Articles by Dr. Shiva

THE REAL GREEN REVOLUTION : BIODIVERSE ORGANIC FARMING

by Dr. Vandana Shiva

We are what we eat.
But what are we eating?
What are we growing on our farms? How are we growing it?
What impact does it have on our health and on the planet?  

Food safety, food security and agriculture are intimately inter-related. How we grow our food and what we grow determines what we eat and who eats. It determines the quality and safety of our food. Yet food safety, food security and agriculture have been separated from each other. Food is being produced in ways that is robbing the majority of people of food, and those who are eating are eating bad food. One billion people on the planet are hungry. Another two billion are suffering from food related diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension. Those who are not getting access to food are victims of the malnutrition related to being poor. Those who can buy food in the global supermarket are also victims of another kind of malnutrition, the malnutrition of the rich.  

Third World countries are carrying a double burden of food related disease, hunger and obesity. The WHO / FAO have predicted that by the year 2020 it is projected that 70% of ischaemic heart disease deaths, 75% of stroke deaths, and 70% of diabetes deaths will occur in developing countries. These diseases, called non-communicable diseases, are directly linked to diet.  

  The roots of hunger

The world is producing enough food for all. However billions are being denied their right to food. The globalised industrialized food system is creating hunger in many ways.  

Firstly, industrialized agriculture is based on destruction of small farmers. Uprooted and dispossessed peasants join the ranks of the hungry.  

Secondly, industrialized agriculture is capital intensive. It is based on costly external inputs such as purchased and non-renewable seeds, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. Peasants get into debt to buy these inputs. To pay back debt they must sell all they grow, thus depriving themselves of food. If they cannot pay their debts they loose their land. And they are increasingly loosing their lives. More than 150,000 farmers in India have committed suicide as costs of inputs have increased, and the price of their produce has fallen, thus trapping them into debt.  

Malnutrition and hunger is also growing because farmers are being pushed into growing cash crops for exports.  

The nature of agriculture, and the nature of food is being transformed. Agriculture, the care if the land, the culture of growing good food is being transformed into corporate, industrial activity. Food is being transformed from being a source of nutrition and sustenance into being a commodity. And as a commodity, it will first flow to factory farms and now cars. The poor will get the left over.  

Factory farms are a negative food system. They consume more food than they produce. Industrial beef requires 10 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of food. Industrial pork requires 4.0 – 5.5 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of food. Factory farmed chicken requires 2.0 – 3.0 times more feed than it produces as food.  

Industrial biofuels are putting a new pressure on food. Food prices in Mexico have doubled since corn, the staple for Mexican tortillas, is being increasingly used to make ethanol for fuel. Corn, soya, canola are all being diverted to feed cars while people starve.  

Industrial agriculture based on high external inputs of chemicals and water creates a push for uniformity and monoculture. This leads to erosion of biodiversity at three levels  

a)     ecosystem level

b)     crop diversity

c)      varietal diversity

  Each agroclimatic zone has evolved farming systems based on species adapted to it. Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystem and farming diversity. It also pushes crops to extinction. Thus rice and wheat monocultures have replaced diverse millets, pulses and oilseeds, often grown as mixtures and in rotation. Finally, industrial farming destroys diverse varieties of crops and replaces them with uniform varieties adapted to chemicals, not to ecosystems and climate.

The Real Green Revolution : Biodiverse Organic Farming

Industrial agriculture has been promoted, financed, subsidized inspite of its high negative environmental externalities. The argument used is that these ecological costs are a necessary part of increasing productivity. However, the productivity of industrial agriculture is actually negative. More resources are used as inputs than are produced as outputs. Usually labour productivity is of labour displacing machinery and chemicals are therefore, by definition, increasing “productivity”. However, labour is not the scarce input. Land and water are. If  instead of labour, energy and natural resources and external inputs are taken into account, industrial agriculture does not have higher productivity compared to ecological alternatives. The shift from internal input to high external input agriculture reduces productivity from 20 to 0.33, a sixty six fold decrease in the productivity ratio over the last fifty years.  

We need to make an ecological transition to produce more food using less resources.  

This productivity analysis is based on a study comparing traditional polycultures with industrial monocultures shows that a polyculture system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5900 units of food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them.  

A usual argument used in promoting industrial agriculture like the Green Revolution earlier and genetic engineering in agriculture now is that only industrial agriculture and industrial breeding can keep up increased food productivity for feeding a growing population. However, increased mouths to feed imply more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. Since resources, not labour, are the limiting actor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labour productivity, which is the relevant measure. A sixty-fold decrease of food producing capacity in the context of resource use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water and biodiversity to feed the world.  

Not only is the measure of productivity of industrial agriculture partial because all inputs, including resource and energy inputs are not taken into accounts, it is also partial because not all outputs are taken into account.  

Ecological agriculture is based on mixed and rotational cropping, and the production of a diversity of crops.  

Biodiversity Organic Farms Produce More

Studies have shown that the common organic agricultural combination of lower input costs and favourable price premiums can offset and make organic farms equally or often more profitable than conventional farms. Hundreds of farmers in Andhra Pradesh who grew cottonseeds supplied by multinational companies, applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides, committed suicide because they could not control the pests. At the same time Tamilnadu farmers practising organic methods were able to get cotton yield of more than 15 quintals an acre (The Hindu, 2004). The studies showed that the average yield of sugarcane is 40 tonnes an acre in chemical farms as compared to 60-70 tonnes an acre in organic farms in the Erode District of Andhra Pradesh ((The Hindu, 2004). Like wise other crops also record higher yields inorganic farming as compared to chemical farming.

A number of research studies have shown that organic farming ensures better yield and fetches more income. For instance, in 1998, a paper, "The Greening of the Green Revolution" (David Tilman, Nature 396), showed that not only were the yields of organic maize as high as those of maize grown with fertilizers and pesticides, but also the soil quality in the organic fields improved dramatically.

Field trials in Hertfordshire (United Kingdom) reported consistently higher yields in the case of wheat grown with manure than wheat grown with artificial nutrients.

Prof. Jules Pretty of Essex University ("Feeding the World", SPLICE - a genetic research magazine, Volume 4, 1998) has shown how farmers in India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques.

Cuba, forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted it as policy, having discovered that it improves both productivity and the quality of the crops ("Castro Topples Pesticides in Cuba", Renee Kjartan, Washington Free Press, August 2000).  

Mr. Balbeer Singh also told that we knew that the chemicals are harmful for human beings, animals and environment, and hybrid seeds do not perform well if conserved for seeds. They actually make you dependent on market. Navdanya did a fabulous job of bringing people out from the vicious cycle of market dependent agriculture. Yield analysis of his one bigha field was done continuously during his conversion period. Following table shows that how Mr. Balbeer Singh reduced the inputs, saved the money and got better yield, which is now stable. He has more diversity in the field as well as on the food.  

(Source : Balbeer Singh, Village Utircha, and Navdanya Records)  

The yields of our farmers and their incomes have doubled and tripled by giving up the negative economy of chemical farming and shifting to biodiverse organic agriculture. The organic project in Madhya Pradesh has also led to increased yields as reported by Dr. G.S. Kaushal, Ex-Director, Agriculture of Madhya Pradesh, who spread organic farming in 21 districts for 11 crops using 12 treatments in the period 2001-2002.  

Since organic farming produces more food and higher incomes for farmers there is absolutely no justification for not adopting it as the national policy to address the agrarian crisis threatening the livelihoods of our small farmers, two thirds of our population.  

The seed / chemical package of the not-so-green revolution is justified on the basis of higher productivity and higher incomes, which in turn are supposed to reduce hunger and poverty.  

However, both in terms of productivity and incomes, for the small peasant in Asia and Africa, costly non-renewable seeds and costly chemicals create a negative economy, with farmers spending more on inputs then they can earn from the produce. This is made worse by globalised free trade and dumping of susbsidised products on markets of the South, which further lower prices, and rob farmers of incomes. Indebtedness and farmers suicides are rooted in this crisis of falling incomes due to rising costs and falling prices.  

The solution to hunger and poverty is to increase food output per unit acre and reduce inputs. Biodiverse organic farming increase output per unit acre while reducing costs of inputs. Across Asia and Africa small organic farms based on biodiversity are producing more food than chemical monocultures.  

Organic producers of wheat using native varieties are getting 6.2 tonnes per ha is Western U.P in India. Under all agro-climatic zones, biodiversity intensification increases output while reducing input costs.  

Navdanya's member Rajender Singh of Village Pulinda in Uttaranchal is earning Rs. 90,000/- per ha growing diversity of 35 crops organically on his 0.5 bigha (1/10^th of an acre) farm. Yogambar Singh is earning Rs. 69500/- per ha growing 13 crops. Chemicals are intolerant to diversity. They need monocultures.  

In Uttaranchal, biodiverse farms give the farmers Rs. 24,000 per acre and yields of 14 quintal / acre. While monocultures give Rs. 6720 / acre and yields of 12 quintal / acre.  

In Rajasthan, monoculture farms give 10 quintals / acre and Rs. 1805 as income while biodiverse give 11.9 quintal / acre and Rs. 5835 as income.  

Biodiverse organic farming, based

on indigenous crops, using participatory breeding, is the solution to hunger and poverty.

  We need to promote biodiversity intensive agriculture, not chemically intensive agriculture as the Green Revolution model promotes. The Real Green Revolution based on biodiverse organic farming is already happening in the fields of farmers. These small-farmer centered, ecologically sustainable initiatives need scaling up to protect the environment, protect the land and livelihoods of small farmers, and produce more food.  

Organic agriculture does not merely produce more food at lower financial and ecological cots, it produces healthier, more nutritious, better quality food.