worth reading ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Great Transition Network <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 8:56 AM Subject: Farming for a Small Planet: Agroecology Now (GTN Discussion) To: [email protected]

From Rahul Goswami <[email protected]>

------------------------------------------------------- [Moderator's Reminder: The last day for comments is Thursday (3/31), after which Frankie will respond.] Menus at fast food restaurants and counters are today as mystifying as the 'apps' that are to be found crowding the screens of young people's mobile phones. There are now, in our bigger cities in India, 'apps' to buy food with (or through). These seem to be popular with a generation that is young - usually 20 to 30 years old - and which lives in shared rented flats near their places of work, which often is the info-tech industry, and is otherwise the finance, retail, services, logistics or trading industries. If there is one aspect common to where these food 'app', or menu 'app', users work then it is that they do not work in what my generation knew with some familiarity as the manufacturing or the public sectors. This is uncomfortable, for we have always been a civilisation that counted our farmers, rivers, forests, temples and traditions. In Sanskrit there is a word used to describe the farmer. It is 'annadaata', which is, the giver of grain. This reverential word is found in every major language spoken and written in India today. The 'annadaata' fed his or her family, fed those who needed rice, gave the rice to be used for the ceremonies and religious observances in the temples, sold the rice to the dealers in grain. For many generations, the forms in which our farmers harvested the crops they cultivated were the forms in which they were bought, stored, cooked and eaten. Even during the formative decades of 'modern' India - that is, the years after our Independence and until the time when we began to be considered by the Western world as a country becoming a 'market economy' - a household rarely owned a refrigerator. We bought rice, vegetables and the occasional fish or poultry from the market, cooked them fresh at home, and ate our meals fresh. A vegetarian meal may keep overnight to serve as a breakfast for the following morning, and in north and parts of central India, where what we call 'roti', the roasted discs of unleavened bread, is made out of wheat or barley, the 'roti' will also keep overnight. To keep food longer, it had to be processed, that is, its nature had to change so that it would not spoil in the climate. Thus, rice was commonly parboiled and stored, or parboiled and flattened to become 'puffed'. Every rice-growing and rice-consuming region, from a single valley to a river basin, had its own methods and preferences of keeping food from spoiling, and finding ways to store that semi-prepared food. This was a kind of processing and most of it was done in our homes. Surely it wasn't that long ago? But memories such as these, so vivid to 50 and 60 year olds, are today seen as evoking times of hardship, want and shortage, are seen as recalling times that an agrarian country suffered 'hunger' before it became globalised and a 'market' of some kind. Such sharp experiences, for that is what the most vivid memories are made of, are considered to be uncomfortably close to the era when famines were recorded, one after another, during the 19th century especially (but also the Bengal famine of 1943-44). Those appalling records are presented as the rationale for the set of ideas and practice (technical and economic in approach and intent) that came to be called self-sufficiency in foodgrain, which I remember first hearing as a boy, and which much later has come to be known as food security. The links were taught to us early - famine, food shortage, hunger - but what was left out was more important, and that was the policies of the colonial occupiers (the East India Company and then Great Britain, as the country used to be called) and the consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and particularly in western Europe. Like the devastating famines in India of the 19th century, the Bengal famine of 1943-44 was an artificial shortage of foodgrain, for what had been harvested was shipped out instead of being sold or distributed at home. These aspects of the relatively recent famines of India, which robbed our ancestors of parents and children, were hidden until we uncovered them out of curiosity about food histories that must have been written (or retold) but were scarcely to be found. Even today, after so much research (especially by the last generation) has become available about the effects of colonial policies on the movements and shortages of food in India, the bogey of food shortage and hunger is still dressed in the garb of technical shortcoming, that our farmers do not know how to increase yields because their knowledge is deficient, insufficient, inefficient. It is a slander of a collective that has supported through its efforts and wisdom a civilisation for centuries. As it was with the colonial era, so it is with the pervasive apparatus of trade and finance which finds its theatre in globalisation, or the integrated world economy. One of its first tasks was to denigrate and run down a complex and extremely rich tradition of agricultural knowledge - but even to call it 'agricultural knowledge' is misleading, for its diverse strands of knowledge, awareness and practice encompassed our relationship with nature and natural forces, and our duties towards state, for faith and religion, towards society - while simultaneously promoting a 'scientific' approach that could derive its authority only by first asserting that what it was replacing was not science. This came to be known as a 'development paradigm' which countries like India and civilisations like the one I belong to were given prescriptions for. Many of these prescriptions were and continue to be the equivalent of chemotherapy and radiation as used for the treatment of cancer - destroy in the name of curing. This is why in our regions (they are entirely ecological regions, our river valleys and plains, we saw no reason to call them anything but the old names they had been given, for words like 'ecology' and agro-ecology only now convey similar meaning) which grew rice, millets, barley, sorghum, wheat, pulses, seasonal fruits and vegetables, a new identity was announced. This was done early in the 'green revolution', a programme that to our 'annadaatas' is no less devilish than the industrial revolution in western Europe was to the very fabric of those societies. The new identity was 'high yielding variety' and these new hybrids were in no way better than what they were given the power to replace. They neither yielded more than the current varieties, nor did they contain more nutritive elements, nor did their plant matter prove to have more uses than what they replaced, nor could they survive during inclement phases of a seasonal climate with a cheery hardiness the way our traditional varieties could. They were inferior in every way—how could they not be for they had emerged from a science whose very gears and levers were designed by the global market which ruled, paid for and determined that science? Youngsters in the India of the 1970s, whether in cities, towns or villages, knew little of these changes and what they portended. Our preoccupations were study, work and attending to the daily and seasonal chores of family. But already, the difference between us and them was being introduced into our quite impressionable lives. Cola, hamburger, popcorn, blue jeans, rock music and behavioural accessories that accompanied such produce had appeared in our midst, via many illicit routes (in those days the Coca Cola company had been expelled). Looking back, such products and behaviours seemed desirable because two important factors worked together - the impact of 'western' (mainly American) popular culture vehicles and in particular its motion picture industry, and the accounts of those Indians, young and old, who had left their country to become (mainly) American. It was a time when our world was still considered to be dominated by superpowers and lesser power blocs (we were neither), but the friendship India had with the Soviet Union, the USSR, at no time became manifest through food and drink, behaviours and attitudes. Why did one influence but not the other? Years later, when working with the Ministry of Agriculture on a lengthy programme intended to strengthen our agricultural extension system, I found a part of the answer. Even in the early 1950s, what became our national agricultural research system, under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (itself a nationalised version of the Imperial Council of the British colonial era), had been partially designed and implemented by the US Agency for International Development and facilitated by the Rockefeller Foundation. A full decade before the mechanics of the 'green revolution' set to work in the plains of northern India, the state agricultural universities and the specific crop institutes they cooperated with were organised along operational lines drawn up by foreign advisers (the early FAO was present too). And that early indoctrination led to one of the most invisible yet long-running collaborations between 'formal' crop science personnel from India and the American land grant colleges with their extensive networks of industry interests. As a young man in my early twenties, I would often hear about the 'brain drain', which is the term we used to describe those students and scholars who had earned degrees from our Indian Institutes of Management or our Indian Institutes of Technology and who had made their way abroad, most of them to the USA. These were publicly funded institutes, and the apt question at the time was: why were we investing in their education only to lose them? I had been utterly unaware at the time that a similar 'brain drain' had taken place in the agricultural sciences, which by the first decade of the 2000s did not require the 'drain' aspect at all, for by then the mechanisms of globalisation, aided by the wiles of technology and finance, meant that the agendas of industrial agriculture could be followed by our national agricultural research system in situ. Of ecology, agro-ecology, environment and organic there was barely a mention, so successfully had the 'food security' threat begun to be spun. It is a recent history that has taken shape while our urban and rural societies have worried themselves about how to escape monetary poverty, to escape hunger, to escape deprivations of every conceivable kind, and to pursue 'development' of every conceivable kind. While this has happened, the historians that we needed - I call them historians loosely, they needed only to observe and record and retell, but from the point of view of our joint families and our villages - to record such a change were very much fewer than we needed. It may seem inconceivable that in a country of our size and population - which crossed one billion about a year before the 2001 Census - we lacked appropriate recordists but this too is a matter of selective exclusion (like the story about the hybrid seeds) for there are essays and tracts aplenty in our major languages and in regional scripts that detail the erosion of tradition because of the assaults of modern 'development' on our societies. But these are not in English, they are not 'formal', they carry no references and citations, they are published in local district towns, they are read by farmers, labourers, retired postmasters and assistant station masters but not by internationally recognised macro-economists or nationally feted captains of industry; they are not considered chronicles of social change and of the studied, deliberate, ruthless dismantling from our societies their traditions, amongst which is the growing of food. Yet, because we are a big country, an ancient civilization, and because we have 167 million rural households (out of 246 million altogether), the sources of tradition (as we first read about in school) are extant, they are evolving and they are still very close to what in Sanskrit we call 'prakruti', that is, nature. (1) In the district of Pathanamthitta, Kerala, south India, several sacred groves are venerated by the residents of the villages along the river Pamba, whose source lies high up in the Western Ghats. Here they maintain sanctified forest reserves (not administratively mandated ones) and have established rules and customs to ensure their protection. The socio-cultural norms governing the sacred groves prohibit the felling of trees, the collection of any material from the forest floor, the taking of the life of all animals. Because of these protective restrictions, faithfully followed over generations, the sacred groves are now havens of biodiversity and of the wild relatives of crops. (2) In the district of Solan, Himachal Pradesh, north India, hill villages have noted with worry the trend of climate change and variability which has become more unpredictable over the past decade. Spells of heavy rain which used to be rare 25 to 30 years ago are now common, plant diseases have appeared which were unknown only a generation earlier, and the yields of crop staples upon which the village depends - such as 'rajma' (kidney bean) and 'urad' (a pulse) - are dropping. Under such circumstances village administration officials together with women's and self-help groups hold teaching and practical sessions on water management; have reintroduced organic farming for their habitat including training in the preparation of different kinds of composts and bio-pesticides; are collecting seeds of the hill millet species endemic to the region in order to widen the crop biodiversity they rely upon, for the millet is hardy and nutritious. (3) The village of Mendha Lekha in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra state, is well known for its practice of village sovereignty and the community-based management of natural resources. All decisions related to the management of the forest and the village are taken through the 'gram sabha' (village council). The sabha relies on the advice of what are called 'abhyas gats', which are study groups. There are many study groups for different aspects of the collective life of Mendha Lekha and these assemble regularly to discuss village and forest related issues. Notably in recent years the sabha has banned the cutting of fruit trees, stopped the use of bamboo by a paper mill, banned the use of chemical poisons for fishing, relies on voluntary labour for the construction of gully plugs so that erosion is prevented, and rosters a daily forest vigilance committee. (4) Changes to the forest - deforestation and new settlement zones - in the district of South Sikkim, north-east India, has altered the forest structure, lowering the capacity of the forest to capture runoff water from the surface compared with 30 years earlier when the forest was denser. Supported by the state administration, a response that has been instrumental in reversing the degradation relies on methods long held as traditional knowledge - multiple small and shallow rectangular trenches dug in the water catchment area. These hold water and promote its percolation into the sub-soil of the hills. This community programme has contributed to the transition of Sikkim into India's first state that practices only organic cultivation. Examples such as these are very much more than encouraging: they are genuinely uplifting, and they are to be found not because of the inter-governmental agencies with their impressive earth system sciences projects bristling with (expensive) specialists, not because of the success of even one of the many United Nations agencies achieving even one of the many development goals they so solemnly (and expensively) have set over the last 30 years, not because of the tens of millions of euros and dollars spent (granted, loaned, round-tripped) by the multi-lateral development banks or funds (World Bank, Asian Development Bank and their ilk). These examples, and a large number like them, are to be found because of local efforts entirely, efforts that shrewd local administrations have sided with and supported, but local efforts that have emerged only because the essential fabric and strength of the societies that bore them have remained considerably intact. And so I see the 'agroecology now' part of Frances Moore Lappé's essay, 'Farming for a Small Planet', as dependent entirely upon the manner in which our villages, their households and especially their religious and social institutions, act as part of their collective dharma. It is an age-old tie, that of the cultivation of the land with the religion of a civilisation. We have in the Rig Veda as one amongst a number of verses that concern cultivation, this one: "Harness the ploughs, fit on the yokes, now that the womb of the earth is ready, to sow the seeds therein; and our praise to Indra, may there be abundant food, may the grains fall ripe towards the sickle." Likewise from the Yajur Veda: "May the seeds be potent, may the rains be plentiful, and may the grains ripen through the nights and days, the 'pakshas' of fifteen days, and the month of thirty days and the year comprising the seasons in the regular order." (Two 'pakshas' of 15 days each, one for the waxing moon and the other for the waning.) Rice paddy holds religious significance everywhere it is grown in India (and indeed in neighbouring countries, and those of south-east Asia). The state of Chhattisgarh is one of the centres of diversity of rice and here the festival called 'akti' reinforces the many community-based principles of biodiversity conservation. In the rice paddy cultivating regions of southern India, rice grains are mixed with turmeric and 'kumkum' (the vermilion powder used to make the women's bindis and men's sectarian markings on the forehead) and this is called 'akshata', to be used as a symbol of blessing in many ceremonies. Just as it is central to worship and observances, so too are our grains and vegetables central to medicine, that is, traditional medicine and ayurveda. In north coastal Maharashtra, villages continue to grow varieties of paddy for medicinal use: one variety ('mahadi') that helps recovery from wounds and fractures, another for convalescing patients to give them strength ('kali khadsi'), another that suits the preparation of healing gruel (white 'dangi'), still another that encourages lactation for nursing mothers (red 'dangi'), and yet another that helps weak mothers recover from delivery ('malghudya'). Often, as I have heard during wanderings as a teenager in these coastal tracts, these were originally found growing near an old temple tank, and the seed had been carefully preserved. With traditions such as these, it should be scarcely conceivable that any civilisation, any country, any primarily agrarian region proceed towards the 'development' paradigm, either misled about its meaning or coerced towards it. This is nonetheless what has happened and what commenced for many countries in Asia not in the immediate aftermath of winning freedom from colonial rule but, in many cases, earlier, when the grain, forest, plantation and spice riches of our lands were commodified and shipped out. For such export to be maintained, entirely new administrations and institutions were created (state forestry is one such, which brought in barriers between forests and agricultural lands that never existed, the resulting havoc of which is still haunting our historically most agriculturally abundant regions, for the forests have with good reason been called the primogenital parent of cultivated varieties, and indeed our medicinal flora). Through these new state structures emanated public works - canals, barrages, dams, railways, telegraph lines, ports, and the factories and industrial estates - because of which for the first time our societies encountered an abstract idea called the agricultural gross domestic product. This form of enumerating the seasonal wealth of a people deployed, at scales not seen before, the economic nature of the state and when that happened - aided and abetted by the first commodity exchanges, merchant banks, cooperatives movements and new western-oriented administrative cadres - the shearing away of the act of cultivation from the principles of ecology in our civilisations occurred: there remained neither the spiritual grounding nor the traditional communitarian values. 'Modern' education took over from there, the 'development paradigm' I have mentioned earlier, and the speed of the new macro-economics was such that the pursuit of products rapidly replaced the time and effort spent on observances and customs. No wonder then that the urban budget menus of today describe substances and their treatments unrecognisable to the parents of those of us in what is called middle age. The very material of our primary crops - the grains and cereals, the pulses and legumes, the vegetables leafy and tuberous, the fruit - are treated as raw material in the way that inorganic substances are, and refashioned according to the dictates of a mechanistic view of everything that grows tended or untended in nature. This is called 'food' and is anything but, yet our youth and our labouring middle classes are buying it and eating it, with the consequences to their health and their cognition, to their endocrinal and hormonal humours only now being recognised, for censoring sciences are now being beaten back. Our opponents are the urbanisers and the globalisers, the agents of a behavioural homogeneity that has been thrust into practically every country and territory by being called economic growth or its twin, development (which has lately spawned a clone called sustainable development). But civilisations, like agricultural villages, do not find meaning through economic growth. They have philosophies, they have cultures, they have profound and ancient religions, they have spiritual practices rich with depth and meaning, they have heritage tangible and intangible, they have craft and art in forms innumerable. It is amongst these meanings that agro-ecology finds a place. With regards, Rahul Goswami *************************************** Tuesday, March 1, 2016

From Paul Raskin

GTN Colleagues: The MARCH DISCUSSION will focus on a key dimension of transition: the future of agriculture. I am pleased to kick it off by sharing with you Frances Moore Lappé’s GTI essay, “Farming for a Small Planet: Agroecology Now.” Please access it at www.greattransition.org/publication/farming-for-a-small-planet. Frankie’s best-selling “Diet for a Small Planet,” first published in 1971, mapped the way to better eating; her new essay points to a better way of farming. The essay sharply critiques the system design and dire consequences of industrial agriculture, and finds hope in the alternative agroecological model now gaining traction. This debate about farming systems defines a critical field of struggle for the larger Great Transition movement. The essay touches on many key questions: Is the industrial model doomed? Can ecological farming meet the nutrition needs of a large and growing world population? What’s the scope for change within the reigning political economy? What are the implications for development in poor countries? Let’s extend our winning streak of rich, animated discussions! If you work in this neck of the woods, please draw from your experience to comment on the essay and the issues it raises. The rest of us will have questions to ask and connections to make. Remember, both expansive and brief comments are appreciated. Comments are welcome through MARCH 31. Frankie’s essay and selected comments will be published in April, along with an interview with Wes Jackson and a review by Randy Hayes, both long-time leaders of the effort to forge a society in harmony with the land. Looking forward, Paul Raskin GTI Director GTI’S PUBLICATION CYCLE: ODD-NUMBERED months are for discussions of new essays or viewpoints for GTN eyes only. EVEN-NUMBERED months are for publication and distribution of the piece. You will receive discussion comments by email. You can also access them on-line at www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-forum, where you will find, as well, an archive of previous discussions. ________________________________________ Hit reply to post a message Or see thread and reply online at www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/173-farming-for-a-small-planet-agroecology-now/1512 Need help? Email [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------- Hit reply to post a message Or see thread and reply online at http://www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/173-farming-for-a-small... Need help? Email [email protected] -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/