Dr. Ramu of Centre of Sustainable Agriculture, India

Here we include a podcast involving a talk with Dr. Ramu of India, on sustainable agriculture.

Dr. Ramanjeneyulu, or Dr. Ramu is short, is a noted agricultural scientist in India, and the executive director of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, whose work involves finding solutions to, and helping the farmers to rediscover pesticide free, debt free model of agriculture that would make farming once again a profitable and sustainable profession.

CSA focuses on developing and promoting locally adapted farming systems, sustainable farming practices. Organic Farming, Non Pesticidal Management, Open Source Seeds, Ethno-veterinary practices water conservation etc are practiced to promote ecological and economic sustainability.

Dr. Ramu

Dr. Ramu

Dr. Ramu has been invited in late May 2013 to Charlotte, North Carolina, provide the keynote speech at the annual conference of Association for India’s Development (AID), a registered Non-profit Organisation in the US that are involved with, among other things, grassroots movements in helping farming to find a sustainable platform, away from the debt inducing and pesticide laden industrial agri-model that is proving to be disastrous to the Indian farmers as well as to ecology and rural economy.

I spoke with him on phone, to learn more of the current situation in India, of his remarkable work, and also about what he might speak about in his keynote speech in North Carolina later this month. We also discussed what might be a good topic for a tentative panel discussion involving Dr. Ramu as well as participants from North America, on topic such as importance of small family farm sustainability on a global scale as a buffer to ensure food security for the planet.

Below is the 13 minute podcast. For your feedback, you may write to tonu@tonu.org or tony.mitra@gmail.com.

In search of support for India’s farmers

When I first arrived in British Columbia years ago and tried to form a group of people that supported holistic agriculture and wished to help the poor farmers in India that might be going the wrong path of chemical dependent high cost and debt-ridden agro-industrial model, many cautioned me that there was a lack of interest among Indian expatriates, to support sustainable living efforts either back in India or here in Canada. As a result, a very small slice of the Indian diaspora settled in any area ever get to be members of the NGO groups in the US such as AID (Association for India’s Development).

This has also been our experience in Vancouver while trying to register a similar body. On average one out of every twenty thousand or so expatriate Indians might show a cursory interest in the plight of the farmers in India.

In order to break out of that shackling restriction, I had been checking if support might come from local Canadians.

My primary interest has been related to agriculture one way or another, and the GM crop issue (Genetically modified seed crop) piled up on top of it since it is a rather recent phenomena. And in this area, I find that there is a lot of overlap of interest for Indians, Canadians and Americans.

All are facing the menace of GMO. While the battle for the major crops in North America is already over, and the people as well as agro-environment have lost and the corporations won – the issue in India is far from settled. In fact, India is shaping up to be the epicenter of the battle, as Argentina and Brazil have already caved in meekly, and China is watching from the sidelines.

Further, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to state that the Civil Society in India is doing a fantastic job of resisting the onslaught of GMO brought about by corporate interest with the collusion of corrupt Indian politicians.

But India is also facing some quarter million farmer suicides, an unbelievable number. In fact, for a tenth of that number, any other country would likely have had a revolution by now. Unfortunately in India, the root cause and effect of the farmer suicide is not a national hot topic. The upwardly mobile Indian yuppy class is busy with Cricket and Bollywood and whatever else it is busy with. Farmers are outside radar range of the Indian affluent society.

Widow of an Indian farmer that killed himself

Widow of an Indian farmer that killed himself

However, the fact is perhaps slowly sinking in among Canadians I speak with, and I speak with quite a few, that India might be the epicenter of the war against GMO, and if India wins its battle, Canadians and others might also benefit, in the long run.

So I decided to join hands with Canadian civil society efforts to resist GMO in Canada, starting with the lower mainlands area around Vancouver, and extending out to British Columbia and Canada.

In the past one month, I have managed to get favorable response and establish a sort of communication channel and relationship with at least one MP, one MLA, a number of city councillors for various towns in the region, been included in group list for CBAN (Canadian Biotechnology Action Network – a group based in Ottawa for all of Canada to fight all kinds of GMO, whether food or not, from the Canadian landscape), been a member of GE free BC (GE = Genetically Engineered, BC = British Columbia).

I have been asked to speak a few times at the town hall of Langley after film shows on the harmful effects of GMO. I might speak again on the 11th of April about grassroots work being done by various people on various fronts in different towns in the region, towards raising awareness on GMO and sending a message to the Govt to label GMO and hopefully ban it from Canada in future.

I am invited to two or three meetings in the coming weeks with City Councillors of Surrey, and White Rock, to specifically discuss pros and cons of how to get these towns declare themselves GM free and what kind of message that would send and how to acquire some legal teeth on it.

I am invited to engage with farmland support group and local farmer initiatives to join in on meetings to discuss some of the overlapping issues connecting local farmer going out of business, globalization in food supply, GMO and patented seed monopoly, chemical dependence, and health.

I wrote an email to the Surrey MLA Mr. Jagrup Brar requesting for a meeting of concerned citizens on the possibility of having Surrey declare itself GMO free. Such a resolution, already passed by Richmond, BC, and many other communities in British Columba, may not have legal teeth, but would hopefully send a strong message, raise awareness and have beneficial effect in the long run. I have not received any response yet, but am hopeful.

I did write to Ms Lana Popham, an MLA from Saanich south in Vancouver island, who is trying to block introduction of Arctic (GM) apple into BC farms. She was prompt enough to respond as well as acknowledge our concerns.Lana Popham, MLA from Saanich South

I have become a sort of member of a local farm, God’s Little Acre Farm, run by Jas Singh, who produces GMO free and  “almost” chemical free, (5% chemical use compared to conventional farms) vegetables, and am planning to make arrangements such that our whole years vegetables may come from there instead of from superstores.

I am going that way with realization that a lot of local farmers have closed shop in the last few decades with the arrival of food superstores that use globalization, importing food from far off lands and shutting out local small farmers. This causes a double whammy of shooting up my carbon footprint on this planet and same time shutting out local farmers and ruining a local self sustaining community and farm economy.

I have written to the food superstores such as Saveon, Safeway, and Thrifty  Foods, asking if they will have all GMO food labelled and segregatedThrifty Foods in their stores. Only Thrifty Foods responded by calling back to check our opinion. I hope more would call them up and entice them to make the move towards labeling and segregating GM food for easy identification of the consumer. I believe it is a basic right of every human to have information on what he or she is eating.David Suzuki

I have communicated with Mr. David Suzuki on the sustainable farming and potential harm of GM crops in Canada as well as in India. I have received an encouraging response from Mr. Suzuki who is focussing, among other things, on raising awareness against the potential danger of introducing GM crops into our diet without knowing what long term adverse effects it is likely to have on general health.

In the process, a whole wide vista has opened up before me. Earlier, I was getting frustrated at the lack of enthusiasm among the well settled and affluent Indian diaspora in helping their less fortunate brothers back in India. But now I find a whole lot more sympathetic Canadians trying to unify under a common cause.

It has cheered me up and help re-establish a belief in our joint future.

I do not know yet how I might get some of that sympathy, energy, effort and fund raising to channel also towards AID Vancouver. But I believe that sympathetic folks usually help each other out. That is why people from Surrey and Delta are invited to Vancouver Anti-GMO meetings and why Canadians join hands with Americans to fight Monsanto in petitions and pickets and organic farm supports.AID Vancouver

I hope that it all will eventually work out, and that the compassionate Canadian people will find it in their heart to also help out a less fortunate Indian farmer.

Tony Mitra

My fast disappearing backyard

Ten years ago, my thoughts on sustainability hovered around the question of overpopulation, resource crunch, peak oil, global warming and the military industrial complex.

Today, those worries are not gone – but more have been added. I am ten years older, and feel almost certain, that, in the west, this is the first generation in more than two centuries that will be worse off in average than the previous generation in terms of financial security, even as this generation spews unbelievably large quantity of junk on the planet.

A nagging feeling that science was being subverted by voodoo economics and snake oil selling politicians did not help. Then came the economic crunch in the making. Average Americans were supposed to be in debt of several thousand each on their credit cards and hundreds of thousands on their home lone. Without being an economist, I could understand that money was being created out of thin air and this was not only creating endless inflation, it was not too different from legalized counterfeiting and ultimately unsustainable. I became intrigued by Ron Paul and his views on money supply, and a warmongering economic philosophy. There were two American politicians that intrigued me – Ron Paul on the Republican side and Dennis Kucinich among the Democrats.  Both were maverick, on the fringes and sidelined.

I developed a healthy suspicion of the Chicago school of economics and Milton Friedman. By the time he passed away in 2006, I had glanced across a few of his books, read up more

on globalization, on WTO on world bank and IMF, and had developed a nagging suspicion of it all.

Early in the new millennia I moved from the US to Canada, one of the best moves I have done in my life that started in India and saw me through all the oceans of the world, and then to Hong Kong and Florida. I came to love the earthliness of Canadians, their sense of balance with nature and their dealings with the first nation people.

Soon, the Iraq war happened, Bush defeated Kerry and got re-elected in the US, and Canada made a serious turn to the right when Stephen Harper came to power at Ottawa.

I lost my parents one by one, and my uncles and aunts. Before long, I was among the most senior of my close relatives and had no one to look up to. My perception of the world started changing. Its terribly lonely, not to have anyone to look up to.

Kolmi, Paul and kids

Through a cousin, I came to know of Quail Spring Permaculture and through Kolmi, learned about AID (Association for India’s development), who were having their annual seminar in Seattle that year. Kolmi connected me up with them, and I ended up attending it in late May of 2011.

It was another eye opener for me. I came to know some inspirational persons in the process and could see how a handful of dedicated people could trigger grassroots level change for the better and from the bottom up. Names that stick with me till this date are Ravi Kuchimanchi, Aravinda, Kiran Vissa, Revathi, Somnath Mukherjee, Jonathan Fine and Kamayani Mahabal among others.

Subsequently came in touch with UBC Social Justice Center and good work done by socially aware student body. They have a Facebook page and I got invited there some years ago.

One thing let to another and friend Arun invited me to the White Rock Social Justice film society and their film shows. Met more Canadians concerned with social justice. From there, and from connection with AID-India I came to realize a new struggle on the horizon on the world food supply and an ongoing effort or Corporate takeover of agri-business away from the farmer. I also learned about Genetically modified crops and animals, and its patenting issue.

Vandana Shiva

I ended up speaking with Ms Vandana Shiva on phone, about corporate theft of community knowledge and about biopiracy. A long one hour talk a few years ago was converted into a podcast. The realization came on the need to preserve seed diversity in the face of rapid annihilation of seed varieties under a mono-culture onslaught of the GM pesticide peddling corporate interest.

I came to understand a fundamental shift in national Governments where corporate interest overshadowed long term interest of citizens, of nature and of the planet.

As my involvement grew on sustainability for the planet, there was a cementing of the belief that the planet was getting globalized on multiple fronts – through corporatocracy on one end, and through a mass movement mushrooming up to resist it on another end. It was a classic class struggle in the making.

I got to know of the farmers march in India through ASHA (Alliance of Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture) and my talks with Kiran Vissa and Kavitha Kuruganti. I also came to know of God’s little acre farm in Surrey, BC and Jas Singh, its farmer.

I came to know of movements to declare Surrey as GM free zone, same as Richmond and a dozen other communities in British Columbia.

I came to know Bobbie Blair, and her work towards GMO free Langley. She invited me to speak for a few minutes at the Langley Town Hall theatre after the show of a movie – One man, One Cow, One Planet, and I did so. It was more or less my first attempt at public speaking on the issue of GMO.

…. more to come here later …

Mukheno Maritong Jagat

I am not sure if I could properly translate that sentence, or rather, that expression. Originally presumed to be in Sanskrit, but it came down to a Bengali idiom, and found itself in standard vocabulary relating to the Bengali propensity of entertaining intellectual debates, or what others might consider as light banter.
The translation of the Sanskrit meaning is not too difficult because Bengali and many other Indian languages derived from Sanskrit, and the roots of many of the contemporary words can be traced to their Sanskritic origin. This particular expression means something like – conquering the world by mere talk. Its a satirical expression. In English, the corresponding term could be – talk is cheap.
I had written a previous post, about my closing down the Khata blog site (http://web.me.com/tonu/Santiniketan_Papers/). I was closing it down. But, it contained some of my own musings and thoughts about life as I perceived it. It contained some years of my thoughts, and some of them came from observations that went back years into my conscience or perception of the world around, or my past.
And so, even while I decided to wind it down, I began a half hearted effort at archiving some of those writings, or rather – bringing them into a newer installment here in this blog, with my more recent views on the topic.
The thing is – I liked the heading, and the way I arranged the image at the top of the page, borrowing one line from Tagore’s poems, and placing my own question below it. To me, it appeared both humorous, and satirical, and in some ways followed Tagore’s own satire, coming out of frustration, at the people around him.

The line in that image is part of a Tagore poem. That came from the middle of one of Tagore’s satirical poem. The line itself stated that, instead of belonging to this useless group of Bengali society, the poet might have preferred to belong to the nomadic Beduin tribes of Arabia. They might not have showed outward traces of culture and civilization that the Bengali intelligentsia was so busy displaying, but they had self respect, and unlike the Bengali babu culture, the Beduin would stand up for their beliefs and confront danger to defend their lifestyle.
The poem started like this, with my own translation in brackets :

Title : দুরন্ত আশা (Unruly Hope)

মর্মে যবে মত্ত আশা সর্পসম ফোঁসে, (When injustice of the powerful hiss at us like a venomous snake)
অদৃষ্টের বন্ধনেতে দাপিয়া বৃথা রোষে, (False anger tied up invisibly by fate)
তখনো ভালোমানুষ সেজে (even then, being the good boys that we are)
বাঁধানো হুঁকা যতনে মেজে (we shall stack tobacco in our water pipe carefully)
মলিন তাস সজোরে ভেঁজে খেলিতে হবে কষে! (and shuffle our faded deck of cards and start our card game)
অন্নপায়ী বঙ্গবাসী স্তন্যপায়ী জীব ( we the rice eating and milk drinking species of Bengal)
জন-দশেকে জটলা করি  তক্তপোশে ব’সে। (can sit around on the mat and have our entertainment)

I had not copied that poem as such on that post, but merely borrowed one the lines from the later section of that poem. That line was IHAR CHEYE HOTEM JODI ARAB BEDUIN (meaning, I’d rather have been born a nomadic beduin in Arabia). Instead of copying that entire poem, I ended up writing one of my own in Bengali, along with a piece of English text. Here is what I had written.

Sunday, March 14, 2010
I had written a light hearted Bangla poem, of mediocre quality, just to lighten up the mood while bad things were being reported everywhere. There was this drip drip bad news about climate change, the new noth-south divide, the gloomy outlook of a world less controlled by nations and more controlled by a shadow group behind giant corporations, coupled with global conflicts raging everywhere, and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, which are merely one sphere of American interst that seem to mesmerise the meida. Add to that the issues of the world food crisis, and to cap it off the continuous drip of bad news leaking out from Santiniketan.
So, I wrote that poem:

তনু এটা লিখেছিল

ভাবার কথা, কত ভাবার কথা,
গোলকধঁাধায় খাবি খাবার ব্যথা।
বিশ্বভারতী কিম্বা বিশ্ব রাজনীতি,
কোথায় হদিশ পাই তার মতিগতি
চঁেচামেচি, লাঠালাঠি অার হাতাহাতি,
Instant পণ্ডিতদের বানী যথা তথা।

বুলেটিন বোর্ডেতে লেখে কত লোক
প্রতিবাদ, মন্তব্য অার কত শোক।
লোকে কত কি না বলে, বড় বড় theory।
ঘরে বসে ভজ শুধু হরে কৃষ্ণ শ্রীহরি।
সবইতো ভাগ্যে লেখা – যা হবার হোক।

পিয়ালি পালিত তবু দিল্লী পালায়
তনু মাঝে মাঝে কিছু চিঠি লিখে যায়
তাপসদা বৈতালিকে রোজ ফিটফাট
টুকু চিকু push করে চন্দ্রের হাট
podcast’এ গান গায় তমোজিত রায়।

বসন্ত উৎসবেতে যত উপদ্রব
কালোবাড়ি ভাঙচোর, মারপিট, ক্ষোভ
রজত কান্ত বলে – যাব অামি কাশিতে
অানন্দরূপদা বলে যোগ দাও SASI’তে
পার্থের যুক্তিতে হারেন প্রণব।

এই করে কেটে যায় অারো এক মাস
প্রচুর সময় হাতে – খেলা যাক তাস
সমাজ উন্নয়ণ রাখো চিন্তার বাইরে
বাথরুমে গান গাও তাইরে নাইরে
তনু এটা লিখেছিল – কোরোনাকো ফাঁস!

And then, like most folks, I got back to the normal grind, going about my work, reading books and listening to interesting speeches by folks, watching a bit of the Winter Olympics highlights, and speaking with other exstudents of Santiniketan. I even ended up writing individual letters to a number of MPs of the Indian Parliament lower house, and got a response too, on the issue of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill 2009.

Regarding Santiniketan, I ended up sending a few joint emails to Delhi, along with Piyali Palit, and searched out a few Rabindrasangeets by Partha da, from iTunes. I included one of them on a recent Podcast – ক্লান্তি আমার ক্ষমা করো প্রভু, and updated the খাতা web blog.

On the side, I was exchanging a few emails with folks. One topic under discussion was if Rabindranath should be separated from Santiniketan, thereby freeing Rabindranath and also Santiniketan – presumably because the two became incompatible with each other – like a marriage gone sour.

But, my thoughts actually turned away from that. I guess I shall never make a good marriage counsellor. The thoughts turned to something else – about ourselves – those of us that seem to engage in debates and discussions on what to do with Santiniketan.

I often get bogged with this dimension – or lack of dimension – in the debates. It appears to me, rightly or wrongly, that such debates have one fundamental flaw – they are conducted by the middle class, for the middle class and only the middle class.

The middle class, I often felt, might be ill-qualified to understand either Rabindranath, or indeed anything outside of the middle-class bubble. Also, I suspect, Rabindranath, while being inclusive and universal in his thought and action, did not rate the Bengali middle class too high on his list of priorities.

In other words, neither Santiniketan, nor Rabindranath, should have been restricted to the middle class world, It is perhaps a tragedy that the middle class Bengali community first kidnapped and then improsonned Rabindranath and all his dreams till this day.

So, perhaps Rabindranath needs to be released and set free. The question is – how does one free Rabindranath from the Bengali middle class? And how does one conduct a debate on these issues, when the only people engaged in such debates are the very middle class that Rabdinranath often had so low an opinion of? Gurudev’s comments come to mind – ইহার চেয়ে হতেম যদি অারব বেদুইন.
Another thing that often amazed me is how the middle class Bengali crowd seem so interested in having a debate but not interested in concluding that with any plan of action. It is as if debates should he held only for the sake of debates, and folks should never have to worry about actually working towards some goal. As if following the mantra of মুখেন মারিতং জগত is the only path worthy of them.

Well, food for thought, along with some coffee.

——————–

That was what I had written, merely two years ago. And how much things have changed since then. I was showing signs of frustration even then, as it appears, with the middle class mentality of not wanting to involve in any good community work, and invariably got drawn to Tagore’s frustrated or sarcastic musings on those issues.
And now, I am closing that site down altogeher, and moving on to the next chapter. It is not proving as easy as it should have been, but the movement is happening, I can see.
Take AID Vancouver chapter for example. It was within a few months of my writing that, when I attended the annual AID conference in Seattle and got so highly motivated with it and by the people there. That started a two year effort by some of us to start a Vancouver chapter of AIDS and a fresh set of frustration, this time aimed not at Santiniketanites, but the general diaspora of affluent immigrants from India for their own frog-in-the-well lifestyle, albeit in well decorated silver lined plastic coated  and electronically climate controlled well rather than the moss covered, close to the nature old wells of India. But, at the end of the day, I guess a frog is a frog is a frog. We have evolved from placental mammals to the simians to the homo lineage, only to revert back to the advanced frog-in-the-well type of comfortable humanoids of the twenty frist century.
But then, two years on, out of hundreds of thousands of expatriates Indians, we did manage to collect half a dozen dedicated people willing to do something more than chew pan and look at Shah Rukh Khan and sing bollywood songs in way of intellectual and spiritual sustenance. We found the necessary minimum to be able to think about – gasp – doing something constructive, starting with making a change in our own lifestyle, within our means, to represent the change we wish to see in others.
And we are going to be, slowly, steadily, be moving towards deeds and not just idle talks, towards making a tiny little difference, somewhere, somehow. The first few steps are already taken – that of meeting up once a week, either face to face, or over the wire.
And, with just a handful of folks, the world suddenly begins to look a lot brighter.