From farmers to policymakers: The road to sustainability

Amongst her various designations, Dr. Rao is the President of Gramya Resource Centre for Women and a core committee member of the South Asian Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAARC).  This week, OneWorld South Asia research associate, Nicole Anand, spent an hour with Dr. Rao to follow-up on the issues that she brought forward at PMTA.

Rukmini Rao/ Photo credit: Pbase.com

OneWorld South Asia: What would say are the most pressing questions facing Indian agriculture today? And how do you propose we work towards answering them?

Dr. Rao: The three most pressing questions are: how we are going to take control of our agriculture, how we are going to make agriculture productive, and how we are going to ensure that while our productivity continues to increase, our environment also improves. All lead to the same answer.

It is important to know the history of India’s agricultural industry in order to understand my answer to these questions. Green Revolution technologies were introduced to India in the 1960s in response to a potential mass famine and because of their ability to increase production. Chemical pesticides and fertilisers comprised some of the major technologies promoted during the Green Revolution. As expected, India experienced a great jump in productivity while using these technologies. Today, however, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that they are in fact very harmful in the long term; For example, we have seen essential waterways become increasingly polluted and farmers die from pesticide poisoning.

Fortunately, as shown through the current Plan and its recognition of excess nitrogen in our soil, the government of India has also recognised that green revolution technology has come with its own baggage. So today the main issue in agriculture is how we can increase production in an environmentally sustainable way.

To determine these solutions, we first need to address a huge problem in the direction of our current policies – namely, that there is overemphasis on so-called ‘new technologies’. Biotechnology is one example that is being pushed for across the country in universities and science laboratories. It appears that there is an unhealthy race to sign on. But the fact of the matter is that this is an unreal, unethical science that is being promoted. The kind of genetic modification being talked about is bad science and the point is that we don’t need it! Because there is evidence in the field suggesting that we can be successful through the promotion of our ‘traditional’ seeds. We feel that biodiversity is the key to tomorrow.

OWSA: Staying on the topic of biotechnology, how do you feel about the work of activists like Vandana Shiva who are taking on the cause to fight multinational corporations (MNCs) from using new technologies for seed development?

Dr. Rao: It is extremely important to fight for what you know will be harmful. Let me explain - I work with the Deccan Development Society and to date, the Dalit women we work with have collected 89 varieties of seed crops. So it is clear that there is great biodiversity here.

As a result, we believe that if our millets or beans, depending on the region/state, are made available by government procurement, there will be a huge demand for them. Henceforth, we would not need biotechnology. We in civil society, including Vandana Shiva, are pushing for the recognition and promotion of biodiversity.

OWSA: Do you think that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) targeting environmental sustainability and poverty reduction have had an effect on the Planning Commission’s agricultural policies?

Dr. Rao: Not really. Except that the plan document for the first time does talk about improving productivity without ecological harm. I do believe that the government now realises that green revolution technologies were actually very harmful. I also think that there is an increasing understanding of this. The problem is that it has taken a long time for this understanding to sink in.

OWSA: Do you think that the MDG on environmental sustainability is a reasonable goal?

Dr. Rao: It is a goal that we all have to work towards, but the means to reach it is not clear at all.  In different countries, different approaches are being tried out. Being a developing country, we cannot only look at the environment, but we also have to talk and think about increasing the living standards of the majority of Indians.

It is a false dichotomy actually, saying that if we stop using fossil fuels or stop destroying our environment then we won’t be able to live a better life.  The reverse is the case, isn’t it? If you ruin the environment, than you are surely going to ruin your life.

I do think that for the first time the government is recognizing that environmental damage has gone too far. In that sense, having a millennium development goal, or an UN-agreed understanding of moving forward, does steer countries in a certain direction.

OWSA: Can you tell us about what in the Five-Year Plan excites you?

Dr. Rao: For the time being, I am excited about the fact that the central government has officially acknowledged and incorporated these local yet significant concerns in the Plan document. But I do recognise that the Plan is a wishful, as opposed to realistic, document.  Moreover, agriculture is a State, not Central, subject.

There are a couple of things that the Plan rightly mentions for the first time.  For one, the Plan recognises that we have to improve the use of water through a participatory approach. So far it has only been a command and control approach, otherwise known as a dictation from the top to the bottom. The major problem with this sort of system is that the beneficiaries are not involved in the decision making which often leads to inappropriate solutions. There are many examples, including in my own work, which have demonstrated that the participatory approach is useful.

Also for the first time, this Plan looks at more than just rainfed agriculture and high resourced areas, which were always considered to be the only areas that produced our food.  This time the Plan mentions the need to find suitable crop varieties in drylands.  This is extremely important because drylands are in fact the producers of 40% of this country’s food.

OWSA: In your conclusion at PMTA, you mentioned that the beneficiaries of subsidies are private companies and not the farmers themselves. It seems that this understanding is not widespread – can you explain this a bit further?

Dr. Rao:  There are two parts to this: we say that we are giving subsidies to farmers and we actually give them bags of chemical fertilizers at a subsidised price.  Who is being subsidised to produce them? The companies that are making these fertilizers.

Moreover, farmers using subsidized fertilizers become dependent on industry, stop using oxen and start buying subsidised tractors. But again, who benefits? The tractor companies.

The reality is that if the government did not give out these subsidies, there would be no market for fertilisers. Farmers would then use organic manure, ridding their dependence on industry.

Furthermore, multinational corporations are supported by European and American companies and as a result, the foreign companies benefit from any effort we make. Of course, farmers are the ones who are subsidising everyone’s work because we are not paying them a due price for their crop.

OWSA: So how do you suppose Indian policymakers and civil society should promote this understanding to move towards more effective policies?

Dr. Rao: We have to explain to people through real life examples. So for instance, we can now see that small farms are actually viable – relative to inputs, productivity is high. Earlier, the common understanding was that with more land there are more crops.

Another example is of farmers using organic manure, as opposed to pesticides, and producing a much better crop.  At least one million farmers in India are now successfully using non-chemical approaches for pest management.

So what we have to do is to look for more and more case studies. And we have to upscale. Civil society can be involved in this process through knowledge sharing, but upscaling can only be achieved through the initiative of farmers themselves.

OWSA: Can you tell us about an intervention you have worked on that you consider a success?

Dr. Rao: One very successful intervention was the project I just referred to that we at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture carried out on the upscaling of crop management without the use of pesticides.

We targeted the state of Andhra Pradesh because at the time, there was a horribly increasing rate of farmer suicides in this area. What was happening was cotton farmers were investing in inputs, fertilisers and pesticides as I mentioned before, but costs kept rising and profits began to shrink.

Many farmers took out loans which they couldn’t repay and eventually, the heavy burden of debt led many to take their own life! So it was an intense time and certainly a necessary time to take action.

We began working with just ten farmers in one village of Andhra Pradesh. Our hope was to gradually watch them ‘go green’ or start using organic inputs. After we saw the farmers succeed, we turned to the government who wanted to see the positive results for themselves. Once they did, state funding and support through the World Bank given to organized women’s groups, and civil society knowledge sharing, allowed for the upscaling of this work to what is now one million farmers!

OWSA: Dr. Rao, your success story seems to involve a deep collaboration between farmers, civil society and policymakers. You also spoke about this sort of model in your presentation at PMTA. In support of this idea, do you feel that the concept of a ‘knowledge portal’ to collectivise information from key actors would be beneficial?

Dr. Rao: I think a knowledge portal is necessary. What is important though is disseminating the knowledge to the grassroots. For example, already today there are some private sector companies who have introduced knowledge portals for agricultural issues, but information is still not on the ground. So it is definitely important to involve small farmer organisations in any portal effort.