Organic farmers can feed the world!

Claude Alvares provides a bird's eye view of the amazing discoveries and innovations made by organic farmers from India as they quietly and rapidly abandon agriculture dependent on manufactured chemical fertilisers and synthetic pesticides. The insights into ecological agriculture were shared during the Bangalore conference.

'ORGANIC farming holds the key to long-term, successful, self-sustaining agriculture. Organic farmers can feed the world!' Those, in brief, were the principal messages resoundingly delivered by South Asia's pioneering organic farmers at the conclusion of a two-day conference in Bangalore, India on 10 and 11 September.

The conference was convened to enable farmers from the Indian sub-continent to share notes on the 'outstanding organic agriculture techniques' which they use in their fields. It was organised by the Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) and Third World Network (TWN) in association with the National Centre of Organic Farming (NCOF) at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore.

The conference was inaugurated on Day One by SK Patnaik, Joint Secretary (Horticulture) in the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India. The Vice Chancellor of the UAS, Dr PG Chengappa, presided. He later released the fourth edition of the TWN publication, The Organic Farming Sourcebook.

Around 50 organic farmers from Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malaysia and China joined the conference in addition to more than 400 organic farmers from within India.

The unique feature of the knowledge-and-skills-share event was its faculty. Academics from universities were generally kept at bay (as most of them do not have much to contribute to the subject anyway) while organic farmers took centrestage. It was an exhilarating experience to see so many ordinary men and women, almost all practising organic farmers, many without the so-called benefits of even a college education or English, delivering with aplomb PowerPoint presentations based on their own field experience.

So much active learning took place on the two days of the meeting that all sessions were house-full and even announcements for tea and refreshments could not induce people to leave the main hall or the demonstration workshops.

Agricultural scientists from the University who attended some of the sessions had to concede that in many areas - like the use of beneficial microbes to create living soils, preparing economic seed material, restoring degraded farmland - the organic farmers were far ahead of the academic community in using innovative methods to solve problems considered extremely serious (or even hopeless) by conventional farmers.

Ruinous impacts of modern agriculture

Organic farming goes back a long way in India. India and China in fact have been doing organic agriculture for 40 centuries. Yet less than half a century ago, these 'agricultures of permanence' made the serious error of hastily adopting the so-called 'Green Revolution' package of techniques comprising new hybrid seed varieties, chemical fertilisers and pesticides. This decision ensured that their agricultures would henceforth have to struggle to survive from year to year. Modern conventional agriculture has introduced enormous instability in all aspects of farming, from seed availability to harvest disposal. In India, failure of modern agriculture now leads routinely to farmer suicides, by the thousands every year.

If that were not bad enough, the scale of dependence on external inputs that modern agriculture has induced is also seen as wholly undesirable. Large countries like India are now dependent on foreign countries for the raw materials from which fertilisers are manufactured: petrochemicals from the Arabian Gulf. Since these fertilisers need water to dissolve and to be conveyed in soluble form to the plant, and also to increase the osmotic potential of the soil water, large investments in artificial irrigation have been equally demanding, causing their own brand of ecological havoc and distress to rivers and watersheds. Conventional, mechanised agriculture using combine harvesters also compels the farmers to adopt monoculture of a single crop over large tracts of land, a practice that degrades the soil. In contrast, traditional mixed cropping practices, using as many as 17 different types of crops from cereals and millets to pulses and oilseeds in one acre of land, enhance soil quality.

The package of hybrid seeds, mechanised equipment like tractors, irrigation infrastructure, chemical nutrients and synthetic pesticides has been promoted on the basis of an unnatural assumption: that it is the role of farmers - assisted by profit-hungry corporations, international agri-research centres and banking institutions - to supply food to plants.

In nature, however, left to themselves, plants are able to secure food for free. Has anyone, in fact, ever seen anyone feeding the Amazon forest with chemical or any other fertilisers? Forests manage all their nutrients themselves. They generate and store them without human assistance and can thereby survive and prosper on a millennial basis.

Human beings, in fact, are unable to create natural forests. Science today concedes that the best way to create a forest is to let a plot of land be by itself without any human interference or intervention. By a process of what is called 'natural progression', nature will ensure the gradual emergence of a forest within 15 years.

Most people however - especially the urbanised educated class, deeply alienated from nature - are convinced that plants cannot grow or prosper without the assistance of chemical fertilisers supplied by huge conglomerates. In the case of their own body's nutrition, they hardly ever think that swallowing nutrients in liquid form is adequate for a normal life. In fact, people fed liquid diets through tubes are mostly found in ICUs. Why then are plants treated differently from the way human beings feed themselves? When did this notion - that unless plants have something constantly 'done to them' they will not grow and not produce - creep into the modern consciousness?

Albert Howard, the founder of modern organic farming, wrote that the entry of chemicals into agriculture occurred when companies manufacturing explosives and weapons found themselves without a market or niche once World War II was over. Interestingly, we now use organo-phosphorus insecticides based on the poisonous properties of phosgene gas discovered during WWII. The same company that manufactured 'Agent Orange' to defoliate the tropical rainforests of Vietnam during the unfortunate war of the 1960s is one of the largest manufacturers of herbicides today.  Modern agricultural theory conveniently reduced the plant to a combination of nitrogen, phosphorous and potash (NPK), laying the ground for a massive diversion of the deadly production of these war industries and their chemicals to agriculture.

Agriculture has not been the same ever since. Today companies - with the active support of governments - are continuously expanding their control over agriculture across the planet, taking it out of farmers' hands, messing it up. They should never have been allowed or invited there in the first place as agriculture has always remained a skilled preserve of people who always knew how to grow things for themselves, their community or the market.

Learning how forests farm

That is why discussions in India on good agricultural practice have invariably turned to the forest. It has become common enough wisdom that the best way to farm is to imitate (or replicate) as closely as possible the dynamics and cyclical flows of natural forests. At the Bangalore conference, the Organic Farming Association made a combined presentation of the outstanding practices of its pioneering founders. The principal idea was that the more closely you were able to replicate the practices of the forest, the richer the condition of the soil and soil life and the better the crop you could anticipate. The greatest consequence was the recognition that by doing this one could also easily cut oneself from dependence on companies, banks, seed suppliers, extension agencies, equipment manufacturers and university scientists.

In its presentation, the Association disclosed how farmers had created several techniques for replicating in their fields the rich littered floors of natural forests and the paradise these had become for soil fauna. Most farmers devoted considerable attention to the creation of mulches which not only protected their soils from the sun, but ensured the continued existence of beneficial microbes underneath. The audience got a rich visual treat on the huge expertise in vermiculture that had developed across the country and the wide range of recipes through which farmers were increasing the populations of beneficial microbes and earthworms in their soils.

The successful imitation of the forest has been the singular achievement of the Indian organic farming community and it came to the fore at the conference like a tidal wave. By the end of the two days most people who had come to learn were more than adequately convinced that here was a quiet revolution that needed no AK-47 guns or police or agricultural scientists or universities or even subsidy from the government. Recently demised Masanobu Fukuoka had once spoken of a 'one-straw revolution'. These farmers had taken what he said to heart - that nature, looked after, is overwhelmingly generous. Farming on the basis of natural principles is the only trusted way. All other methods - including the need for unnatural genetically modified seed - are wholly unnecessary, in fact, dangerous and therefore dispensable. They impress in the short term; they impress those who are always impressed with any new technology.

The second presentation on forests and organic agriculture at the conference came from Kamal Melwani, a researcher from Neosynthesis Research Centre in Sri Lanka.

Melwani focused on the uses of analogue forestry to remediate water contamination caused by intensive use of agrochemicals. She observed that the use of agrochemicals often comes together with the removal of other natural vegetation and the introduction of monocultures. The impact was eventually felt on the groundwater where concentration of nitrates, nitrites, chloride and potassium now exceeded World Health Organisation drinking water standards. She reported that 64% of infants in the Sri Lankan peninsula (where the Centre did its work) have methemoglobin levels above the normal range. She also disclosed the alarming rise in spontaneous abortions linked to contaminated water supplies.

Melwani recounted that her group was contracted in 2001 to use bioremediation methods to reduce the concentration of nitrate and nitrite in the soil which had got there from chemical fertilisers. The bioremediation they introduced included use of both microbes and plants. The principal means was the restoration of the vegetation in the micro watershed around a drinking water well. Over six to seven years, deep-rooted plants were established, forming a root web below the surface to draw up contaminants. The downward trend in nitrate concentration was indisputably established with the help of piezometers. (Control wells, on the other hand, continued to indicate an upward trend in nitrate concentrations.)

The pilot area was then converted into a production area for both trees and annual crops including vegetables.  The project was able to establish that with the maturity of the vegetation there was a decrease of nitrate and nitrite within four years.  The biodiversity created brought in birds, butterflies and reptiles. The technology guaranteed organic food at negligible cost when compared to conventional water treatment technology including reverse osmosis. The demonstration was replicated in other wells that had been rendered saline and contaminated with sewage after the 2004 tsunami disaster that hit the island republic.

These broad ecological perspectives set the tone of the presentations to come. Organic farmers thereafter addressed a bewildering range of issues organised around three major themes of importance to organic farming: a) soil and water conservation; b) problems faced with insects, weeds and plant disease; and c) raising and using organically grown seed.     

Claude Alvares is Director of the Central Secretariat of the Organic Farming Association of India, located in Goa, India.

*Third World Resurgence No. 230, October 2009, pp 8-10