By Mithilesh Kumar Sinha | EMN
Agro ecology i.e. the Zero Budget Natural Farming is the foundation of sustainable agriculture as well as sustainable food security. Agro ecological farming is one of our best hopes for feeding a hungry world — especially under conditions of increasing social and environmental stress It’s called food democracy. Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said, ““Hunger is not an issue of charity, it is an issue of justice.” Food is not simply a commodity, but a throbbing and dynamic expression of history, culture and civilisation. It not only represents a way of life, it is life itself. Food is an inalienable, fundamental and sacred right.
Farming the land as if nature doesn’t matter has been the model for much of the India’s food production system for long time. The results haven’t been pretty: depleted soil, chemically fouled waters, true family farms all but eliminated, a worsening of public health and more.
Over one billion hungry people go to bed every day all over the world; this can be termed as our most tragic achievement in modern days. We have to reclaim our right to food, nutrition and food safety. The need is to produce food where the poor and hungry live and to boost agricultural investment in these regions. Food democracy is the new agenda for ecological sustainability and social justice.
The Green Revolution India attained national food self-sufficiency 35 years ago through investment in technology, institutions and infrastructure, but still 35 per cent Indians remains food insecure. In India the low income of the majority of the population and high food prices prevent complete food security for all. Surging food grain prices and worsening global supplies are challenging the food security in India. The grain yield of Indian farmers is not going up and there is growing gap between demand and supply. After three decades of relatively comfortable production and availability of food grains, India once again seems to be sliding back to those humiliating days of 1960’s we used to live from ship to mouth on imported wheat obtained from the USA.
India is facing several new problems, of which the following are important: First, increasing population leads to increased demand for food and reduced per capita availability of arable land and irrigation water. Second, improved purchasing power and increased urbanisation lead to higher per capita food grain requirements due to an increased consumption of animal products. Third, there is increasing damage to the ecological foundations of agriculture, such as land, water, forests, biodiversity and the atmosphere and there are distinct possibilities for adverse changes in climate and sea level. Fourth, while dramatic new technological developments are taking place, particularly in the field of biotechnology, their environmental, food safety and social implications are yet to be fully understood. Finally, gross capital formation in agriculture is tending to decline in both public and private sectors during the present decade. The rate of growth in rural non-farm employment has been poor.
To all the problems faced by the farmers Agro ecology is the key answer. Agro ecology is the truly green revolution we need for this century. It invites us to embrace the complexity of Nature: it sees such complexity not as a liability, but as an asset. The farmer, in this view, is a discoverer: he or she proceeds experimentally, by trial and error, observing what consequences follow from which combinations, and learning from what works best —even though the ultimate “scientific” explanation may remain elusive. This is empowering: the farmer is in the driver’s seat, where she constructs the knowledge that works best in the local context in which she operates. In contrast, so-called “modern” agriculture, which is in fact twentieth-century agriculture, did the exact opposite: it sought to simplify Nature. What to do on the field was defined by whatever was prescribed by « science » developed in laboratories. The path from research to practice was unidirectional, and it was seen as unproblematic: since solutions were based on science, they were considered universally applicable. The experiential knowledge of the farmer was irrelevant at best; at worst, it was treated as « prejudice », and as an obstacle to the top-down implementation of sound scientific prescriptions from “experts”.
Agroecology, a farming approach that mimics natural ecosystems, is an alternative method to conventional farming that can produce more food using fewer resources. It must be recognised as the way forward for the food, nutritional security and livelihood security of the small and marginal farmers across India. It is free from debt and suicide because Small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods.
As a social movement, agro ecology encourages peer-to-peer exchanges of information between farmers. It prioritizes local solutions relying on local resources. And it transforms the relationship between the farmer and the « expert » from the department of agriculture or from the international agency, not in order to reverse it and to replace one hierarchy with another, but in order to move towards the co-construction of knowledge, as most clearly illustrated by participatory plant breeding.
It promises inclusiveness, participation, livelihood generation, the stemming of migration to cities, empowerment of the small farmer, and the stimulation of family farming practices.
