Traditional farming holds Indian
aces By Manipadma Jena
KORAPUT, India - Last monsoon season,
65-year-old Sunadhar Ramaparia, a member of the
Bhumia tribe in the eastern Indian state of
Odisha, mixed indigenous crops like "para" paddy,
foxtail millet and oil seeds in his upland plot.
The rains came, then played truant for 23
days and in the scorching heat even lowland
farmers' hybrid paddy saplings burnt
to dust. But Ramaparia
harvested a full crop.
Deforestation and
climate change have resulted in erratic rainfall,
shrinking water bodies and severe soil degradation
in Ramaparia's hamlet of Tentulipar, located in
the Eastern Ghat region of Odisha's Koraput
province, leaving scores of farmers vulnerable to
extreme hunger.
But the Bhumia tribe is
simply falling back on the wisdom of their
3,000-year-old traditional farming systems to
ensure a year-round supply of healthy food.
The tribe uses local seeds from the
biodiversity-rich Eastern Ghats, a discontinuous
mountain range that runs parallel to the Bay of
Bengal along India's eastern coast at an average
of 900 meters above mean sea level.
The
agricultural system here has adapted to the
intensely hilly terrain, built resilience to the
changing climate, and developed a natural
pest-control mechanism. Tribal farmers grow hardy
crops on the highlands, and more water-intensive
crops on the midland and low-lying areas.
Though the government of India has offered
the tribe subsidized hybrid paddy, which yields
about 3,700 to 4,800 kilograms per hectare - a
much larger haul than the 2,400 to 3,300 kilograms
farmers can expect from traditional seeds -
Ramaparia and his 20-member family have no
intention of abandoning their indigenous crops.
"The rice from government seeds not only
has no taste or aroma, they demand a lot of costly
medicine (chemical fertilizer and pesticides), and
they give diseases to those who consume them,"
Ramaparia told IPS.
"A lifetime of eating
our own grains has kept an old man like me strong,
let any young man try arm wrestling with me," he
challenged jovially, looking around at the
assembled villagers.
This is not an
isolated example of a single tribe holding out
against chemically altered seeds.
According to the 2003 India National
Sample Survey - based on which the National Policy
for Farmers (NPF 2007) and the agricultural
programmes of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012)
evolved - 69% of India's 1.2 billion people are
rural. Tribal communities constitute 10% of the
total rural population; of this, roughly eight%
follow traditional agricultural practices.
According to the National Sample Survey,
46% of farmers use the government's hybrid seeds,
while 47% use "saved" seeds.
Food
security and dietary diversity According to
Saujanendra Swain, a senior scientist with the
Jeypore-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
(MSSRF), "Multi-cropping, where up to six crops
are cultivated together, provides dietary
diversity.
"More food is produced with
limited land and labor, and the staggered harvest
greatly reduces the risks of crop failure as crops
have varying maturity periods."
An MSSRF
study of seven tribal villages in 2009 found that
80% of the tribal community favored a crop mixture
of hardy millet and pulses, which promised a high
degree of food security.
Harvesting starts
in September, with early-maturing finger millet,
and ends in January, with the harvesting of pigeon
pea. The process requires very light labor - at
the start of the monsoon seeds are planted in
shallow furrows filled with cow manure and left to
grow by themselves. In smallholdings, women form
the backbone of this practice.
For
46-year-old Chandra Pradhani, a tribal farmer in
Nuaguda village, the three buzzwords that define
the tribal system are: organic, recyclable and
sustainable.
These principles are
reflected in the practices employed - food and
fuel products are grown in their natural
environment, using no artificial inputs, and
hand-gathered for consumption; agricultural waste
products are used for crop treatment and pest
control; and seeds are preserved in
"gene-seed-grain banks" for the next generation.
During the July and August monsoon months,
the leanest in terms of food availability, tribals
forage in the forest for "green leafy vegetables
and mushrooms", said a farmer named Gari
Mathabaria, busy making puffed rice that she will
barter at the weekly market for a measure of
paddy, told IPS.
"Seasonal berries and
fruits form a good part of our food, though their
quantity is declining as forests are shrinking,"
she lamented.
Pulses, which comprise a
minor part of the local diet, are grown as a cash
crop. Vegetables are confined to backyards where
local beans form the lifelines of many farming
communities.
These practices need not be
limited to the Eastern Ghats. According to the
Indian National Sample Survey, 60% of the
country's 140 million hectares of sown farmland
are rain-fed and can easily replicate similar
traditional farming systems.
FAO honors
indigenous farming The Eastern Ghats has a
long history as a biodiversity hotspot. Numerous
rice varieties originated in the Jeypore "tract",
or valley, in Koraput some 3,000 years ago.
Human interference with this delicate
ecosystem and the industrialization of agriculture
have, however, destroyed much of the diversity. A
1950 survey by the Central Rice Research Institute
found 1,750 local paddy varieties. In 1990, only
40 years later, the MSSRF could trace only 324
varieties.
"Now an informed guess is that
100 varieties are perhaps available," Swain told
IPS. MSSRF also recorded eight species of minor
millets, nine species of pulses, five species of
oil seeds, three species of fibrous plants and
seven species of vegetables in the region.
Experts fear that these varieties, too,
could soon disappear. "Just 15 years ago we
recorded 25 varieties of local beans, called
'simba' - today, they have dwindled down to four,"
Swain said.
But things might be looking
up. Last January, the Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) accorded the status of Globally
Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) to
the traditional agricultural system in the Koraput
region.
This status, akin to UNESCO's
World Heritage Site tag, grants farmers the
support they need to continue to nurture and adapt
their ancient practices to a changing climate and
shrinking landholdings in order to ensure food
security, without succumbing to modern
agricultural practices.
"The Koraput
Agricultural Systems are both environmentally
sustainable and climate smart," M. S. Swaminathan,
chairman emeritus of MSSRF and widely considered
the "father" of India's Green Revolution, told
IPS.
"Their relevance will increase with
[more frequent] disturbances in climate. It is
therefore appropriate that the FAO has recognised
the system as a GIAHS," he added.
The
decision comes not a minute too soon. In recent
years, hybrid paddy and commercial crops have been
elbowing the staple millet out of the local food
chain, even though millets have been proven to
have higher nutritional value than rice and wheat
and can be consumed by adults and infants alike.
Kalidas Biswas, deputy director of
Jeypore's Agriculture Department, told IPS the
government should include millet in the country's
public distribution system, and, in districts
where millet is a staple food, procure it for a
"supportive price". At present, tribal farmers are
compelled to sell millet at low prices in local
markets.
"This will motivate tribal
communities to grow their indigenous cereal,"
Biswas stressed.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
