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This article provides information about the need of food security in the diversified and sustainable system of food production:
It was the incidence of Andhra Pradesh in Warangal, where farmers have also been committing suicide. Farmers who traditionally grew pulses and millets and paddy have been lured by seed companies to buy hybrid cotton seeds referred to by the seed merchants as “white gold”, which were supposed to make them millionaires.
Image Courtesy : fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/en/press-media/made-from-whey.jpg
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Instead they became paupers. Their native seeds have been displaced with new hybrids which cannot be saved and need to be purchased every year at high cost. Hybrids are also very vulnerable to pest attacks. Spending on pesticides in Warangal has shot up 2000 per cent from $2.5 million in the 1980s to $50 million in 1997.
Now farmers are consuming the same pesticides as a way of killing themselves so that they can escape permanently from un-payable debt. The corporations are now trying to introduce genetically engineered seeds, which will further increase costs and ecological risks. That is why farmers like Malla Reddy of the Andhra Pradesh Farmers’ Union had uprooted Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bollgard cotton in Warangal.
The rich diversity and sustainable systems of food production are being destroyed in the name of increasing food production. However, with the destruction of diversity, rich sources of nutrition disappear. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre, and from the perspective biodiversity, the so called “high yields” of industrial agriculture or industrial fisheries do not imply more production of food and nutrition. Yield usually refers to production per unit area of a single crop.
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Output refers to the total production of diverse crops and products. Planting only one crop in the entire field as a monoculture will certainly increase its individual yield. Planting multiple crops in a mixture will have low yields of individual crops, but will have high total output of food. Yields have been defined in such a way as to make the food production on small farms by small farmers disappear.
The Mayan peasants in the Chiapas are characterised as unproductive because they produce only 2 tons of corn per acre. However, the overall food output is 20 tons per acre when the diversity of their beans and squashes, their vegetables and their fruit trees are taken into account. In Java, small farmers cultivate 607 species in their home gardens. In sub-Saharan Africa, women cultivate 120 different plants.
A single home garden in Thailand has 230 species, and African home gardens have more than 60 species of trees. Rural families in the Congo eat leaves from more than 50 species of their farm trees. A study in eastern Nigeria found that home gardens occupying only 2 per cent of a household’s farmland accounted for half of the farm’s total output.
In Indonesia, 20 per cent of household income and 40 per cent of domestic food supplies come from the home gardens managed by women. Research done by FAO has shown that small bio-diverse farms can produce thousands of times more food than large, industrial monocultures. And diversity in addition to giving more food is the best strategy for preventing drought and desertification.