Kissan Swaraj: Farmers’ Self-rule
By Rev. Thomas John, Companionship Facilitator, Chethana, JH India
Farmers' displaying seed varieties at the National Seed Festival in New Delhi. Photo courtesy of: Cargi Parsai, The Hindu.
Today, the Indian peasantry, the largest section of surviving small farmers in the world, faces a crisis of extinction as a result of seed alienation. It was the Green Revolution that first initiated the process of seed alienation. Later, with globalization enabling multinaltional corporations (MNCs) to enter the Indian seed market, seeds increasingly became a non-renewable ‘input’ that had to be bought by farmers every year. Monsanto, operating through its subsidiary Mahyco, is the leading MNC that today controls the Indian seed market. It has a market share of 43% for the sale of seeds in general and 93% for the sale of cotton seed alone.
Indian farmers were made totally dependent on company supplied hybrid and GM seeds that were bred to respond to new sets of costly farm inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The cost of production was raised far above what farmers could meet from their income, thus, leading them to debt and penury. Since these seeds were not resilient enough to stand the vicissitudes of unpredictable and changing climatic conditions, they created substantial crop loss and the consequent debt and farmer suicides. India has seen over a quarter of a million farmers’ suicides between 1995 and 2010.
It is this situation of almost complete dependence of farmers on company supplied seeds and the related excessive increase in the cost of production that prodded farmers to look at the possibility of saving native varieties of seeds and retrieve traditional framing practices and wisdom associated with them.
Saving indigenous seeds is reminiscent of the idea of “Swadeshi” or local self-sufficiency popularised by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s freedom struggle. The campaign around “Swadeshi” involved boycotting British products and the revival of domestic products and production processes. It involved an attempt at achieving self-reliance and self-sufficiency. For farmers in India, seed saving is a second freedom struggle against the enslaving, life threatening and exploitative corporate globalization.
On March 8th and 9th 2014, farmers from 17 states in India came to the national capital, Delhi to display 2300 varieties of seeds that they had conserved over generations at the National Seed Festival. They also announced the formation of a National Seed Savers’ Forum. Dr. Debel Deb from Odisha, credited with conserving 920 varieties of rice, showcased his drought and flood tolerant rice varieties rich in Vitamin B and iron at the event. Vijay Jardhari, a small farmer and founder of seed saving movement called Beej Bachao Andolan (Seed Savers Movement) was able to save 350 varieties of rice, 8 varieties of wheat, 4 varieties of barley, 220 varieties of kidney beans, and 8 varieties of cowpeas. Sahadja Samurdha led by Mr. Krishnaprasad, located in Bangalore, responds to the increasing demand for native seeds by commercializing native seeds through a seed company owned and managed by farmers. He is creating a new market for organic farming in India by leveraging the knowledge and networks of existing farmers to revive and save traditional varieties of seeds and commercialize them. There are more than 3000 farmers in Karnataka State who grow and save native seeds.
Chethana, the Joining Hands Network of the Presbyterian Hunger Program in South India, has a three-pronged strategy to campaign against corporate seed monopolies:
1. Organize 10 member farmers’ cooperatives in each locality as “Seed Savers” to cultivate/produce indigenous seeds in various crop varieties, save them and disseminate them among fellow farmers; to work towards value addition to indigenous foods cultivated from these seeds; to facilitate the inclusion of these foods in the food habits of people and to produce other organic farm inputs in the form of fertilizers and pest repellents. These farmers’ cooperatives are expected to develop themselves as entrepreneurs (Mutual Aided Co-operative Societies) and thus become self-reliant resistance groups that provide a viable alternative to corporate monopolies in agriculture, while ensuring the economic sustenance of the communities.
2. Network among such groups across each state and across South India to provide an alternative market and supply chain and also align themselves with national level advocacy groups to campaign against corporate monopolies in farming, state policies favouring these monopolies, and work towards creating GM free States, as farming is a state subject within the federal structure of India.
3. Develop stakeholders’ organizations in each State involving farmers groups, organic farm producers and marketers, ecology and biodiversity activists, consumer forums, academic scholars and researchers in farming. There is a middle class in India that is deeply concerned about the threat posed by chemical inputs, genetically modified seeds and biodiversity, human health and to life in general. Including them in this struggle is important as numbers matter in a democracy.
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Demonstration plot of a local seed saver's group ready for harvest. Photo courtesy of CHETHANA.
For Indian farmers, saving indigenous seed varieties, innocuous as it may appear, is a spiritual and political act of resisting corporate monopolies in agriculture. It is a spiritual act of saving their soul, their agency; saving biodiversity on this planet; saving earth and its fertility; saving human lives and the environment from toxic chemicals; and saving a culture and ethos that affirms mutuality and interdependence as core values for “abundant life.” Saving Seeds is a political act of resisting ‘sovereign’ nation states from becoming stooges in the hands of corporate monopolies and the international agencies formed to give legitimacy to their unhindered plunder of the resources belonging to poor farmers in two thirds of the world and asserting the food sovereignty of people to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies.
As Kavitha Kuruganti of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) puts it: “Ultimately war will be won only if farmers, the last farmer, actually holds on to seed because she or he realizes that this is something too critical and too sovereign to be handed over to anyone else.”
