The story of how India’s organic farming movement started – and grew – till its significance became so overpowering that even the Central Government was forced to get involved – has not really been told. I don’t however intend to tell it here, because of the brief time available. But I will provide in an impressionistic overview in a few paras.

As far as my own personal knowledge goes, the first meeting about reviewing what we were doing to our farms and fields was held under the auspices of the newly formed Association for the Propagation of Indigenous Genetic Resources (APIGR) at Wardha in 1984, and it focused on genetic resource depletion in the form of loss of seed varieties – a critical issue with the organic farming movement. APIGR survived for some years. It called meetings annually during which people came together over specific issues including conservation of rice varieties, Indian breeds of cattle, water scarcity and green revolution, etc. It also published a series of booklets on these deliberations.

APIGR was followed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of ARISE. The initiative for this came from Bernard deClercq, one of India’s most insightful organic farmers who lives and works in Auroville. ARISE was even registered as a national society, but the exercise eventually faltered. This is not the suitable forum to examine why.

Then we come to the third avatar of the organic farming movement in the country, the Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) set up in 2002 in Bangalore. A majority of those attending were organic farmers from across the country. OFAI was formally registered in 2006, but is actually now ten years old. This has now remained the main association, with most organic farmers of all hues and various state level organic farming associations as a part of its membership. It has biennial conventions at different places in India – which are sort of university conventions – where farmers come to exchange techniques, participate in seed exchanges and make presentations on discoveries.

So it is confirmed that the organic farming movement was not initiated by either scientific institutions or the government which – from 1966, in fact – became increasingly addicted (if I may use the term) to a strategy of agricultural production based on chemical fertilisers and dangerous poisons called pesticides. Of course, in the 1940s and 1950s, when no chemical fertilisers were yet available with the kind of power they exercise nowadays, the official establishment in India – symbolised by trained British agricultural expert, Albert Howard – did nothing but good organic farming! The books written by Howard are still very influential, from An Agricultural Testament to Soil and Health, the latter released only last year. Both books are organic farming classics the world over, as well known as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Japanese agricultural scientist, Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution (which I publish from Goa and has now reached its 25^th edition). (All 4 titles are available from www.otherindiabookstore.com)

In the so-called developed countries like the USA and Europe as well, the organic farming movement was initiated by farmers and members of civil society organisations. It was their growing strength which led to the formation of the International Federation of Organic Farming Movements (IFOAM), the world’s apex body of organic agriculture. Last year, the Asia-level groups set up IFOAM-ASIA. OFAI deputed one of its members (Ashish Gupta) to the new organisation which elected him as the first Vice-President of the new executive board.

The need to pay more attention to farming by organic methods received a huge stimulus in India with the introduction of stricter standards for food imported into Europe from the Indian subcontinent. Export consignments to Europe with pesticide residues in excess of norms were returned. This is when the GOI, under strong pressure from the export lobby, turned to support organic farming, purely in order to shore up exports. This explains also why – till date – the entire production and export of organic food is in the hands of the Commerce Ministry, and not the Ministry or Department of Agriculture! And it has remained there since!

For the purpose of preparing organic farming standards, the Indian Government – as usual – called in persons associated with IFOAM and other NGOs in Europe. These standards were later adopted as the National Standards on Organic Production (NSOP). APEDA was asked to set up an organic farming section to administer such exports. Agencies to accredit certification inspectors were notified. Much later, GOI decided to bring in an organic certification scheme for the domestic market under the AGMARK regime.

For the purposes of organic production, the GOI overnight redesignated the National Centre for Biofertilisers into the National Centre of Organic Farming (NCOF), and their regional offices as well became regional centres of organic farming (RCOF). This enabled it to keep the mainstream agricultural research and extension infrastructure actively linked exclusively with green revolution technology.

The export-oriented organic certification schemes were terribly expensive at first, since they relied upon European inspectors (some still do). Later, these were replaced by Indian inspectors under accredited Indian agencies. Nevertheless, the cost of certification has remained high. Any extra income the farmer could get on his organic produce was being eaten up by the inspectors.

Disgusted with the huge costs of certification, the Govt of India, FAO, and groups like OFAI, sat together in an unprecedented series of meetings and drew up a new organic quality assurance guarantee in the form of the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) first evolved by the organic farming community in Brazil, south America. This low-cost scheme has been entirely successful and it has led to the registration under the Societies Act of the PGS Organic Council (PGSOC) run purely by NGOs servicing sustainable agriculture. There is also now an NCOF-run PGS system. More than 5,000 farmers are presently registered as successful organic farmers under the private PGS label.

At the state level, several state governments – notably Karnataka, Kerala, MP, Bihar, Maharashtra, etc., – have announced their own individual organic farming policies to promote and support conversion of farmers to organic agriculture. Large amounts have been allocated in some state government budgets to promote organic agriculture. (For more detailed information on the history of the Organic Farming Movement please consult, The Organic Farming Sourcebook, www.otherindiabookstore.com).

This brings me, also very briefly, to the consumer side of the organic farming movement which is not at all well organised. Organic stores – which two decades ago were approximately one or two per city at the most – have now shot up to more than 500 across India, and there are some superchains as well, including Namdhari’s and 24 Letter Mantra. A few organic food restaurants have also been started.

Consumers now know what is organic food. But somehow at the moment, only the very poor and the very rich have access to it: the poor because they grow it for themselves, the rich because they can afford the high rates of organic farmers who grow for the market. The middle class complains that organic food is priced higher than conventionally grown food and it does not see why it should pay the difference in price because it is still to be health conscious with determination. Why organic food is sold at a higher cost is also not necessary to go into at this meeting, especially since organic farmers do not use costly chemical fertilisers or synthetic pesticides or GM seeds, which cost a bomb because they are fully controlled by multinationals like Monsanto. But that is a fact of life today. It can only change when more and more farmers begin to raise crops organically, and more of it is sold directly to consumers, as is done in some areas today in the form of green bazaars. So much for this aspect of the movement.

The Scientific Basis of Organic Agriculture

Since this discussion is taking place within the walls of a scientific institution, I thought it best in this second part of my presentation, to illustrate those aspects of the movement that have found support among the scientific community.

Today organic farming is done under various labels: organic farming is also natural farming, zero-budget, Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA), biodynamic or ecological agriculture. Permaculture, another form, is also regaining ground. Local idioms refer to organic farming as “jaivik kheti,” or “naisargic kheti” or “shendriya sheti”. The defining feature of all is the absence of reliance on chemical fertilisers, pesticides and GM seeds (which are, besides being another form of pesticide, a form of unorganic or unnatural input into a system that is based almost entirely on natural principles). Use of GM seed is expressly forbidden in organic agriculture.

In my view, some basic aspects of India’s agriculture need to be highlighted first. Historically speaking, there are only three significant ways in which we human beings have ensured the supply of food needed for our survival and our other necessities:

a) The first looks at nature as a direct source. Nature is the most experienced farmer there is, and of course, it follows principles (example, selection) which have evolved over millions of years. Nature remains today the largest producer of biomass, fruit and flower, and a host of other things we cannot even begin to enumerate so we have to concede that we can never match either the scale, the efficiency, or the energies employed in that department.

b) The second is the way we have learnt recently under the influence of Western advisers, which is largely to substitute natural processes with industrial inputs like chemical fertiliser and pesticides based on a wholly reductionist (NPK) view of the plant. This system, also called the green revolution (GR) — but now turning increasingly brown — is only 50-60 years old in India; it has only a little earlier origin (but not more than a hundred years) worldwide, notably in those countries which have by now almost wholly industrialised their agriculture.

c) The third way is one that developed between these two other ways. It is still subsisting widely today and is often referred to as indigenous or traditional agriculture, which is based on culture and natural resources, but in most cases, takes advantage of natural principles and bases its practices on those.

The implication or assumption in most educated and scientific circles is that the green revolution system is the result of science, it is modern, and therefore certainly an advance on both: farming according to natural principles or indigenous agriculture.

Now this, in my opinion, is what the organic farmers of the world have refuted to a large extent because of a better scientific explanation or theory of how plants and soils work. And this will be the focus of the rest of my presentation today, because I expect that it will be appreciated by people who work with — and are committed to — the idea of scientific agriculture. Ecological agriculture is a contribution of organic farmers to human knowledge. It is quite awesome in nature and if we are intent on using labels – we could confidently called it the most modern practice of farming available in our times.

First and foremost, no form of food production which emerges as a result of natural biological principles at play can be labelled either unscientific or not scientific. This is important to establish at the start, because very often, the move to farm away from a system based on industrial chemicals is seen not just as a move away from a more efficient and productive agriculture, but as a move away from science, rationality, etc., and all that goes with the mental baggage associated with those terms. When the forest produces fruits and we (and birds and animals) eat that fruit or the honey or the flowers, the produce we eat is a result of natural biological principles in operation. They do not come into existence by any process that is against science or is unscientific or pre-scientific in any way. It would in fact be an absurd proposition to claim that natural processes are contrary to science, because science is nothing more than our undertanding of the functioning of nature at various levels and in various fields.

So anything that grows according to natural principles cannot be in anyway contrary to science. In fact, since modern scientific methods are only a few centuries old, and are yet to scratch the surface in many areas, natural methods that evolved over millions of years have stood the test of time which is the most important test there is. We need to keep that in mind. Just to give you a simple example: with all the scientific knowledge available to us, we simply cannot regenerate natural forests. All natural forests emerge on their own and each is a unique community. We may even understand them, but we cannot create or duplicate them.

This brings us to indigenous agriculture or agriculture that has continued to produce food even after the introduction of the GR. This is also often among the educated and scientific community seen as a technology of stagnation, of low productivity, and incapable of meeting the demands of growing populations.

Again this is untrue, because traditional agriculture, in contrast with modern agriculture, has kept all cultures alive and well, in times of peace and war, for several thousands of years. So it cannot really be that bad or inefficient. It met the needs of societies at the appropriate time. If it didn’t, societies would not have survived and we all would have long ceased to exist. There are in fact features of indigenous agriculture that are not so well known and which one should keep in mind, in addition to the fact that it was (and is, because much of it still exists) “default” organic.

One important feature of traditional agriculture, for example, is the inherent biodiversity implicated in its cropping systems which is often as impressive as that found in natural biodiversity-rich areas. It is well recognised that traditional systems are biodiversity-based, whereas conventional modern agricultures are principally monocultures. But it is when we examine the nature of the biodiversity that the scientific contributions of indigenous cultures appear staggering in their achievements. Among rices alone, for example, we in India had at one stage more than 300,000 varieties, all these prior to the advent of the GR. In fact, the GR reduced that diversity sharply to a few handful of so called successful varieites that can survive only on chemicals and copious quantities of water. The CRRI had 60,000 varieties. The Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI) under Dr R.H. Richharia – when he was alive – had 19,000 varieties collected by him only from that state. So we need to seriously review our perceptions of non-GR technologies.

Different approaches to plant nutrition:

What then is the difference between traditional/natural agriculture and conventional agriculture, and how has this difference been highlighted and exploited by the organic farming movement? This is a very interesting question, and needs some introduction to botany fundamentals.

Standard texts in botany highlight the following principal sources for the nutrition of plants. These are conveniently set out in the table below:

Sources of plant nutrition:

*Taken from, Claude Bourguignon, The Regeneration of the Soil, Other India Press, Goa.

Thus 95-97% of the plant’s nutritional needs or constituents are met from the atmosphere, and are therefore never sourced from the soil or the ground through the root system. The root system is responsible for intake of some mere 3-5 % of the plant’s constituents, including some nitrogen, vital minerals, which by their nature, cannot come from the atmosphere since they come from rock. It is important to highlight here how the plant draws these from the soil.

Principally this process is controlled by soil microbes, who through natural chemical processes, transform the minerals into forms that can be absorbed by the plant’s roots. For example, it is they who do the conversion of sulphur into sulphates or phosphorus into phosphates. (Some plants like legumes are masters in fixing atmospheric nitrogen directly in small nodules on their roots: this is commonly known.) Older agricultures procured minerals from tank silts or from rivers overflowing their banks, and microbes from cowdung and composts (adding to the microbes already found in the soil).

Some of these minerals are non-constitutive elements of the plant, and include potassium and chlorine, lithium and sodium, among others: the plant returns them to the soil after its life. Others – constitutive elements – like phosphorus, boron, sulphur, etc., are exported from the soil with the plant when it is removed (with the harvest). This is how soil deficiencies progressively occur, because little or no effort is made to replace the elements that are exported from the soil with the crop. In other words, we begin mining the soil and since we are dealing with limited physical quantities, soil micro-nutrient deficiencies and exhaustion is inevitable, leading to plant disease of all kinds.

Thus our organic farmers found that if they reintroduced soil microbes in large quantities into the soil through recipes like panchagavya or jeevamrut and then created conditions for those microbes to survive and work – for example, providing a good mulch – their need for external inputs declined rapidly to such an extent that on the best organic farms today, almost no external input, even addition of microbes, is any longer necessary. These farmers have come very close to how a forest system maintains itself, with absolutely no inputs from human beings.

These lessons have come from hard-working and intelligent farmers who found they had to develop these techniques, after close analysis of traditional ways and close observations of forests, to develop a new agriculture of permanence and sustainability.That learning took place outside the walls of agricultural universities and science institutions.

Now this almost natural mimicry is exactly what is displaced by modern agriculture of the green revolution. NPK are supplied in soluble form, after being produced in vast industrial units. Since these salts cannot be absorbed by the plants directly, they have to be conveyed to the roots through water, demanding huge dams and irrigation canals. Therefore irrigation is required not for the plants’ natural thirst, but as a mechanism to convey industrial salts to the root system. Since the plants are genetically not equipped to absorb all the salts, most of these are conveyed by the same waters to the river, tanks and sea. The efficiency in uptake of chemical fertiliser is therefore extremely poor.

But more important is the effects of these salts on the soil flora: termites, earthworms and soil microbes perish or migrate because they are unable to survive the inhospitable environment. The soil becomes sterile and the dependence on chemicals increases, soon leading to the law of diminishing returns. This becomes the new ground for looking for deadlier technologies like genetically modified (GM) seed which fundamentally speaking cannot improve the yield potential of a seed (like hybridisation or crossing sometimes does, because of hybrid vigour) but can only promise to protect existing crop yields from destruction.

Agriculture at Crossroads

Agriculture has always worked within the seasons and for that reason has remained sustainable. Sustainability is a measure of “how long”, whether the practices of one generation survive or can survive, into the next and then the next. Traditional agriculture has lasted thousands of years, which is a great measure of success in evolutionary terms.

In contrast, GR agriculture is undoubtedly already in the throes of a crisis of monumental proportions. In fact, the failings of the first GR – the use of dangerous, but increasingly ineffective pesticides which severely compromise the food we eat – are now exploited to further the cause of the so-called second GR, based on GMOs. One of the primary arguments used to push GMOs is their purported ability to reduce the use of toxic pesticides.

There is really no paradigm shift involved, so calling it a second GR will not help. The approach – heavy or exclusive reliance on external inputs, each one more expensive than the last – is the same: a methodological approach that departs needlessly from the natural principles governing plant growth, and which seeks to use non-renewable resources (petrochemicals) to provide substitute nutrition for that which can always be provided by nature free of cost. That’s how our forests run in any case. That’s how most of our vegetation survives, but not our agriculture, which operates within an artificial box.

There is one argument continuously made in defense of industrial agriculture: that earlier we imported food, now we produce it ourselves. But this does not acknowledge the fact that we now import the petrochemicals needed to grow that food, and without that critical industrial input, organised agriculture would face collapse. In fact, the era of cheap oil is gone, oil production has peaked, now industrial culture has moved into fracking which has even greater environmental consequences than the extraction of oil. To found an agriculture on such a base is to build a house on sand. This is a completely unsustainable operation by any definition.

The majority of the organic farming community do not accept the idea that inputs for farming must come from outside the farm: getting into that situation, or remaining in that relationship of dependence, is taken as a measure of defeat. How directly opposite is this approach to official agriculture which strongly insists on enhancing dependence on more and more expensive tools (including GMOs), not just from outside the farm, but outside the country’s laboratories and oilfields as well!

That thrust, we must concede, is the natural consequence of permitting the wholesale invasion of agriculture by industrial elements. Industrial agriculture furthers the interests of those who supply industrial inputs: fertiliser plants, agricultural research laboratories, pesticide manufacturers, and now multinational seed monopolies like Monsanto and Bayer. This means industrial agriculture begins and extends with continuous dependence on external inputs into the foreseeable future.

One important final observation about all this movement, before I conclude.

Many of you may not know this, but in quantitative terms India is still the largest producer of organic in the world. This is not so if one goes by official data, but I can tell you why the official data are completely unintelligent and unreliable in this respect (see table 1).

Table 1: Some strange statistics about organic farming, India and Worldwide

In India, millions of farmers have been growing organically for several centuries. But since they do not do it the way the Europeans do organic farming today, or follow the organic standards laid down by Europe, we presumably cannot call them certified “organic”; in fact, we call them “default” organic. Organic by default. The presumption is, if the farmers had the cash and the water, they too would have gladly used chemicals. Since these limiting factors are operating practically in all dryland areas, with little or no irrigation and where chemical fertilisers cannot be used, we turn that situation into one of profit, and sell the produce as “default” organic. The idea is not to improve default organic to the status of intended organic, but to take advantage of the situation.

So if you Iook at world figures of organic production, you see that Australia is the world’s leading producer of certified organic. You may then ask, what does Australia produce? 97% of Australia’s certified organic produce is pasture grass, which is not even for the direct consumption of human beings! So, simply because of non-sensical and arbitrary definitions, Australia leads, India trails. The problem is that such defining exercises do have huge policy implications which we should critically examine.

Why would one say that India is the largest organic producer in the world? Well, just take any one item (say, jackfruit) at random. All jackfruits grow without fertilisers and pesticides and irrigation, completely naturally. Production in volumes is approximately 1.5 million tonnes, which is greater than the entire organic export of all commodities put together out of India to the European Union.

Or take Mahua flowers, of which production is some 60 million tonnes. Or ber, which is 0.9 million tonnes. Or wild produce, like rock honey. If I have to enumerate the number of things that human beings eat in India and which are not produced with the use of chemicals, pesticides or irrigation, I would need several pages for a listing. If we certified all the naturally growing grass our animals eat from hillsides and plains, Australia with its 12 million ha organic pastures would be quite far behind. Put the entire organic production from India together, and it will clearly out total the organic production of the rest of the world. This is in fact our strength, but for some convoluted reason, we are determined to undermine this inherited capacity for ecological agriculture and chase dangerous chemical fixes based more on industry than science without a second thought.

Seminars like this one will, I hope, help redress these conceptual and policy grievances, so that we can reclaim our rightful position as the largest producer of organic in the world.

(Presentation made by Claude Alvares at the national seminar on “Relevance of Organic Farming in Indian Agriculture” held at NIAS, IISc, Bengaluru, February 3-4, 2014)