‘Beej Swaraj’ must be India’s key motto

Community seed banks can certainly help ensure food security in a climate-risked world, but they need to better understand their role to truly make a difference. They have to focus on what helps the ‘seed cause,’ and helps preserve the wealth of crop and plant diversity and share it widely, while opposing any attempts to privatise it.

The people working with seeds and community seed banks must get together and safeguard their common heritage handed down since generations. Community seed banks must strengthen and spread local knowledge, seed diversity, and collective farmer ownership to stay effective, while overcoming challenges like lack of supportive government policy and inadequate resources. Bharat believes that community seed banks of traditional varieties in every taluka/tehsil are vital for ensuring food and nutrition security in a climate-risked world.

Traditional seeds are vitally important because they have adapted over very long periods to local conditions, and also provide diverse qualities to meet diverse needs and preferences. Seeds have travelled far and wide over long periods, undergoing both selection for desired features by seed-saving farmers; and also adaptation to specific local/bio-regional conditions. Seed savers and plant breeders have historically played a role in selecting seed varieties for preferred traits in crops. They do such selection and replanting for several generations of each crop until they develop a stable variety with consistent qualities. This process ensures that the seeds emerge with distinct identifiable qualities, consistent across the same plant variety, and remain stable over time.

India is said to have a 10,000-year history of agriculture. Of this, 9,940 years was traditional chemical-free agriculture with self-saved, locally adapted seeds. This largely provided for the needs of the entire country that already had one of the highest population densities in the world — even before the Green Revolution took off in 1966. For example, there is a reference to an estimated 200,000 varieties of rice in India in R H Richharia’s book, ‘Rices of India’. He collected over 14,000 rice varieties just from the Madhya Pradesh region, which then included Chhattisgarh, considered a global center of origin and diversity for rice. Out of these, 1,700 varieties were high-yielding, even better than many Green Revolution promoted varieties. They included diverse features, different colors, shapes, sizes, flavors, fragrances, and various other qualities like resilience to drought, floods, and pests. This diversity, adapted to local conditions, is a most precious treasure for long-term sustainability.

Until 1965-66, there was significant resistance in India to Green Revolution technologies, which emphasised chemical fertilisers. Agricultural experts (like R H Richharia), and policymakers (like agriculture minister, K M Munshi), and before them, leaders like Vinoba Bhave and Gandhi — strongly advocated for the indigenous agricultural system rooted in traditional organic farming with local crop varieties.

But by the latter sixties, India’s government was aiming not only for rural agricultural self-sufficiency but also for surplus production to enable increase in urbanisation and industrialisation. The shift in government policy weakened resistance to Green Revolution technology. The Planning Commission reasoned that focusing on two main cereals, rice and wheat, could help generate enough surplus for the basic sustenance of urban populations, facilitating further urbanisation and industrialisation. Semi-dwarf and dwarf varieties were introduced as India’s traditional varieties of grain crops like rice, wheat, and millets were usually tall, and thus prone to lodging, where the plant bends and falls over after application of chemical fertilisers.

Despite Green Revolution, the indigenous method of mixed cropping agriculture, using traditional crop varieties has remained resilient, at least in remote, poorly connected regions where it is difficult to get agricultural inputs to, or bring food out from these places. In such places, indigenous communities, with their wisdom, continued with their traditional methods, practicing mixed cropping of their indigenous varieties.

For example, in the Niyamgiri foothills of Odisha, they plant different kinds of millets together, alongside vegetables, and even sow plants like marigold, tulsi (holy basil), or kadi patta (curry leaves) within those fields. Another example is the Barah Anaj system of Uttarakhand, revived by the Beej Bachao Andolan, currently led by veterans like Vijay Jardhari. Even in dry, low rainfall (unirrigated) regions of western India, traditional farmers were able to combine cotton, several millets and pulse-legumes to get continuing yields round the year to meet their needs.

These poly-cultures are very resilient and can withstand all kinds of diseases and pest problems because they have a broad genetic base. The problem of pest attack spreading like wildfire, for instance, is absent, and even if there is some pest damage, it doesn’t spread rapidly. Traditional seeds and crops are decentralised, open-pollinated, open-source, more resilient and better adapted to diverse local conditions and grow quite well with organic methods. Weather patterns are becoming increasingly unpredictable. There are times of excessive rainfall, cloudbursts, and floods that destroy crops; or there are long dry spells between two rains, causing planted, germinated seeds to die. With diverse cropping, even if a few varieties succumb to harsh or unseasonal conditions, others survive. In fact, when some plants die, their neighbouring plants get more space and sunlight and can grow better. So even then, the total harvest may still be excellent.

And that is why our indigenous and locally adapted seeds are important for the future world, the climate-risked world, with depleted groundwater resources, and potential disruption of fossil fuel supplies and other imported chemical inputs like phosphorous, potash or scarce micro-nutrients.

According to the Gaia Atlas of Planet Management, edited by Norman Myers, there are an estimated 80,000 species of plants that are edible for humans—not just for birds, bees and animals, but humans. This genetic wealth of crops and biodiversity is absolutely critical for the future. It includes plants that will grow even under harsh, unpredictable conditions, without any agricultural inputs. As compared to 80,000 humanly edible plant species gifted free by Nature, we are now tragically reduced to a situation where just 8 crop species today provide 75% of all human food!

We need all kinds of seed banks. We need in-situ seed banks in our forests, and in situ cultivated diversity in farmers’ fields. Even if they are not organised into formal community seed banks, such decentralised seed banks for every cluster of 100-200 villages can help the farming community all around them.

My personal, involvement has been more closely with Vanvadi. This is a 30-year old forest regeneration project in the foothills of the Sahyadri Western Ghats, a ‘global hotspot of biodiversity’. Apart from the vital eco-system services it performs, I look at Vanvadi as an in situ seed bank of forest species. We documented about 120 traditionally useful species, including 52 species of uncultivated forest foods growing in the forest. We want to continue enhancing the diversity so that this is also available for those who want to take seeds or saplings. It becomes in a sense, sort of a natural seed bank for forest species, but it is not really organised as a seed bank.

At the national level, the Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch (BBSM) or India Seed Sovereignty Alliance was formed in 2014. But for several years prior to that, the seed saving and sharing movement was already getting revitalised through seed festivals organised in different parts of India. Among the early seed festivals in this millennium were those organised in Mumbai and Pune in 2010, Kolkata (2012), followed by a mega ‘Peoples’ Biodiversity Festival’ in Hyderabad, parallel to the global gathering of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). Thereafter, several dozens of seed festivals have been organised in various parts of India, including New Delhi, Nagpur, Wardha, Mysore, Manipur, Kerala, Telangana, and many other places.

At almost every seed festival, BBSM publicly releases a seed declaration or seed manifesto. In recent years, a number of smaller seed festivals have been organised at a bioregional level with the participation/support of BBSM. Sometimes, informal gatherings are held with local farmers, where they are asked to bring seeds which they can share, and they can take seeds.

As we go along, the seed saving and sharing movement must try to be better organised in terms of documenting all the various species, and the uses and the related knowledge, preserved as a precious shared bio-cultural heritage.

But sadly, seeds have become big business. If you look at recent trends, continuing since several decades, big agri-corporates are going all out to gain access to the enormous genetic treasures still existing in our country and some other parts of the world. Today, even more than ever before, big agri-business interests are prospecting genetic bio-resources for enhancing their market control; and this genetic material, contained in seeds and plants is one of the most critical assets for the future.

We have the PPVFRA (Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act; and the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority), and the registration system. But we have had a lot of old, open-source farmers’ seeds being claimed to be the private wealth of an individual farmer, just because he was the first to go there and register it.

When the government started this Act, it acknowledged the existence of numerous varieties of common knowledge’s which they assured will be protected from privatisation. But a few decades later, they haven’t even begun yet the task of documenting and recording all these pre-existing varieties of common knowledge that were passed down over many generations of farmers. And such common heritage varieties are being unethically registered as privately owned varieties, merely because they were the first to be recorded before the PPVFRA.

So, this privatisation of our genetic wealth is a tricky situation, with potentially grave consequences down the line. The farmer who has successfully registered a variety in his name can then conceivably sell it to a multinational. Certainly, farmers and seed savers need to be more thoughtfully alert and better organised to safeguard our genetic commons from privatisation.

Community seed banks and seed savers and plant breeders and farmers need to get better organised to ensure that farmer’s varieties are registered as their collective heritage under Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act. They should have good Material Transfer Agreements — explicitly protecting the seeds from privatisation — with the farmers they supply to. Or sometimes, seed sharing with well known neighboring farmers may be based on trust that the recipient is a good, reliable farmer; and he’s not going to go and pass on these seeds to someone who will register it in his own name and make it a private variety.

All community seed banks and seed savers must declare their seeds as an open source collective heritage with mandatory protection from privatisation; and press upon the government to recognise and register them as such. Additionally, every farmer must pledge to conserve and widely share at least one seed variety. It is only though such widespread, decentralised availability of our traditional, locally adapted seeds that India can protect her food security and sovereignty. Beej Swaraj must be our key motto!

This was originally published as part of Celebrating community seed banks of India: Conversations on climate-resilient seeds

Bharat Mansata is Founder member of the Vanvadi, Forest Collective, Maharashtra and member of Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch