Sri Lanka's experiment with organic agriculture.

Sri Lanka's President talks at the UN General Assembly of his country banning chemical fertilisers and pesticides. 

Pic courtesy: Tamilguardian.com

It was expected. The uproar over Sri Lanka’s path-breaking decision to go organic is on the predictable lines. The same arguments, the same kind of fear psychosis, and the bogey of ideological thinking that will take the world backwards should not come as a surprise anymore. Any possible disruption to the power equilibrium dominated by agribusiness giants is sure to be backed by an orchestra playing the usual wrong concerto. 

Even before the UN Food Systems Summit recognised the need to move towards a healthier, more sustainable and more equitable food systems, Sri Lanka had made a bold resolve a few months earlier to put the concept of agro-ecological transformation into action by banning the imports of chemical fertiliser and pesticides, through a gazette notification on May 6, 2021. Coming before the ban on palm oil imports and the directive to growers to uproot the existing plantations in a phased manner, Sri Lanka has shown a remarkable determination to make a transition towards a healthy and sustainable future for farming. 

Addressing the UN General Assembly in New York on Sept 22, President Gotabaya Rajapaksha said: “Sustainability is the cornerstone of Sri Lanka’s national policy frame work. Because of the impact on soil-fertility, biodiversity, water ways and health, my government completely banned the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and weedicides earlier this year,” adding that the “production and adoption of organic fertiliser as well as investments into organic agriculture are being incentivised”. 

For a country reeling under a huge foreign debt burden, with as much as 80 per cent of the revenue collected going towards debt servicing, and at the same time faced with severe food shortages at home, the Sri Lankan President has so far stood firm against the panic being created in the name of growing food insecurity arising from an anticipated drop in production. This reminds me of a similar kind of pressure built within days after former President Suharto of Indonesia had banned in one go the use of 57 chemical pesticides on paddy under a presidential decree in the late 1980s. This was in response to an unprecedented attack of brown plant hopper pest on paddy, and it was on the advice of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that the late President Suharto then launched integrated pest management in paddy. 

An impression is being created as if Sri Lanka’s food crisis is the result of the nation’s shift towards organic farming. Well, that is incorrect, a propaganda drummed up by the chemical industry. In reality, the ban on chemical fertiliser and pesticides came into effect only in early May, and since then there is only one cultivation season, called Yala - sown in May and harvested in August, but even before the crop hit the market, fears over declining yields were already rife. What needs to be known is that it is generally in the 2^nd and 3^rdyear after the chemical use has been stopped that we can see the yields tapering off before it stabilises, and then slowly begins to rise. In any case, the external cost that intensive farming systems leave behind is often taken as a price that the society inevitably has to pay. To illustrate, the rice belt in the north is witness to renal failure in a big way among the rural poor, which many believe is linked to excessive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, while a number of experts discount any such link.   

A report in The Independent, London, says that more than 20,000 people have died from the Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) as it is called, and has rendered over 400,000 sick in the past 20 years. 

In the case of tea also, the second-largest export commodity, again an unnecessary scare is being created. Already the yields are very low, with FAO estimating that the yields have been continuously on the decline in the past decade, dropping to 350 to 400 kg per acre in large areas, and even to 150 kg per acre in some cases. With nearly 75 per cent of the tea growers being small, soil degradation is among the prominent reasons for the falling yields. The advantage in going completely organic is that in years to come, applying suitable agro-ecological approaches in cultivation practices, Sri Lanka can build on soil health thereby rejuvenating the tea gardens. It can create a niche in the global market with organic tag being it’s USP. Considering that the demand for organic food products is raising globally, Sri Lanka is placed in an advantageous position given its head start provided of course it takes the right steps to guide the transition. 

The challenge before Sri Lanka is to redesign its research, development and production approaches. It has to first begin by reorienting the national agricultural research programmes suitably altering the educational curriculum. Research priorities need to shift based on validating and protecting community knowledge and innovations. Especially to address the complexities of climate change, traditional varieties and the richness of available diversity offers immense resilience. Care must be taken to ensure that the transformation process is participatory; forcing it down on farmers will not work in the long run.   

For those who doubt whether agro-ecology – and it includes organic, natural and biodynamic farming systems etc -- can feed the world, and if yes then how to achieve food system transformation, a 2019 report by the FAO’s High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition, details the pathways. It also quotes a meta-analysis (2017) by Raffaele D’Annaolfo et al which has conclusively brought out the economic gains accruing from agro-ecological farming systems. Accordingly, the yields increased in 61 per cent cases analysed, decreased in 20 per cent, while farm profitability increased in 66 per cent cases. 

It requires courage to stand up alone. And it happens only when you believe in something that you stand for. President Rajapaksha’s tryst with organic farming may eventually open the door to the future of global farming. #

Source: Sri Lanka goes organic. The Tribune. Oct 2, 2021. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/sri-lanka-goes-organic-318938

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When Prof David Pimental said: "99.9% pesticides go into environment, only 0.1% hits the target pest."

Amidst a hurricane of lawsuits that the agrochemical multinational Bayer-Monsanto faces in America and elsewhere over its herbicides Roundup and Dicamba alleged link to cancer, a joint investigation by Unearthed, a journalists research group founded by the Swiss NGO Public Eye and Greenpeace UK found that India tops the global chart with nearly 59 per cent of the pesticides sales being of ‘Highly Hazardous Pesticides’. Japan follows up with 52 per cent; Brazil with 49 per cent; US with 36 per cent and UK sells only 11 per cent of these.  

As per a report in The Guardian agrochemical companies haves disputed this data. Bayer has specifically termed it ‘misleading’ but has still not countered it with its own data. Meanwhile, CropLife International, a powerful lobby group of the agro-chemical industry, claims only 15 per cent of its products are Highly Hazardous, 10 per cent that can be ‘used safely and responsibly’. Nevertheless, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHT) are defined as “pesticides that are acknowledged to present particularly high levels of acute or chronic hazards to health or the environment according to internationally accepted classification systems.”

This reminds me of a discussion I had with Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug sometimes in the mid-1980s. To a question what he had to say about Rachel Carlson’s path-breaking book Silent Spring, considered to have spearheaded the environment movement, Borlaug said that she was an ‘evil force’ and ‘these are the kind of people who don’t want hunger to go away’. He then explained that pesticides are like medicines. Farmers have to use them carefully taking all the precautions. What Borlaug said could be debated at length but it certainly formed the basic strategy for the Green Revolution wherein pesticides were used to save crops from pest damage. But over the years, as pesticides became more pervasive in environment,  innumerable studies have shown the use and abuse of chemical pesticides leading to environmental damages, ecological imbalances, pest resistance and contamination of the entire food chain. More recently, the UN Human Rights Council has said that pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole.”

“It’s a myth,” Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food told The Guardian: “Using more pesticides has nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to FAO, we are able to feed 7 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” The report further said: “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.” 

After the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a report linking Glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp herbicide) to cancer in humans, a flurry of lawsuits in America were unleashed against the use of the toxic pesticide. While Monsanto (which has since been bought over by Bayer) claimed that regulatory agencies worldwide, including European Commission and US Environment Protection Agency, do not point to a link between Glyphosate and cancer, a large number of cancer victims nevertheless began filing legal cases. As per the latest count, an estimated 42,000 (and still counting) lawsuit have been filed so far, several legal sources say that the number of plaintiffs may have already swelled to over 100,000 by now.

Not only against Glyphosate, the lawsuits now have also moved on to another herbicide Dicamba. On Feb 15, a US federal court awarded a Missouri farmer $ 265 million in damages for the destruction wrought to his peach orchard. The farmer charged the two big agrochemical companies – Bayer and BASF – for wrecking havoc to his orchard from Dicamba herbicide sprays done by his neighbour that drifted to his field. The herbicide was being used by his neighbour for Dicamba-resistant cotton that drifted to his peach orchard ‘curling leaves and killing trees’. Another more or less similar 140 lawsuits against Dicamba now await the companies.

But it’s the legal action against Glyphosate that is being keenly watched. So far, in three trials against Glyphosate, the jury has awarded $2.3 billion in damages to four plaintiffs. Although the damages were later reduced to $ 190 million, the judgements mostly pertain to the failure of the company to adequately warn consumers of cancer risks posed by the herbicide. It was first in Aug 2018 that a San Francisco jury had awarded Dewayne Johnson, a gardener, $ 289 million in damages, which was later, reduced to $ 78 million. He suffered from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and claimed that he used different Glyphosate formulations in sprays. Since then three more plaintiffs have been awarded in two cases heard.

In India, a Down to Earth magazine says on an average 10,000 pesticide poisoning cases are reported every year. The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) had recorded 7,060 deaths from accidental pesticide poisoning in 2015, which highlights the grave danger pesticides poses. The fact that the nearly Rs 20,000-crore pesticides industry is expected to grow at a rate of 8.1 per cent till 2024, clearly shows how crucial it is to fix the regulatory holes. The proposed Pesticides Management Bill 2020 expected to be placed in Parliament will perhaps not only tighten the regulations, and make industry pay for the health damages it causes; but also look beyond keeping the tens of thousands of lawsuits in mind.

If only the world had listened to forewarning that the eminent Prof David Pimental of the University of Cornell had issued five decades back, in mid-1970s, perhaps much of the damage could have been averted. I still recall the title of his scientific paper: “99.9% pesticides go into environment. Only 0.1% hits the target pest.” Knowing that pesticides are poisons, and with less than 1 per cent of chemicals effective against pests, the world could have certainly evolved safer alternatives. Who will take that blame?

But equally important, if 90 per cent of all food eaten in the city of Copenhagen is organic, there is no reason why city dwellers cannot opt for healthy pesticide-free food. That’s a true smart city. #

The hazards of pesticides. The Tribune. Feb 26, 2020
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/the-hazards-of-pesticides-45295?fbclid=IwAR243Lmmng1WWg8IXGq0Ed0WLYiY6isxyWUhrDItJXdqA_fY_lTwCiAbNS0 

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Towards an Organic Future

Its high time to move to agro-ecological farming systems. 

Pic -- from the Web

At a time when global temperatures are soaring, a latest study by a French think tank – Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) – has shown that agro-ecological farming alone has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe by 47 per cent and thereby keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees.  

This study comes at a time when the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) is already talking of green direct payments to organic farmers who opt for sustainable farming practices. At the Regional Symposium on Agro-ecology for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems for Europe and Central Asia, 2016, one of the policy recommendations was to shift 30 per cent of the European budget on agriculture to green direct payments. The IDDRI study in addition shows that a transition from intensive farming to agro-ecological farming will bring down the pesticides consumption by 380,000 tonnes per year in European farming.

And yet I find that most climate mitigation studies point to more crop intensification, which will expectedly lead to freeing up larger proportion of cultivable lands and thereby claim to ensuring there is no drop in food production. In other words, it is push for a hyper-intensive farming system that leads to more toxic soils, more water mining sucking the remaining aquifers dry, and leading to more contamination of the food chain. This flawed assumption was essentially behind the launch of the New Vision for Agriculture at the World Economic Forum 2009 aiming at increasing food production by 20 percent, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions per ton by 20 percent, and reducing rural poverty by 20 percent every decade.

The 17 agribusiness giants that would spur the launch of New Vision for Agriculture includes Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), BASF, Bunge Limited, Cargill, Coca-Cola, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro AG, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart, and Yara International. In other words, it is more of the same leading to more catastrophic outcomes in the future.

The IDDRI study provides a lot of hope at a time when the UN-sponsored TEEB initiative – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity – for agriculture and food, has in its latest study warned of a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions emanating from farming practices. Accordingly, the entire farming production systems, stretching from cutting down of forests for making land available for cultivation to food waste dumped in landfills, account from 47 to 51 per cent of the global gas emissions. This factor alone plays a prominent role in world’s climate going topsy-turvy, and which returns to haunt farming community reeling under the terrible impact of climate change. The challenge therefore is how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which becomes a surer form of mitigation for farmers from the chaotic implications from climate aberrations haunting them in the years to come.

What is therefore of paramount importance is to bring in policies that help farmers to transit to a more climate resilient agriculture. Before apologists for Green Revolution kind of farming systems raise on uproar over declining food production from a shift to organic farming, it is important to know that in its earlier study along with the UK-based Soil Association, the IDDRI has in a report entitled ‘Ten Years of Agro-ecology in Europe’ clearly showed that it is possible to feed Europe a healthy and sustainable diet by transiting to natural farming systems. Earlier, an International Assessment for Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, which was ratified (India included) during an intergovernmental plenary in Johannesburg, April 7-12, 2008, had warned that ‘business as usual’ is not the way forward.

Over the years, an emerging consensus has developed around agro-ecology, which alone has the potential for an inclusive approach, and has immense ability to reduce the damage being done to the planet. In India, a major initiative was launched when village elders in Punnukula village in Khamam district in Andhra Pradesh came together to stop the use of chemical pesticides. This was way back, more than 15 years ago. This local initiative, and exemplary testimony to the richness of available local knowledge, led to the introduction on Non-Pesticides Management (NPM) under the Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) expanding to 3.6 million acres without the use of pesticides. After the State’s bifurcation, and driven by the enthusiasm shown in adopting NPM practices, Andhra Pradesh launched Zero Budget Natural Farming aiming to bring its nearly 60-lakh farmers under the fold of non-chemical agriculture by the end of the year 2024.

Surprisingly, there is no drop in crop productivity. Just a year after the introduction of ZBNF, a study by Rythu Sadhikara Samstha  (RySS) based on crop cutting experiments showed that crop yields in fact had gone up from 10 to 69 per cent – 10 per cent in irrigated paddy and the highest 69 per cent in brinjal. Since wheat is not grown in south India, it is not possible to know the impact on wheat yield when grown without chemicals but I am sure suitable farming practices can be evolved that keeps productivity at par. More so in a state like Punjab, which ironically being the country’s food bowl still imports a significant proportion of its wheat atta requirement. Much of the attathat is imported is from Madhya Pradesh considered to be free of chemicals. I fail to understand why can’t instead Punjab focus on organic wheat production within the state if the domestic demand is so heavy.

This will require a paradigm shift in the way agricultural research is being conducted. All these years for instance crop varieties have been evolved based on its response to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It’s time to move to organic breeding, developing future crop varieties responding to organic manure, less water and needing no chemical pesticides. This has to be followed by adequate reforms in agricultural markets, providing a higher price for organics and also providing for exclusive procurement of organic produce coupled with policies that encourage farmers to make the transition. With soaring demand for safe and healthy food, mainline agriculture research has no option but to keep pace with the changing times.

According to Friends of Earth, in Europe alone, climate change has taken the lives of more than 115,000 people since 1980, causing an economic loss of Euro 453 billion. In the global south, floods, drought, heatwaves and other extreme climate related events/disasters results in hundreds of thousands of people dying every year. Instead of just blaming the weather gods, the time has come to urgently reform the prevalent farming systems so as to move away from intensive cultivation that has denuded soils, mined groundwater and is increasingly leading to desertification. #  

Towards an Organic Future. The Tribune. May 1, 2019

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/towards-an-organic-future/766290.html?fbclid=IwAR2iVNBXwK4HB4Vrf26I6rik6emnO3mEsnZDual1UKawwpN8E7rsVfPewsg

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