MOST people are not aware that the modern brand ‘organic’ in food spread worldwide from South Asia. In 1905 the British sent their Imperial economic botanist, Albert Howard, to undivided India to ‘improve’ the quality of agriculture and set up an Agriculture University at Pusa in Bihar. Howard, however, found fertile soils and no pests in the fields. He remarkedly wrote, ‘I decided to make the peasant and the pest my professor.’

He studied agriculture through these ‘teachers’ in the context of South Asia. His studies went on to be published as the classic, The Agricultural Testament, a book which conceived the organic movement worldwide, right from Rodale Institute in the United States to the Soil Association in England. In the present times, a mechanistic and reductionist world-view has brought about a widespread assumption that Nature is dead and that the Third World, including the subcontinent, needs help at every level. This has led to violence against nature and the weaker sections of society in non-industrial cultures.

The slogan of the South Asian Journey talks of the connection between diversity, empowerment and peace. These facets are deeply linked through the subcontinent’s food and agriculture systems. Diversity connects the living world. Separation comes from uniformity. Monocultures create divisions because they don’t have the ingredients of synergy. Much of our calculus has continued looking and measuring the world in a century old outmoded paradigm. The potential for transformation and transition is what counts, not a static, determinative entity. The variable benefits of mycorrhizal fungi in organic soils help build fertility and allow different plants to get the nutrients and minerals. This is a known fact.

Take the case of pollinators. The pollinators, as the United Nations has assessed, are contributing majorly to our food systems. Navdanya’s ongoing research on pollinators shows a 30 per cent increase in food productivity due to pollination. But we don’t see pollinators when we think of food and end up using every chemical in our arsenal of poison to kill them. For example, the Monarch butterfly in the US is down to 10 per cent of its original population because of the increased spraying of a herbicide called Roundup owing to spread of Roundup ready Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Now that the WHO has found that it is a carcinogen, there is a proposition to protect the Monarch under the Special Species Act. Sri Lanka banned Roundup for sale because it was found linked to kidney failure. Now Argentinians have found it linked to birth defects. We are talking about potential damage to the world at large. Not only is it damaging to our health and the health of species, but it is also reinforcing the idea of violence against diversity, therefore creating a dangerous disconnect.

 

Diversity is also the most important companion of the poor. Biological diversity allows them their livelihoods. In India, where poverty levels are already high, we now face epidemics like food-related illnesses – 600 million diabetics and 18 million cancer victims. If we want profound peace, cultural dialogue and ecological sustainability, what activity could be better than one we cannot escape two or three times a day? Each of us engages in this celebration of diversity, making peace and ensuring health through our engagement with food culture.

My book, Stolen Harvest, talks about the fact that we are now in a food dictatorship. You have to use the same instruments you fight dictatorships with to build spaces of freedom for people, and every activity of creative engagement with food is an opening up of such a space. If food has become the war, you have to resist the war through food. For instance, there has been a campaign against Coke and Pepsi in India as they leave no drinking water for women. As a result two of their plants have been asked to shut down. But there remain 88 more where women have to walk ten miles for water so that Coke can sell for 12 rupees what it makes for 20 paisa (1/60th the amount). This makes no sense. It is also toxic. There is an impending need to spread an empowering movement to create freedom zones for seed freedom and food freedom – areas where people produce and consume their food in ways that are not ruled under this dictatorship fuelled by the control of the media and global corporations.

 

An important aspect of empowerment is economics. There is no place more promising than ecological agriculture. The paradigm we have developed in agriculture is based on introducing chemicals in farming to enhance food productivity. We have come to treat organic home-made food as unhygienic, and hazardous toxic unnaturally packaged food as safe. Something has gone radically wrong here. The reduction of natural food to a hazard has happened because it was taken out of its cultural space into the domain of commerce. Industrial and chemical agriculture is justified on grounds that it is a better way of feeding the world and removing poverty. Nothing could be farther from the truth considering that the makers of weapons of mass destruction and the chemical industrialists of modern wars are now the controllers of the seed supply. And they have huge advertising budgets – ensuring the wrong message reaches people.

I did my first study on agriculture in 1984, at the peak of the Punjab violence, to understand that if chemicals made farmers of Punjab prosperous, why were they taking to guns and bombs? And when I did the calculus in terms of soil fertility, the abundance of water, the diversity and the sovereignty of determining what will grow, what price will it sell at and where it will be sold, I found that the farmers had actually become poorer. In a similar analysis in Nigeria with Boko Haram, we found that Lake Chad is nothing compared to what it earlier was. The disappearance of water has sown the seeds of conflict. The 2009 drought in Syria displaced a million people. And it is a historical fact that all the conflicts and violence begin when states don’t respond to the problems at their ecological and economic roots.

 

The drainage of wealth out of agriculture for toxic chemicals is the foremost reason for poverty in South Asia. For instance, in case of untimely storms in North India, all the chemically farmed wheat fields of Rajasthan, UP and Bundelkhand get devastated, while the organic wheat fields survive. This is so because the soil is where the real resilience and strength lies and organic farming doesn’t meddle with the nutrition quotient of the soil. As part of my studies on climate change and agriculture, I wrote a book called Soil Not Oil, where we showed that 40 per cent of the Green House gas emissions come from chemical farming and globalization. Based on the calculations, one can say that 100 per cent of the emissions gap could be dealt with by organic farming. This could be done by adding two tonnes per hectare of organic matter, which could pull out enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to bring the predicted temperature change to two degrees and average concentration of Green House Gases in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.

Taking from such studies, we have created two new measures. One is agriculture for nourishment – which considers nutrition per acre instead of health per acre. The long neglected knowledge of women is most appropriate for this measure. They are the ones who thought of nutrition in their little kitchens as they quietly kept growing vegetables to feed their children. They grew millets and mandua while the colonized men considered white rice to be superior. We at Navdanya celebrate this truth as Mahila Anna Swaraj: Food Sovereignty in Women’s Hands, which is the knowledge of diversity of nutrition, and the food to remove poverty.

The second major shift we have proposed is wealth per acre to assess true costs of the agriculture system. It attacks one of major problems of our economic calculus that externalizes all costs. We cheat ourselves to showcase growth. But in China, it is clear that environmental damage is nine times the growth. And in India we did the calculation for industrial and chemical farming: the destruction is 1.2 trillion dollars of environmental externalities. And it ends up being the river’s polluted water you cannot drink, it ends up being the disappearance of butterflies which cannot pollinate your crops, dead soils – siphoning off your money for poisons and seeds when you could have your own seed banks, your own ecological fertilizers, and your own pest control systems. The only way we can counter this trend is through resilience.

In these times of climate change and violence, this resilience can act as a starting point for Sasians to realize that the lines that were drawn to divide us are artificial and till the time we treat them as unchanging, we will continue to divide ourselves. It is when we become conscious that our divisions were part of an historical error and we make new creative connections to transcend these divisions and borders that we will create a new South Asia of peace and prosperity.