By the end of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of the long campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts.
The
agro-ecological farming systems of Bharat have been placed under
modern threat from the time that the ‘Green Revolution’ was
planned. This planning became manifest through the direct policy
support given to the public finance and sanction given to the
creation of ‘command areas’ which were fed by the water collected
behind new large dams. But it also became manifest through the
connections that were being created between our national agricultural
research system and the West, in particular the agricultural
universities of the USA.
That
threat took form from the early 1960s, and one of its results was to
lead a generation of crop scientists, agricultural administrators and
State and Central Governments to accept ‘high yielding’ and
‘productivity’ and ‘hybrids’ as the only dimensions of the
relationship between staple crops and the provision of food to
Bharat’s people. These views were successfully marketed, thanks to
sustained and continuous support by the Government machinery, to the
consuming public, and even found place in school textbooks in all
major languages. In this way, the idea that a ‘scientific’
approach to new ways of growing our staple crops was projected to our
society as being the only modern way.
When
this happened, for over a generation of younger citizens who became
adults in the early 2000s, the idea that agriculture is equal to
well-applied doses of science was one that went largely unquestioned.
Meanwhile, the role of the kisan was deliberately diminished. By the
end of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of
the long campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their
legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource
stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were
reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of
the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.
It
is against such a background – which is a chapter of the overall
transformation of the cultivation of food in Bharat – that the
opposition to genetically-modified crops and food is to be viewed.
The steadfast opposition to this technology is grounded in the
recognition that our country’s immense biodiversity of seeds,
plants and life forms is our collective heritage, which has evolved
through the cumulative innovations, adaptations and selections of
many generations of indigenous farming communities, for whom these
seeds and life forms are sacred.
When
this position is understood, then the reason why genetically modified
organisms – uncontrollable and irreversible when let into the
agro-ecological environment – and their produce is so despised,
becomes plain. It is not a matter of science alone, as the
geneticists and their financiers claim, but has as much, if not more,
to do with culture, independence and self-reliance. These are
essential aspects of the GM discussion which the proponents and
advocates cannot employ, because none of these aspects favours their
position.
Articles
such as GM crops debate can do without Swadeshi paranoia follow
a pattern of advocacy. They treat technology of GM as being by itself
the silver bullet that can solve all crop problems, they elevate GM
scientists over all other science related to the practice of
agriculture, they denigrate shamefully and belittle the farmer and
her knowledge, they cast slurs on all those who are critical of GM
and seek to discredit them by citing academic papers and other
material that advocates GM. This is the pattern that we are seeing
not only in Bharat, but wherever there is opposition to GM and to the
policies that the technology depends on to enter a country.
The
growing of our crop staples, of vegetables and fruit has to do with a
great deal more than the adoption of a particular technology. On
everything other than the need (always framed as urgent) to accept
GM, the proponents and advocates of this technology can join no
discussion, for that is the limit of their argument. For a
generation, farmers’ groups and unions have been protesting the
neglect that farm livelihoods have been subjected to. They have
protested (and continue to) policy impacts that have caused the
displacement of farmers in huge numbers because smallholder farming
earns them nothing, or because their farms are swallowed up by racing
urbanisation; they have been demanding a minimum living income as a
guarantee to all farm households, which must be their due as food
growers.
Who
are they and what do they have? They have 85 per cent of the total
holdings in Bharat (117.60 million marginal and small holdings of the
total of 138.34 million) which account for 44.5 per cent of the land
area under agriculture (71.15 million hectares of the total of 159.59
million hectares). It is this large section of our people, the
providers of Bharat’s food on that 85 per cent of all farm
holdings, whom we are accustomed to call ‘annadaata‘,
that is represented by organisations like the Bhartiya Kisan Union,
the largest farmers’ union in the country, which has opposed GM
crops (and field trials) from the outset. “We are concerned about
farm community’s and nation’s seed and food sovereignty which
will certainly be eroded when GMOs are pursued as a technology,”
was the BKU statement, which powerfully shows us why GM is a
socio-economic, ecological and cultural question, none of which are
subordinated to science.
This
is what worries the growers of Bharat’s food. Technological and
market fixes have not shortened this list of worries but have done
the opposite. The subject for us is the growing of crop staples, or
crop choice, the methods used to cultivate, the support that the
‘kisan’ finds, and the environmental and cultural links between
crop grower and food consumer. When considering this
multi-dimensional nature of food and farming, it is important to note
(which the GM advocates and proponents omit) that conventional crop
breeding continues to meet important challenges like improving
drought tolerance, improving nitrogen fertiliser efficiency, and
increasing yields according to the contexts of the different
agro-ecological regions in our country. When we reached
self-sufficiency in food staples, we did so by relying on crop
breeding together with providing support (erratic as it was, prone to
politically manipulation) to our ‘kisans’. Where then is the
place for GM?
There
is none. That is why proponents have resorted to quoting papers that
are designed by institutions outside Bharat which have a great
interest in facilitating the grabbing of Bharat’s genetic commons
and bio-cultural heritage to be privatised and monopolised. The
Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch had stated their opposition to GM most
forcefully in a statement (released in New Delhi earlier this year):
“We assert our sovereign rights to freely plant, use, reproduce,
select, improve, adapt, save, share, exchange or sell our seeds –
without restriction or hindrance – as we have done for past
millennia.” GM has no place in this assertion, by a countrywide
seed savers’ network, of the rights of kisans.
There
is no place for GM under any of the scenarios presented by the
proponents (climate change in particular). As an indication of our
enormous agro-diversity, the National Gene Bank of the National
Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources has said that its base collections
total 402,894 accessions of 1,586 crop species. These include 159,569
cereals, 57,523 millets, 58,756 pulses or grain legumes, 58,477
oilseeds, 25,330 vegetables, 6,872 medicinal and aromatic plants, and
3,847 spices and condiments. There is in this astonishing collection
(and the kisans’ own collections) all that our country needs to
find staples that will deal, as Surajit Dasgupta has mentioned, with
“increasing temperatures, decreased water availability in some
places and flooding in others, rising salinity, and changing pathogen
and insect threats”.
The
methods to deal with these have been practiced by the cultivating
households (of which there are many within our 167 million rural
households) in the 20 agro-ecological regions of Bharat and their 60
sub-regions over which are roughly apportioned the diversities of
soil, climate, physiography, the availability periods of conducive
moisture (which determines the length of growing seasons). They had
perfected crop rotations (largely abandoned by industrial
agriculture) and which can increase yields by even 20 per cent, the
water holding capacity of soils (woefully under-studied) had been
improved, they lowered susceptibility to drought by planting cover
crops that increase soil organic matter, they had saved themselves
from water pollution by nitrogen and the need for pesticides.
This
is a small glimpse of the wider context in which the GM advocates and
proponents work, but they do so outside the dimension of cognitive
justice that ties us together – acknowledging the right for
different knowledge systems to exist with their associated practices,
livelihoods, ways of being, and ecologies to coexist. It is
organisations like Anchalika Krushak Sanghatan of Odisha, Bhu Adhikar
Abhiyan of Madhya Pradesh, Ekta Parishad, Gujarat Khedut Samaj,
Bharat Swabhimaan Andolan Lucknow, Shetkari Sanghatan of Maharastra
that are rearticulating this wider context in which GM and the
techno-capital domination is represents. These are a few amongst the
many organisations that have created diverse spaces which democratise
food, its research and its provision, and whose hundreds of thousands
of members practice bio-diverse ecological agriculture free from the
narrow issues of technology and its overlords.
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