Sustainable agriculture

We need farming systems which would sustain and improve agriculture, improve community food sovereignty. We want to move towards establishing farming systems that are appropriate for and tolerant towards a specific area. Farmers need to gain more control over the production resources and managing the support systems.  They need help in dealing with risks, vulnerabilities and environmental change, including climate change.

Sustainable agriculture is based on the principle that we must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Our goal is to have healthy, environmentally sound, profitable, human and just food and agricultural systems. Reaching towards this goal is the responsibility of all participants, including farmers, government, researchers, organizations and consumers. Each group can contribute to strengthen the sustainable agriculture community.

History

Agriculture changed dramatically during the last decades, especially since the end of the Second World War. The crisis of food production and a growing population lead to starvation deaths during the 1960s. This called for drastic efforts at achieving food self sufficiency. The action came in the form of the Green Revolution. India choose to modernize its agriculture, by using new technologies, high yielding varieties, chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The country was self reliant for a while, but there were also significant costs. Their traditional agricultural knowledge was neglected. Local farmers became more dependent on external inputs, which led to debts, migrations and farmer suicides.

Since two decades a growing movement for sustainable agriculture encourages innovative and economically viable opportunities and addresses many environmental and social concerns.

In Orissa

Today, Orissa stands at the crossroads. They should address the ecological, economic and socio-cultural crisis. Either by continuing to adopt a model of more external inputs including GM seeds or by choosing ecological agriculture as the only sustainable way out of the crisis. We will try to convince the stakeholders to choose this last option. 

The “Organic farming” being promoted by the government as well as NGOs in the state does not seem to be getting prepared to address this crisis in the making. For, this has been promoting only input replacement – from chemical inputs to non chemical.

Principles

Sustainable agriculture must take into account site-specific characteristics like topography, soil characteristics, climate, pests and local availability of inputs. However several general principles can be applied to help growers select appropriate management practices:

• Selection of varieties that are well suited to the site 
• Diversification of crops and cultural practices to enhance the biological and economic stability
• Improve and protect soil quality
• Efficient and humane use of inputs

What we do? 

Restoring biodiversity

Instead of using a lot of different crops that are natural to the environment, farmers get encouraged to grow single crops. These crops make the eco-system unstable because they are not adapted to the environment and exhaust the soil. In case of pest, disease attack or erratic rain the entire crop may disappear. The over emphasis on only rice and wheat as food grains has disregarded those from the dry and hilly region of Orissa who rely traditionnaly on millets based farming system.
We make efforts to encourage the farmers to go back to producing mixed crops . This gives them a better chance to provide food continuously and it also keeps the soil fertile and clean.

Conservation of seeds

Seeds are the foundation for sustainable agriculture. The agriculture of any state will be as strong as its seed program. Traditionally seeds are the property of the farming community. Farmers relied on farmer-to-farmer distribution and exchange systems to meet their seed requirements. Over centuries farmers, especially women, have identified selected, cultivated, saved and exchanged seeds at the community level. Nowadays the external dependency makes farmers ignore their traditional knowledge and lose their skills.

We want to establish community managed seed banks in the villages to :

• re-establish traditional knowledge and technical skills in producing, maintaining and exchanging seeds
• revive biodiversity by improving the availability of and access to diverse varieties of seeds
• plan and manage the seed requirements in the villages
• achieve seed self-sufficiency at the community level
• secure more space for women to regain their traditional role of seed keepers for their communities

We want to reach these objectives by participatory exercises with local farmers. 

Cash crops

In Orissa there is a shift from growing food crops to cash crops. The present Indian government encourages farmers to grow cash crops, like cotton, chilly, bio-fuel... They convince them by telling that their income will improve. But this is only true when the market price for cash crops is high enough. We want to reveal the real story of farmers becoming even more dependent. If the market price for cash crops goes down, small farmers will have no income and as a disastrous result: no food. We ask farmers in Orissa to think twice before starting to cultivate cash crops. We all need cash, but our essential need is food. We can not eat cotton or bio-fuel.

GM crops and pesticides

Living Farms is opposed to genetically modified organisms (GMO's), toxic pesticides and agrochemical transnational companies. We are not against development and industrie in general. But the core question we like to ask is : “who's prosperity will be promoted?” We want to take care of the earth and improve the wellbeing of all people, not only the proft of a few giant companies.

It is very likely that Genetically Modified (GM) food will soon be launched in India without any label. Consumers will have no choice but become labrats in this genetic experiment. Genetic Modified crops are created by inserting a foreign gene (of bacteria, viruses, spiders...) into a plant.  GMO's should not be released into the environment. There is no adequate scientific understanding of their impact on the environment and human health. Unintended side-effects of genetic modification can be harmful to those who consume it, to those who grow it and also to the environment.

A survey in west-soutern Orissa shows that GM cotton causes health problems to both humans and cattle. People who have come in contact with the cotton exhibite severe allergies and cattle die after feeding on Bt cotton cultivated fields.

Independent scientist tested GM food on rats. The symptoms were alarming: stunted growth, impaired immune systems, potentially precancerous cell growth in the intestines, inflamed kidneys and lung tissue, less developed brain, enlarged livers, pancreases and intestines and higher blood sugar.

Genetically Modified crops also affect the environment. The balance in eco-systems is achieved through interactions between various species over millions of years. It is hard to predict the consequences of playing with this balance. Data from across the world show that some pests have developed resistance to GM crops, so farmers should use even more chemicals (i.e. Bt Cotton). Year after year they are forced to buy the seeds again from the company because usually GM seeds are patented. 

Farmers' suicide

The gradual increase in costs of cultivation due to externalization of inputs especially fertilizers, pesticides and GM seeds, combined with dependency on money lenders for credit and decreasing margins has put the farmers under major threat. Local farmers are suffering because of serious debts. Since 2005 the media reports about Bt Cotton being the cause of many farmers committing suicides after their crop failed. Still many cases remain unreported.

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