I am here on behalf of the Organic Farming Association of India. Our business is sustainable farming. I have – in a fairly long life of 60 years – engaged myself in a wide variety of pursuits, from being a researcher to journalist, lecturer and publisher, environmental activist and book salesman. But the two human activities that have enchanted me no end and which do not bring fatigue are the act of learning and the activity of raising food.

I will speak a little today about the latter because there are, as this seminar indicates, several ways of raising food: simply put, some bad, some good, some unsustainable, some not.

We did good farming for 10,000 years. During this period, our peasants and adivasis bred an enormous bank of cultivars and varieties of food plants. In rice alone, they created some 300,000 varieties in India alone. Englishmen who visited India in the 18th and 19th centuries concluded that agricultural practice was so optimal, it could not be improved. Albert Howard, the founder of organic farming as we know it today, went on record to say he had come to teach Indian farmers but had ended up learning from them instead.

Despite this great and undisputed competence, the Government system under the instigation of private American Foundations introduced the environmentally destructive “green revolution” package of practices into India. So for the past 50 years or so, we have done farming that hardly matches with the skills and expertise of our past agricultural history. We have in fact got into ‘bad farming”. Let me explain what I mean when I talk of ‘bad farming’.

Bad farming has several features:

• Pumping the plant with external inputs like water, fertilizers and pesticides
• Expensive in money terms, so requiring enormous subsidies cornered most by the rich
• Intensive in energy terms, especially non-renewable energy
• Ecologically disruptive, harming insects, soil fauna and other life
• Practices like monoculture, abhorrent to nature

Bad farming is bad because after generating a host of problems for nature and for society (including farmers and consumers), it is also unable to meet its objectives of sustainable yields for any length of time. This in effect means:

• Declining production or diminishing returns, due to soil degradation
• Widespread insect resistance, due to indiscriminate pesticide use
• Marked reduction in biodiversity of crops
• Rise in prices of fertilizers, as these are dependent on imported oil stocks
• Large annual increases in subsidy element, last being Rs.1,20,000 crores
• Unviable farming operations leading to elimination of producers (farmer suicides)
• Harm to public health in the form of food contaminated with dangerous pesticides

Now all agree that green revolution agriculture has reached a plateau and cannot move ahead, but only backward. The response of the system: more of the same or new technologies. The present debate on the introduction of Bt brinjal is quite symbolic.

First you create a problem of insect pests with your methods of agriculture which involve monocrops, heavy use of pesticides (recommended by scientists as sound strategy), reduction in diversity of seeds. Then you argue the pests are beyond control and there is need for more effective pesticide. So you engineer the plant itself and make each cell of the plant toxic to the insect concerned. Millions of plants now manufacture Bt toxin. What appears sporadically in nature as a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, now becomes a feature of every cell of every exemplar of the plant so engineered. The reduction in diversity is phenomenal. In place of hundreds of varieties of brinjal, we now have now only one variety: bt brinjal, owned by a single company. We replace natural food with tampered food. Experience and history tell us that every time we do something like this, we are simply generating a new wave of horrors.

The media, scientists, governments are pushing genetically engineered crops as the latest technology for feeding the hungry millions. Anyone with common sense is bound to ask how this latest and most expensive of technologies, fully owned by one of the most ruthless corporations in the world (Monsanto) – solely moved by profits and profiteering – can assist in feeding the poor, hungry millions of this world. But educated people who read will believe anything.

Why does this continuous reliance on technological circuses continue to happen? Because so-called scientific thinking has departed from nature’s wise ways. We have become in fact alienated from nature and her way of thinking, even though we remain very much part of the systems of nature in every way. This is waywardness, not progress. At some stage one will have to return to natural intelligence and pay respect once again to nature’s practices.

We are told that nature is the mother of Invention, but that is inadequate description of her truly prodigious powers. Nature is actually the most ingenious and most prolific producer of this planet. Human beings are hardly even close competitors. But when we begin the process of distinguishing human beings from the rest of creation and assume the mantle of superiority we begin put ourselves under the framework of unsound thinking. We are the only species on earth in fact that preaches to others that it is inherently superior to all others. We convince ourselves (it does not take much trouble to do so since there is no one to question) that we are the most prolific producer of goods and services on earth. We feel we are superior to nature because we can speed up nature. We can substitute for it, for its processes, with new processes that are the results of human intelligence.

One of the most simple examples of this difference between natural and scientific intelligence is demonstrated with the leaf when compared with plastic. Both perform work. One is from renewable sources, the other is not. One degrades completely after use, the other is non-biodegradable. The more we respect and learn from natural intelligence, the more sustainable we are. The more we depart from it, the more problems we create for ourselves, each more serious than the ones before.

Climate change is the recent and most dramatic of the signs of departure from the pathways of natural intelligence. If climate change is true, then the industrial model which has caused it is the greatest failed human activity in history because in geological time, it could not be sustained even for a few minutes without going down like a pack of cards.

Conventional agriculture based on use of chemicals and pesticides is part of this way of thinking and this is the reason why it has no foreseeable future. What are the indicators? Based on fossil fuels, it is foolishly founded on non-renewable resources. Its economic liability is now enormous. Its economic unviability, leading to farmer suicides, is obvious. Its productive capacity is stagnant or declining.

Organic farmers – who are the best exponents today available of sustainable agriculture –
have somehow chanced upon the wisdoms associated with nature’s intelligence. At the South Asia Conference on Outstanding Organic Agriculture Techniques, organic farmers agreed that they had among themselves solved all the serious problems associated with sustainable farming and production and there was really no further need of agricultural scientists and universities.

This is largely because they all rely upon one proven model: nature, the forest. From it, they have extracted the principles of natural farming. Let us now see how that model of farming is attracting and exciting the world.

If one wants to see one of the best agricultural systems in the world, one has to visit the Amazon rainforest. This remarkably self-sufficient system produces food and it produces biomass. It keeps an enormously diverse community of species alive without human intervention, assistance or external inputs.

Organic farmers in India and elsewhere have learnt the art of mimicking the natural forest and its principles of utilising freely available resources for livelihood and for survival. Once these principles are learnt by experience, there is no going back to conventional farming using external inputs like chemical fertilisers and toxic pesticides.

Organic farmers use organic seed, avoid hybrids, refuse GM seeds entirely. They interact with the soil as a living medium, looking primarily after the soil fauna so that they can perform the work that nature has long assigned them to do. They ensure that monocultures are avoided, that no insects are killed. They farm in the company of termites and earthworms. They do not irrigate their crops like conventional farmers do, but rather use methods that protect soil moisture. They understand the function of mulches, the need to keep the soil covered always so that soil fauna including the microbes are protected from the hostile action of the sun. They never burn organic material of any sort, but utilise it for building up the humus in the soil.

They do not purchase inputs, they do not borrow organic matter from others, they generate everything they need on the farm itself. By producing food without chemicals and poisons, they protect the health of consumers. They allow all creatures to flourish as nature has plenty for all. They need no oil stocks from the Gulf, nor so-called subsidies from the Ministry of Agriculture all of which goes in their name to fertilizer production companies.

What is most significant is they protect and build on the soil so that their method of raising crops can be continued without difficulty for any length of time for any number of years or centuries. There is no better yardstick of sustainable agriculture.

In my opinion, this is the most exciting time to be in agriculture. I use every opportunity I get nowadays to convince young people to leave their colleges and universities and return to the land and start growing plants. Agriculture is a subject only for the most intelligent and sensitive of human beings. It requires you to observe nature closely, how it works, adapt its methods to your own field, raise a net output that is an asset to society. The least intelligent of students go into computers (or IT) where they implement code and become contract labour for so called advanced economies which themselves are tottering every day. Neither do we need a single additional engineer, mechanical or electrical. We need instead – on a urgent basis for the crisis-ridden present and future – millions of young people who understand plants, soils, forests, ecosystems, wildlife, species and environmental rehabilitation. People who can design production systems that do not degrade the environment, but enhance it. Only if this new cadre becomes available will be we able to save ourselves and future generations.

(This text is illustrated by a series of background slides.)

(Talk delivered at CMS College, Kottayam, Kerala, India on January 15, 2010)