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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] (fwd) Turning the world upside down: Genetic security in native seed-baskets
  • Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 04:37:53 -0700

Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 10:26:19 +0200
Reply-To: wiegand@lufa-speyer.de
Sender: Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group
<SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>
From: Klaus Wiegand <wiegand@LUFA-SPEYER.DE>
Organization: LUFA Speyer
Subject: Turning the world upside down

the article below, from the india together website, focuses on
Lakshmi and the work of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) -
an organisation which, as the article says, "is turning ecologically-
smart, people-centred agriculture into living reality, and
demonstrating daily that high-technology, capital-intensive farming
is unnecessary and inappropriate for hundreds of millions of the
world's poorest people." maybe a bit long to read, but a quite nice
example for SUSTAINability
---
http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/dds/upsidedown.htm

Turning the world upside down

Genetic security in native seed-baskets

May 2002: As a dalit, Lakshmi is at the very bottom of India's
hierarchy of castes. It wasn't long ago that people from Lakshmi's
background were seen by many as fit for only the most menial jobs
and not even worthy of a name. But one of the most influential
agricultural scientists in the country, M. S. Swaminathan, a
pioneer of hybrid rice and regarded as the father of the 'Green
Revolution', will soon be beating a path to her door in the tiny
village of Humnapur in Andhra Pradesh.

When [the author] visited her, Lakshmi set out on her modest front
porch a cornucopia that may hold nothing less than a key to the
future of farming if it is to be just and sustainable. From simple
woven baskets and clay pots she brought out more than eighty
varieties of seeds - part of one of the richest and most diverse
agricultural heritages in the world.

When he drops by, Professor Swaminathan will see that this
'community gene bank' is part of a larger picture: Lakshmi
manages the seeds for her sangham - a voluntary association of
poor women. And her sangham is one of seventy five, each
comprising around a sixty families, in the Deccan Development
Society (DDS) - an organisation which is turning ecologically-
smart, people-centred agriculture into living reality, and
demonstrating daily that high-technology, capital-intensive farming
is unnecessary and inappropriate for hundreds of millions of the
world's poorest people.

Along with the community gene banks, which they stock and
control, the women of DDS have established their own food
security systems, with grain stores in each village that they control
and manage themselves. To support their efforts, a local farm
science centre brings together and organises traditional knowledge
and helps develop fertilisers and pesticides from natural sources
such as the neem tree.

DDS has also built a 'green school' where dalit children, who
otherwise face a life of little more than bonded labour, learn
practical, income-generating skills as well as academic subjects
that allow them to enter 'mainstream' society should they want to
do so. And DDS is training women in radio and video production so
that they can tell their stories to the wider world. Some of these
new video makers are travelling as far as Peru to share their
knowledge of ecological agriculture, or 'permaculture', and to learn
from others.

"The fact that dalit women, who are poor, illiterate and
marginalised, can manage such complex projects is the strongest
political statement of the decade" says P V Satheesh, the Director
of DDS.

At first sight, there could be few less promising environments for a
sustainable agricultural revolution. These villages - in the Medak
district of state of Andhra Pradesh, close to where it meets the
borders of both Maharashtra and Karnataka - are on the Deccan, a
raised plateau that rolls for hundreds of kilometres across southern
India. Rainfall is sparse and uncertain. Most of the soil is poor -
often only a few centimetres of dust and pulverized laterite rock
which, in the dry season, gives the ground a rusty red colour.
Similar dryland terrain covers some two thirds of India. So the
success of DDS's work holds lessons for vast areas of the country,
as well as for many other parts of the world.

The Deccan is a harsh, unforgiving land, but with care it can be
made to bloom. As recently as thirty years ago more than seventy
different crop varieties were grown in some farmer's fields. Half a
century ago, mangos from this region were so prized that the
Nazeem of Hyderabad, hereditary ruler in the district, sent armed
guards to protect the caravan of bullock carts that brought the
fruits
to his palace.

As a small boy, Jayappa showed a gift for learning. Twice his uncle
had to drag him away from a local mission school: the family
needed even the tiny amount of cash that a young child could bring
working for landlords, and education was a luxury they thought
they could not afford. When Jayappa was eleven his father died and
a local large landowner illegally seized the family's tiny parcel of
land. At seventeen Jayappa borrowed some money, took the
landlord to court and won, but spent nine years in wage labour to
pay off the debt.

For another twenty years, Jayappa worked in different parts of
Andhra Pradesh [Medak District] much of the time for landlords
embracing high-tech agriculture, always for pitiful wages. "We, the
wage labourers, saw the land being killed while we remained poor"
he says. Then, in the 1980s Jayappa heard about the fledgling
DDS: groups of the very poorest coming together, pooling their
small savings, gradually achieving greater autonomy, and adopting
environmentally friendly farming techniques.

Returning to his home village, Jayappa set up a sangham with DDS
help. He started with other men but found that too many of them
wanted loans from the community chest for extravagant and
unrealistic purposes. Conflict threatened to tear the sangham
apart. The solution, he says, was to turn to the women. They
tended to make more modest and sensible decisions.

Beginning with savings of as little as 5 rupees a month (approx.
0.25 euros or £0.08) the women's sanghams in Algol and other
DDS villages have gradually brought back into cultivation extremely
marginal lands which before could barely yield more than 40-50kg
per acre. Now, the rejuvenated lands yield 200-300 kg of sorghum,
50kg of pigeon pea, 50kg of assorted pulses and amaranth, fibre
crops, and enough fodder for two head of cattle per acre.

Together, the DDS has generated the equivalent of thousands of
new jobs over a decade, and earnings per acre increased up to 12
times. And all this, while eliminating the use of chemicals and
increasing the biodiversity in the fields.

Initially, plants such as sunhemp are used to improve the soil.
Large quantities of cow manure are also added to increase soil
fertility. Simple earthen banks and rock dams help retain soil
moisture. Water retention benefits not only the small holders
themselves, who are often on the higher and poorer ground, but
also their neighbours downstream, who find their wells fuller
for a greater part of the year as a result.

Crops are used in combination to maintain soil health.
Typically, these will include varieties of sorghum (known
locally as jawar), a drought-tolerant crop which extracts
nutrients, and leguminous crops like pigeon pea, which add
nitrogen to the soil.

Walking across one of these fields one commonly sees a mix of a
dozen or more species of food plants. Manemma, a sangham
member in the village of Gangwar, has 22 different varieties growing
on three acres. These include five varieties of jawar, black gram,
green gram and horse gram, finger millet, pearl millet and two
varieties of foxtail millet, sesame, three varieties of pigeon pea,
cow
pea, field bean and bindhi. There are also wild vegetables, which
have been eliminated or made toxic on chemical intensive farms.
Some wild plants are highly nutritious and are important for local
food security throughout the year. Indian spinach, for example, is
one of the richest sources of Vitamin A precursor in the plant
kingdom.

"None of this is our invention" says Suresh, chief scientist at KVK,
the local farm science centre. "Almost all of what we teach are
things that some local farmers have been doing in some form for
centuries. All we have done is to put the knowledge together in
easy to use form, and helped disseminate it more widely".

What is new is the way that the centre has collected and
systematised best practice in indigenous knowledge. A good
example is a non-pesticide management (NPM) system which
KVK disseminates using a 'mandala' display of seeds and
treatments. This lays out actions and interactions in time and
space which the farmer needs to manage in order to protect their
crops through the year without the use of artificial pesticides. It
may sound complicated, but the mandala portrays complex
information and relationships in a way that is easy for to literate
and non-literate alike to understand. Along with community gene
banks like Lakshmi's, DDS rates its most important achievement
as the creation of village-based, community-owned and managed,
public distribution systems (PDS). These stock essential food
grains produced by the sangham members, ready for distribution at
affordable prices during lean times of year.

The need arose because the government-owned PDS system has
been a near disaster: it encouraged the purchase and consumption
of rice imported into areas like the Medak district where it had
never been a part of the staple diet. "Eating rice became
fashionable" says Satheesh. "Communities which had thrived on a
highly nutritious diet based on sorghum and millet switched over to
a staple that was alien to them. Their immune systems were
compromised and they were laid bare to diseases".

"Culture and food are inseparable" he adds. "Denial of indigenous
food is a political act, and we must become conscious of it". With
a community controlled PDS, traditional foods that were once
almost forgotten have become again common in many households.
Prices sometimes differ considerably from those in the regular
markets. For example coarse millets that fetch very little outside in
the 'mainstream', are given a high value in the women's markets.

Even though the rains are poor this year, the women's sangham in
Eedulpally village will be able to feed their family three times a
day
without going into debt. But there is more to PDS than just having
enough food to stay alive - it is a matter of human dignity. "We
used to be very lonely" says Sundaramma, a leader of the
sangham. "We would work all day and then we would be alone in
our houses in the evening. Now we meet, work, talk and sing
together. We share our burdens. Previously we didn't even know
what a bank was. Now we are talking with men and with people in
higher castes. We have become ushar (alert, intelligent).

When they started the sangham in Eedulpally, the women could
not even afford a second good sari. Now they no longer have to
stay indoors while their clothes are drying after a wash, and, in
addition to the food bank, the women of Eedulpally have been able
to create a balwadi - a shady place for young children of sangham
members to be cared for instead of having to sit out in the blazing
sun all day while their mothers work in the fields.

Over in the village of Basantpur the sangham has created a
medicinal garden that can meet many of the essential health needs
of the community. On just 5 acres (2 hectares) of rocky ground
flourish 45 or more species of shrubs and trees. Santoshamma, a
sangham member who looks after the garden, proudly displays
some of its contents: gooseberries, grown for their high content of
vitamin C; neem, whose leaves are used to treat scabies and for
ailments affecting newborns and young mothers. Extracts from
three plants in one part of the garden are combined to make an
Ayurvedic treatment effective against coughs, stomach pain and
various skin diseases, while pomegranate is used for loose bowel
motions and for dysentery. Bandagurja is applied to a snake bite,
and will keep someone alive for long enough to get them to hospital
even if they have been bitten by a king cobra - one of the world's
most deadly snakes.

Mahatma Gandhi called dalits the 'people of God'. The women's
relationship to the land is about more than producing food: it is a
religious commitment, expressed in daily acts and in festivals
throughout the farming year. In Medak district, every season is
interpreted as a state of the mother earth goddess. "When the
streams and rivers flow full: Mother is bellyful and flows in
content"
they say. "When land is replete with diverse crops: mother is
heavily pregnant. When the ear-heads are forming: mother is in
birth pangs. When seed formation is taking place: mother is
breastfeeding her children".

One of the greatest challenges is to equip the rising generation of
children with the confidence and skills to defend their culture and
also be capable of dealing with the modern world. To this end, DDS
founded a 'green school' or Pacha saale in 1993 to give a second
chance to local dalit who either never had the chance to go for
government schools or had to drop out because of poverty and
other pressures.

Every aspect of the school - from its physical structure to its
curriculum - reflects a philosophy of self-reliance and environmental
protection. It hive-like buildings were made with local rock and
without precious resources like wood and cement. They cost less
than half the average of new buildings in the area, and are cool
even on the hottest day.

"We are questioning the construction of knowledge" says
Satheesh, Director of DDS "The normal assumption is that it flows
down from those with higher education. Here we see much of that
reversed".

Another crucial battle for DDS is with, and for, the media. In Andhra
Pradesh, like in most of India, television and radio tend to reflect
official policy in favour of 'high-tech' agriculture. In response,
DDS
has trained some sangham members in radio and video production
skills so that they can make their own programmes. "With video
we can express ourselves" says one determined young women,
known to everybody as 'General'. "When outsiders make films
about us, they don't understand what we're saying. You film us
selectively. We know our own stories".

The women of DDS have shown they can produce more and
healthier food from the land with fewer inputs than the methods
touted by so-called modernisers. They have reversed the
degradation of natural resources, increased their resilience to
adverse events, and created, strong supportive local groups. Others
are following their example without prompting, and they have won
respect from scientists, economists and other professional elites.

So what will Lakshmi tell Professor Swaminathan?

"When we ate hybrids ['green revolution' crops] we found they
made our skin itch terribly. The cattle did not relish the fodder
from
these crops, and did not thrive. Hybrid sorghum extracted too
many nutrients from the soil, leaving it dead. With GE [genetically
engineered] crops we would have to purchase many different
inputs. The technology would come with many uncertainties and
with hidden costs. This year the rain is scarce. But even without
good rain we are still hopeful of a crop because our varieties can
withstand drought, and, thanks to all the manure we add, the soil is
full of life. Whenever rain comes, life will return, and some of our
crops will pull through because we have such variety".

"I have no interest in or need for genetic engineering because
in my hands I have all these seeds, which I can also share with
others. These seeds give us good, nutritious food and excellent
fodder for our animals. We know them very well. We know our land
very well."

Caspar Henderson
May 2002

--

Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfl@intrex.net
http://www.permaculture-online.com
http://market-farming.com




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