. Now they set off to find traditional rice varieties;
travelling over 5000 km within (and a bit outside) Odisha, they brought
back dozens of varieties still being grown by so-called ‘backward’
farmers. Natwarbhai tried them all, noting down their names,
characteristics, and productivity. He and Jubraj continued even after
the tragic death of Rajendra due to cerebral malaria, eventually
reaching the astounding figure of 360 varieties (90per cent of these
from Odisha). When I expressed astonishment at this, Natwarbhai laughed:
“we are aiming to have at least 500. This is in any case only a small
fraction of the total diversity that Indian farmers have created”.
So
true. I remember when coordinating India’s National Biodiversity
Strategy and Action Plan process a decade ago, I had come across the
mindboggling fact that the country’s rice diversity was anything between
50,000 and 300,000 varieties!
How does Natwarbhai
keep track of this diversity, year after year? He said he and his
colleagues kept an album, in which they noted down each variety’s
characteristics. I was later shown a two-volume set of this album by
Sudhir Pattnaik of the Oriya journal Samadrusti; it had tiny
packets of each kind of rice variety, with key features of their growth,
performance, and values written alongside.
Diversity
was nice, but would it feed India’s growing population? Natwarbhai was
categorical: “Without doubt. Firstly, I get as much or more average rice
production on my land as those using chemicals in this region;
secondly, I can grow pulses as a next crop, and then gourds or other
crops as the third … all on the same plot of land. And I get better
fodder and mulching material. Overall productivity is therefore higher
than my neighbours who use new seeds and chemicals. If land is not
turned to non-food cash crops like tobacco, we would easily produce
enough food with organic farming.”
So why then were
his neighbours not switching to organic? Natwarbhai explained that the
government and corporations were constantly giving ‘incentives’, e.g.
subsidies on chemicals, and filling the cultivators’ minds with promises
of bumper crops and high returns. Another factor was that many of the
traditional varieties had tall stalks, and ‘lodged’ (fell down) if there
were unseasonal rains. But Natwarbhai asserted that even with this,
productivity did not drop significantly, provided it did not keep on
raining. Yet another reason was that many of the lands here were being
cultivated by sharecroppers, who had to do what their absentee landlords
told them to.
I reflected on this a bit. Farmers
here were probably also being seduced by news from other regions of
India, some of which had achieved over 30 quintals per acre; no-one was
telling that this was possible only with increasing amounts of external
inputs, that the land would simply not sustain this intensity of
cultivation for long, and that growing costs of inputs would eventually
reduce profit margins. Official records showed that in any case, HYV
rice had yielded an average of around 15 quintals in Orissa.
Other
farmers were slowly getting interested in Natwarbhai’s methods. He and
others have organised dozens of meetings with farmers, and offered free
seeds for those willing to test them out (on condition that if they had a
good crop, they would return twice the amount, to go into a grain
bank). The journal Samadrusti also did its bit in public
outreach. If only the government would help, these efforts would go much
further. Unfortunately even civil society organisations were not always
helpful; Natwarbhai pointed to a patch of black-grain paddy (Kali Jiri)
swaying gently in the breeze, and sadly recounted how an institution
from Chennai run by a famous agricultural scientist had taken some
samples, and then claimed credit for the variety!
I
asked Jubraj why he had not gone looking for a job in the city, like his
other young colleagues? He was, after all, a graduate in history. His
answer was simple: “I enjoy this. I think it is more worthwhile than a
job in the city”. Productivity on his land? “I’m getting 18-20 quintals
per acre; those using new seeds and chemicals here were getting less,
while spending more.” In a general scenario of the newer generations
turning away from occupations like farming, it was good to see the young
man wanting to carry on Natwarbhai’s mission.
In a
recent address to an international conference on biodiversity in
Hyderabad, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: “Biodiversity, found in
our forests and our fields, could provide us keys to the solutions of
the future. So we need to build a movement to conserve traditional
varieties of crops.” Nice words. But the Indian government’s
agricultural policies and programmes have systematically destroyed the
diversity and knowledge of thousands of years of intelligent, innovative
farming systems. Increasingly they are marginalising the small
cultivator, and handing over controls over farming to the private
corporate sector. Efforts like Natwarbhai’s and Jubraj’s, small as they
may seem, are crucial elements of sustainability that India is going to
desperately need when its food production systems face ecological and
social collapse.
Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh, Pune
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