Go naturewise
Courtesy to “Dawn”
Najma Sadeque
The concept of organic farming is slowly catching on with farmers
world over, even though the number is not much to write home about,
yet. Najma Sadeque explores the issue
When Fidel Castro recently retired, the
world in general crowed over being rid of him while avoiding mention of
his greatest achievements for humanity. For many years, successively
under the US and the Soviet Union hegemony, Cuba adopted their
intensive chemical farming methods. When the Soviet Union broke up and
could no longer support Cuba with cheap oil and other inputs, the rest
of the world (including those who had no quarrel with it) blockaded and
isolated Cuba as well.
Left to its own devices, the country faced food shortages and possible
famine. Castro then resorted to organic farming, mobilising the
country's highly educated workforce to restore the lost knowledge and
put it into practice at once. Within five years, the country was
self-sufficient in food. The feat could have been achieved sooner, but
it takes three years or more to restore depleted, chemical-saturated
soils to fertility. Today, Cuba teaches organic farming to the world
and extends scholarships to the deserving and poor, including from
America.
For 10 to 15 thousand years or more according to recorded history,
people adapted nature's methods to invent farming. Until a century ago,
give or take a few years or decades, the entire world's farmers, grew
food and other crops in much the same way. Farming knew no other
qualification. Today, this time-tested method has been labelled natural
or organic farming to differentiate it from industrial methods applied
to massive acres growing single crops, replacing manure with chemical
fertilizers, and employing heavy machinery and laboratory-modified
seeds designed not to reproduce.
The family far was born when people realized plants sprouted from seed
with some help from moisture and manure, and the next automatic step
was to gather seeds and sow them in a cleared space close to home. When
it succeeded, it led to doing the same with more crops on bigger plots
until they reached a size that a family or group could care for, and
manage on its own.
More discoveries followed. Unusable parts of the crop decomposed and
became part of the soil in a few months, and new seed did well in it.
It meant that crop waste as well as dead creatures recycled into fresh
nutrients and fertilizer. Since all creatures retain only about half
their nutrient intake, excretions are always nutrient-rich. This was
the most important discovery of all. There was no waste in nature! It
was an unending cycle.
Nature never needed any help; after all, it has been thriving for
billions of years on its own in mind-boggling diversity according to
climate, soil and scores of other conditions.
Early experiments discarded monoculture as a bad idea. If one or a few
plants of the same crop caught disease, it was likely to spread and
destroy the rest. Mixed crops in the same plot not only made this
unlikely – pests tend to be crop-specific -- the same disease did not
catch on to different plants either.
Mixed cropping was also the best insurance: even if one crop failed,
there were many others to fall back on. With crop variety, harvesting
and sowing times were staggered, and there was never too much work at
any time. The ancient Mayans of South America, for example, planted
some forty different types on the same plot. Today New Guineans still
plant around a hundred varieties.
There is enough information about organic farming to fill a
multi-volume encyclopedia. Sadly, peasants mostly handed down the
treasure trove orally from generation to generation. Much was lost
during the colonial years, but fortunately in India, Bangladesh and
elsewhere, it is being recovered. Today, in America, Europe and India,
where decades of chemical monoculture has impoverished the soil,
communities and small farmers are increasingly returning to organic
farming, not only to produce safer and healthy food, but also to
maintain healthy soils and high productivity indefinitely.
In the early 20th century, scientists came to the erroneous conclusion
that plants needed only three elements for growth and development
(nitrogen, potash and phosphorous), and if the soil was too poor to
provide these, artificial substitutes could be used. (Actually they
need almost 40 elements in varying combinations and proportions).
The end of the First World War perhaps had something to do with this
decision since the arms manufacturers suddenly found themselves stuck
with mountains of surplus, unsold chemicals that no one wanted anymore.
They were then marketed in different ratios for various crops and sold
for 'scientific farming.' A naive public swallowed the bait.
In the West, industrialists and businessmen had penetrated every field
except agriculture early last century. Investors tried to grow seed on
scale for sale, but since seed came free from nature, and farmers
preferred to select from their own for the next planting, they were not
ready to waste their money. Finally, a hybrid seed was developed in the
laboratory that promised to double or treble the crop. Essentially, a
gene that produced far more grains was extracted from a related species
in a different geographical area, and incorporated.
The yield was indeed greater; but since it was developed in an
artificial environment, those artificial conditions with artificial
fertilizers had to be duplicated everywhere too. It also kept the
farmer dependant for life on seed, fertilizer and pesticide companies.
The farmer was told he was saved from the tedium of seed-saving, but he
was not told that the seed stopped performing after some years, and new
seed had to be developed every five to 10 years.
Another major problem was that chemical pesticides did not just kill
pests; they killed off all beneficial micro-organisms and insects in
and above the soil as well, so that organic farming was no longer
possible until the soil was made chemical-free. The pests that survived
developed resistance so that more or stronger chemicals had to be used
in subsequent seasons to do the same job.
Thus, a livelihood where inputs once came free with only labour and
knowledge to be invested was now turned into a debt-based enterprise.
In the mid-sixties, gullible South Asian governments were misled by the
Harvard Advisory Group to believe that they would never be able to feed
their ballooning populations unless they turned to 'scientific'
farming. Since only big landlords had the acreage and money for
large-scale chemicalised production and tractors, they were the ones
that got the subsidies, the easy credit and big profits. The ignored
peasants could not compete and 800,000 displaced rural Pakistanis
migrated to the urban areas in search of survival as a result of the
not-so-Green Revolution that fizzled out in less than a decade.
From once providing fulfilling livelihoods for three-fourths of the
world's population, agriculture is today an 'industry' appropriated by
big companies, investors and landlords who never get their hands dirty,
but obtain income and profits so huge that could be comfortably spread
among over 2.5 billion people. The seed and agro-chemical corporations
control three-fourths of the global market.
Today, less than a quarter of a billion acres out of some 29 billion
cultivable acres in the world, are organic. But the numbers suggest the
scope for bringing back a billion or two livelihood possibilities. The
major problem for the world's peasants is that they have neither the
political clout, nor the money for a voice to be heard over corporate
clamour and muscle that dominate the media and government lobbies.
However, they now have consumer choice and concerns about health,
rising cancer, chemical poisoning of soils, water bodies, and wildlife
on their side. Within six years, global organic food exports have
soared for one billion dollars to six billion dollars, with no signs of
abating.
Over the past decade, major field studies across the world have
compared yields of energy-intensive chemical farming with organic
farming. A recent University of Michigan study examined almost 300
examples demonstrating that organic farming yields up to three times as
much food as industrial farming in developing countries. An earlier
five-year study carried out in a cross-section of countries by the
Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and Food First, USA, also showed
yields up to ten times more in exceptionally fertile areas.
Pakistan has over 40 million cultivated acres, but its known organic
acreage is so negligible and figures do not appear anywhere, even
though most landlords grow organic wheat for their home consumption
while they send the chemically-grown to market. There are only a few
organic farmers by choice in the country, but two NGOs -- Green Circle
in Lahore, and Lok Sanjh in Islamabad -- are reviving organic farming
by training entire groups and villages.
The limiting factors to an organic Pakistan are land reform (including
land rights for women) and peasants' access to credit. The latter may
be possible; the first more difficult.
Enter the earthworm
And so, the world now turns to other means to practice organic farming. And here enters the earthworm.
Vermi compost, compost which earthworms create from eating rubbish (kitchen waste, dry leaves, etc,) is found to be the answer. According to Fateh Ali, who has been practicing organic farming for half a century now, Pakistan needs around 200 million tons of vermi compost to cater to our crops.. This would have again led to a problem, had it not been for Ipil Ipil tree.
The foliage of Ipil Ipil, a tree dominantly found in South America, is one of the favourite foods with earthworms. Ali believes that if we grow jungles of Ipil Ipil in Pakistan – and it is very much possible - we will be in the position to manufacture sufficient compost.
“In 2006, India exported 7.5 million of compost, and I’m sure Pakistan will be able to do much better, given the opportunity,” says Ali.
Unfortunately, the farmers in the country are still reluctant regarding the idea of organic farming. But Ali feels that they will have to open up, since more and more of their land is getting addicted to chemical fertilisers, and buying them is costing a fortune.
— Sa’adia Reza
In : Najma Sadeque
Notes