Urban youth who willingly drop out of corporate rat race pursue this back-to-the-roots career. Quite often, it’s a joint decision with the spouse. This drives this sector, partially, but significantly.
Thanks to this urban-looking rural pursuit, India is getting increasingly dotted by numerous enterprises that are small in size but with long reach.
A slow but sure departure from the traditional, organic farming joins like-minded pursuits that hold special appeal to Indians, like Ayurveda and yoga.
Yoga now has political and diplomatic heft, being officially promoted at home and abroad. The rest have gained commercial dimensions.
Domestic and multinational corporations are entering the ‘natural’ and ‘herbal’ arena of foods, beverages, medicine and cosmetics to cope with the threat posed by yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, who has grabbed some of their market share.
There are no instant gains in organic farming that has three to four years’ gestation period. The challenge is how to secure land and inputs and how best to use money for farming.
Some socially conscious assist traditional farmers who are ready for change, if only to survive against adverse natural conditions and to cope with vagaries of a monetary system that governs farming finance.
Among them is industrialist and philanthropist Kamal Morarka. Over the last 15 years, he has created several green oases in the arid Shekhawati region in Rajasthan state.
He responded to entreaties from harried farmers in and around Nawalgarh, his ancestral home, 325km from Delhi. Utilising services of experts, he has helped get water for the arid area through canal and groundwater, arrange seeds and organic fertilizer and solve problems with quality of soil.
Not just a do-gooder, Mumbai-educated and based Morarka belongs to that extinguished breed of socialist entrepreneurs. A lieutenant of late Chandra Shekhar, he was a lawmaker and a minister in his short-lived government in 1990-91.
Once produce started piling up, it needed marketing. The 50,000-plus farmers across the Shekhawati region formed a non-government organization to place the entire activity on an even keel.
Farmers in rain-fed areas respond well to things organic. Their farms dot Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states. Sikkim in the Himalayas is the only state to totally organic.
Now, take the big picture. On paper, India’s organic movement looks fantastic. It has 600,000 organic farmers, the highest tally in the world. It ranks ninth in terms of area under organic agriculture.
Organic farm products are ‘in’ today with Indians demanding healthier food and the central and state governments increasingly pushing for and supporting organic farming. The middle class is growing aware that food grown with pesticides, hormones, chemical fertilisers and bio-engineered genes harms both the body and the earth.
Yet, Morarka and Kumar admit that their effort is but a drop in the ocean. Much of India is using chemical fertilisers. Switching to farming methods and inputs is not easy considering age-old practices and rural poverty.
Organic farming can be dismissed as “rich people’s luxury” when yields are uncertain and leave the farmer desperate for survival. This is no exaggeration considering over 12,000 suicides were reported in the farm sector every year since 2013.
Climate change is another culprit. Sixty thousand suicides are linked to it.Things are only getting worse with each year passing.
Awareness is an issue. In Rajasthan, 19 per cent farmers practice organic farming, which is actually many times higher than the national average of 1.1 per cent. Its 91 per cent farmers, a survey says, are aware of the ill effects of the use of chemical fertilizers.
This underscores a contradiction. India’s farm production increased from 83 million tonnes in the 1960s to 252 million tonnes in 2014-15. But use of chemical fertilisers increased from one million tonnes to 25.6 million tonnes in the same period.
During 2016-17, a record US$51 million (RM199 million) were spent on organic farming, which is but a fraction of what goes into the farm sector and pales against this year’s US$10.3 billion spent on chemical fertiliser subsidies.
India generated about 1.35 million tonnes of certified organic products in 2017, including tea, sugar cane, cereals, vegetables and fruit. Of this, 263,687 tonnes was exported.
Indeed, much of organic farming aims at exports. One finds better Indian stuff in supermarkets abroad in the European Union, United States, Middle East, South Africa, Australia and Asean. Can organic farming thrive mainly on exports?
Paucity of supply chains and warehouses limits domestic sales. Unsurprisingly, in supermarkets dotting Delhi that has 18 million inhabitants, organic products, more expensive than the rest, occupy but a few shelves.
The grow-small- and-export is catchy for individual farmer, but that cannot determine a national policy. The world is intensifying efforts to convert more land to organic farming.
Organic farming isn’t just fuelled by the desire to eat better. It’s fuelled by fear that soon, there won’t be enough to eat at all.
The writer is president of the Commonwealth Journalists Association (2016-2018) and a Consultant with ‘Power Politics’ monthly magazine. He also writes a column for The Hans India. He has co-authored two books, ‘Afghan Turmoil: Changing Equations’ (1998) and ‘Afghan Buzkhashi: Great Games and Gamesmen’ (2000). He also lectures at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications