Remembering Gandhi

Today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's one hundred and fortieth birth anniversary. Gandhi has much to say to us in the fight against global warming and climate change. His basic dictum that "the earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed" has become even more relevant today than it was in his time. His suggestion that self sufficient village republics should be the primary focus of human development, though difficult to actualise today, gives some pointers towards how agriculture at least should be organised. Mechanised and chemical agriculture has become a liability at present as described in detail in the earlier post yesterday and so an alternative has to be sought. This alternative involves a combination of forest, soil and moisture conservation work with bio-diverse organic agriculture. Such an alternative can succeed only if it is practised by small communities by pooling in their human and natural resources. A sustainable internal input agriculture on these lines is more energy efficient and also results in lower greenhouse gas emissions than modern external input agriculture. A schematic diagram of sustainable agriculture is shown in the figure below.

Research has shown that organic arable production is about 35% more energy efficient, and organic dairy production about 74% more efficient per unit of output than non-organic production. Organic farming, by definition, prohibits the use of synthetic fertilizer, using instead a limited amount per hectare of organic matter and knowledge of soil biology. Since the pH of the soil is not disrupted by organic farming techniques, the use of energy–intensive lime is also minimal or non-existent; again contributing to lower CH4 and CO2 emissions compared to modern external input farming techniques. The use of organic matter also increases carbon content in the soil, storing up to 75 kgs of carbon per hectare per year. Organic farming uses nitrogen-fixing plants as cover crops and during crop rotation, which help to fix nitrogen in the soil rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. And finally, organic farming techniques maintain soil micro-organisms and so help in oxidizing atmospheric methane. The combined effect of all the different benefits of organic farming produces a Global Warming Potential of 36% that of modern external input farming.
Simultaneously this sustainable system being labour intensive and respectful of nature will take care of the problems of livelihood creation and conservation of natural resources and create an “economy of permanence” as outlined by the Gandhian environmental economist J. C. Kumarappa . This system respects both nature and the human being and prioritises leisurely decentralised communitarian living based on the collective local consumption and husbanding of renewable resources over the frenetic non-renewable resource guzzling pulls of globalised market led modern agriculture. Worldwide there is a burgeoning movement in ecological farming combined with local area watershed development that has come up as a reaction to the deleterious effects of modern agriculture. This movement is theoretically underpinned by the green ideology of development in harmony with nature and at its own leisurely pace. Many localised efforts have thrown up viable solutions to the intransigent problems created by unsustainable agricultural production. In the western Madhya Pradesh region too there have been successful localised experiments in this sphere for the development of sustainable dry-land agriculture backed up by local area watershed development involving the poor in project formulation and implementation by various NGOs like Samaj Pragati Sahayog, Aga Khan Rural Support Programme and Sampark and also government institutions like the Wheat Research Station of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research at Indore. The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath has initiated a small people's movement in this direction. There are also many efforts being made by individual farmers to tackle the problem of unsustainability of modern agriculture and they are making innovative switches to sustainability on their own. What is needed now is an overarching mass movement to give direction to research, action and advocacy for the establishment of an environmentally, economically and socially just system of agriculture in the region that will simultaneously address the problem of global warming. The schematic diagram of the activities of this movement and the expected outcome is given below.