What happens to the seed affects the web of life. When seed is living, regenerative and diverse, it feeds pollinators, soil organisms and animals—including humans. When seed is non-renewable, bred for chemicals, or genetically engineered with toxic Bt or Roundup Ready genes, diversity disappears.
In recent years, beekeepers have been losing 25 percent of their hives each winter. According to a scientific study in 2008, bees and pollinators contribute more than €153 billion annually to agriculture. Chemically-farmed soils, sprayed with herbicides and pesticides kill the beneficial organisms that create soil fertility and protect plants.
Organic seeds and organic farming do not just protect human health; they protect the health and wellbeing of all.
With industrial seeds and industrial agriculture, the diversity of plants and crops disappears. India had 200,000 rice varieties before the “green revolution” in the 1970s, which relied on pesticides and fertilizers to avert famine in India. This diversity was replaced by monocultures.
Today the fastest expanse in acreage is of genetically engineered corn and soya, because they are patented and corporations can collect royalties from farmers. When seed freedom disappears and farmers become dependent on genetically modified organism (GMO) seeds, they in effect become seed slaves.
According to the National Bureau of Crime Records, more than 284,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since seed monopolies were established in India. Gandhi spun cotton for our freedom. Today GMO Bt cotton has enslaved our farmers in debt, and pushed them to suicide. And 95 percent cotton seed is controlled by one company: Monsanto.
When culture is eroded, biodiversity is eroded. And when control over seeds becomes big business, diversity disappears faster. Diversity is a product of care, connection and cultural pride.
Greed Versus Care
The tribals and peasants who gave us rice diversity wanted to evolve a rice for lactating mothers, a rice for babies, a rice for old people. They wanted to have rices that would survive droughts and floods and cyclones, so they evolved climate-resilient rices. In the Himalaya, different rices are needed for different altitudes and different slopes. The intimacy and care that go with belonging to a place and a community allows diversity to flourish.
Greed promotes carelessness and drives control, and control is facilitated by uniformity and monocultures. You cannot control diversity, you can only co-evolve and co-create with it.
A will to control becomes a will to destroy diversity, through what I have called the monoculture of the mind. And the expansion of corporate control over seed and plants is the main reason for the disappearance of diversity in our fields and in our food.
Undermining Health and Nutrition
Corporations first controlled agriculture through the chemical inputs for the green revolution. External chemical inputs demand uniformity and monocultures. In an ecological system, wheat and mustard and chana grow in a mixture, as an internal input self-organizing system is based on diversity and co-operation. When ecological inputs are replaced with external inputs, diversity becomes a problem, and monocultures become an imperative. Chemically-fertilized crops start competing with one another and different external inputs have to be applied to different crops.
This is how the green revolution destroyed our rich diversity of rice and wheat. Millets, which we atNavdanya call forgotten foods, were driven out of our farms and from our plates on totally unscientific criteria of being called inferior grains, even though in health and nutrition terms they are superior to green revolution and hybrid rice and wheat.
Indigenous rice and wheat varieties are superior in nutrition to the new varieties. Native rices have a low glycaemic index, while industrial rice has a high glycaemic index. When all that the poor get is industrial rice, they also get diabetes. India is now the capital of diabetes, which is intimately linked to the disappearance of diversity.
Not only does living, organic seed have more quality, nutrition and taste; farming systems that are based on biodiversity produce more nutrition and “health per acre”, as the Navdanya study has shown. Seed freedom is the answer to hunger and malnutrition. One billion people today are hungry and two billion are obese because agriculture is out of balance with nature. Half of humanity is denied wellbeing through food.
Globalization and the Disappearance of Diversity
Globalization means an expanded and aggressive assault on the diversity of our crops and foods is taking place. There are three forces driving the disappearance of diversity, and all are connected to corporate control over seed and food.
The first is the entry of big business in the seed market, with uniform commercial, industrial hybrids and GMOs, and the consequent displacement of local diverse varieties evolved by farmers. Local farmers grew different water melon varieties, and water melons were seasonal fruits. Today you get only one oblong variety everywhere, all year round, because watermelon seeds are now commercial hybrids sold by corporations, which can only breed and sell uniformity.
The second factor in the disappearance of diversity is long-distance trade. Diversity goes hand in hand with local, decentralised food systems. Long-distance trade replaces freshness and softness with hardness, so fruits can travel. You may have noticed how soft jacket oranges have disappeared and been replaced with varieties that cannot be peeled. Corporations are advising the Indian government that bananas and mangoes need a makeover to travel longer, and stay longer on shelves.
The third factor is industrial processing. When McDonald’s wants potatoes for French fries, only Russell Burbank will grow. Pepsi’s Lay’s chips cannot use indigenous potato diversity—such as the tomri that we grow in the mountains. Ketchup requires tomatoes with pulp, not juice. So the juicy, tasty tomatoes disappear, and hard and tasteless tomatoes replace them.
The Italians have continued to grow good, diverse tomatoes since and have managed to get the Mediterranean diet on the Unesco heritage list. Every cuisine in every part of India deserves to be recognized as a cultural heritage.
Navdanya has been making its contributions to protecting biodiversity and food heritage. But the issue is too important not to be taken up by every citizen in their daily lives. We are what we eat. When we are careless with food we are careless with ourselves. Will we only wake up when the last peasant and the last seed disappears?
At the end of 2004, Leontino Balbo Junior, executive vice-president of the Balbo Group, Brazil's biggest organic-sugar grower, gave over 100 hectares of the company's land to a sugarcane variety called SP84-2025. Variety SP84-2025 had had a chequered history. Initially a robust and productive crop which had proved ideal for the fertile plains of São Paulo state, by the late 90s it had become susceptible to yellow-leaf virus, which had not only reduced its productivity but had also threatened to contaminate adjacent fields. Weakened and commercially useless, it was abandoned by the industry in 2003 and consigned to the scrapheap of crops gone bad.
Balbo chose SP84-2025 to make a point. Since 1986, he had been working on a new form of agriculture that he was convinced would increase a crop's productivity, boost its resistance to pests, reduce the resources needed to cultivate it, and broaden the biodiversity of the land in which it was grown. He called his approach "ecosystem revitalising agriculture" (ERA) and claimed that it could revive not only ailing crops, such as SP84-2025, but also ailing land that had been "starved of vitality" by decades of modern farming. If it was successful, the impact would be felt far beyond agriculture.
"My aim, since I started that work," he explains in the low-key cluster of buildings that make up the Balbo Group's admin centre in Ribeirão Preto, 350km north-west of São Paulo, "has been to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, a way to preserve the natural resources we need now -- water, soil fertility, biodiversity and the atmosphere. Otherwise, we won't be able to maintain a civilised society. If we have a water crisis, for example, we will end up having a global war because of natural resources. And human beings as a civilisation will be gone."
It's a Saturday, a few weeks before this year's harvest is due to begin, and the Balbo offices are deserted. The company was founded in 1946, although the family has been in the sugar business since 1903, and its administrative buildings feel as though they are in a time warp. The chairman's office is still kitted out in 70s executive style -- a huge desk, deep leather sofa and plenty of heavy onyx ashtrays. Except for a carefully arranged display of organic consumer products, the boardroom could be that of any small- to medium-sized car-parts manufacturer in the West Midlands. The hectares of green sugarcane fields stretching off in every direction through the windows give the place an eerie sense of being lost to the modern world.
In one sense, Balbo himself is also from another age. Now 52, he is fit and enthusiastic -- he begins each day with a workout, limits his alcohol intake and is an accomplished water-skier. He has a full head of black hair, which he is quick to point out "is not dyed", and fixes you with an intensity when he talks. He is at the helm of one of the most successful organic-sugar producers in the world and can talk the science of modern agriculture. But his real laboratory is nature itself and the annual cycle of sowing, reaping, clearing and sowing that has always been the farmer's lot.
Sugarcane is harvested once a year, with the plants left in the ground to grow again, usually for up to six or seven harvests. Before he began his experiment, SP84-2025 was producing about 98 tonnes of cane per hectare. After he began to apply the various tools of ERA to the crop. And something remarkable happened: cane that before had shown the unmistakable signs of yellow virus -- leaves that were blemished with pale streaks -- grew taller, stronger and furthermore remained pest-free. And its productivity soared, to 156 tonnes per hectare. In subsequent years, despite the arrival in Brazil of the orange-rust fungus, to which SP84-2025 had also proved highly susceptible, the cane delivered yields well above average and off the scale for a crop that had largely been declared moribund. "It was something that had never been seen in the industry before," Balbo says.
ERA is organic in its approachbut, Balbo says, it goes much further than simply not using artificial pesticides or fertiliser. At its core is a respect for soil. Farming has tended to treat soil more as a receptacle for water and nutrients than as something that makes an active contribution to plant growth. "Soil is not just a container," he says, "it's also the content of the ecosystem. It holds the biodiversity, both living and mineral, that's essential for life. If the soil loses this function, all other things are compromised." According to Balbo, modern agriculture damages soil in three ways. Farm machinery compresses it, making it less able to hold water; fertilisers upset its natural chemical balance; and monocrops reduce its biodiversity, which he sees as essential for healthy plants. "So much soil used for agriculture is dead," he says. "We need to revitalise it, to restore the energy of its ecosystem."
To do this, Balbo set aside 16,000 hectares of the family plantation and began to change how it was farmed. First to go was the decades-old habit of crop burning. Since the early 20th century, many sugarcane producers have started fires in their fields before harvesting. Crop burning eliminates pests and snakes, and burns the "trash" -- the living and dead leaves -- from the canes, which makes them easier to cut. Balbo says the environmental downsides of this approach, however, are significant.
Balbo checks a fermenter, which uses yeast to turn sugar into ethanol
Matthew Mahon
"After burning, the cane releases a sugar melt, like honey, which drops down into the soil. So the harvesters have to cut and collect not only the cane, but the melt, which is full of soil. This has to be washed at the mill -- we were using three million litres of water every hour just to do that. Burning the trash denies you the opportunity to return it to the soil as mulch."
As an alternative to crop burning, Balbo spent five years, from 1988 to 1993, developing a mechanical harvester that would cut the cane "green", that is with its leaves still on. He built a machine that cut the cane into pieces and fed them into a hopper where opposing currents of air stripped off the leaves and sprayed them on to the recently cut ground. Harvesting in this way, Balbo says, returns 20 tonnes of trash per hectare to the soil each year, restoring nutrients, especially nitrogen, and forming a mulch that helps keep weeds down.
To address the problem of compression, Balbo turned his attention to the tyres used by the farm's trucks.
"Farm equipment is heavy," he says, "and wherever you drive you compress the soil, changing its geometric structure and reducing its ability to hold water. We now have ultrasoft tyres that we partially deflate before driving into the fields to reduce the impact on the soil."
At first, the results were not good. Production levels fell and pests increased. But, after five years, multiple layers of trash began to feed an increasing biodiversity of micro and macro fauna, and the canes grew stronger. What began as a hypothesis -- that restoring biodiversity to the soil would lead to stronger plants -- was starting to be proven.
Balbo's inspiration is rooted in his upbringing in the lush countryside of São Paulo state. "I would come home from school," he says, "strip down to my shorts and ride my bike into the forest to go fishing. I would stand there in the pond, waist-high in water, with a fishing rod in one hand and a rock in the other, ready to fend off crocodiles. It was there where I first started to understand the complexity of the forest, a place where each living organism has a role, a function in helping the others grow."
In 1980 he went to São Paulo State University to study agronomy. He was a conscientious student but was saddened, he says, by the number of his classmates who, after graduation, went to work for fertiliser companies rather than on the land. He decided to dedicate himself to increasing the vitality of the land he would farm, to returning its state as close as possible to that of the forest that surrounded it.
"For me, the forest has always been my inspiration," he says. "There, you see no monocrops. There, there are hundreds of organisms growing together. The toxins secreted by one plant are taken up and metabolised by another. I don't like to use the word 'balance'. That implies something static. Instead there is omeostasis, where the system regulates itself to the benefit of all the parts that grow in it. Trash from plants falls back down on to the ground, and the soil is a living ecosystem that nourishes everything that grows in it."
A forest, though, is not a farm, and Balbo's challenge was to find a way of replicating the self-sustaining ecosystem of uncultivated land, while still being able to harvest crops, an act which, in its very nature, removes nutrients and energy from the land. Returning trash to the fields as mulch went some way towards this, but he still needed another way of restoring nutrients to the soil and capturing the energy that the plants had absorbed from the Sun. He turned his attention to the byproducts of the sugar-production process itself.
A worker injects Cotesia flavipes eggs into caterpillars. Te latter plague cane but can be used to host the egg of the wasp, its natural predator
Matthew Mahon
Sugarcane juice collected at various stages of grinding is tested for purity. The results show if the grinders are performing at peak sucrose extraction
Matthew Mahon
The sugarcane pulp emerges from the lsat stage of the extraction process, leaving behind the cane juice. The pulp will then go the biomass boilers
Matthew Mahon
At the estate's mill in São Francisco (one of its three mills, the company has turned this one over to organic production) the liquid residue left over after the cane pulp is fermented is collected and sprayed back on to the fields, and dry matter is fed directly into a furnace, which produces 200 tonnes of steam per hour. Some of this is used to extract sugar from the cane. The rest of the electricity powers the mill and its associated buildings, with excess sold to the grid.
At the heart of Balbo's approach is the principle that, if he can restore his soil to condition of that in the forest, nature will do the rest. But nature works slowly and, between 1992 and 2000, he had, he says, many sleepless nights and a lot of stress. "We weren't getting good production figures and the environmental results took some time to return, because no one had done this before, I didn't know exactly where the problem was -- in the tyres or in the trash. It was difficult to understand what was linked to what in the environment."
In 1991, the World Bank commissioned the Copersucar Technology Centre, part of a large co-operative to which Balbo belonged, to carry out independent tests on Balbo's fields over five years. The aim was to investigate the possibility of using trash to produce electricity, but Balbo agreed on the basis that the researchers would bring a scientific eye to his new agricultural techniques. "I had a sense that I was doing the right thing," he says, "but I needed outside verification."
The outcome was a disaster. "Ninety percent of their conclusions were negative about the potential green-cane harvesting offered for a new production model," he says. "It was depressing and frustrating. I was sure I was seeing good things happening in the fields, but they were PhDs in entomology, in geology and so on, and they were finding the opposite. I asked myself: should I listen to them or rely on my own deep feelings?" The "good things" he was seeing represented a small but perceptible increase in biodiversity in his fields. Areas that before had been sterile were now starting to show signs of life. And it was at the lowest point of the Copersucar research period, when he needed, he says, just to get away from the researchers, that he at last understood why biodiversity was so important. "Whenever I felt down or confused, I would go into the forest. I noticed something interesting. A branch had fallen from a tree and leaf-cutter ants were cutting up the leaves and transporting the parts back to their colony. Right next to them were living leaves, on branches still attached to the tree, and the ants left them alone. Somehow the fallen leaves were telling the ants that they were dying and ready to be recycled and the ants were acting on that and leaving the healthy ones. From the ants, I learned that everything in nature has a function. Everything is doing something. You can't just go into an ecosystem and apply insecticide and eliminate 30 or 40 species of insect, because they have a role there."
Returning to his crops after the researchers had left, he noticed signs that ERA was working. Fungi started to grow in the layers of trash on the ground. "These hadn't been there before," he recalls. "Some worked to decompose cane trash. Others metabolised leguminous plants [beans and peas] we were using as rotation crops." After them came earthworms and termites, churning the soil and making it looser, and increasing its water-holding capabilities.
"The bugs, combined with using softer tyres, changed the geometry and the composition of the soil. We soon started to see a fourfold increase in water retention, a fivefold increase in resistance to erosion and a threefold increase in organic content," he says.
Matthew Mahon
The number of pests in the fields was falling too. One of the most serious a sugarcane farmer can face is a small herbivorous insect, Mahanarva fimbriolata. "We had a big problem with Mahanarva fimbriolata," says Balbo. "Conventionally, you use pesticides, but we did nothing. We started to see the arrival of a fly, Salpinpogaster nigra, which is the bug's predator." When certain predatory insects became too numerous, a parasitic fungus would emerge that reduced their population count. The arrival of another sugarcane pest, a caterpillar called Diatraea saccharalis, was accompanied by that of a tiny wasp, Cotesia flavipes, which predates it.
"By leaving all of the insects in place," says Balbo, "we enabled nature to keep them under control." ERA had finally arrived.
It has taken him 27 years, but balbo has not only improved cane production on his land. He has also increased its biodiversity far beyond fungi and wasps. The Balbo fields are now home to hundreds of forest animals including foxes, deer, capybara and armadillos, four types of big cat and countless bird and insect species. But he sees sustainability as something more than this, a philosophy that encompasses not only environmental concerns, but economic and social ones too. His business is doing well, producing 75,000 tonnes of organic sugar -- 34 per cent of the world market and a figure he is planning to raise as demand increases -- and 55,000m3 of organic ethanol each year from a crop of about 1.2 million tonnes of cane. His sugar is used in about 120 high-profile products from Green & Black's chocolate to Yeo Valley yoghurt. On the farm, energy use has fallen by half and, when the introduction of green-cane harvesting threatened the jobs of the manual labourers who had previously cut the crop, he ensured that they were retrained and found work elsewhere on the plantation. All Balbo employees now have access to welfare, medical and sports facilities, and low-cost housing.
Yet, despite the industrial scale of the operation he now runs, there is still something of the Mowgli in Balbo. "I draw my strength from the land and the plants and everything that is alive," he says. "These canes are very happy. I can feel that."
Not everyone in the precision world of modern agriculture is comfortable with this apparently unscientific approach. The literature is still split about the benefits of green-cane harvesting, let alone the much more radical techniques of ERA. Balbo is passionately opposed to GM crops ("like giving a monkey a revolver") and he agrees that much of what he did in the early days came from intuition. But, he says, the results now speak for themselves.
"I felt from the start that, in the forest, the higher the diversity of plants and animals in an ecosystem, the higher the stability of that system. I saw that the ants were not eating living trees, and that meant to me that if I could bring the soil in my fields to the same condition of the soil in the forest, the ants wouldn't eat my cane either. And it has worked. Since we transferred this production model from the forests to the cane fields, the cane has a higher stability, a higher production and we can get more cuts out of it. In fact, I am hoping we will soon never have to remove cane any more, as we have to now after six or seven cuts. It will become permanent."
Those who have worked closely with him over the past two decades say he is more scientific than he, and his critics, make him out to be. "What he practises is phenomenology," says Evaristo de Miranda, a senior researcher at Embrapa, Brazil's state-owned agricultural-research centre in Brasilia, who has been following Balbo's project for more than 20 years. "It's what farmers have done for over 10,000 years. He observes, experiences, analyses, innovates and transforms. He knows, as a good agronomist, to ask the right questions. He interrogates nature all the time and nature responds. His advances are empirical, in the full sense of the term."
Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto, an agronomist at Imaflora, which promotes sustainable agriculture in Brazil, agrees. "Leontino is one of the best agronomists I have ever met. He has a solid scientific and technical background. It looks like he doesn't use a scientific method to test his ideas, but he does not do things randomly or without background and a clear objective. He works with hypotheses and tests them. And, even if he believes it is not science, it is."
Balbo himself is careful to back up his claims with statistics. Visitors to the company are often treated to a long presentation on rising crop yields, falling pest numbers and reduced use of natural resources that leaves little unsaid or unanalysed. (wired's lecture lasted for five-and-a-half hours and comprised 503 slides.) He is thrilled with what he has achieved and evangelical about it, and is, in unguarded moments, a little puzzled that others don't always share his vision.
Balbo's challenge is not so much criticism of what he does but invisibility.
"I don't know anyone who doubts the techniques he is applying," says Ricardo Abramovay, professor of economics at the University of São Paulo, who researches large-scale agriculture. "He has achieved what many consider impossible: a large continuous area occupied by a single product that still provides exceptionally favourable conditions not only for agriculture but also for wildlife." The problem is that very few outside the sustainable-agriculture sector have heard of what his is doing.
That should change this year, as Balbo is taking his ideas out of his testbed in São Paulo state, into the wider world. To market his ideas, in the autumn, he will be launching Agros Fortis (based on the Latin for "strong fields"), a technology-transfer company that will help others adopt ERA.
"My first and main concern is to offer an alternative production model to chemical systems," he says. "For me, at this stage of my life, money comes second and it will be a consequence of having been useful though the application of the technology. I intend to charge growers a certain amount per hectare of land where the technology is applied, and find a way they can pay me back from the additional revenues that ERA will provide. It is not my goal, like some big corporations do, to make the growers dependent on the system or to add extra costs. This technology aims to make the growers independent again, after almost four decades of domination [by big business]."
In the meantime, his own sugar production continues to grow. He is hoping to turn his 16,000 hectares of organically certified fields into 22,000 hectares. Balbo is certain that ERA can be applied anywhere in the world. "Yes, even in deserts," he says. "It just depends on how many resources you are going to mobilise." But he has a long way to go: even conventional organic farming makes up only about one per cent of the world's agriculture. The fertiliser companies can rest easy for a while.
And, like all good innovators, he feels there is plenty more he can still do in Ribeirão Preto.
"All along it has been like I have been doing a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and now I have about 100 pieces to go. We will be able to produce cane sugar at half the cost of conventional production today, providing all those environmental benefits and using a third of the resources. That's what makes me so enthusiastic."
He knows that the project's scope is huge -- "Sometimes this feels like too much for one man to do" -- but insists that he won't stop.
"I always see things to improve, new things to try," he says. "If you put your love into the construction of something and you are really dedicated to it, then there is no competitor for you. I love so much what I do, the opportunity to help people to eat healthy products as well as contribute to the environment. I love it so much," he says, pausing for a while to gaze once more at his lush fields of cane, "that I never get tired."
Ancient seeds have offered new hope to India’s beleaguered farmers.
According to media reports, farmers in the Ganges River delta in Eastern India are using ancient seeds in the hopes of fighting off famine and keeping their crops sustainable in a climate-changed India.
Media reports say in a case study in the Ganges River delta, scientists are distributing these ancient seeds to farmers free of charge. This case study was launched after farmers found that the high yielding modern seeds they had used since the 1960s failed after a massive tropical storm intruded inland and contaminated their farmlands with salty sea water in 2009.
Cyclone Aila crashed into the Bangladesh-India border about four years ago, according to reports. It brought along a giant surge of sea water. The water rammed inland, causing widespread damage.
It destroyed houses and immersed crops under water. It polluted drinking water. It forced people to flee their homes. According to international agencies, the storm is said to have impacted about three million people.
The cyclone also left lasting damage in the fact that it doused farmlands with salt water. When the waters receded, they left salt in the soil. Four years later, according to international agencies, the tragedy is still having a devastating effect on the lives of many people in the country.
Many people do not have enough food. Many lack safe drinking water and many more do not have a means to make a living. Most tragic of all, farmers are having a hard time growing crops because of the salt in the farmland. Four years after this devastation, farmers say growing food is a challenge on these farmlands because of the salt. They say their seeds have failed them.
According to experts, the seeds that failed were the modern variety that the farmers had started using after the so called green revolution of the 1960s. Asish Ghosh, Director of the Kolkata-based Center for Environmental Development, said in a recent interview that growing crops is a challenge because the sea water, after it receded, left salt in the farm soil.
He told reporters recently “farmers cannot have any vegetables growing after Aila because still — still there is salt in the soil.”
According to scientists, densely populated river deltas across the globe have had to face similar challenges as climate change is forcing coastlines to retreat and allowing salt to invade on lands which were once upon a time fertile farmlands.
To adapt to challenges of rising sea levels and powerful storms brought on by climate change, a case study found that ancient seeds, developed more than a hundred years ago were found successful in keeping crops sustainable.
According to media reports, this field study found, for example, that the only variety of rice that will grow in the contaminated Ganges River delta is a salt-tolerant rice variety developed more than a century ago by small-scale farmers. Indian scientists told reporters that there were more than a hundred thousand varieties of rice alone at one time. But according to them, most of those seeds are now lost.
Media reports say that Debal Deb, a scientist and a rice conservator is now in a race against time and determined to save as many traditional seeds as possible. In the last decade, he has traveled across India to salvage what is left of those traditional seeds.
“My own collection, I have more than 200 varieties, some of which can withstand drought and can yield something on zero irrigation, some varieties which can withstand 12-feet deep-water for three months, and the stem will elongate and still give some yield.
And we have at least six varieties of salt-tolerant rice which can withstand seawater intrusion. These are the unique properties which genetic engineers have not yet imagined.”
According to reports, nonprofit organizations are working with farmers to restore these traditional seeds which went out of use because farmers after 1960 started to use high-yielding seeds of the green revolution.
Deb told reporters that governments and agribusiness are just now coming to the recognition of how vital and critical these ancient seeds are to the future of agriculture and feeding billions. He said that in spite of billions of dollars spent on plant breeding and genetic engineering programs, these programs have yet to produce seeds that rival the tolerance of the traditional seeds to extreme weather-related conditions.
He added that the importance of these traditional seeds cannot be overemphasized to the future of agriculture as climate change envelopes the planet.
By Perviz Walji
Source: Center For Investigative Reporting, PBS, Oxfam
Rice feeds the world. It provides more calories to humans than any other food, and more than a billion people depend on rice cultivation for their livelihoods.
In fact, rice is central to existence in many nations. For example, in 2008, when rice prices tripled, the World Bank estimated that an additional 100 million people were pushed into poverty. No wonder that changes in the price and availability of rice have caused social unrest in developing countries.
To keep rice prices affordable as populations increase, the International Rice Research Institute estimates that anadditional 8-10 million tons of rice will need to be produced worldwide every year. But a report from the International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that by 2050 rice prices will increase some 35% because of yield losses due to climate change. Some 90% of the world’s rice is grown in Asia, on more than 200 million small scale farms, most no larger than an acre.
These colliding trends mean that the world must learn to produce more rice – and to do it with less land, less water and less labor. That means devising more efficient and profitable production systems that are resilient to climate change and contribute less to it. This is exactly the challenge EDF and its partners have taken up in India, a country where roughly 500 million of the world’s 2.3 billion people in small-scale farming families live and earn $2 - $4 a day.
An EDF supported rice plot where GHG emissions are measured every other day (Tamil Nadu, India).
Rice farming releases greenhouse gasses more potent than carbon
When organic material decays without oxygen, as it does in water-logged rice paddies, soil microbes generate methane, a greenhouse gas with 25 times more warming potential than CO2. In India, rice methane emission account for about 10% of the nation’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Lately there is growing awareness that when rice is grown under dryer and aerated conditions, nitrous oxide emissions from rice can be as (or even more) significant as methane emissions. Nitrous oxide has about 300 times more warming potential than CO2. It has not yet been estimated what percentage of nitrous oxide emissions in India, or for that matter other rice growing regions in Asia, come from rice cultivation.
Partnering with NGOs in India yields a promising future
The rice farmers in South India are working with non-governmental organizations that are part of a broad coalition called the Fair Climate Network. EDF’s science team is working with these NGOs to develop an environmentally sustainable and economically profitable way to farm rice that will increase climate resilience and decrease GHG emissions.
With our partners, we are developing rice farming practices that change water, fertilizer and organic matter management such that GHG emissions go down as rice yield and farm profitability stay stable or go up. Our partners are working with thousands of rice farmers to record all the farm level data (methods of tilling and weeding, types of fertilizer used, amount of water used and harvest yields) necessary to understand the economic and environmental impacts of their work.
We have also developed protocols to quantify everything: yields, production costs, and emissions of nitrous oxide and methane from the rice fields. Our partners have even set up field laboratories in rural South India to constantly monitor GHG emissions. Our preliminary research work in fields “adopted” by EDF's partners shows that there is potential to reduce GHG emissions by 2-5 metric tons per acre per year which is same as taking of an average American car off the road for a year.
A farmer’s daughter (Andhra Pradesh, India) trained to collect GHG samples from flux-chambers.
Eventually, we expect to have enough data to make a case for low carbon farming of rice throughout all of South India. If low carbon rice farming becomes the standard just in all rice growing farms in South Indian states where we are currently active, we can decrease GHG emissions by 40-100 million tons of CO2e per year while saving water, improving farm incomes and protecting rice yields. This reduction is roughly equal to taking 10 million American cars off the road or taking 10-20 coal power plants off the grid. To make this possible, we will have to raise resources for outreach and the transactions costs of monitoring and verifying the GHG reductions.
The potential for this kind of research to support development, food and political security, while mitigating climate change is enormous. That’s something to think about the next time you have a bowl of rice.
