Organics and India

By Steve Kupetz, Wedge member, former Board President

The horror stories abound: The eggplant shining bright purple with just-before-market chemical spray. The white eggs dyed with a chemical, because brown country eggs fetch a premium price. The Coca-Cola bottled with enough pesticides to itself serve as a pest killer. The village farmers who don't eat the pesticide-drenched vegetables they grow for marketing, but instead keep a small home garden to which they apply very little or no chemicals.

In Kolkata (they now use the pre-British name), I meet with the Development Research Communication and Service Center. You can read about them on www.drcsc.org and here's an excerpted case study from that website. Uday Das is a marginal West Bengali farmer with 1000 sq.m. of land. By 1998, doing chemical intensive agriculture, he had run up debts of 1000's of rupees at the local agri-chemical shop, and had to sell his goats. In the same year, he was hospitalized with acute stomach pains and had to sell one-third of his land. The doctors thought Uday's illness was caused by his unprotected exposure to excessive pesticide. Uday then met two sustainable ag trainers, who taught him integrated farming: planting close together different plants that draw nutrients from different soil layers, mixed instead of mono-cropping, choosing crops that germinate easily and can be harvested year-round, eliminating most chemical fertilizers with mulching. His brothers thought that Uday and his family would surely perish under the new system. But now Uday has cleared his debts, married his daughter into a good family, and purchased one new cow and a TV set.

I wonder if Uday's TV will be as popular as the village one I saw with 50 people lined up, peering through the door and windows for the evening soap. And Uday's success story is only a drop in the 700 million-Indian-farmers bucket. But the DRCSC is forging ahead with education and training in: indigenous plant biodiversity, seed banks, medicinal herbs, bio-fertilizers, vermi-compost, mushroom production, and much more. They are now even planning to expand their retail marketing with some kind of more upscale organic/whole foods retail outlet in Kolkata. You would think that ten million people would be able to support at least one food co-op!

Editor's Note: Steve traveled in Rajastan & Delhi for a month this winter.