Not possible to practice traditional farming in India anymore; here is why -Vivian Fernandes

-The Financial Express

For most consumers, ‘organic’ is probably a code for ‘safe’ or ‘residue-free’, not necessarily produce grown without chemical fertilisers and pesticides. But marketers use the tag to tap into a seam of fear in some urban parents who are so anxious about health that they are willing to pay for advertising that spells ‘well-being’. A brand of ‘organic’ jaggery, for example, on the shelves of Reliance Fresh stores claims to be free of genetically modified organisms (GMO), when GM sugarcane is not even undergoing field trials in the country. Only one variety of cane that has been genetically-engineered for drought tolerance is being tested in India and that too in glasshouses at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Even if it passes the tests, it will be years before it jumps the regulatory hoops; perhaps, never at all.

“Organic is the result of activism,” says Parag Sinha of NAPL Advisors, a consultant to food parks and dairies. It is a nice tag, he says, but it is difficult for produce to earn that label unless grown in isolated areas like Sikkim or Arunachal Pradesh. Sinha was in the business of growing residue-free chilli for export to the European Union (EU) at Khargone in Madhya Pradesh. He says he signed up farmers on contract for 250 acres the first year and 1,250 acres in the second. Farmers were paid the market price prevailing on the day of purchase, if their produce had residues below the maximum levels permitted by the EU. Chilli is prone to pest attacks and needs repeated sprays. A small team advised farmers about the chemicals to use and when to use them. In the third year, Sinha contracted 5,000 acres, but ran out of working capital and defaulted on purchases.

But prices were high that year, so farmers did not suffer losses. In 2016, Sinha suspended the business after a viral attack as farmers cannot revert to the crop for three years. Sinha found that 70% of the produce, on average, was residue-free. Some farmers cheated. Some others followed the prescribed practices, but their plots were so small they could not escape contamination from neighbouring fields. “Residue-fee farming is not difficult,” Sinha says, “It is not even costlier.” But for people like Rangu Rao, chemical pesticides are anathema. He considers them environmentally unsustainable; bugs develop resistance to them over time. They also kill beneficial microbes in the soil. And they have to be bought for cash, which is financially oppressive for smallholder farmers who have little marketable surplus. Ideally, Rao would want smallholder farmers to grow all they wanted. But they can’t. They have to buy clothes, for instance. So, they need cash.

He would like them not to use chemical fertilisers. For him, they are like steroids. He believes farmyard manure (FYM) can do the trick. But tribal farmers do not own plots large enough to keep cattle. It is also not possible to scour the landscape for enough quantities of the dung of free-range cattle to supply crops the nutrients they need. Huge quantities of manure would be needed to replace chemical fertilisers. The Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research near Delhi says FYM is rich in micro-nutrients and organic carbon, but it has just 0.5% nitrogen, up to 0.4% phosphorus, and 0.3% potassium. In comparison, urea has 46% nitrogen, single superphosphate is 16% phosphorous and muriate of potash 60% potassium. Rao is one of a group of idealists from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University who, three decades ago, decided to work among tribals in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas district. Rao is CEO of Safe Harvest, a company whose chairman is Mihir Shah, former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission.

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