Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Water Wisdom by Vandana Shiva
http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article3044-water-wisdom.html
Published on Sunday, March 14, 2010 by Resurgence.org

Since 1966 – and as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution 
model of water-intensive, chemical farming – India has over-exploited her 
groundwater, creating a water famine.

Intensification of drought, floods and cyclones is one of the predictable 
impacts of climate change and climate instability. The failure of monsoon in 
India, and the consequent drought, has impacted two-thirds of the country, 
especially the breadbasket of India’s fertile Gangetic plains. Bihar, for 
example, has had a 43% rainfall deficit, and the story is the same in many 
other parts of India.

In the final analysis, India’s food security rests on the monsoon. Monsoon 
failure and widespread drought imply a deepening of the already severe food 
crisis triggered by trade-liberalisation policies, which have made India the 
capital of hunger. They also imply a deepening of the water crisis.

The monsoons recharge the groundwater and surface-water systems. Since 1966, 
as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution model of 
water-intensive chemical farming, India has over-exploited her groundwater, 
creating a water famine. The chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution 
use ten times more water than the biodiverse ecological farming systems.

In the 1970s, the World Bank gave massive loans to India to promote 
groundwater mining. It forced states like Maharashtra to stop growing 
water-prudent millets like jowar, which needs 300mm of water, and shift to 
water-guzzling crops such as sugar cane, which needs 2,500mm of water. In a 
region with 600mm of rainfall, this is a recipe for water famine.

A new study published in Nature magazine and led by Matthew Rodell of the 
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland shows that water levels in North 
India fell by 40mm between August 2002 and August 2008. And over the same 
period more than 109km3 of groundwater disappeared from aquifers, most of it 
extracted for chemical, Green Revolution-style farming.

Not only has chemical agriculture mined groundwater, but it has also mined 
soil fertility and contributed to climate change. Chemical fertilisers 
destroy the living processes of the soil and make soils more vulnerable to 
drought. Chemical fertilisers also produce nitrogen oxide, a greenhouse gas 
300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The solution for the climate crisis, the food crisis and the water crisis is 
the same: biodiversity-based, organic farming systems.

Biodiverse ecological farms address the climate crisis by reducing emissions 
of greenhouse gases such as nitrogen oxide, and absorbing carbon dioxide in 
plants and in the soil. Biodiversity and compost-rich soils are the most 
effective carbon sinks. They also help adapt to climate change and drought by 
increasing organic matter, which increases the moisture-holding capacity of 
soil, and hence provides drought-proofing of agriculture.

Biodiverse organic farms increase food security by increasing the resilience 
and reducing the climate vulnerability of farming systems. They also enhance 
food security because they have a higher production of food and nutrition per 
acre than Green Revolution monocultures, which measure the yield of a 
cash-crop commodity, not the total food output, nor the nutritional quality 
of that food.

Biodiverse organic systems also address the water crisis. Firstly, production 
based on water-prudent crops such as millets reduces water demand. Secondly, 
organic systems use ten times less water than chemical systems. Thirdly, by 
transforming the soil into a water reservoir by increasing its organic matter 
content, biodiverse organic systems reduce irrigation demand and help 
conserve water in agriculture.

Maximising biodiversity and organic matter in the soil thus simultaneously 
increases climate resilience, food security and water security.

However, the dominant paradigm of agriculture based on the Green Revolution 
and genetic engineering is based on reducing biodiversity and reducing 
organic matter to promote monocultures based on intensive inputs of 
chemicals, water and fossil fuels. And as the multiple crises deepen because 
of these non-sustainable practices, corporations try and transform the crisis 
into new business and marketing opportunities. Examples include the patenting 
of climate-resilient traits that farmers have evolved over centuries and 
projecting this biopiracy as an ‘invention’.

In a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal, ‘Fight Droughts 
with Science’, Henry I. Miller, co-author of The Frankenfood Myth, stated: 
“The first drought-resistant crop, maize, is expected to be commercialised by 
2012. If field testing goes well, India would be a potential market for this 
variety.” What Miller fails to mention is that India already has hundreds of 
thousands of drought-resistant crops.

These are the crops farmers are growing in times of drought. While 
cultivation of rice has gone down from 25.673 million ha to 19.13 million ha, 
the area under water-prudent drought-resistant nutritious crops has gone up 
from 15.325 million to 15.956 million ha. The biotechnology industry is 
clearly a laggard in breeding for drought resistance, compared to centuries 
of breeding by India’s farmers. Miller also fails to mention that the 
genetically engineered drought-resistant maize seed performs badly in normal 
years. This is not science.

Another example of corporate opportunism in this period of drought is the 
pushing of Roundup (a broad-spectrum herbicide). Roundup kills everything 
green other than one single crop and therefore destroys the biodiversity and 
organic matter that is needed to promote climate resilience, conserve water 
and increase food production.

It is vital that the government of India does not use this emergency of 
drought to act as a marketer of GM seeds and Roundup. The alternative is 
clear. It involves:

1. Conservation and large-scale distribution of the seeds of water-prudent 
crops.

2. The promotion of organic agriculture to increase climate resilience and 
food and water security.

3. Incentives to farmers to encourage a shift from water-guzzling Green 
Revolution agriculture to water-conserving biodiverse organic agriculture.

Farmers did not create the Green Revolution. They should not be punished for 
its consequences.

Vandana Shiva is the author of Soil Not Oil. She teaches regularly at 
Schumacher College in the UK and The School of Seed in India.