It all started when the Muyu Chakana Foundation, in the middle of the pandemic, decided not to put band-aids on the biggest wounds, the other words, instead of handing out food baskets, give native seeds and promote family gardens. Vegetable gardens and native seeds that change lives, young former gang members and indigenous people in the process of becoming seed growers and permaculturists, understanding the true importance of native and indigenous creole seeds.
In India, rice has been considered auspicious and a symbol of prosperity and success since ancient times. For thousands of tribal and underprivileged women in Nayagram block of Bengal’s Jhargram district, caught in a cycle of Maoist violence and poverty, the cultivation of organic indigenous rice varieties has brought hope and prosperity.
Almost 5,000 women are now part of Aamon, East India’s largest all-women producer company, formed with support from Pradan (Professional Assistance for Development Action), a civil society organization working with the poorest communities in rural India.
Through regenerative agriculture, the women’s incomes have tripled and they have overcome the ill-effects of conventional chemical-based agriculture that has wreaked havoc on the ecology and human life.
The women, mostly from Sabar, Lodha and Santhal tribal communities, have revived traditional folk varieties and grow organic black, red and brown rice with just basic farmyard manure.
Alongside, they have restored the local ecology and are delivering on a promise of good health. Swarnalata Mahata from Pukhuria village bought a scooty last year from her savings. She proudly rides it to the rice mill in the nearby Murakathai village where she works.
Aamon is an all-women enterprise reviving traditional rice varieties in Nayagram block of West Bengal’s Jhargram district. Pic: Pradan
“I could have never imagined I would own a vehicle one day,” she says happily.
The vehicle is a symbol of socio-economic change in Nayagram as women farmers associated with Aamon have financial independence as well as confidence and decision-making power.
Swarnalata and her husband had meagre earnings from conventional paddy farming on their 1.5 bighas (0.5 acres) land. “Whatever we earned went into repaying loans. Since the cost of inputs was very high, we took loans for farming. We hardly had any money left,” says the 26-year-old.
Going back to indigenous varieties of rice
Swarnalata joined Aamon in 2016 and when the proposal to grow black rice was mooted, she had to beg her husband to let her cultivate the indigenous variety.
Women holding placards with names of traditional paddy varieties being grown in the farms. Aamon started with 300 women growing 18 traditional varieties. Pic: Pradan
“My husband and in-laws were sceptical. They felt that I would degrade the land. I somehow convinced them and, luckily, the experiment worked well. Now my family is happy,” she says.
Parul Mahata, 26, from Rakhalbon village says the women farmers save majorly on input costs now. “We don’t need to buy hybrid seeds. And our input costs have reduced drastically,” she says.
The input cost per acre of paddy with chemical farming was Rs3,000 to Rs4,000, which is now down to only Rs 800 per acre.
Earlier, the paddy would sell for Rs11-13 per kg while the black rice now sells for Rs34 per kg and the other varieties fetch Rs20-25 per kg. So, the women have seen a jump of two to three times in their incomes.
Parul and Swarnalata also have the satisfaction that the money goes directly into their bank accounts and they actively participate in taking decisions in the family. “Earlier the women toiled in the fields but the men made merry with the money. Now we get money for our hard work,” says Swarnalata.
The organic rice grown by Aamon farmers is bought by traders across India. Pic: Aamon/30Stades
Sourangshu Banerjee, Team Coordinator, Pradan, says the organisation started working in Nayagram block in 2007-08.
“Nayagram was a hub of Maoist insurgency. The unceasing violence took a toll on the people who had no avenues for employment and lived in poverty. This caused anger, resentment and frustration.”
The Pradan team did some interventions with the villagers in conventional agriculture but did not make much headway due to the prevailing political situation. So they focused mainly on works under MGNREGA, the anti-poverty programme that provides at least 100 days of wage employment in a fiscal to every rural household.
During the course of the work, the Pradan team came across a campaign against BT mustard, says Banerjee. “We thought the campaign to preserve and conserve local species and go in for organic farming could resonate with people in Nayagram.”
Reaping a rich harvest
They studied the market to analyse the demand for commodities that could fit in the geopolitical situation of the Nayagram region and zeroed in on the traditional and healthier varieties of rice such as black, brown and red which they sell under the brand Aamon.
“We found a healthy demand for the traditional rice varieties which are more nutritious,” says Banerjee.
Black rice and red rice contain a pigment called anthocyanin which gives the black and red colour respectively. Both the varieties contain anti-oxidants and anti-cancer properties apart from several nutrients.
The villagers in the region traditionally did only one crop of paddy and their annual income was between Rs.40,000 and Rs.50,000, which has more than doubled now.
Aamon is targeting a turnover of Rs3.5 crore this year. Rice being dispatched for sale in the pic here. Pic: Pradan
The new venture started with 300 women farmers who grew 18 varieties of rice using indigenous seeds in the first year, says Banerjee. They used farmyard manure and natural inputs and got a high yield of 4 tonnes per hectare. After this success, other indigenous varieties were explored and by 2019, these women were growing black, red and brown rice for large scale production.
Today, 4923 women farmers in 140 villages in Jhargarm are part of Aamon that is managed by the women members. They use the latest technology to process the paddy and Aamon sells across India.
Women are now diversifying their portfolio to add new products such as turmeric, medicinal herbs and Sal leaf plates.
Some 1500 women farmers have sown turmeric over 20 hectares and the first crop will be harvested in February. Another 300 farmers are growing medicinal herbs over 40 hectares.
The gender question
The tribals in the Nayagram area live in abject poverty and their mainstay is agriculture or foraging for timber and non-timber forest produce.
After Pradan’s intervention and the push for organic farming, the villagers saw benefits not only in monetary terms but also in terms of improved soil fertility and ecosystem regeneration as microorganisms are returning and rejuvenating the barren soil.
At the outset, the Pradan team faced the challenge of convincing farmers to let the women join the self-help groups.
After initial resistance families of women farmers allowed them to use the land for organic farming and were surprised with the results. Pic: Pradan
“The lands were not in the names of the women and they faced opposition from their husbands and in-laws who were not convinced that organic farming would work,” says Banerjee.
Some families even told the women that they were giving them the land on an experimental basis and if they failed, the women would have to pay in cash to make up for the loss, he says.
As part of capacity building, the women were told about the harmful effects of conventional farming, excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides, benefits of organic farming and different techniques of farming.
The marketing mechanism
Banerjee says they realized that just motivating the women to take up organic farming would not suffice in the long run. The produce had to be marketed so they organized a robust supply chain.
For the commercial venture, it was decided to start the farmer producer company, Aamon. Village producer groups were set up to oversee and manage the production and assign what the farmers would grow. There are currently 52 groups in the 140 villages.
Last year, the farmer producer company got orders for black rice worth Rs1.5 crore.
The farmer producer company’s turnover in the last financial year was Rs30 lakh and this year they are targeting Rs3.5 crore, says Banerjee.
He says the company has a database of traders who regularly procure from Aamon. “The women grow crops as per the pre-orders. For rice, we take orders from traders between February and May. The crop is sown in July and harvested in December.”
The orders that are taken by the farmer producer company are passed on to the village producer groups and they assign what the farmers will grow. At harvest time, the rice is sold to bulk traders.
Infrastructure support
To process the rice, Pradan, through contributions of Rs10 lakh, set up a rice processing mill in Murakathai village that is managed and operated by the women themselves. The mill has a capacity of one tonne per day.
Aamon has appointed women as purchasing officers in the villages. The purchasing officers check the quality and procure the rice as per the order. They then send it to the mill where it is processed and given to transporters who ferry it to the traders.
The Aamon rice mill in Murakathai village, operated by women, has the capacity to process one tonne of rice every day. Pic: Pradan
The storage model is unique as well. The FPC does not have a warehouse for storage. After harvesting, the farmers store the produce in their houses till it is sold.
“The farmers understand that holding stock for the company is their economic contribution to the company so they are willing to do it,” says Banerjee.
“The small farmers who don’t have much storage capacity and need money immediately, we clear their rice first. Some bigger farmers can store it for several months and theirs is sold later,” says Banerjee.
Now that the women are growing other products, more mills have been established like the one at Baksa village for turmeric production with a capacity of 3 quintals per day. The turmeric will be brought to the mill where it will be water-cleaned, air-dried and pulverized to be sold as turmeric powder.
A production unit for making Sal leaf plates has been put up in Chandabila village. It can make 10,000 to 15,000 plates in an eight-hour shift. Both units, costing Rs10 lakh each, were built with help of funds provided to Pradan by FICCI. A centre for bio inoculants has also been set up where bio fertilisers are produced and provided to the farmers at subsidized rates.
Sometimes, the way food gets positioned socially may have no relation to how science determines its nutritional value.
As evidence around climate change and its impact becomes more glaring, many people believe reorganising the global food system is one possible strategy to combat this challenge. Studies suggest that our current global food system (that entails various aspects of production, transportation, and consumption) results in roughly one-third of the total carbon emissions. Current food practices are affecting the health of the people and the planet in equally negative ways. One proposed suggestion, as part of the reorganisation of our food system, is the concerted effort to engage in methods such as agroecology, decentralised small-scale farming and engaging with indigenous knowledge systems. But how do these global designs affect the everyday living in remote Indian villages? How does this relate to young indigenous people who may be attracted to individual social mobility, rather than thinking about climate change and sustainability? How do they look at their own indigenous food systems and practices?
Motilal Hansda, 21, is part of an online English writing class that our organisation (sinchan.co.in) conducts for rural youth. He belongs to the Santhal community, a historically marginalised social group categorised as a Scheduled Tribe. He lives in the Chakai block of Jamui district in Bihar. Declared as an ‘aspirational’ district by the Indian government, Jamui has some of the lowest indicators on sustainable development goals, and has the presence of left-wing extremism. Hansda is representative of the aspirational indigenous youth here. During the Covid lockdown, Hansda (re)discovered sing ara (a green vegetable foraged from the forest). In a conversation that started with his frustration over closed markets, his grandmother told him about the local foods that her generation ate, some of which are still available but not readily consumed. “She told me about a time when they did not eat rice and wheat, but mainly edi arba matkom (edi and arba are different kind of grains; matkom is a form of mahua—sacred tree for Santhals). I wonder why we have overlooked all this food present in the village and the forest,” says Hansda. For the English class, he intends to write an article exploring the reasons for why and how the Santhal food plate transformed. There is no one absolute answer to the question Hansda poses, but one dimension of it lies in the systematic invisibility, and often devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems.
Since food is entangled with identity and culture, it tends to encode and reinforce social hierarchy. The complex religious affiliations of Adivasis—Christian, Sarna or Hindu orientation—also has its own unique effect on what food practices they take up and what they let go. Sometimes, the way food gets positioned socially may have no relation to how science determines its nutritional value. Take the well-known case of millets. Somewhere down the line, millets got so entangled with economic status that it infamously became the ‘poor man’s food’. Escaping from millets and transitioning to rice became a way to ‘move up’ the social (food) ladder. In the last decade, Odisha, followed by other states, backed the resurgence of millets, citing its superior nutritive value and climate adaptability over rice. Communities have even replaced multiple varieties of local rice (brown rice in Chakai) for the polished ‘high yielding’ market variety. Emulating the food choices of dominant caste and class groups is one of the reasons that young Santhals have turned a blind eye to the rich local resources. A plethora of uncultivated forest foods and herbs that has been part of the Santhal life is now in a state of decadence. Therefore, I reinstate Hansda’s question: how is it that something superior in terms of its nutritional values and climate adaptability is considered a poor person’s food?
Leveraging community knowledge
Over the years, the developmental impulse to mainstream Adivasis through schools and other institutions have reinstated their status as nutritionally deficient. Through the rhetoric of development and modernity, these communities are trained, insidiously or explicitly, to look at themselves as lacking. Not to say that these communities are not facing any real challenges. In India, 45 per cent indigenous population consists of poor, ingenious women and children, among the worst affected by malnutrition, according to the NFHS-4 India Report. But sometimes in the process of defining the poor, we constitute them and their world as poor. This conflation of actual cases of economic deprivation and the subject effects of being termed ‘backward’ has implications that further deteriorate their condition. Today we have a growing body of evidence to show how the consumption of uncultivated foods in rural communities could help achieve food security and nutritionally diverse, sustainable diets. But in places like Chakai, uncultivated foods and their consumption are threatened. The first major reason is the loss and degradation of environments in which wild foods thrive, often due to deforestation and mono-cropping-based agriculture. The second major reason, and one we have been discussing in the article, is the social attitude of the others and Adivasis towards foraged food from the forest, which reinforces the image of junglee, something young educated Adivasis want to avoid. In the school curriculum, chapters on nutrition and balanced diet fail to recognise indigenous food practices. There are severe implications of this social and curricular ‘removal’ on this knowledge system. The region suffers from a high rate of malnutrition and poverty, and yet people fail to capitalise on “uncultivated” or “wild” foods, which are cultural assets.
Even today, rice and potatoes are the staple food in many Santhal households. Though easily available, local foods are not part of their meals. Another contributing factor is the labour-intensive process of procuring and preparing these local foods. Government and non-government organisations usually work on two major approaches to tackle the health problem of rural communities. The first step is to introduce the concept of kitchen gardens; the second is to ask people to produce cash crops that could enhance their income. There is an assumption that people can improve their health with more income.
Indigenous foods (1st row, from left) mushrooms; wild snails; ants; (2nd row) Santhals being trained to document their food systems; weevil larvae; and crabs
Thus, there are efforts to link people to markets and enhance their capacity to buy different kinds of food items. Though these approaches remain relevant, there is a growing need to actively complement this approach by putting local food systems at the forefront. Currently, I am associated with one such project that engages with indigenous food systems. Given the lack of knowledge and consolidated information about these food items, a major part of our project is to document and exhibit them. We did so by using methods of community participation, placing local youth at the centre of change. To encourage and attract local youth, we used creative mediums of films, theatre, and community radio. Eventually, the locals did not just produce but also exhibited many films on forest foods. The project got the youth collaborating with their community elders in exploring many sources of locally available nutrition from vegetables, fruits and meat. We also partnered with community experts like Boro Baski to create graphic stories for children. Beyond our own project in the last couple of years, there has been a rise in social media channels that share Adivasi foods. There has been an emergence of entrepreneurship models that are creating products from local items and developing restaurants to serve Adivasi delicacies.
Global health, local taste
Food systems are dynamic, and keep changing. The real questions are how they change, who decides its course and for what ends. As Hansda wonders about the evolution of the Santhal plate, he may also actively envision the future of what his plate would hold. In a turn of events, his plate may potentially hold answers to global problems, and science may be catching up with his community’s age-old wisdom.
This would need a lot of investment from key stakeholders, at the level of policy and practice, to incentivise the drive towards indigenous food systems and their systematic evaluation. However, all problems and their solutions are bound to be political. The trend towards homogenisation of food, tastes and identities is a strong local force likely to pose challenges to indigenous knowledge systems. The other major difficulty would be to work on material conditions that sustain this local knowledge.
Transforming social attitude is just a precondition for eventually work towards regenerating forest cover and refashioning agriculture. Both steps involve substantial upheavals that will upset the currently acknowledged logic of development. Gradual reduction of forest, market dependent agriculture and eventually ‘buying what you eat’ is considered historically inevitable and developmentally desirable, to suggest and assert otherwise would not just be considered unfeasible, but also dangerous.
(This appeared in the print edition as “Scientifically Rich, Socially Poor”)
Eating is a political act. Solidarity agriculture, practiced under the name of SoLaWi in Germany as in other European countries, is a possibility of living in coherence with this conviction. A farm and a group of families form an economic community that cares about people and the environment, producing clean, fair and healthy food. Solidarity cooperation, beyond destructive comfort zones.
by Stephen Sherwood, Ana Deaconu, and Myriam Paredes
The experience of the Campaign aligns with Deleuze and Guattari for whom being depends on human-material relations that embrace context, material and people and involves an assemblage of extensive-intensive capacities. Change in food is born in the constitution of embodiments, enabled through common (and not-so-common) practice — what we summarize through the metaphor of existence. The boundaries of space are not drawn just by legal documents or the scriptures of a formalized institution, but more so they are inscribed through the “memory” of practice. In this sense, we argue that the Campaign’s influence is largely bound by the socio-material and biological potentials of flavor and taste.
In Food Sovereignty in International Context: discourse, politics and Practice of Place. Edited by Amy Trauger. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment Alberto Arce, Stephen Sherwood and Myriam Paredes
In our February report, “The Ultimate Mystery Meat,” we revealed how soy production is responsible for ongoing massive deforestation across the Brazilian Cerrado and Bolivian Amazon basin. Our initial field investigation to 28 different locations producing soy in Brazil and Bolivia in September 2016 showed that these large industrial farms sell soy to US-based traders, most significantly to two companies- Cargill and Bunge. In addition to their role in creating a market for deforestation-based soy, we found that these companies are also frequently involved in directly financing land clearance and associated infrastructure development. Cargill and Bunge in turn sell soy to meat and dairy companies, who then sell to large consumer-facing companies like Burger King.
The production of a small family dairy, the result of a settling process with obstacles, has become the solid foundation of a family existence. After a phase of experimentation in the milk processing and the commercialization of the derivatives, the sale of yogurt in the immediate environment has been prioritized. When the production leaves the farm, it is practically already sold, without reaching the market.
ECO Feria’s Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) is a participatory accreditation mechanism reachable for small producers, facilitating the sale of organic food products, benefiting family agriculture and other stakeholders in the social solidarity economy and the consumer as well.
