Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

A Farming Model to Sustain the World
January, 27 2010 By Sharma, Devinder
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/4122
   Ten years from now, in 2020, when we try to look back, Indian agriculture 
can be transformed into a healthy and vibrant system where farmer suicides 
have been relegated to history, where distress and despondency has been 
replaced by the lost pride in farming,  where agriculture becomes sustainable 
in the long run, and does not add on to global warming. As we enter 2010, the 
script for a futuristic agriculture, which brings back the smile on the face 
of farmers, without leaving any scar on the environment, is being rewritten.
   What began as a small initiative some six years back in a non-descript 
village in Khamam district, has now spread to over 2 million acres in 21 
districts of Andhra Pradesh. I remember when I first talked about the miracle 
brought about in village Pannukula in Andhra Pradesh, many thought I was 
simply trying to romanticise agriculture. How farming can be done without the 
use of chemical pesticides, I was repeatedly asked.
   Pannukula dug out a lonely furrow, but eventually blazed a trail. In the 
next four years, more than 318,000 farmers in 21 out of the 23 districts of 
Andhra Pradesh have discarded the intensive chemical farming systems, and 
shifted to a more sustainable, economically viable and ecologically friendly 
agriculture. A silent revolution is in the offing. In Kharif 2009 (the 
monsoon season), some 1.4 million acres was covered with what is now known as 
Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA).
   As I write this in the first week of January 2010, the area had expanded 
to 2 million acres of 21 districts. More than 0.6 million acres increase in a 
farming system that does not use chemical pesticides, and is also phasing out 
chemical fertiliser, that too in matter of few months, is a record of sorts. 
And all this has happened without any push from the government agencies and 
the private sector. I see no reason why this environmentally safe, and a 
farmer-friendly system of sustainable agriculture, cannot cover 200 million 
acres across the country in another ten years or so if the government gets 
serious.
   60,000 acres increase in a farming system that does not use chemical 
pesticides, and is also phasing out chemical fertiliser, that too in matter 
of few months, is a record of sorts. Ten years from now, in 2020, when we try 
to look back, Indian agriculture can be transformed into a healthy and 
vibrant system where farmer suicides have been relegated to history, where 
distress and despondency has been replaced by the lost pride in farming, and 
where agriculture becomes sustainable in the long run and does not result in 
climate change.
   This is a roadmap for the future of Indian agriculture, and for that 
global agriculture. It not only provides a sustainable path, with a very low 
carbon footprint, and has tremendous potential to remove poverty and hunger. 
It has been conclusively demonstrated that household food security has 
improved with a 40 per cent drop in the purchase of food from the market. The 
crop yields have gone up, and farmers are now able to cultivate two crops in 
a year. This is the Zero Hunger model that I normally talk about which needs 
to be adopted under the proposed National Food Security Act.