THE LOSS OF AGRO-BIODIVERSITY AND MILLETS

If all the qualities of agro-biodiversity known and valued by people are well understood by the scientists and agricultural institutions, why would the diversity declined and some landraces be lost? Minor millets such as foxtail millet and finger millet have been fast disappearing from farmers' fields. Manchu korra, a foxtail millet variety that lives off dew, is no longer to be found in most villages. Similarly, the white variety of redgram, which has a particular medicinal value, has been displaced by newly introduced varieties of seeds in certain areas of Medak District. The area under rabi jowar, out of which a particularly tasty bread is prepared, has drastically decreased.

There is no single answer to this question. People come up with some pithy one liners in reply in one of the millet grown regions of Andhra Pradesh.

• Paisalu kattukuntunnaaru ippudu - [people] are bundling up money [thoughtlessly] these days." This is a very perceptive comment on the monetarisation of agriculture to the exclusion of everything else.
   

• Kaalam kaaka - because the rains don't come (as they used to)." This is a very popular perception. There is a strong memory of the past, which had Naalgu nelala kaalam [four months of rain cycle]. Many of the traditional crops need rains at the right time.
   

• Devunikeruka - God knows why. This is an expression of perplexity; in spite of the well known qualities, uses and needs of the traditional crops, the question of why people are not cultivating them is truly perplexing for a number of farmers, especially for women.
   

• Neighbour's pressure: Another interesting reason is that even the ones who want to continue to grow traditional seed varieties cannot do so, if the neighbours have all gone for mono-cropping or hybrid varieties. In such cases, Naluguri kannu dani meede - "everybody has their eyes set on the crops" - they would start stealing from the farm. This entails adequate watch and ward over the crop. Who has that kind of time?

Lengthy discussions with farmers over the course of several years have revealed patterns of farmer perceptions regarding the threats to diversity, which have been grouped below into seven categories:

• Governmental policies and programmes

• Media influence

• Agricultural extension, which promotes monocrops and commodity crops

• Market preferences

• Diminishing cattle population and farm mechanisation

• Chemicalisation of agriculture

• Erratic and insufficient rainfall

Government policies and programmes

Social Safety Net Policies
The farmers single out the public distribution system as a major threat to their agro-biodiversity. The Government of India pursues a policy of providing cheap ration to the needy families across the country. This huge affirmative action provides each identified poor family with about 20 kgs of foodgrains per month at an inexpensive price.

While the programme has a laudable intention, the effect it has on drylands and their biodiversity has been lethal. Under the PDS system, the government has been selling only rice and wheat across the country for over three decades. This has affected the traditional food habits of people. Even those communities, which used to eat sorghum and millets, have gradually switched over to rice or wheat. This situation has adversely affected the production and consumption of sorghum and millets. In Medak district itself, over 100,000 hectares of croplands have stopped producing these traditional crops. Much of these lands have been left fallow.

FALLOUT OF P D S : alarming increase in fallowisastion of farmlands
A major segment of the population, which is affected negatively by the way in which the PDS is implemented, is the young children. They get used to eating rice purchased from the ration shops and forget their sorghum breads and millet porridges. This change is further reinforced when they go to government hostels to study. Many of the poor households send their children to hostels during their years of schooling because it reduces the financial burden of raising them at home. In these free hostels run by the government, they are served only rice. There is no sorghum or millets in their menu. With their formative years characterised by a diet of rice, they refuse to accept sorghum and millets as they grow up.

Finance Policies: Agriculture in Zaheerabad is also moulded by the government's agriculture financing policies. It is easy to get credit and crop loans from state institutions for commodity crops such as sugarcane, horticulture and cotton grown as monocultures, while farmers who plan to grow millets and sorghum on their fields do not get similar support. Under this continuous pressure to shift to particular crops, farmers get disheartened and change their cropping pattern in accordance with the credit diktats of the banking and other lending institutions.

Seed Policies: Many focus group discussions, especially with women farmers, aimed at understanding whether the government seed policies had led to any particular shift from traditional seeds towards HYV/Hybrids. In fact the HYVs and hybrids are commonly known as Sarkari Vittanalu-- government seeds.

A common argument emanating from the mainstream science and policy makers in support of hybrids is that they give better yields, and therefore would be welcomed by farmers. However, the women farmers react very differently to the issue of hybrid seeds. Strangely there seems to be a kind of disaster association in their minds with the hybrid seeds.

In a focus group discussion the women said that hybrids were introduced during the HYDERABAD ACTION. This was a time when the national government of India had sent its army to annex the state of Hyderabad, ruled by a Muslim ruler. This was also a time when riots between Hindus and Muslims broke out in the region and claimed hundreds of lives.

The Hyderabad Action took place in the early 1950s. Objectively, their view that hybrids were introduced at this time is incorrect as HYVs were introduced in the region in late 1960s with the Green Revolution. Metaphorically, however, the association is with disaster, a perception that has little to do with actual historical dates but one that reflects a particular reading for a period in their history.

This association of disastrousness gets clarified when they start explaining their perceptions of the quality of hybrids. The main complaint is that "hybrids" make soil lifeless : praanam gunjukoni tintadi wrenches life out of the soil and gobbles it up. Some of the farmers, however, feel that "hybrids" by themselves do not really cause any lasting damage to the soil. It is the package of practices prescribed in growing "hybrids" [use of chemical fertilisers on dry soils especially] which "forces life out of the soil". In the farmers' minds there is no clear distinction between hybrids and HYVs. What is clear for them is the distinction between their own seeds and the seeds that have come from government sources.

However, there is a consensus that "hybrids" are not good for consumption - either for humans or for their livestock. They cause allergies and lanju. "Peyyiki chetu" [not good for health]. Similarly, animals do not find the fodder from the hybrid crops palatable or digestible. It does not give the animal any strength 'peyyiki talagadi '.

The high yields of hybrids, which is a positive quality for science and policy makers is not so positive for local people. For farmers, hybrids yield uncontrollably like "wild crops" - aagam panta lekka pandutadi --not like decent crops. They are also not seen as a crop, which is suitable for the small and marginal farmers. "Hybrids were brought in by the upper caste farmers and the big landlords. Everyone was attracted to them because they were new on the scene - because one could make money. But anyway, hybrids are not grown for us - they are for sale--who knows where they go to and who eats them?"

The second major influence identified by farmers is the media, which is completely dominated and populated by the urban middle classes. This media constantly promotes the elite foods like rice and wheat. The rural poor find their own foods marginalised by the media and start wondering whether they are inferior in status. Over a long period of time, this sense of inferiority has deepened and slowly they have started abandoning their own foods.

The special capacity of the millets and other crops which used to withstand harsh environments, instead of getting the credit they deserve, have earned them an identification of being 'famine foods'.
This has contributed to negative connotations. Eating millets and sorghum is identified with the poverty of the consumer because these foods do not find a place on the fashionable media. With the spread and dominance of an elite media, the traditional crops are losing their sheen.

The third major factor to impact on agro-biodiversity is the state agricultural extension network, which has refused to recognise the inherent strengths of biodiversity in agriculture. They relentlessly promote monocultures and commodity crops and provide no extension services for other farming practices
Market preferences.

Markets have been a major player in the marginalisation of millets. During earlier times when markets were local and followed people's food tastes and eating preferences, there was not much conflict between what people produced and what the market accepted. But as markets are currently dictated by distant demands, millets have been consigned a very low priority. . In order to produce for these markets, people have been forced to follow a cropping regime that does not include diverse varieties, and certainly not millets.

A particularly worrying problem that confronts the farmers in the region is the diminishing cattle population in their villages and on their farms. Much of the traditional agricultural practices demand farmyard manure (FYM) in which cow dung is the most crucial element. With no cattle around, there is no farmyard manure either. Shortage of farmyard manure was the single most commonly repeated concern raised by the villagers.

The decrease in the cattle population, and the resulting decline in the availability of FYM, according to the farmers, has been caused by a host of pressures:

• The decreasing pastures and village commons has been a major obstacle in owning and raising cattle. Richer landlords who, in the past, used to own pastures have sold them off to earn money. Much of the village commons have been allotted by the government to the landless people for farming.
   

• With the increasing emphasis by the government on children's education, many children who worked as cattle-herders earlier have gone to schools. Consequently, there are no herdsmen in the villages. As the better-off farmers have taken to mechanisation of their agriculture with increasing use of tractors, the animals have been sidelined.

In a puzzling cause-effect-cause cycle, the diminishing cattle population and the reduced availability of the FYM has made farmers depend more and more on chemical fertilisers. Chemical fertilisers are subsidised by the government, are available on credit and are easy to use. They also reduce the need for cumbersome transportation and application processes required of FYM. For one acre of farm, one needs to transport about 10-15 cartloads of FYM, whereas the equivalent in chemical fertilisers represents just a few bags. While you need four to six persons to load and unload the FYM and spread it on the farm, a single person can handle all these operations for the chemical fertilisers. Chemicals save farmers' time.

The costs of chemicalisation of agriculture is less visible but significant. In an unreliable rainfall regime such as Zaheerabad, millets and sorghum do not respond well to the application of chemical fertilisers, compared to FYM. This leaves farmers in a bind. They cannot grow these crops without access to abundant FYM, forcing many to abandon millets and the diversity regime of their farming practice. If they move to crops like cotton and sunflower that do respond to chemical fertilisers, they run the risk of incurring heavy debt in case of crop failure. Sometimes they pay with their own lives, as illustrated earlier.

Farmers also note that the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides has created several new negative environmental impacts. They believe that the use of chemical fertilisers results in the loss of natural fertility and soil life (microbes), which in turn makes the revival of soils a difficult process. The use of pesticides impacts on the bird population and on the population of beneficial insects, leading to an increase in pests and diseases.

Another reason very often cited by farmers for declines in crop diversity is an increasingly erratic rainfall. Farmers fondly recall what used to be a four month rain regime earlier, and say that if the same pattern comes back the diversity on their farms will also be back.