Beej Bachao Andolan

Excerpts from Report in InfoChange News & Features, October 2008

Dead end on the road to development

By Deepti Priya Mehrotra

Three films screened at the PSBT Open Frame International Film Festival in September critique the dominant development model by examining the lives of three communities — subsistence farmers in Uttaranchal, the fisherfolk of Chilika, and Delhi’s ragpickers

Three documentaries, screened at the PSBT Open Frame International Film Festival on September 16, 2008, together provide a powerful critique of the dominant developmental model. Two films discussed the ‘vanishing local’ — the crumbling of subsistence agriculture in Uttaranchal (Apna Alu Bazar Becha, by Pankaj H Gupta), and the destruction of fisheries in Orissa (Chilika Banks — Stories from India’s Largest Coastal Lake, by Akanksha Joshi). The third film explored Delhi’s scrap industry, run largely by ragpickers (Scavenging Dreams, by Jasmine K Roy and Avinash Roy). The films depict the lives of millions of ordinary people, barely surviving behind the façade of Shining India.

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Jardhargaon, a village in the Garhwal Himalayas, led a relatively isolated existence until three decades ago. The people here followed an agro-pastoral system that sustained human life and the environment over centuries. Today, it is in the midst of a hectic social and environmental transformation. Commodification is leading to the breakdown of local livelihoods.

Vijay Jardhari is trying to conserve biodiversity, to enable people to exercise some control over agriculture and therefore over their lives. He explains: “We have crop varieties that have been used for thousands of years, and which require no, or very little, investment. But today, traditional seeds are being snatched away from the farmers.”

Septuagenarian Bachni Devi recalls that when she came to Jardhargaon as a young bride, she worked at levelling the land, planting, transplanting, weeding, harvesting and cooking: a demanding schedule that left her with barely two hours of sleep every night! However, she looks back on those days as preferable to the present: “We had love, fellow-feeling and cooperation. We worked in each other’s fields. Today, if somebody pays money he can hire a worker. Otherwise nobody will help.”

Surat Singh says: “We ate well. We had roti and drank a litre of curd, and felt happy. We had few needs. We got manure from the cattle, and fodder from the forests. It was a good life.”

Dhoom Singh Negi explains the traditional baranaja (literally ‘12 grains’) method: “A dozen varieties were planted on one plot. Thus, a family could meet all its nutritional needs from a small field.” Subsistence agriculture provided the essentials of life. It began to break up by the 1970s, and, within the space of one or two generations, has been irretrievably lost. Surat Singh recalls a traditional saying: “Sell your potatoes in the market, and buy them back at a higher price.” This was the logic that local people began to face. Their produce fetched a market price, but it was typically lower than the price of other commodities in the market. They became net losers. The land was unable to sustain their burgeoning lifestyles. Khem Singh says: “Now people sell whatever they can. If their cow gives half-a-litre of milk, they go and sell it!”

Negi explains: “Money is equated with ‘progress’. It has penetrated deep into the area. Today, a packet of seeds costs Rs 500-600. To plant a crop, the farmer has to take a loan. Agriculture has become a gamble because new cash crops involve higher investment and greater risks. Self-reliance is gone. The small farmer has become a farm labourer, working for wages.”

Sahib Singh, a biodiversity activist, says: “Our Beej Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Seeds) is trying to conserve the agriculture of the area. But sometimes we ask: Who are we conserving it for? Young people all want to go away to cities.”

Rajbir Singh, 35, is visiting from Mumbai. He says: “If I depend on agriculture, I will be able to grow enough for one month. What will we eat the rest of the year? What future is there in the village? We have to go out to earn. Even if I don’t feel like going, I have to.”

Khem Singh insists: “They will come back. The city is just for coming and going. If they get stuck in a job, they stay on. If they don’t find a job, they come back. And after their job, this is where they will return. This is home.”

(Deepti Priya Mehrotra isa Delhi-based writer)

The film ‘Apna Aloo Bazaar Becha’ (Sold One’s Potatoes in the Market), based on traditional agro-biodiversity and on the work and people of Beej Bachao Andolan won the Golden Deer award for the best short film at the ECOFILMS festival held in Rodos, Greece in June 2008. The film, made by Pankaj H Gupta is slated to be screened at a number of other festivals and venues in the coming months.

In his acceptance speech,  read in absentia, at the award ceremony, he said, ” Few mountain communities, however remote, remain untouched by globalization. Jarhdhargaon, a typical village of middle Himalaya in the Indian province of Garhwal (Uttarakhand), led an isolated, egalitarian existence until just 30 years ago, living off an agro-pastoral system that had sustained human life and the environment for over six centuries. Today, it is in the middle of a rapid social and environmental transformation. This short documentary, based entirely on local perspectives, reflects on this process of change - what triggers the shift to modernization and what impacts it has on the personal, social and environmental spaces. In particular, the film focuses on the primary subsistence activity of farming: whether it can survive in the face of steady out-migration, and if the attempts by Beej Bachao Andolan (Save Seeds Movement) to resist modernization can be successful.”

Pankaj Gupta is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment & Development in Bangalore (India). On the filming, he says, “The film has a simple message - that our relations with nature, and with each other, are of vital importance. It is encouraging to know that the dilemmas of a remote mountain community in India has found resonance in far-off Europe…. In a sense, the award is really a tribute to the values that the film represents and to all the people in front of the camera for baring their souls.”

Beej Bachao Andolan had its annual  gathering of friends and farmers on17-19 May 2008.

The subject for this year’s discussion was “Kheti par maar - Van pashu, mausam aur sarkar“. In English, this would roughly translate as “The attack on farming - wild animals, climate and the government”.

“It was a great opportunity to have learned about the work you (Beej Bachao Andolan) are doing which I have found to be not only inspiring but one that Africa can follow, to guide us all in achieving what you already have in your part of the world. I thank you on behalf of my fellow Africans.”

Dr Melaku Worede (Ethiopia) Agronomist, Winner - Right Livelihood Award (1989). Message to Biju Negi at “From Seed Security to Seed Sovereignty” Regional Meeting in Ethiopia, 3-11 November 2007

Project Censored Releases Censored 2008 and its pick of the 25 most important under-covered news stories of 2006-07.

Project Censored announces its selection of the Top Censored News Stories of the 2006-2007 cycle. Each year since 1976, hundreds of student researchers, faculty, and volunteer members come together to select the most important news stories that were under-covered, glossed over or ignored by the country’s major media outlets.

One of these concerns the far-reaching but little reported Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (with a telling acronym of KIA) that will hand Indian agriculture to US agribusiness and open India’s doors to rapacious corporations such as Wal Mart. A brief summary and link follows:

Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops, yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.

Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field. [more]