In Kerala, organic farming is ‘politically’ correct

Organic farming is growing big in the Kerala Assembly election campaign. Both the ruling UDF and opposition LDF now swear by organic farming, particularly of vegetables and fruits, and have listed it prominently in their manifestoes.

On the one hand, the UDF is promising heavy subsidies and an Organic Farming Board. On the other, the LDF promises a scheme to bring 50,000 hectares under organic farming while helping make Kerala kitchens free of pesticide-laden vegetables and fruits.

What’s spurring the political interest is the growing concern that the vegetables, fruits and food grains the State buys from its neighbours could be contaminated with high doses of pesticides. Kerala relies for its supplies of vegetables, fruits, rice, wheat, chicken and eggs on Tamil Nadu and other southern States.

“Most of the vegetables and fruits we get contain mind-blowing levels of banned pesticides,” TN Prathapan, the Congress MLA who is part of the ‘Green Brigade’ in the Assembly, told BusinessLine . “This is the major cause for the sharp rise in the incidence of cancer, infertility and lifestyle diseases in Kerala.”

The UDF wants to encourage each household to raise the daily vegetables it needs and to raise them organically, he added.

Over the past five years, Kerala — both urban and rural — has seen a ‘vegetable revolution’ of sorts. Urban middle-class families grow vegetables in tiny spaces so that they get at least a portion of their vegetable supplies uncontaminated. “This is becoming a people’s movement,” TM Thomas Isaac, economist and former State Finance Minister and a member of the CPI(M)’s Central Committee, told BusinessLine . “People have woken up to the fact that what they eat is poison and now they want a solution to it; the political parties have realised this and the manifestoes reflect this.”

Isaac, who is defending his Assembly seat in Alappuzha, said the two manifestoes also signal the emergence of a political consensus over organic farming as well as self-sufficiency in vegetables and other food stuff. “The media has had a very positive role in this,” he noted.

Dr B Ekbal, neurosurgeon, health activist and former Kerala University Vice-Chancellor, said organic farming is now becoming a movement like the total literacy and library movements of the past which shaped Kerala’s socio-cultural identity. “It’s good for the State that the political parties are seeking votes using organic farming and poison-less fruits and vegetables,” he told BusinessLine . This should be extended to animal husbandry too, he added.

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