Report on Pre-Dissertation Explorations in India
By Elizabeth Louis
2006 J. Watumull Scholar
East-West Center Degree Fellow
Ph.D. Student, Geography
Thanks to the Watumull Scholarship for the
Study of India, I was able to spend 2 ½ months in India, during the
summer of 2006, on an exploratory, pre-dissertation trip to learn more about
contemporary issues related to globalization, development, agriculture,
environmental degradation and biodiversity. My goal for this trip was to
understand how to focus my research on sustainable agriculture so that it would
be beneficial and relevant to the current issues faced by small farmers.
I
spent my first month in India with Navdanya, a program initiated by the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) to conserve agricultural
biodiversity. Navdanya places farmers at the center of agricultural
biodiversity conservation and empowers them to take control over the political,
ecological and economic aspects of agriculture. RFSTE, which was founded in
1982 by Dr. Vandana Shiva, works on agro-biodiversity conservation and
protecting people's rights from threats to their livelihoods and the
environment by centralized systems of monoculture in forestry, agriculture and
fisheries.
In
my month with Navdanya, I learned a great deal more about the complex issues
affecting farmers, from seed sovereignty and corporate control, to drought,
pests and volatile agricultural markets. I spent a week in Delhi volunteering
at Navdanya's organic store and three weeks at Bija Vidyapeeth, Navdanya's
'seed school' in Dehradun, which included an organic farm, a seed bank, and a
soil research lab. Most of my learning occurred through working in the fields
with the farmers, listening to their conversations, and talking to them about
their lives and the issues that confront them. Bija Devi, one of Navdanya's
oldest members and a repository of knowledge on traditional agriculture, shared
with me her perspectives on agricultural biodiversity, gender and livelihood
issues in rural areas.
While
in Dehradun, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Vandana Shiva about how
Navdanya was giving farmers a complete alternative to dependence on corporations
– from acquiring the seed,
through production, processing and trade. She talked about the benefits
and challenges of their sustainable agriculture model and said that their
biggest challenge is figuring out ways of helping farmers to directly market
their products on a large scale. Currently, most of the produce and grain are
bought by Navdanya at 10% above market rates, transported at Navdanya's expense
and delivered to their network members (individuals) in the cities or to their
outlets. This is hardly a sustainable method as farmers are dependent mainly on
Navdanya's infrastructure and as the number of farmers increases, their ability
to accept all of farmers' surplus is becoming strained . I learned later that
marketing produce locally is a major challenge for small organic farmers all
over India. I also discovered that one group, the Deccan Development Society,
is using an innovative alternative public distribution system (PDS) to sell
their products.
When
I applied for the Watumull scholarship, I had talked about visiting local
communities that Navdanya worked with, to better understand their perspectives
on sustainable farming. Unfortunately, I was not able to visit many communities
because farmers were in the process of planting their new round of crops and
Navdanya's staff had completed their community visits for that season. However,
I did have the opportunity to talk with one of their key field coordinators for
the Uttaranchal hill regions, who works very closely with farmers, and to meet other
farmers who visited Navdanya.
After
Navdanya, I spent two weeks with Kalpavriksh, a national environmental NGO
based in Pune. The environment at Kalpavriksh was very dynamic and I especially
benefited from talking with Ashish Kothari, a founding member, who is very
knowledgeable about India's environmental and socioeconomic issues and is also
a very prolific writer on matters of biodiversity conservation. Under Ashish
Kothari's leadership, Kalpavriksh has successfully carried out an ambitious
project of designing the National Biodiversity Action Plan for the Ministry of
Forests and the Environment in India, through widespread grassroots
consultations and awareness involving public hearings, biodiversity festivals,
workshops and seminars, foot marches and boat rallies, questionnaires, and
outreach through mass and folk media.
From
Pune, I traveled south into the Western Ghats in Karnataka State and spent a
few days in Sirsi, where Sunita Rao, one of Kalpavriksh's project managers is working with women
to promote home garden diversity, protect forests, and encourage local seed
exchange networks. They have a nursery of indigenous forest species and are
involved in documenting the home garden diversity of the area, in order to
eventually build up a case for policy change where local varieties of
seeds and organic, sustainable
agriculture becomes the endorsed norm. I also had a chance to talk to Pandurang
Hegde of the Appiko Andolan Movement in Sirsi, inspired by the Chipko movement
in the Gharwal Himalayas. The
Movement works mostly as a watchdog group in the area to document timber
smuggling activities and other issues related to conservation and agricultural
biodiversity. After Sirsi, I spent a week in Kerala, visiting a coffee and
spice estate and the Periyar Tiger Reserve.
Next,
I visited Bangalore and interviewed Vanaja Ramprasad, founder of the Green Foundation, an NGO that supports local
organic farmers and has many similarities with Navdanya. From her, I learned
that one of the biggest obstacles to the organic farming movement is the State
Government of Karnataka, which was pushing floriculture (intensive cultivation
of flowers for export) and contract farming, both of which were environmentally
and socioeconomically unsustainable because of high pesticide use and
redistribution of agricultural land for these unsustainable practices.
My
visit to India coincided with the failure of the Doha Round of the Free Trade
talks due to disagreements on agricultural subsidies in developed countries. In
addition, many farming communities were experiencing high rates of suicides due
to crop failures, the cause of which have been attributed not only to drought, but also to farmer
indebtedness from purchasing fertilizer and pesticides necessary for growing hybrid
and GMO cotton varieties. In spite of the current desperate situation of many
farmers, I learned that there is extreme reluctance on the part of the national
and state governments to support organic farming ventures among small farmers.
Some states, like Uttaranchal, were promoting organic agriculture on the one
hand, and also pushing the use of pesticides and fertilizers on the other. At
the national level policy-makers are still very closed about the long-term
possibilities of sustainable agriculture and are very focused on the issue of increasing food production
through technological means will little regard to the long-term sustainability
or suitability of the crops and technology for a given region. Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ashish Kothari and
others whom I interviewed all talked about the need for research on different
sustainable and conventional agriculture models and encouraged me to do a
comparative study to evaluate the tangible and non-tangible benefits of the
different models.
Thanks
to this experience, I am convinced more than ever of the potential of
sustainable agriculture to address the many adverse impacts of the current
global economic system on livelihoods, pollution and degradation, biodiversity,
economics and food security, natural resource management, and cultural and social practices. As a
result, for my doctoral research, I have decided to examine the effectiveness
of the sustainable farming movement in India in mitigating the impacts on small
and subsistence farmers. The larger questions of how India should proceed on
its development path, and, more specifically, my concern that the current
neo-liberal development policies and accompanying emphasis on free-trade
promotion are not conducive to an environmentally sustainable and socioeconomically
just progress, are my main motivations for choosing this research topic.