The Hindu Business Line : To measure poverty, you may have to go chak

The Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agriculture Movement) in Bangladesh experiments with an alternative to micro-credit. “Very poor female-headed households are given an animal to raise until it has a calf. The woman can use the milk, either for her own consumption or to sell on the market, and keep the animal’s offspring as her own to raise. The original animal is returned, and then passed on to another poor family in her village.”

Thus explains Food Sovereignty and Uncultivated Biodiversity in South Asia by Farhad Mazhar, Daniel Buckles, P.V. Satheesh and Farida Akhter ( www.academicfoundation.com ).

“Maintaining a few animals in the ecological village farming systems of the Nayakrishi is not difficult for women in this situation as plentiful fodder is available from uncultivated sources. Landowners welcome the increases in livestock numbers because this form of controlled, itinerant grazing leaves the dung directly on the land where it can be put to use in the cropping system.”

‘Uncultivated’

The focus of the book, published in association with the International Development Research Centre ( www.idrc.ca ), is not micro-credit but ‘uncultivated’, so that we’d start seeing things “that we would casually walk past, that we might never taste, that we cannot purchase,” writes Bina Agarwal in the foreword.

“Flourishing in the interstices of the cultivated and the uncultivated, the public and the private, the field and the forest, are innumerable leafy greens, fruits, tubers, roots, small fish, grasses, and other forms of food life hidden from our graze that constitute the daily diet of numerous villagers across South Asia.”

For instance, a study by the authors found that in 10 Bangladeshi villages uncultivated food provided about two-thirds of the food weight and all of the fodder and fuel needs of very poor landless households, and one-third of the food weight and a fifth of the fuel and fodder needs of better-off landed households.

Uncultivated biodiversity provides not just food security, as part of the coping strategy that the poor use during seasonal shortages or drought; it gives them food sovereignty, giving people control over a basic need, argue the authors.

Such plants are part of the everyday sustenance and important sources of vitamins, mineral and proteins not just of the poor but also of the relatively well-off, says Agarwal. For example, in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh “79 species of uncultivated leafy greens used as food have been documented. Many plants have medicinal properties.”

Shak and Chak

Shak, a key ingredient in Bengali rural cuisine, is not just leafy greens but “any uncultivated plant available in and around the household that can be rendered edible by the technology of cooking. They are ‘shak’ if one knows how to cook them.”

Bethua shak (Chenopodium album L. of the family Chinopodiaceae) is an example. Though not a cultivated plant in Bengal, it is an essential leafy vegetable just like any cultivated cabbage or spinach, inform the authors. “Strikingly, bethua is classified as ‘weed’ by Bangladeshi scientists.”

“What do you mean by weeds?” angrily asks 62-year old Eeramma, a woman farmer from village Shekhapur, Medak, cited in the book. “There is nothing like a weed in our agriculture. We eat whatever grows on our land. If we can’t our cattle eat them… Yes, I have seen weeds in those lands where they use Sarkari Eruvu (chemical fertilisers).”

Conceptually, the notion of a single, improved species is flawed because all other plants, and even other varieties of a species, are implicitly reclassified as ‘weeds’, lament the authors. “It justifies and even requires destructive, propriety technologies, seen most potently in the business strategy of the Monsanto Corporation.”

They forcefully decry the corporate push for food and agricultural systems built on fewer and fewer plant species, which ignores the historical development of food technology in different cultures and diversity as an integral part of the cuisine system.

And ‘chak’ is more than what we know from a recent SRK-starrer. How so? Read on: “Collecting information on how poor people survive is not easy. It is even difficult to find them at home when we go looking for them. In the village when we ask, ‘Where are they?’ the answer that comes back is ‘Chak’, meaning they are in the open fields or ‘out there’, collecting her family’s daily nourishment from the road side, government lands, or from the private lands of others…”

Poverty measurement

Standard methods of poverty measurement cannot explain how these people survive, observe the authors. “To fully appreciate the survival strategies of the very poor we need to go beyond the calculation of food expenditures at the household level, the main focus of conventional studies.” Hence, to measure poverty, you may have to go chak. And you’d find the poor in many places…

“Near the end of the Aman season the very poor are very busy in the sugarcane fields harvesting for farmers. Later in the year they are harvesting potatoes and preparing seedlings for the paddy fields of farmers. They may receive some money for this labour, which they will use to buy oil and salt or pay for school expenses and debt repayments,” narrate the authors.

“They will also collect the straw, which is no longer needed to cover the ground in the potato field, and bring it home for fuel. They will take potatoes in partial payment for their harvesting work… They will sell eggs from their ducks or chicken to buy rice. This is their livelihood.”

Another barter happens between women of the poor and the better-off families. Since the latter do not go out to collect the leafy greens they want to eat, they get the same from the poorer women. “The poor woman brings the desired leafy green, and the better-off woman gives her something in exchange needed by the poor woman… There is seldom any bargaining or estimation of how much is given for what.”

At times there is demand in the local markets for certain leafy greens like Kolmi, Dheki, Kochur loti and aquatic tubers like Shapla, Shaluk, and Dhep, one learns. Distressingly, though, these exchanges are informal, depending a lot on what others want to give. As a result, “the poor only sell in the market if they are desperately in need of money.”

Costing gaps

Conventional approach to economic assessment of agriculture options suffers from a gaping flaw in failing to internalise the costs of negative environmental and social impacts, the so-called externalities, say the authors.

“While it may not be useful to measure everything, and some aspects are not easily quantified, limiting economic assessment to financial costs and benefits at the farm level is clearly inadequate to a meaningful assessment of economic performance for the community or nation as a whole.” Failure to properly measure costs can lead to mistaken appraisals of public investments and prices for commodities that don’t reflect true costs, cautions the book.

A case study it presents is of BATC, the British American Tobacco Company. “Aggressive campaigning by the BATC, favourable taxes and public subsidies on agricultural infrastructure rapidly displaced food crops from regionally important food producing areas such as Kushtia in western Bangladesh.”

Other unsettling statistics are that tobacco requires six times the amount of fertiliser per acre as any other crop widely grown in that country, and that for every kg of finished tobacco product the curing process uses some 40 kg of fuel wood.

Curing, ironically, seems to be aggravating, rather than curing rural problems in many ways. One, “as the fuel wood disappeared, leaves of trees and rice straw that could otherwise be used as fodder for milking cows and cooking fuel were also diverted into curing of tobacco.” Wonder if any one considered the opportunity loss involved.

Two, “women and children are normally responsible for tending the fires during the curing process, a task that runs for continuous periods of 60 to 70 hours without sleep. Children of tobacco farmers are typically absent from school during this time.” Three, the ascent of tobacco has seen farmers becoming indebted, losing ready access to markets and production inputs of their earlier food-based systems.

Material ‘exchange’ in nature

Food production systems have to be assessed as dynamic systems of ecological, economic and cultural organisation, urge the authors. “Conceptually, the discipline of economics ignores the relations of material ‘exchange’ in nature and the ‘metabolic’ social interactions of money and numbers.” The efficiencies created by synergistic and internally reinforcing production systems do not get the attention they deserve in economic assessments, the authors rue.

They showcase a success story — that of 27-year-old Susilamma, who has a one-acre farm in Raipally, Medak district, producing “a mixture of cereals, legumes and oilseeds, along with a vast array of uncultivated greens harvested during the monsoon.” She uses seeds from her earlier harvest, effectively stored “by mixing the seeds with cow dung ash, layering them with neem leaves and packing them in a tight basket of local palm leaves. Some seeds stay uninfested and viable for planting for over 3 years.”

Quite aptly, therefore, a photograph depicts her as a happy rural woman with healthy crops in the foreground; the caption reads: ‘Diversity is the cornerstone of Susilamma’s balance sheet’.

Penta Pooja

In the Deccan, April is the month for Penta Pooja, or the worship of the manure heap, informs the book. Manure? Yes, farmyard manure, which is a catalyst for the soil, and which is as treasured as seeds.

“Eruvaa! Adokaa Laxmi (Manure! That is the goddess of wealth)” extol the Deccan farmers, notwithstanding the fact that many in the scientific circles may smirk at the worship as a sentimental statement of ignorant farmers. Wait, there is sensible economics behind the seeming sentiment, say the authors.

After studying nearly 80 households in the Pastapur village, Medak district, they found that the large farmers in the village used about 5,500 tonnes of farmyard manure on their fields, of which only 2,425 tonnes came from their own manure heaps. “The remaining 3,075 tonnes were purchased from other villagers who had either no land and therefore no use for the manure they had generated, or had excess manure that they could not use on their own lands.” The smaller farmers produced and used about 4,000 tonnes.

The authors add up the value of manure, cart rentals, and wage paid for spreading the manure on the fields, and arrive at Rs 12,60,000, which is “equivalent to some $30,000 or 84 per cent of the entire annual budget of the Pastapur Village Council.” And the illiterate farmers perhaps knew this all along, exclaiming: ‘Eruvaa! Adokka Laxmi’.

A book that would make you think if our professional accounting and costing bodies can possibly contribute more to the field of agriculture, so that the rural farmer gets the right price and the corporates acted more responsibly.

D. MURALI

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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