Rice in Orissa - Life in Orissa
This article is written by Living Farms & published in the Paddy newsletter of the organisation Thanal.
Rice in Orissa is intricately interwoven with its history,culture and traditions, however the present reality of rice is bleak, overrun with greed and impatience and threatened with extinction, and rice conservationists and farmers are fighting a battle for the survival of this food crop which is the life of Asia.
Ratnakar Sahu, a senior sage-like and prominent organic farmer of Orissa who is so deeply entrenched in nature that poisonous snakes live as pets in his home, laments that with the rice culture fast disappearing people have become materialistic and can no longer enjoy the thrill of being a part of ones natural surroundings.
Sri Ratnakar Sahu sums up what he has learnt from the fields. He is today able to define the seven friends and the seven enemies of the farmer. The seven friends are the earth who is the mother, the cow the caretaker, the tree the life force, the water which symbolizes courage, the seed his capital, his friends and cofarmers, the earthworm, micro organisms, birds, bees and the animals, whereas his strength were the farm labourers.On the other hand the seven enemies of the farmer are loans, artificial fertilisers, chemical pesticides, hybrid seeds and GM seeds, wish for a materially luxurious life, laziness, and depletion of natural resources.
Memories haunt
What he says is evident to everyone today. Though living in modern cities, the Oriya is at heart still a villager and misses the familiar scents of fresh hay,boiling paddy, floating chaff and the peculiar strong odours from cattle sheds that once charmed him and soothed his nerves. It pains them that such a life, and the cultures and festivities associated with it, is gone forever and will not return as their children are selling ancestral property and buying apartments in multistoried buildings sprouting in the cities.
Cities too are affected
It is not that the cities are shielded from the effects of reduced interest in the cultivation of rice. The city of Bhubaneswar was surrounded by low lands, fed by the rivers Daya and Kuakhai and other prominent canals like the Taladanda, that were utilized by the farmers for cultivation of paddy. They served as wetlands, water reservoirs and kept temperatures within control. But now thanks to “development” these lands have been filled for residential and industrial purposes. The city is, perhaps as a consequence,witnessing abnormal increases in temperature and also water logging, a phenomenon not noticed a few decades earlier.
Whether Food Security?
Today the cultivation of paddy itself is threatened as farmers are being encouraged to go in for cash crops.The growth of paddy cultivation in the state has become almost stagnant. Farmers are dependant on the market for seeds and the supply is erratic.
While the traditional varieties were pest and disease resistant, the new varieties are notorious for the same.Farmers of Orissa have now become accustomed to spraying the highly toxic pesticide endosulfan twice on the crop. With the increase in cost of chemical inputs – forced down the gullets of farmers who were used to organic cultivation - and the threat of floods and erratic rainfall, everywhere farmers are now abandoning agriculture. Festivals, religious and cultural, that were once vibrant, continue today only as token symbols, their significance forgotten.
Government statistics amply demonstrate how farmers are being encouraged to move away from food crops.Vast stretches of rice fields in the districts of Kalahandi,Rayagada, Bolangir, Gajapati, Ganjam, Sundargarh and Phulbani have today been converted to cotton cultivation. Floriculture is spreading as is the conversion of food crop land to grow biofuels. The farmers who grew rice in their fields have today become dependent on rice doled out under government schemes. The resultant food shortage is being politicized to usher in the biotech revolution.The rice farmer, once the pride of the state, is migrating in search of work. Cultures and festivities have given way to poverty, hunger and sorrow.
Threat from hybrids, modern agriculture
While hybrid varieties are being introduced apparently to improve rice output, Orissa has never been short of rice, it is in fact a rice exporting state. It always was, as the 14th century Chinese writer Wang-Ta-Yuan recorded, but the scientists have raised the bogey of “inadequacy of subsistence farming” to do away with indigenous varieties so that the farmer becomes dependant on the market for seeds. Along with this the scientific skills of both the farmer and his family members - experts in choosing, storing and improving upon seeds - is dying, rues Natabara Sarangi, a retired school teacher and farmer, who conserves more than 300 varieties of rice in his farm.The traditional varieties required very little care and yet gave high yields. A survey conducted by the Central Rice Research Institute in Orissa to document traditional rice varieties has revealed that while high yielding varieties could not tolerate drought conditions followed by cyclonic storms that led to considerable crop loss in a particular year in the Mayurbhanj district of Orissa, the native varieties were not affected.
Monocultures have further depleted the diversity of rice. The entire country is today ruled by a few hundred hybrid varieties against the 2,00,000 traditional varieties endowed with several qualities that once adorned it. Even today, says Natabara Sarangi, one can get more than 50000 traditional varieties if one has the patience to trace them. The Jeypore tract alone has yielded 1745 upland varieties in the survey mentioned earlier. While once the taste and type of rice changed from village to village, food aficionados have become accustomed to the current reign of rice without taste.It is tragic that such a huge diversity will soon be a thing of the past.
Sources of nutrition available locally
The disappearance of many traditional varieties of rice suitable for certain uses has meant that puffed rice mudhi, beaten rice chuda, puffed paddy khai, or stale rice soaked in water pakhala, which are the cheap food available to all sections of the population in Orissa and have sustained them for centuries, do not have the necessary nutrients to sustain them. Rice milk,torani, and even the left over water after boiling rice,peja, have been sources of nutrition and medicine for many an ailment. The polishing of rice in mills has resulted in the top red nutritious protein and amino acid rich layer being removed, leaving only the carbohydrate containing endosperm behind. No wonder the state ranks high in the malnutrition index and has a very high rate of infant and maternal mortality. Associated losses The short stems of the high yielding varieties have resulted in less hay for cattle and for compost. The hay is also used for building roofs of mud houses.With the source of easily available food gone, the farmers can no longer afford to keep cows. This has led to the loss of yet another good source of nutrition:milk. Cow dung also served as fuel, an antiseptic, and when mixed with cow urine and water was used to wipe the mud floors of houses. Cow dung fed fires used to keep the mosquitoes at bay and perhaps also the dreaded disease malaria that is currently taking a heavy toll in the state. Keeping cows has always been a way of life in Orissa but this practice is also disappearing just as the traditional rice varieties have disappeared over the years.
Can the glory be revived?
But there is still hope. The untiring efforts by a few thousand rice farmers in the conservation of traditional varieties of rice and the rice ecosystem has sustained the hope of being able to uphold the rice culture .The interest of the state government in promoting the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), and in traditional rice farming further strengthens this hope.
Conservation Activities
Conservation of native varities by farmers of the state is yet to be properly recorded and documented.Besides Natabara Sarangi, Siba Prasad Sahu of Gaisilat Block in Bargarh district is spearheading another movement involving 300 farmers of the region who are collectively conserving 70 varieties of rice,including various medicinal varieties. Sri D. Narayan of Ganjam district is another organic farmer who is conserving five varieties including a medicinal variety called Karani which is capable of curing digestive problems including acidity. He is also conserving and cultivating a local variety called Boudiahunda that is in demand for being used for puffed rice mudhi.Another variety has been brought in from Chhattisgarh which has 15% protein content confirmed through laboratory tests. Conservation activities of a few varieties are also being done in Beguniapada Block as per Sri Simanchal Nayak, a farmer leader.
Sri Ratnakar Sahu of Patnagarh, Bolangir, is conserving certain varieties of rice. He is in search of certain varieties which were available in Orissa and which can still be traced. They are: the Karni, a medicinal variety farmers used to treat the body pain of the farmer and his cattle after ploughing, a very fine tasty variety called the Jonyjari, another scented variety called the Hubri Mahaharaj, a variety called Gidan, which is perfect for beaten rice, and a variety earlier found in Khariar of Nuapada district that served as a medicine for certain form of heart ailments.
Rice is life
Rice is not just food for Orissa, it is life itself. It is a complete knowledge base that was intricately woven around nature. The people’s happiness merged with it and raised the level a few notches. The rice fields were knowledge reservoirs and were a complex system compared to the current monocultures governed by linear thinking. The knowledge of the weather, type of soil, type of land, and other elements of the ecosystem led to minimum intervention farming that suited all life forms which were associated with it.This knowledge has to be regenerated. The glory once associated with the cultivation of rice must be revived to inject life and energy into the fast depleting agricultural creativity and endeavour of the farmers of the State.
*** Say Yes to Rice, Say Yes to Life ***
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