When I found that dominant science and technology served the interests of powerful, I left academics to found the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, a participatory, public interest research organisation. When I found global corporations wanted to patent seeds, crops or life forms, I started Navdanya to protect biodiversity, defend farmers' rights and promote organic farming.
Navdanya/RFSTE's journey over the past two decades has taken us into creating markets for farmers and promoting tasty, healthy, high quality food for consumers. We have connected the seed to the kitchen, biodiversity to gastronomy. And now we have joined hands with Slow Food to celebrate the quality and cultural diversity of our food.
The seed has inspired us to spread the message of sustainability through Bija Vidyapeeth, which I started with Satish Kumar as a sister institution of the Schumaker College in the UK.
My journey on the road to ecological sustainability started with the Chipko movement in the 1970s when women in the region of the Himalayas protected forests by hugging trees.
For me, ecology and feminism have been inseparable. And Diverse Women for Diversity is one expression of combining women's rights and nature's rights, celebrating our cultural diversity and biological diversity.
The defence of nature's rights and people's rights have come together for me in Earth Democracy - the democracy of all life on earth, a living democracy which supports and is supported by living culture and living economies.
I am happy you have visited us on the web. We look forward to your visit to our farm, our cafe, our school. Let us together build an earth family. Let us in our diversity create an earth democracy.
While the immediate short term measure is debt relief and higher MSP, the longer term, lasting solution to the agrarian crisis is a debt free internal input ecological agriculture called by a variety of names – agroecology, organic, zero budget, permaculture, biodynamic, vedic krishi, natural farming etc etc.
The government – driven and controlled by MNCs – is planning to deepen this debt trap, to create more markets for costly seeds and chemicals. The 2017 budget has Rs 100,000 Crores allocated for agricultural credit, which means encouragement to farmers to get into more debt for more chemicals and more hybrid and GMO seeds from multinationals. This is a recipe for a deeper debt trap and an increase in the resulting suicides.
We have, across the country, success stories of farming without chemicals – producing more food, more nutrition, while increasing farmers incomes. Navdanya’s own experience has shown that chemical free biodiversity based farming produces more nutrition per acre and can feed two India’s. Farmers using their own seeds and their own ecological inputs, growing diverse and nutritious foods that people need and want, and creating their own markets without middlemen, can increase their incomes 10X to 100X.
There is absolutely no reason for a single farmer to commit suicide, nor for a single child to be wasted and stunted in our abundant Bharatvarsh.
Wherever farmers are practicing biodiverse ecological farming and participate in diverse markets they control, there is no debt, no farmers suicides. Suicides are taking place where farmers have become dependent on buying costly seeds and costly chemicals as inputs, they have been forced to give up diversity, to grow a commodity crop which can only be sold to government or traders, or the corporations behind both. Buyers are driving prices down. Squeezed between ever increasing costs and falling prices, the farmers are trapped, and in hopelessness they are committing suicide.
The way out of the epidemic of farmers suicides:
LOWER COSTS : lower the costs of production to zero through natural, ecological, organic farming and saving, selecting, breeding, and exchanging indigenous open source seeds.
INCREASE NET INCOMES : increase net incomes by saving on unnecessary expenses for toxics, including toxic seeds , and growing diverse , healthy, nutritious, chemical free crops for diverse markets.
INCREASE CLIMATE AND MARKET RESILIENCE : In addition to high costs of chemical farming, chemical farming is making farmers vulnerable to climate change, and exposed to volatile money markets. Diversity creates resilience, both to an unpredictable climate and an exploitative market.
Small farmers are our Annadatas :They are the foundation of Bharat, her health, her prosperity. They produce more than large industrial farms.
There is a common myth – that small farms are unproductive and that an increasing population requires an increase in productivity, which in turn requires large farms, which in turn requires a concentration of land ownership. To feed the people, the industrial, empirical prerogative is to take away their land. All the scientific evidence is showing that small farms are more productive than large farms.
The International Assessment of Agriculture Knowledge, Science and Technology (IAASTD ) has clearly shown that small agroecological farmers are more productive.