Nurturing the organic seeds of change

Suryatapa Bhattacharya

• Last Updated: December 04. 2009 7:57PM UAE / December 4. 2009 3:57PM GMT

DEHRADUN // It is 8am and baking hot, but already the guests – farmers, government ministers, academics and scientists – are pouring into Dr Vandana Shiva’s farm in Dehradun, a town in north India better known for its exclusive boarding schools than for organic agricultural practices.

Dr Shiva, dressed in a blue sari, is hosting a conference on climate change ahead of her trip to Copenhagen to speak at a counter-summit for the UN Climate Change conference that starts on Monday.

She will speak alongside the likes of Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and critic of corporate globalisation, and George Monbiot, a British environmentalist, where she will be championing her favourite cause: saving the indigenous seed.

The way Dr Shiva, a nuclear physicist turned eco-activist, sees it, climate change is partly the result of the industrialisation of food production. And if the world is serious about reducing the greenhouse gasses which are warming up the planet, they should look to the way food is mass produced and transported around the world.

Although India recently announced it would slow the country’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 – it is ranked fifth globally in overall emissions and that is expected to grow as the economy grows – Dr Shiva believes these efforts will not save farmers at the mercy of climate change.

Instead, she advocates a return to organic farming especially of more hearty crops that have evolved to withstand extreme weather. Genetically modified crops, which do not evolve, just do not have this ability, she says.

Her work has earned her both friends and enemies. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister of environment, who is giving the opening speech at the farm this day, calls her both his friend and adversary.

“She hectors me,” said Mr Ramesh, who remembers meeting Dr Shiva for the first time at a trade conference in Doha in the 1980s.

Dr Shiva does not remember the meeting, but the experience has stayed with Mr Ramesh. “I disagreed with you on many points. You were critical of the things I did,” he reminded Dr Shiva. “But we both agreed on one thing. We believe in the environment. And on sustainability of local ecosystems.”

As well as drumming up support and signatures for her stance, Dr Shiva also conducted a three-hour session with a group of farmers who had travelled from across India to discuss the sustainability of their crops.

Dr Shiva let the farmers do most of the talking, while she took notes. They made presentations about their observations on buying new varieties of seeds and the challenges of growing them. At the end of the session, she encouraged them to exchange notes about which crops succeed and which fail.

“She sowed the seeds of sustainability in us,” said Vir Singh, a professor at the nearby GB Pant University of Agriculture, who was attending the conference.

He was one of the first experts Dr Shiva brought on board to advise farmers in the region on how to best utilise their seeds.

Prof Singh, as well as farmers and other scientists, have helped Dr Shiva draft a community plan on sustainable agriculture which will form the basis of her presentation in Copenhagen.

“This is everyday work,” she said. “The venue differs, who we are speaking to and who are speaking to us differs, the country differs, but this is what we do every day.”

Dr Shiva, 56, is well known in India and abroad because of her persuasive stance against corporate farming, patenting of Indian plants, the use of chemical fertilisers and the Indian government’s ennui towards agriculture.

Her quest to empower the common farmer has led her to face off against international groups such as the World Trade Organisation and corporations such as Monsanto, which sells genetically modified seeds.

But such bravado has not been without consequences. When she went public on what she said was a correlation in a spike in the number of farmers committing suicide and their purchases of genetically modified cotton seeds, she claims she received threatening phone calls.

“My parents lived a life of fearlessness and they always told me that as long as I have my conscience, I should carry on,” she said.

It was to her parents that she turned 25 years ago when she found herself increasingly conflicted with her job as a scientist for the government.

“My mother told me that if I was so determined to do something, that instead of sitting around and wringing my hands in despair, I should do something about it,” she said.

So she left her job and set up Navdanya, or “nine seeds”, a movement dedicated to saving the indigenous plants of India which were at risk of being wiped out by monoculture and industrialised farming.

The idea behind Navdanya is to conserve different species of grains, vegetables and fruit and research the attributes that allow them to flourish under different climatic conditions.

Initially her parents funded her seed bank. It was not until many years later that she was able to use some of the money that came with accolades that she was awarded, such as the Right Livelihood Award, popularly known as the Alternative Nobel Prize for her conservation efforts.

The first seed bank was in her parents’ cowshed, and her first employee was Bija Devi, an indigenous woman from the hills who originally came to Dr Shiva looking for work as a maid. “I told her, look, I wash my own dishes, but I am looking for someone who can watch over the seeds. Do you know anything about the cultivation of crops?”

As it was, Ms Devi had been forced to leave her own farm as the land had grown so fallow that she had to look for another source of income.

Ms Devi, now in her 70s, is a wrinkled old woman with cataracts. But her nimble fingers can still de-seed a ripe fruit.

She works and lives at the farm, nestled in a lush valley in the foothills of the Himalayas. Twenty acres have been dedicated to Bija Vidyapeet (college of seeds), the farm and a seed bank, which holds 560 species of rice alone.

A cluster of houses with mud walls make up the offices of Navdanya, a kitchen and a cafeteria where food is made from locally grown ingredients. Most of the houses are classrooms and hostels for those studying and researching agriculture. The oldest, whitewashed two-storeyed building at one end of the property is the seed bank.

The middle ground is dedicated entirely to a variety of crops, which are sectioned off by flowering plants such as marigolds, curry leaf plants and margosa trees, which act as natural insect repellents.

Ancient agricultural ideas have been borrowed, even from North American Indians, and beans are grown alongside maize because the legumes and beans provide the soil with much-needed nitrogen, which in turn helps the maize to flourish.

A number of farmers from the area are employed at the farm, while others often stop by to re-familiarise themselves with the traditional farming practices.

“Our seeds do well with organic farming. They are not married to the chemicals out there. There was a lot of focus on conservation but not on production. Through conservation and production we will save the seed,” Dr Shiva said.

There are now 55 seed banks across the country on the outskirts of cities such as Bangalore, Delhi and Balasore. The banks have managed to locate and store 3,000 types of rice found in India, where once there were more than 200,000 varieties.

India is considered vulnerable to global warming, with rising sea levels and changing monsoon patterns.

This year has been an indicator of such factors, according to Dr Shiva, with cyclones blowing more sea water inland than before.

The monsoons have also been a disappointment this year, but Dr Shiva cannot help admire how some of the heartier varieties of maize and millet in her organic farm have taken that in their stride.

She likes to champion millet and other lesser known grains as the “forgotten seeds”. “This year the millet has done very well,” she said, walking through the millet patch and comparing them to Masai warriors.

The millet is grown from seed that was collected by farmers from drought-stricken areas over the years and stored in the seed banks.

When the rains did not fall sufficiently on Dehradun, the farmers planted this variety. It proved successful.

This is a message that she has sent out to the government and one that is hard to ignore as half the country was plagued by drought this year, the worst since 1972. Sugar crops failed and led to the highest prices since 1981. Rice production dropped by 15 million tonnes.

Dr Shiva’s answer is organic farming. Whether that is feasible on a corporate scale is debatable. In India, a majority of the agrarian land is owned by small-scale farmers, who still rely on the weather for water.

Around her farm in Dehradun, more than 2,000 farmers have since turned to organic farming. “Others are obstinate,” she said, “because of the lure of subsidies by the government.”

Unlike genetically modified seeds which need very specific care, including more water and chemical fertilisers, indigenous seeds are heartier, adapting to climate in a way that it seems only Dr Shiva can see.

But she is not alone. She is a farmer’s best friend and they know it.

sbhattacharya@thenational.ae