Following on from part 1, this article gives a brief history of Indian farming movements and their approach to social and environmental issues.
The farmer’s union Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (or KRRS) emerged in the 1980s in response to the myriad of issues plaguing Indian farmers. “Karnataka” in the name refers to the Indian state in which it was founded, Karnataka, where the movement focuses its activism, although it has found worldwide fame and inspired people across the globe.
Its founder, M.D Nanjundaswamy, believed that the benefits of the Indian “green revolution” had largely been a myth, opposing the new technologies and methods of farming which had been introduced in its wake. According to Nanjundaswamy, “globalisation as it has been formulated by the World Trade Organisation will spell a disaster to the third world agriculture,” a disaster he described as a “genocide.”
In particular, Nanjundaswamy took aim at the multinational companies like Cargill and Monsanto, whose GM seeds have reportedly engendered debt and pesticide dependence amongst Indian farmers, as detailed in Part 1 of this article.
In the early 1990s, nearly 1000 farmers affiliated with the KRRS occupied the head office of Cargill Seeds in Bangalore, creating a bonfire from documents and equipment. Later in the 1990s, it went on to do the same to Monsanto, occupying their offices and burning their GM field trials. In 1999, members of the KRRS travelled to France, where they joined forces with the French agricultural union Confédération Paysanne (“Le Conf”) and burnt experimental field trials, an action which resulted in the 10 month suspended jail sentence of Le Conf founders José Bové and René Riesel.
Opposition to GM seeds continues to this day, with protests breaking out in March 2024 after the State Biotechnology Coordination Committee granted permission for further field trials of GM crops such as cotton and maize.
The KRRS perform these actions in the name of ‘satyagraha,’ initially conceived by Mahatma Gandhi, and meaning nonviolent resistance, typically in the form of civil disobedience. Ideologically, the KRRS align themselves with the work of Indian anti-imperialist and socialist Ram Manohar Lohia, who believed in cooperative and community owned labour - a form of decentralised socialism.
‘Swaraj ', meaning “self-rule” is a concept that was developed during the Indian independence movement and means a freedom for people to govern themselves, and it is a central tenet of KRRS’ philosophy. Swaraj was not just about freedom for British rule for Gandhi - according to Indian academic Ananya Vajpeyi, “to think about swaraj meant not just to address the historical circumstance of British colonial rule over India but also to meditate upon the larger question of why the West - by which he meant capitalism, industrialism, imperialism and nationalism - had come to dominate the world.” Given the effects of these collective forces in impoverishing Indians, it is easy to see why swaraj is part of the KRRS belief system.
In the early 2000s, the KRRS founded their own school. The school, nestled near the Biligiriranga Hills in western Karnataka, is named Amrita Bhoomi - meaning “eternal life” - and within it, farmers train each other on agro-ecological methods using demonstration farms.
One such method is ‘zero-budget natural farming’ (ZBNF), a form of natural farming. The idea behind natural farming is that “farming should be left to nature itself, it should be simple and low-cost.” This distinguishes it from organic farming, which still requires intensive labour and the input of external organic fertilisers.
The origins of natural farming are typically attributed to Masanobu Fukuoka, and his “philosophy of nothing” - inspired by his brush with death after contracting pneumonia, after which he came to believe that nothingness is the world’s fundamental nature. Instead of action, Fukuoka pursued inaction: “no cultivation, no fertiliser and no weeding.” This principle is exemplified by Fukuoka’s website, which declares “an uneventful day is a valuable day.” Fukuoka’s farms still required labour, but made nature the guiding hand.
Instead of weeding, Fukuoka would sow plants at opportune times, along with white clover as a natural form of weed control. He eschewed ploughing, fertilisers, and pesticides, and rejected a modern ‘unnatural’ agriculture which concerns itself with unblemished, perfect-looking, and often either exotic or unseasonal fruit and vegetables. In the words of Fukuoka “if we do have a food crisis, it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.”
It was community worker Partap Aggarwal who brought Fukuoka’s practice to India. At the time, Aggarwal lived in the Friends Rural Centre of Rasulia. This land had initially been purchased in the late 19th century by American Quakers for “promoting spiritual truth in education, health and agriculture”, but by the time Aggarwal worked there, its focus had changed to rural development, particularly agricultural improvement. Aggarwal read a review of Fukuoka’s book, “The One Straw Revolution” in an American magazine, and begged an English friend to send him a copy. After finishing the book in one evening, Aggarwal and colleagues set to work: banning chemical fertilisers and pesticides, drastically reducing ploughing and diversifying their crop pattern.
In the early 1980s, natural farming found its way into the research of Subhash Palekar, a former agricultural scientist who became disillusioned with the Green Revolution after witnessing its effects on his own family farm. Palekar combined knowledge from Hindu scripture, organic farming and conventional agriculture to establish Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) which he tested on his own farm.
The principles of ZBNF include a reduced irrigation pattern and the use of cow dung and straw or soil mulch throughout the growing process. ZBNF farmers also avoid pesticides, using homemade remedies for fungus and insects sourced from local plants like neem, chilli, garlic and tobacco.
‘Zero budget’ does not mean that it costs the farmer nothing, but that this form of farming requires no external financing. This idea was revolutionary in the wake of skyrocketed levels of debt amongst Indian farmers, who were increasingly dependent on Monsanto and Cargill seeds and heavy machinery they could not purchase themselves. In 2002, a senior farmer leader from the KRRS came across Palekar teaching ZBNF in Karnataka’s neighbour state, Maharashtra, and invited him back to teach some workshops to KRRS members, who quickly took to the method.
The KRRS now teach it to not only their members but farmers from around the world. In Karnataka, it is estimated that between 60,000-100,000 farmers attend ZBNF training camps, whilst the movement’s leaders claim that millions practise it across India.
There are many reasons for ZBNF’s success as a movement. One is the communal nature of education - “where farmers themselves are both students and teachers, and education is a collective process of reflection and action.” Another is its incorporation of socioeconomic issues - the KRRS at its heart is a peasant movement, conceived to unionise the vast majority of Karnataka, who depend on small plots of farming land and exist in opposition to globalised neoliberalism. Many of the farmers who begin to practise ZBNF do so because of the appeal of farming without debt. This is perhaps a lesson for other agroecological and ecological movements - galvanising large amounts people across social classes for environmental activism requires a concurrent improvement of their lives - ecological liberation necessitates the liberation of the people.
But the final reason why ZBNF has succeeded is simply that it works. Farmers have seen increased quality of soil and organic matter after implementing ZBNF, along with increased presence of (beneficial) soil insects and earthworms. Farmers who practise ZBNF also report a reduced need for irrigation (Palekar claims up to a 90% reduction) and reduced labour intensity.
The context of how ZBNF emerged - in opposition to hegemonies of debt, conglomeration, and oppression - are integral to the question of its future. In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the rise of ZBNF can be attributed to the Andhra Pradesh government itself, along with backing from the World Bank, something which has faced left-wing critique.
These two institutions were, of course, instrumental to the agricultural crises which plagued Andhra Pradesh (and India more broadly) in enacting agricultural reforms which made farmers dependent on GM seeds and costly green revolution technology throughout the state, boosting the private finance sector but largely creating disaster for social and environmental welfare.
Faced with these crises, the Andhra Pradesh (AP) government launched a ZBNF movement in 2016, though later renamed it to Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF). But in Andhra Pradesh, anywhere between 54.4% and 74% of citizens are landless, with land ownership concentrated by caste, with AP Dalit (“untouchables” - the lowest social caste) caste members having one of the lowest rates of land ownership of any Indian state. The top 5% of households control 30% of total land, whilst the bottom 50% own a mere 0.24%.
Of course, leasing land as a farmer is an option - but one of the perils of ZBNF is that it takes a while to get off the ground, meaning tenant farmers may struggle to pay rent during this period. This demonstrates that ZBNF is not a magic bullet to inequality, and that larger reforms to land redistribution are needed.
Furthermore, the AP government use APCNF as a method of tying small-holding farmers to large agribusinesses via Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), and the programme itself depends on funding from the World Bank and other international finance institutes. The reduced chemical and water dependence of ZBNF has been argued as a case to reduce state-funded agricultural subsidies, replacing them with private finance supporting the initial transition to ZBNF, which further entrenches the “small-state” neoliberalism discussed in Part 1 of this article.
The founder of Rishi Kheti, Partap Aggarwal, states in his preface to new copies of The One Straw Revolution that “if only a fraction of ordinary farmers could adopt rishi kheti, they could bring down the agro-business establishment, the government, and with it the entire urban-industrial structures in the country.” Although this has not yet happened, the KRRS and ZBNF movements have planted the seeds for an autonomous, ecological food system in India. Keeping these movements at the grassroots - and remembering their peasant origins - may be the key to the future Aggarwal envisioned.
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