![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this first paper, we explain why traditional knowledge is an important theme in the study of Indian agriculture, especially given the crises routinely facing poor, smallholder farmers. We begin with an overview of some of the key authors who have written about the problems facing small farmers both within and outside India. Different authors have focused on different aspects of the benefits that can be derived from the local knowledge and skills of farmers, but these do not always pertain to organic farming. Our interest in organic farming is specifically about ‘traditional’ knowledge. With the industrialisation of agriculture in India and elsewhere, many poor, small farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments. How ‘traditional knowledge’ might be retrieved, reinvented, reintroduced and modified so as to create a farmer-driven, sustainable and biodiverse agriculture is our concern. In the final section of this paper, we analyse the four situations we have been working on as examples of the possibilities and challenges facing the revival of ‘traditional knowledge’ in the villages of Kolkata, central India and Sikkim.
Acknowledgements
Dr. Madhushree Sekhar from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai supported us by providing useful comments based on her fieldwork in Odisha and Chhattisgarh where tribal Khonds sell their ‘uncultivated’ forest products at local weekly markets. Special appreciation is due to Professor Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay, vice-chancellor of Amity University, Kolkata, for drawing our attention to the large body of literature concerning heavy metal pollution in India and the East Kolkata Wetlands.Footnote83 He joined Vicziany as a co-author of paper 4 and suggested that Dr. Somenath Bhattacharyya join our project on the Wetlands. Thanks also to Jaideep Hardikar for interviewing farmers in Telangana and Maharashtra. The Australian Awards Fellowship Program in Melbourne involved indigenous Australian speakers and specialists such as Bruce Pascoe, who spoke about traditional knowledge in their own communities. These discussions and site visits to indigenous communities and gardens in Melbourne, Healesville, Alice Springs and Bairnsdale helped the participants to see the common problems shared by Australia and India in the matter of food security in an arid environment. These shared concerns will be revisited in forthcoming work by the 51-member, inter-faculty Monash Food Security Group that Dr. Jagjit Plahe began to convene three years ago.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Alex de Waal, ‘Armed Conflict and the Challenge of Hunger: Is an End in Sight?’, 2015 Global Hunger Index (Washington, DC: The International Food Policy Research Institute, 2015), pp. 23–9 [www.ifpri.org/ghi/2015, accessed 3 June 2016].
2. Ibid., p. 18, Table 2.1.
3. Ibid., p. 31, App. B.
4. See, for example, Amitabh Mattoo (ed.), The Reluctant Superpower: Understanding India and its Aspirations (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2012).
5. Marika Vicziany, ‘It Takes Two to Tango: Industry and Foreign Direct Investment’, in Pascaline Winand, Marika Vicziany and Poonam Datar (eds), The European Union and India: Rhetoric or Meaningful Relationship? (Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015), pp. 256–61.
6. See, for example, Ranjan Ray and Kompal Sinha, ‘Rangarajan Committee Report on Poverty Measurement: Another Lost Opportunity’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLIX, no. 32 (2014), pp. 43–8. Amongst other things, Ray and Sinha speak of the need to take micronutrient deficiency seriously. Ibid., p. 45. Also see Ranjan Ray, ‘Changes in Food Consumption and the Implications for Food Security and Undernourishment: India in the 1990s’, in Development and Change, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2007), pp. 321–43.
7. FAO, ‘Policy Brief: Food Security’, Issue 2 (June 2006), p. 1 [http://www.fao.org/forestry/13128-0e6f36f27e0091055bec28ebe830f46b3.pdf, accessed 29 Oct. 2016].
8. Marika Vicziany, ‘Why European Cows are the Envy of Poor Indian Farmers’, in Pascaline Winand, Marika Vicziany and Poonam Datar (eds), The European Union and India: Rhetoric or Meaningful Relationship? (Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015), p. 208.
9. Rahul Anand, Naresh Kumar and Volodymyr Tulin, ‘Understanding India's Food Inflation: The Role of Demand and Supply Factors’, IMF Working Paper WP/16/2 (2016), p. 7, Fig. 2 [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp1602.pdf, accessed 9 Nov. 2016].
10. Ibid., p. 26. 2016 is an exception because the excess of food stocks has been reduced, but not eliminated: stocks of wheat and rice are 50 million tonnes relative to the buffer requirement of 41 million tonnes. See Sandip Das, ‘Despite 22 Per Cent Fall in Wheat Procurement, FCI Stocks Higher than Buffer Norms’, The Financial Express (22 July 2016), p. 1 [http://www.financialexpress.com/markets/commodities/despite–22–fall–in–wheat–procurement–fci–stocks–higher–than–buffer–norms/325033/, accessed 9 Nov. 2016].
11. Ashok Gulati, ‘Prevent Food Mountain Turning into Waste Heap’, The Economic Times (10 May 2012), p. 13.
12. Gary Singleton, ‘Impacts of Rodents on Rice Production in Asia’, International Rice Research Institute, Manila, n.d., p. 8 http://books.irri.org/971220183X_content.pdf. Singleton cites the work of K. Hart saying that ‘overall losses of grain to rodents in India were approximately 25% in the field before harvest and 25–30% post harvest’.
13. FAO, IFAD, WFP, The State of Food Insecurity in the World (Rome: The Food and Agriculture Organization, 2015), p. 46 [http://www.fao.org/3/a–i4646e.pdf, accessed 29 Oct. 2016]. The FAO defines hunger ‘as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment’ and ‘undernourishment means that a person is not able to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements, over a period of one year’. FAO, The FAO World Hunger Map (Rome: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015), p. 1 [http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/, accessed 29 Oct. 2016].
14. FAO, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, p. 8, Table 1.
15. Carla Roncoli, Keith Ingram and Paul Kirshen, ‘Reading the Rains: Local Knowledge and Rainfall Forecasting in Burkina Faso’, in Society and Natural Resources, Vol. 15, no. 5 (2002), p. 410; and Paul Richards, ‘Community Environmental Knowledge in African Rural Development’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2009), p. 28.
16. Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 82–3.
17. Paul Richards et al., ‘Seed Systems for African Food Security: Linking Molecular Genetic Analysis and Cultivator Knowledge in West Africa’, in International Journal of Technology Management, Vol. 45, no. 1/2 (2009), p. 198.
18. Ibid., p. 202.
19. Paul Richards et al., ‘Farmer Knowledge and Plant Genetic Resources Management’, in In Situ Conservation and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Developing Countries, Report of a DSE/ATSAF/ IPGRI workshop, 2–4 May 1995, Bonn–Röttgen, Germany (Rome: IPGRI, 1995), n.p.g. [http://www.bioversityinternational.org/fileadmin/bioversity/publications/Web_version/62/ch09.htm, accessed 21 April 2017].
20. Chambers, Rural Development, p. 89.
21. Afio Zannou, Paul Richards and Paul C. Struik, ‘Knowledge on Yam Variety Development: Insights from Farmers’ and Researchers’ Practices’, in Knowledge Management for Development Journal, Vol. 2, no. 3 (2006), pp. 31–2.
22. Chambers, Rural Development, p. 91.
23. Marika Vicziany, Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay and Somenath Bhattacharyya, ‘Food from Sewage: Fish from the East Kolkata Wetlands and the Limits of Traditional Knowledge’, in this issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2017), doi:10.1080/00856401.2017.1341038.
24. Glenn Davis Stone, ‘The Birth and Death of Traditional Knowledge: Paradoxical Effects of Biotechnology in India’, in Charles McManis (ed.), Biodiversity and the Law: Intellectual Property, Biotechnology and Traditional Knowledge (London: Earthscan, 2007), p. 225.
25. Ibid., p. 221.
26. Ibid., p. 222.
27. Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahe, ‘Extending Traditional Food Knowledge into New Marketing Institutions for Small Farmers’, in this issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2017), doi: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1342183
28. Stone cites many other examples of farmers not being aware of what they were doing: most could not give an accurate definition of Bt cotton seeds even after 14 years of its presence in local markets; others did not know that there were four types of Bt seeds on the market; some farmers bought different sized bags thinking they were different when they were not. See Glenn Davis Stone and Andrew Flachs, ‘The Problem with the Farmer's Voice’, in Agriculture and Human Values, Vol. 31, no. 4 (2014), p. 652; Glenn Davis Stone, ‘Field versus Farm in Warangal: Bt Cotton, Higher Yields, and Larger Questions’, in World Development, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2010), p. 394; and Glenn Davis Stone, ‘Towards a General Theory of Agricultural Knowledge Production: Environmental, Social, and Didactic Learning’, in Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, Vol. 38, no. 1 (2016), p. 7.
29. Paul Richards, ‘Community Environmental Knowledge in African Rural Development’, in IDS Bulletin, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2009), p. 30.
30. Ibid., pp. 30–1.
31. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Amazon had dense populations that cultivated the infertile soils using biochar: see Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, ‘Discovery of the Orellana River c. 1542–1543’, in H.C. Heaton (ed.), The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and other Documents (New York: American Geographical Society, 1934), pp. 167–235; and Frederique Apffel-Marglin, ‘Can Soil Solve Global Warming?’ TEDxYouth@LincolnSudbury (29 March 2013) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYrjMC9Eueo, accessed 21 April 2017]. See also the International Biochar Initiative (2017) [http://www.biochar-international.org/biochar, accessed 22 April 2017].
32. Ian J. McNiven and Damein Bell, ‘Fishers and Farmers: Historicising the Gunditjmara Freshwater Fishery, Western Victoria’, in La Trobe Journal, no. 85 (May 2010), pp. 83–106; Ian J. McNiven, Joe Crouch, Thomas Richards, Kale Sniderman, Nic Dolby and Gunditj Mirring, ‘Phased Redevelopment of an Ancient Gunditjmara Fish Trap over the Past 800 Years: Muldoons Trap Complex, Lake Condah, Southwestern Victoria’, in Australian Archaeology, Vol. 81, no. 1 (2015), pp. 44–59.
33. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Technology and the Reproduction of Values in Rural Western India’, in Frederique Apffel-Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin (eds), Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 204–11.
34. John Kerr and N.K. Sanghi, ‘Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation in India's Semi-Arid Tropics’, in Gatekeeper Series SA34, International Institute for Environment and Development, London (1992), p. 6 [http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/6048IIED.pdf, accessed 30 Oct. 2016].
35. Ibid., p. 11.
36. Farmer–government–NGO science partnerships have also been recommended for many other countries. See Fiona Hinchcliffe, Irene Guijt, Jules N. Pretty and Parmesh Shah, ‘New Horizons: The Economic, Social and Environmental Impacts of Participatory Watershed Development’, in Gatekeeper Series SA50, International Institute for Environment and Development, London (1994) [http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/6064IIED.pdf, accessed 30 Oct. 2016].
37. Chambers, Rural Development, pp. 201–15. Chambers goes on to suggest ways in which outside experts can learn from the poorest farmers.
38. Lachlan Gregory, Jagjit Plahe and Sarah Cockfield, ‘The Marginalisation and Resurgence of Traditional Knowledge Systems in India: Agro-Ecological “Islands of Success” or a Wave of Change?’, in this issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2017), doi:10.1080/00856401.2017.1336686.
39. Our understanding of these terms agrees with N.S. Jodha's definition: ‘[Areas with]…low and variable rainfall, frequent droughts, heterogeneous (including erodible and low fertility) land resources…low regenerative capacities…and high risk production options’. See N.S. Jodha, ‘Common Property Resources and the Environmental Context: Role of Biophysical versus Social Stresses’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 30, no. 51 (23 Dec. 1995), p. 3278.
40. N.S. Jodha, ‘Depletion of Common Property Resources in India: Micro-Level Evidence’, in Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, Supplement: Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policy (1989), p. 261.
41. Ibid., pp. 262–3.
42. For estimates of this dependence across seven arid regions of India in the early 1980s, see ibid., p. 266, .
43. Ibid., p. 271 and Tables 4 and 5, pp.272–3.
44. N.S. Jodha, ‘Rural Common Property Resources: Contributions and Crisis’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 25, no. 26 (1990), pp. A72–A74, Table 12.
45. Jodha, ‘Common Property Resources and the Environmental Context’, pp. 3281–3, esp. Tables 5, 6, 7.
46. P. Sainath, ‘Decadal Journeys: Debt and Despair Spur Urban Growth’, The Hindu (26 Sept. 2011) [http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/decadal-journeys-debt-and-despair-spur-urban-growth/article2487670.ece, accessed 13 Sept. 2014].
47. In the words of Ajit Singh, a Jat leader, the authority of the Jats has declined, the power of both Hindu and Muslim landlords has fallen, and differences in income and status are becoming increasingly blurred. He said: ‘The differences between the haves and have nots in villages is going down…it is not possible to increase income greatly any more’. Marika Vicziany, interviews with Ajit Singh, New Delhi, 8 Mar. 2016 and 14 Feb. 2017.
48. N.S. Jodha, ‘Drought Management: Farmer's Strategies and Their Policy Implications’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 26, no. 39 (28 Sept. 1991), p. A–99, Table 1.
49. See, for example, N.S. Jodha, ‘Intercropping in Traditional Farming Systems’, in Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 16, no. 3 (1980), pp. 427–42.
50. Green manure crops fertilise the soil when dug into the earth.
51. A.R. Vasavi, ‘Agrarian Distress in Bidar’ (Bangalore: National Institute of Advanced Studies, 1999), p. 11 [http://dspace.rri.res.in/bitstream/2289/5457/1/1999_NlAS%20REPORT%20R5_Agrarian%20Distress%20in%20Bidar.pdf, accessed 11 June 2017].
52. L. Thrupp, ‘Linking Agricultural Biodiversity and Food Security: The Valuable Role of Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Agriculture’, in International Affairs, Vol. 76, no. 2 (2000), p. 266.
53. HYVs were the first modern example of industrial engineering in agriculture. HYVs were originally developed by scientists in the USA, Mexico, Vietnam and the Philippines, then imported and acclimatised in India. Their plant characteristics were a large edible head, short stems, short growing seasons, ability to grow under cloud cover and allowing a high density of plants per plot. They were ‘high yielding’ because these features maximised the edible part of each crop.
54. ‘Helicoverpa species’ (Brisbane: Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Queensland Government, 2017) [https://www.daf.qld.gov.au/plants/field-crops-and-pastures/broadacre-field-crops/integrated-pest-management/a-z-insect-pest-list/helicoverpa/helicoverpa-species, accessed 16 April 2017].
55. Vasavi, ‘Agrarian Distress in Bidar’, pp. 11–2.
56. Ibid., p. 24, Table II, p. 26, Table III.
57. Ibid., p. 9.
58. Chambers, Rural Development, p. 85.
59. M. Stuiver, C. Leeuwis and J.D. van der Ploeg, ‘The Power of Experience: Farmers’ Knowledge and Sustainable Innovations in Agriculture’, in J.S.C. Wiskerke and J.D. van der Ploeg (eds), Essays on Novelty Production, Niches and Regimes in Agriculture (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2004), p. 95.
60. Ibid., pp. 96–8.
61. Ibid., p. 103.
62. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, ‘Peasant-Driven Agricultural Growth and Food Sovereignty’, in ICAS Review Paper Series, no. 6 (Sept. 2013), p. 9 [https://www.tni.org/en/briefing/peasant-driven-agricultural-growth-and-food-sovereignty, accessed 13 April 2017].
63. Jagjit Plahe, Sarah Wright and Miriam Marembo, ‘Livelihoods Crises in Vidarbha, India: Food Sovereignty through Traditional Farming Systems as a Possible Solution’, in this issue, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2017), doi:10.1080/00856401.2017.1339581.
64. Van der Ploeg, ‘Peasant-Driven Agricultural Growth’, pp. 10–3. According to Vanhaute: ‘peasant societies are the best guarantee against large-scale human disasters…the future is in a new peasantation’. See Eric Vanhaute, ‘The End of Peasantries? Rethinking the Role of Peasantries in a World–Historical View’, in Review (Fernand Braudel Centre), Vol. 31, no. 1 (2008), p. 54.
65. Van der Ploeg, ‘Peasant-Driven Agricultural Growth and Food Sovereignty’, p. 14.
66. FAO, ‘FAO and Traditional Knowledge: The Linkages with Sustainability, Food Security and Climate Change Impacts’ (Rome: FAO, 2009), p. 4 [http://www.fao.org/3/a-i0841e.pdf, accessed 29 Oct. 2016].
67. FAO, Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture: Contributing to Food Security and Sustainability in a Changing World (Rome: FAO, 2011), pp. 1–66 [http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/biodiversity_paia/PAR-FAO-book_lr.pdf, accessed 29 Oct. 2016].
68. Wahyudi David, Nayu N. Widianingsih, Anwar Kasim and Angelika Ploeger, ‘Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Traditional Farming System on Natural Resources Management’, Conference paper at 2nd International Conference on Biodiversity (2012) p. 1 [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236108208_Role_of_Indigenous_Knowledge_in_Traditional_Farming_System_on_Natural_Resources_Management, accessed 31 Oct. 2016].
69. FAO, ‘FAO and Traditional Knowledge’, p. 3; Ben McKay, ‘A Socially Inclusive Pathway to Food Security: The Agroecological Alternative’, Research Brief no. 23 (Brasília: International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, June 2012), p. 1.
70. Michael Lipton, ‘Can Small Farmers Survive, Prosper, or be the Key Channel to Cut Mass Poverty?’, in Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics, Vol. 3, no. 1 (2006), pp. 58–85 [http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/ag072e/ag072e00.htm, accessed 6 June 2016].
71. S. Mahendra Dev, ‘Small Farmers in India: Challenges and Opportunities’ (Mumbai: Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, June 2012), pp. 6–7 [http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/WP-2012-014.pdf, accessed 29 Oct. 2016].
72. Lipton, ‘Can Small Farmers Survive, Prosper, or be the Key Channel to Cut Mass Poverty?’, p. 81.
73. Ibid., pp. 79–81.
74. The face of India's future is reflected in the fear that even large retailers in Australia have of the new retailing giant, Amazon, which has entered the fresh vegetable markets of Europe and North America and, through its Internet system, delivers ‘within an hour of ordering online’. See Eli Greenblat, ‘Fast and Vast Amazon on its Way’, The Australian (20 April 2017), pp. 1, 20.
75. Vicziany, ‘It Takes Two to Tango’, pp. 258–9.
76. This section is based on Julia Quartz, ‘Constructing Agrarian Alternatives: How a Creative Dissent Project Engages with the Vulnerable Livelihood Conditions of Marginal Farmers in South India’, PhD thesis, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, 2011, pp. 57–62.
77. Ibid., p. 58.
78. Ibid.
79. See a brief history of the conferences and publications initiated by IDS and the Future Agricultures Consortium at [http://www.future-agricultures.org/farmerfirst/, accessed 13 Feb. 2017].
80. The program was funded by the Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
81. N.S. Jodha, ‘Poverty Debate in India: A Minority View’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 23, no. 45/47 (Nov. 1988), pp. 2421–8.
82. Richards, ‘Community Environmental Knowledge in African Rural Development’, p. 30.
83. His research and publications cover the fields of molecular virology, Chandipura virus, molecular microbiology, microbial ecology and enzymology. Most recently, he has been working on the microbial communities of North East India's oil refinery areas.