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Food/Farming

Ignored health risks, bungled pilot projects, bonanza for Dutch firm: Modi Govt. forces fortified rice on poor

26th May 2023

Modi government rushed with its plan to supply fortified rice despite internal and external expert warnings on the adverse effects of feeding it to people, particularly children. Niti Aayog reviewed the pilot studies in seven districts across India only after the government’s orders to distribute fortified rice had already been passed. It found that all of them were fundamentally flawed and had failed. The report was never made public while the government continues to push fortified rice.

The Avocados of Wrath

7th May 2023

Per capita consumption of avocados has kept on growing in the importing countries, driven by intense marketing campaigns promoting the nutritional benefits of this food. GRAIN reports on how the industrial agribusiness model exploits small- and medium-sized growers, forces them to take on all the risk and also bear the burden of environmental externalities. Meanwhile, big agribusiness companies and their investors are largely shielded from the public health and environmental impacts.

How Mr Miyawaki Broke My Heart

4th May 2023

What’s wrong with the popular Miyawaki method of ecological restoration?

P.V. Satheesh, the Original Millets Man of India

22nd March 2023

The founder of Deccan Development Society not only popularised millets but also worked for agro-biodiversity, food sovereignty, women’s empowerment, Dalit rights, social justice and local knowledge systems.

Big Farms make Big Flu: The deadly connection between industrial farming and pandemics

17th March 2020

From Climate and Capitalism: Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace explains the tight links between new viruses, the epidemiologically dangerous methods of industrial food production, and corporate profits. “To understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous, we must investigate industrial models of agriculture and livestock production. But, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so.”…

The terrifying science behind the accelerating locust plague

11th February 2020

From Wired: It’s the worst locust outbreak to strike Africa in decades, and Pakistan and India’s border states too have been badly affected. And the problem is about to get a lot worse—the insect population could boom by a factor of 500 by June. Unlike other species, a rapidly-warming planet present an advantage to locusts….

Mihir Shah: India’s water crisis has a simple solution

18th December 2019

“This plan has multiple win-wins: Improvement in soil and water quality, higher incomes for farmers, reduced malnutrition and obesity, and a simple solution to India’s water problem by drastically reducing use of water in agriculture.” Also watch: ‘Bringing the Science Back Into Water: A New Paradigm for 21st Century India,’ a talk by Mihir Shah….

Climate justice is injustice, if partial

18th October 2019

Ratheesh Pisharody writes: While we pretend to have weaved in a “justice angle” into the climate emergency narrative, we conveniently veto-ed ourselves back in. Thus we ensure we represent the perpetrators and also the victims. By taking away a large part of that victim-hood-bank we seem to want an unfair share of “climate justice” too….

Retd. Justice Jasti Chelameswar of the Supreme Court of India delivering the keynote address

SAPACC: A big step forward for South Asia’s climate justice movement

27th September 2019

From The Wire: The SAPACC campaign rests on two pillars: climate science and mass mobilisation. Large organisations coming together on an issue considered too abstract for a movement only a few years ago is a significant shift. It reflects the climate’s intensifying impact in South-Asia and how the issue has exploded in the public consciousness….

Jaunti Live: The first Green Revolution village now has a farm crisis

2nd September 2019

From Down to Earth: India is going through one of the worst farm crisis in its history. To understand about this crisis we have to investigate the roots of the celebrated Green Revolution and what happened after that. This is the story of Jaunty, the village which was once the flagbearer of the Green Revolution….

Subhash Palekar receives the Padma Shri in 2016

The Indian Express

Budget & Zero Budget Farming: A response to Subhash Palekar

15th August 2019

Influential natural farming advocate Subhash Palekar recently approved the use of Genetically Modified crops in his well-known “Zero Budget Natural Farming-ZBNF” method. In an equally startling interview, he described organic farming as “worse than the atom bomb.” Here, two veteran practitioners respond to Palekar, while reviewing the history of the Organic/Natural Farming movement in India….

P. Sainath: How a patch of Anantapur came to be a desert

28th July 2019

From The Wire: This specific patch of some 1,000 acres near Dargah Honnur village in Anantapur district –once covered by millet cultivation– has over many decades become more and more a desert. That has been driven by often paradoxical factors –and created the kind of space that filmmakers send out location scouts to look for….

Eating for a better world: Some questions and a guide

25th July 2019

From Trophic Tales: The focus on the welfare of individual domesticated animals might be an extension of the modernist tendency to simplify and discriminate. The morality of living, eating, and dying is more complex than two-word slogans can prescribe. If we care about animals —wild or domesticated— we’ve to think in terms of entire ecosystems….

Poisoned earth, poisoned people: The unravelling of Punjab

10th July 2019

From The Guardian: Cancer rates are the highest in the country, drug addiction is rife, and 900 farmers have killed themselves in two years. How did Punjab turn toxic? A new film explores the roots of its problems; ‘Toxification’ tells the moving stories of farmers at the sharp end of the chemical epidemic engulfing Punjab….

We have drought-proofed our cities, and left farms and farmers to die

1st July 2019

Devinder Sharma writes: This year, nearly 82% of Karnataka is reeling under drought. But in Bangalore, you won’t get even a hint of the terrible human suffering that continues to be inflicted year after year. Karnataka has suffered drought for 12 out of the past 18 years. But life in Bangalore has never been affected….

Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life

19th June 2019

David R. Montgomery writes: Conventional wisdom says that fertile soil is not renewable. That’s not really true. Fertility can be improved quickly through cover cropping and returning organic matter to the land. Soil-building is about getting the biology, mineral availability, and organic-matter balance right, rolling with the wheel of life instead of pushing against it….

Ishaan Tharoor: How Somalia’s fishermen became pirates

15th June 2019

From Time Magazine: Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia’s last functional government in 1991, the country’s 3,330 km of coastline —the longest in continental Africa— has been pillaged by foreign vessels, freezing out the country’s own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. The first pirate gangs emerged in the ’90s to protect against the aggressive foreign trawlers….

Cuba embarks on a 100-year plan to protect itself from climate change

27th March 2019

From Science Magazine: Cuba has become the latest country to enshrine the fight against climate change in its constitution. A team of Cuban experts has just finished drafting a $100 million proposal that the government plans to submit early this year to the Global Climate Fund, an international financing mechanism set up by the U.N….

How India’s economists have failed its farmers

15th January 2019

Devinder Sharma writes: If raising productivity is the major factor I see no reason why Punjab farmers should be committing suicide. But the fact that economists don’t want to acknowledge is that it is actually the low price that farmers being deliberately paid that is the primary reason for the terrible agrarian crisis that prevails….

Tribute: Dr. G. Nammalvar, messiah of Tamil Nadu’s organic revolution

6th January 2019

It’s been five years since the passing of G. Nammalvar, the icon of sustainable farming who died on December 30, 2013, while leading a campaign against the plan to extract methane gas in Cauvery delta. An agriculture scientist, he left his job and travelled across Tamil Nadu spreading the message of organic farming using story-telling….