CV Subrahmanyam/The Hindu
ALTERNATIVES
He did not form a people’s movement. Nor did he plead with the government to popularise his natural farming method. Palekar took a more direct route instead. He reached out to the farmers. Met them in person and trained them in his cultivation practices. He continues to spread awareness and hold training workshops for farmers….
Read More about Subhash Palekar: From farmer to national treasureConflict/Dispossession
Colin Todhunter writes: There is a notion that we can just continue as we are, with an endless supply of oil, endless supplies of meat and endless assault on soil, human and environmental well-being that intensive petrochemical agriculture entails. Given the statistics, this is unsustainable, unrealistic and a recipe for continued resource-driven conflicts and devastation….
Read More about Arms, Agribusiness, Finance and Fossil Fuels: The Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse
25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans
AFP
CLIMATE CRISIS
Rajabhau Deshmukh, a farmer from Beed says: We’ve been reaping merely 20-30% of our average crop in the last few years. Even as bank loans, moneylenders’ debts, relatives’ credits and the interest keep gnawing at us, we’ve to somehow run our homes. To be honest, it seems we are not even allowed to fall sick….
Read More about A Marathwada farmer’s wake-up call to India: try to understand why we die
Aadi Kumbruka with various types of legumes, millets, oilseeds and corns grown on his farm.
India Water Portal
CLIMATE CRISIS
Nauri grows 72 varieties of crop on his two-acre farm. “The benefit of mixed cropping is that even in extreme weather events, we get something out of the field. Some crops work well in drought, others in flood. Compare this with mono cropping which won’t even yield enough to eat in severe drought”, he explains….
Read More about Tribals in Odisha humour changing skies with mixed plattersECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Colin Todhunter writes: A new paper by Rosemary A. Mason in the Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry, titled ‘The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the environment’ indicates that a ‘sixth extinction’ is presently under way (The Sixth Extinction, describes the ongoing extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch – since around 10,000 BCE). Download paper: The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the…
Read More about The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the environment
Frans Lanting
Bookshelf
From the blurb: Around the world, people are increasingly facing a future that is crowded and hot, subject to violent weather extremes and a changing climate, where the rich and poor inhabit separate spheres and governments are unable or unwilling to confront these most vital challenges. For India, this reality is the very tangible present….
Read More about New book: Elemental India : The Natural World in Crisis
George Varghese
CLIMATE CRISIS
The rains have let us down terribly this year. There were farmers in our area who did not bother planting their rice crop when they realized that it wasn’t going to rain much this year and then there were others that took a chance and planted but didn’t bother harvesting since the crop was a disaster….
Read More about Weathering The Change - A Farmer’s Diary of 2015
Morvarid Fernandez
CLIMATE CRISIS
Morvarid Fernandez writes: Our crops failed, cattle graze the dry paddy straw, and fields remain fallow because there is not enough water. Bore wells are deeper, the lines longer, and the black blister bug – usually a bane – simply did not appear last year. The monsoon of 2015, you ask. But there just wasn’t one….
Read More about Winds of change – A view from NersaCLIMATE CRISIS
IndiaSpend reports: Indian farms depend too much on increasingly uncertain rainfall: while there was not enough rain during the pre-monsoon kharif season (July-October) last year, there has been vastly excess rainfall during this rabi season (October-March). For instance, Eastern Rajasthan, the farm belt of the desert state, had more than 14 times the normal rainfall during this pre-monsoon season….
Read More about A Farmer’s Life Crisis — And India’s Farming PredicamentEconomy
Dr. M.S. Swaminathan writes: It’s unfortunate that industrialised nations are so inward looking in the area of agricultural trade, particularly since hardly 2 to 3% of their population depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Nairobi has paved the way for famines of the future. (Also read: Digest of articles on the recently concluded WTO talks)…
Read More about M.S. Swaminathan: The WTO has paved the way for famines of the futureDigests/Specials
Commentator Biraj Patnaik writes: Nirmala Sitharaman gave the world a good illustration of crocodile tears. She was at the centre of the negotiations and walked away with little more than assurances of pious intent, after conceding to the core US demand to drop the re-affirmation of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) from the ministerial declaration….
Read More about Digest: What the WTO talks at Nairobi mean for Indian agriculture
Dead mango trees at the author's farm during the drought of 2011-2015
Uma Shankari
CLIMATE CRISIS
Chittoor-based farmer and activist Uma Shankari writes: After the year 2010, for the first time we’ve had good rains; in fact exceptionally good rains, a side effect of the Chennai disaster. My husband used to say, “If Chennai drowns, we’ll be saved”. This time it came true. We’ve not seen such heavy rains in twenty, thirty years….
Read More about Did Marx call the peasant an idiot? He was right, I am an idiot.
ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said Chris Arsenault, Reuters ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation…
Read More about Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues
Reuters
CLIMATE CRISIS
(Note: The weather is changing, adding to the woes of the Indian farmer, who is already in a state of crisis. Even as the pundits split hairs over climate change, for the farmer, it seems the writing is on the wall. In Weathering the change, we present a short series presenting the farmer’s perspective on the impact of these changes.)…
Read More about Series: Weathering the change – Part 1
CLIMATE CRISIS
‘Capitalism is Mother Earth’s Cancer’: World People’s Summit Issues 12 Demands Common Dreams Decrying capitalism as a “threat to life,” an estimated 7,000 environmentalists, farmers, and Indigenous activists from 40 countries convened in the Bolivian town of Tiquipaya for this weekend’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change, aiming to elevate the demands of social movements…
Read More about News updateCLIMATE CRISIS
Common Dreams At least ten million of the poorest people face food insecurity in 2015 and 2016 due to extreme weather conditions and the onset of El Niño, Oxfam has reported. In Oxfam’s new report called Entering Uncharted Waters, erratic weather patterns were noted including high temperatures and droughts, disrupting farming seasons around the world….
Read More about Oxfam Report: 10 Million at Risk of Hunger Due to Climate Change and El NiñoCLIMATE CRISIS
Stop the killing fields Farmers are in a terrible situation, with no water for crops, livestock or drinking. If we dismiss this year as a freak weather year, we will never make the necessary corrections Sunita Narain, Editor – Down To Earth magazine This is our season of despair. This year, it would seem, the gods…
Read More about Down to Earth issue on the elusive monsoonCLIMATE CRISIS
Part 4 – Capitalist agriculture: class formation and the metabolic rift Libcom.org In this fourth installment on our series on food and climate, we look at the dynamics of capitalist agriculture in terms of production, class formation, and the ‘metabolic rift’ in the nitrogen cycle. Part 1 (Climate, class, and the Neolithic revolution) looked at the…
Read More about LibCom series on Capitalist agricultureBookshelf
Ecological Agriculture in India – Scientific Evidence on Positive Impacts and Successes Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) Note on the book by by Kavitha Kuruganti of ASHA: Very often, when ecological agriculture (whether it goes by the name of organic farming or natural farming or bio-dynamic farming) approaches are advocated for large scale replication…
Read More about Book: Ecological Agriculture in India
Arayil/Flickr
Development/Growth
When we talk of sustainability, we often hear terms like eco-friendly technologies, appropriate technologies etc. To this, critics often say that we’re talking of going back to nature, we are being primitive, unscientific and that this is not possible. This article tries to provide a logic for eco-friendly, appropriate technologies using human and animal power….
Read More about Negative entropy and sustainability
