There is a romantic halo, an almost celebratory ring, around the concept of traditional farming practices, often interchangeably called ‘low-input’ or ‘sustainable agriculture’. It is the antithesis of the green revolution and industrial agriculture that farmers have been practising for almost five decades. Any departure from incessant use of chemicals is welcome; it would heal the deteriorating soil, improve the food by reducing the poison on our plates, and bring down the ever-rising costs of agricultural production. The catch is that there is confusion, both in government circles and civil society, over ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the absence of a set of coherent practices and a scientific, evidence-based, theoretical framework.
Worse, there is no systemic support for farmers if they choose to switch from the industrial to a more organic approach to farming. A systemic support has five pillars, just as the green revolution did in the decade of 1970s. One, a knowledge system for farmers and other stakeholders. Two, institutions that are community-based, and combine public and private sectors, government and civil society, among others, to steer the switch. Three, institutional financial support. Four, risk mitigation planning about who will bear the risks during the transition from one system to another. In any case, farming under any system is risky. And five, thinking about markets and consumption. How would the new system ensure premium or fair price? We need all of these in place for any kind of farming system, organic or inorganic, because agriculture is not merely an interaction within ecology but also among complex socio-economic factors.
In a recent conference on sustainable food systems — one among the many that this writer has attended in the past two decades — there was an emphasis on stories of exceptionally talented and hard-working farmers who are the bedrock of the thousands of experiments in sustainable farming in India. But the common refrain — virtually no State or market support — went unnoticed. Even the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana, announced by the Centre a few years ago, is one more scheme sans a long-term vision, appropriate policy or market support.
What is agonising is that the reigning confusion in the policy domain hurts the transition, touted as a way to fix the problems in agriculture given that farmers are in the throes of a biting crisis. There are dozens of names for sustainable farming that are rooted in the agroecological framework. And barring some guidelines issued by the Centre about what constitutes natural — a term often used to denote traditional farming — there is no concrete national roadmap to guide farmers’ transition from inorganic to organic food production systems. Chemicals are hurting the soil, the farmers know. They want a way out. There are no evidence-backed new ways.
For instance, there is no platform in the State or private domain for a knowledge system to back a farmer wanting to move away from chemicals to embrace more natural or organic systems. We have tens of different models, self-driven by farmers, maintaining on their farms both high levels of productivity at low costs and polycultures without any chemical use. But the proponents of sustainable agriculture have fallen short of developing a set of concepts or coherent and consistent policy alternatives for a new paradigm for agriculture, or even collating these experiments, studying their viability, and imagining acomprehensive support system.
The result is that the farmers practising non-chemical production system have become a club or, worse still, an exhibit that the agriculture departments put up on display in their fairs or conferences, which, ironically, maintainstatus quo and promotemore new chemicals.