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[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=E2=80=
=94how
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 Lapp=C3=A9'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

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Tuesday, March 1, 2016