Conflict/Dispossession
Live Mint reports: This is not a one-off dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu— the latest flare-up puts the spotlight on the growing incidence of water wars among states and, in some instances, within regions in a state. Riparian states warring over water is not new— nearly every river in the Indian subcontinent is contested….
Read More about Video & Report: Cauvery face-off puts spotlight on water warsALTERNATIVES
Aurel Keller writes: The collapse of the Soviet Union, and resultant loss of imports crucial for the island nation’s industrial agriculture system left Cuba with a severe food crisis in the 1990s. Today, Cuba has become a regional leader in sustainable agriculture, and its practices and institutions a model for localized and small-scale urban agriculture….
Read More about Video & Report: Four important lessons from Cuba’s urban food survival strategy
A view of the Sangatya farm
ALTERNATIVES
The New indian Express profiles ‘Sangatya’ commune, and its co-founder, Shreekumar a chemical engineer turned organic farmer and activist and Ecologise.in author. Sangatya, located in Nakre village near Karkala in south Karnataka, is experimenting with creating spaces for sustainable living. The commune is also a place to gain hands-on experience in many areas, including community-building….
Read More about Sangatya Commune: An experiment in sustainable living
ALTERNATIVES
Dan Palmer writes: Christopher Alexander is a radical architect and writer respected by permaculture practitioners. According to him, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: and the form of the whole comes second, but “it is impossible to form anything which has the character of nature by adding preformed parts.”…
Read More about Christopher Alexander’s neglected challenge to Permaculture
Elephants raiding a banana plantation near Bannerghatta, Karnataka
Nishanth Srinivasaiah
Conflict/Dispossession
Peter Smetacek writes: Culling wild animals that have come to depend on agriculture for sustenance is only a short-term measure. This was portrayed as a man-animal conflict rather than what it actually is: the conversion of our forests from rich storehouses of bio-diversity to green deserts by a combination of mismanagement, political expediency and ignorance….
Read More about The culling of wild animals herald future water wars in India
Education/Awareness
Chethan Kumar reports: The recently Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas, is a first-of-its-kind attempt to present the latest research and raise awareness on the role of soil organisms. Bangalore-based scientist D.J. Bagyaraj, the only Indian contributor to the Atlas, talks about the vital role of soil biodiversity for sustainable food production and prevention of land degradation….
Read More about Interview: DJ Bagyaraj – India’s only contributor to the Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas
Development/Growth
Kannaiyan writes: In July 2014, in his first public event as a newly-elected prime minister, Modi called for a standing ovation for India’s farmers. He wanted to craft an image of a farmers’ leader. Two years on, I’m sitting in my farm in Gattawady village, Erode, Tamil Nadu, filled with mixed feelings. Here is why….
Read More about A farmer’s message for Narendra Modi
ALTERNATIVES
Frances Moore Lappé writes: The primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system, embodied in industrial agriculture, that views life in disassociated parts, obscuring the destructive impact this has on humans, natural resources, and the environment. The emerging alternative, relational approach —agroecology— has already shown promising success on the ground….
Read More about Farming for a small planet: Agroecology now!
Education/Awareness
Mrinal Pande writes: For more than four centuries, Ghagh, literally “the sly one”, has been undoubtedly the most popular of poet philosophers for farming communities in the Indo-Gangetic plains. An astronomer and agricultural guru, Ghagh’s pithy couplets discuss crop cycles, seeds, tips for buying healthy cattle, and reflections on vagaries of both man and nature….
Read More about Ghagh: Why a 16th century farmer-poet is still relevant
Morvarid Fernandez
Food/Farming
Maninder Dabas writes: With 35% of agricultural households having less than 1 acre of land, the shrinking of agricultural land holdings in India is a worrying trend. Since 1995-96, the average size land holding has decreased from 1.41 hectares to 1.15 hectares which accounts for the decrease of 30,000 hectares of cultivable land each year….
Read More about With cultivable land shrinking steadily, food surplus India stares at food deficient future
Food/Farming
Sumit Chaturvedi reports: The 2011-’12 agricultural census and caste census, summarises the failure of India’s land reforms: No more than 4.9% of farmers control 32% of India’s farmland. A “large” farmer in India has 45 times more land than the “marginal” farmer. 101.4 million – or 56.4% – of rural households own no agricultural land….
Read More about Failure of reforms: 5% of India’s farmers own a third of the land
Bookshelf
Martin Simpson writes: It is impossible to read Farmageddon without coming to the conclusion that the world’s food and agriculture system is screwed. This is a system that produces enormous quantities of food, yet wastes up to a third of it… What it also produces is environmental disaster, ill health in humans and stressful and unhealthy animals….
Read More about Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat
Bookshelf
Billy Brack writes: Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity by Fowler and Mooney is one of the important books of our times, explaining how agribusiness is putting the world at risk by limiting the world’s food crops to a few genetic strains. Quite literally we are putting our eggs in one basket….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shattering: Food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity
Economy
Harish Damodaran writes: Is farming really a business? If so, to what extent? Is there something about agriculture that makes it fundamentally different as a business? Farmers suffer rules other businessmen never encounter. There are at least four “laws” of business operating only in farming, of which the last two are probably unique to India….
Read More about Is agriculture a business?Economy
Harish Damodaran writes: In the past, droughts invariably fuelled speculation and hoarding by unscrupulous traders. But this time, Indians in the cities are hardly feeling the pinch. Barring sugar, consumers aren’t paying all that much more compared to a year ago. Simply put, this time it is a drought essentially of farmers and rural producers….
Read More about There’s a drought in many parts of India. Why isn’t it making headlines?
ALTERNATIVES
Pierce Nahigyan reports: Founded in 2014, WeFarm is a free, peer-to-peer service designed for farmers around the world. It enables farmers to share information with each other via SMS, or text messaging. WeFarm translates and connects queries from continent to continent, and has thus far provided more than 100,000 answers to its 43,000 registered farmers….
Read More about How WeFarm connects small farmers without the Internet
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
Development/Growth
As output is rising at a slower rate since 1990, profitability of farmers is getting adversely affected: for they are not being able to produce at as fast a rate as they had been doing before. Note, decline in public investment is a conscious government decision. There are also other policy changes which aggravated this….
Read More about Farmer suicides: What do we know? What does it mean?
Shutterstock
Consumerism/Lifestyle
Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….
Read More about CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature
Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Devinder Sharma writes: Arun Jaitley’s economic agenda revolves around pushing reforms in order to lift growth and create jobs. But what is not being realised is that agriculture alone – the sector that has been neglected all these years – has the potential to create massive gainful employment, build domestic demand and thereby revitalise the sluggish economy….
Read More about More than Make in India, Jaitley needs to focus on Farm in India
CLIMATE CRISIS
SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….
Read More about CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends
