Wednesday 25 July 2012

Cash Crops Invade Food Crop Space



Today I visited two interior villages of Ujjain district and found how food insecurity has systematically clenched its grip on North Indian villages. These two villages, Sanwarkhedi and Padmakhedi villages are microcosm of typical North Indian villages which are always under the shadow of malnutrition and food insecurity.

The landscape of both villages is lush green in these early days of Kharif crop or the monsoon crop. Unfortunately this crop greenery does not contribute to the local food security at all! All that you will see on the farms is soybean and soybean which people can only sell and not eat. Villagers have their own logic of trading soybean for wheat and gaining some additional rupee as profit in the trade off. Rightly so, not many economists can beat them in their argument. Their reason is simple – one acre soybean cultivation fetches them at least Rs. 9,000 whereas wheat will give an income of just Rs. 6000. If they sell the soybean and buy wheat from the market, they still will have saving. Because the on-the-farm selling price of soybean is normally Rs. 2300 per 100kg whereas the best quality wheat could be bought from market for Rs. 1300 per 100 kg. Ballu, a farmer of Padmakhedi with 21 acre of land sees no reason for cultivation of wheat for the purpose of selling. “Unless it is for your household consumption, don’t grow wheat” Ballu says. Fortunately, he understands the fact that home-grown food is better than chemically grown food grain that is available in the market.

Three crops dominate farming system of these two villages – soybean, wheat and gram. They practically cultivate no other, not even vegetables which can flourish during monsoon crops. All villagers cultivate wheat as their second crop and use it for domestic consumption. Villagers inform that the scene was pretty different 10 years back when soybean had not entered the local farms. They used to grow maize, sorghum, and small millets – all these have disappeared from the farms and food platter of villagers. Their traditional diet was rich with diversity of vegetables and cereals. But the story of that famed food self-sufficiency is slipping into oblivion now. Veteran farmers like Devprasad Gujjar remember how they used to eat less but still remained healthy in the olden days. Nowadays, villagers generally eat more in quantity but still do not have the vigour which half the quantity of food used to give some ten years back.

It will be too premature to conclude that people do not understand this transition from food security to food insecurity. They actually know and that is what is more bewildering. Ramabai Nayak, a rickety 70 year old woman, captures what nearly all villagers when she says “if there is money in the pocket, you can have food in the plate”.

I scanned both village surroundings for fruit trees and all that I could see was 4 mango trees and 2 guava trees. I cannot claim these villages have only as many fruit trees in real number; they may have more but definitely not even one tenth of what they had ten years back. Farmers say these trees especially mango trees and sugar apple (Sitaphal) which were as ubiquitous in North Indian countryside as Neem tree (Azadirachta indica) do not fetch any money. There lies the reason why these trees disappeared so quickly. Even more unfortunate is the gradual disappearance of cultivation of common vegetables like tomato, pumpkin, bottle gourd, colocasia and the others which can give nutritional support for at least six months in the rainy season and post rainy season. Now villagers buy all vegetables from weekly market which gets its vegetable supplies from places as far as Maharashtra – a central Indian state 500km away!

Thus the siren song of cash crops chokes the feeble cries for household nutrition sufficiency. The real tragedy is villagers despite knowing the reality find themselves are unable to restart the safer agriculture of yesteryears. Thus goes the invasion of cash crops..


Saju MK, Caritas India.

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