Transcription

• Speaker #0

  At some of these global meetings that I have attended, you know, I've heard people from Africa leaders saying that, you know, we have to push for yields and increase in productivity at any cost because Africa has very low yields and productivity. That's a reason for famines. That's a reason for hunger. And they're all pushing in the direction of industrial farming practices or conventional farming practices. And you can't blame them because it's true. When we look at the global distribution of fertilizer and pesticide, Africa actually is using very little. So you can't blame them for wanting to increase. You know, you can't, we can't say to them sitting in the global north that no, you should not do this. But at the same time, they will follow the same cycle then if they get into that track. And they are at a point when they are not yet using. So this is a very good moment. for you know states and governments to say that no don't go down that track let's show a different pathway yeah for sustainability because they don't have to reverse anything yet

• Speaker #1

  On this podcast, we talk a lot about the future of farming and food, about regenerative agriculture, but mostly from the perspective of Western countries and Europe. But today we're going to turn the focus more on the global south, in particular India, right? Yes. Maybe to start with, you could tell us a little bit about the big differences in the food system and agricultural system between Europe and India.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so I think the big difference differences I think are in terms of how we conceptualize of a farmer, the scale of farming. So when we look typically at Europe or the UK, you know, farms are quite large. I mean, even though here they are considered as small farms, but something like 100 hectares or 200 hectares would be a very large farm anywhere in the global south. So we're really talking about one hectare, two hectare, three hectares, less than five hectares, where 90% of the farmers own less than five hectares of land. So farming as an enterprise then has a very different meaning. It's both subsistence, but it's also their main livelihood. And they have to make do with very small plots of land, and often with very little resources. So I think when we think about, for a lot of the poor, you know, it's not out of choice, but even just out of necessity or their lack of resources, most of the farming is regenerative or organic, because they don't have money to invest in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and so on. They tend to be small scale, they don't have much tools, they don't have money to hire labor, and therefore they end up with sort of intercropped, multi-cropped systems, which are, I think, a way, even if they didn't have the label, but very much regenerative, very much climate resilient in terms of what can grow in a particular area. reducing risk in terms of the crop mixes it was usually integrated or mixed crop farming like having some grains like millets having legumes having vegetables having a mix of things on the same plot of land so it also fertilizes the land some of these leguminous crops for instance and it also reduces the risk of pest or pathogen attack i think the problem Um... Um... that these farmers face, very small farmers, of course, is that, and this has been intensifying, I think, with low yields. So even though they have these very small plots, they have these integrated cropping systems. Often the areas where I studied in eastern India, which I still continue to study with indigenous people, that what they produced was probably enough for them for like four or five months of the year. So it was not even taking care of their food needs for the whole year. It was not viable in that sense. So you did need something to either increase yields and increase productivity or to somehow bring incomes into the family in order to be able to purchase food and to purchase other needs, whether it's health care, whether it's education costs, fees, school fees, clothes, whatever it is. And I think this led definitely to the taking up of more high yielding. varieties of crops which often needed monocultures rather than these integrated farming systems. They also needed much more of very controlled levels of nutrient like fertilizer and so on. And monocultures, even though they were small, so these were not industrial farms, they still I'm talking about small farms, but the monocultures still. brought in problems in terms of soil degradation, in terms of overuse sometimes of water or decline in water levels. This was also enhanced by government subsidies and incentives, for instance, for the very poor farmers to give them subsidy for free electricity in order to operate machines to take groundwater from wells to irrigate their farms, for instance. So they are, in fact, they focus on the livelihoods of the farmers. But there was a trade-off between securing farmer livelihoods versus your environment and natural resource utilization. So I think that's one thing that when we talk about the global south, that we have to be very mindful that if we start from the perspective of the farmers, farmers have a small plot of land and they need subsistence, they need income, they need that small plot of land to perform multiple roles. for them. And so any intervention that we take or any support that we take has to look at both the food consumption needs, but also some surplus for markets. I think with Europe, the issues, of course, are very different in terms of, you know, the scale and size of farms in the first place. I think because of that, the farms were never subsistence. they were always for the market. And therefore, it pushed farmers into adopting certain technologies and so on, which could increase profits, improve yields, improve productivity without necessarily caring for the environment. Maybe the consequence or the impact is the same that in both cases, whether you have the very poor farmer or the medium and rich farmer of Europe, the incentives or the motivations might have been different. But I think in some ways, they have contributed to a crisis in terms of You know, our environment of overshooting the planetary boundaries. I mean, from the latest analysis, I was also part of the Eat Lancet Commission. The report was launched recently in Stockholm. And I think what we see very clearly is that the food systems have contributed to almost 30% to global greenhouse gas emissions. But apart from that, they also contribute to the overshoot of, you know, six of the nine planetary boundaries around water. around nitrogen and phosphorus, around the integrity of landmass integrity and biodiversity. So this has unfortunately been the effects of sort of more, I wouldn't use the word industrial, as I said, farming, but more the adoption of technologies which have sought to improve yields and which have in a way led to... monocultures.

• Speaker #1

  Yes. You studied how gendered vulnerabilities to climate change are often misunderstood or misrepresented. Could you maybe tell us more about this?

• Speaker #0

  Yes, sure. So I think, I think just continuing from where we are, I think in the context of farming, particularly and food systems, we find today, over the last 20-30 years, that not just has the research on climate change or climate change become an issue globally, but I think we are also seeing the impacts of climate change on the ground. So whether it's a poor farmer or a rich farmer, you know, there's a seasonal variability in rainfall. Rainfall comes at the wrong time. So if rainfall comes just about when you're going to harvest your crop, doesn't matter whether you have half an acre or five acres or 20, you know, that crop is destroyed. before it can be harvested or late rains. So in a lot of Asia, not only India, in the tropics, we grow a lot of rice or paddy crop, which needs a lot of the traditional ways of growing paddy required a lot of water. So the paddy seedling should be like almost submerged in water. And this was because of what is called in Asia as the monsoon rains, very heavy rains during the months of August, September, October, or July onwards. for four months. Over the past several decades or two years, we see definitely shift in that pattern. So the rains don't come on time. So people have transplanted their paddy and then the rain doesn't come, then the seedlings dry up. And then you have to either start the process again, without any security, you may not have seed, you may not have seedling, and so on. Now paddy is one crop, which is very much dependent on female labour. or women's labour for a lot of the activities apart from ploughing and land preparation, then the planting, the transplanting, the weeding, even the harvesting can be done by both men and women. But a lot of these activities, then the post-harvest, threshing, storage, all these activities are done by women. Now with insecurity, this is one example, but similar sort of effects on different crops, whether it's potato again can get destroyed by sudden rains when the potatoes are ready to harvest. So whatever be the I think given the risk in agriculture. which farmers themselves have been experiencing, irrespective of any climate predictions. Within South Asia, particularly, being quite patriarchal and with restricted women's mobility, the men have been migrating out for work. So farming has really been left to women. I already mentioned that women are not recognized as farmers, but I think more importantly, in climate change policy, You know, this nuance. is not there. They either see women as doing everything, and as some kind of heroic saviours of humanity. And in fact, this often ends then adding burdens on women by targeting everything to women or they see women as really victims that you know poor things they have worked so hard and then they get very little return. I think what has been missing is really in these policy approaches and also in interventions and I think this is what I've been trying to work on is that we can't homogenize the experiences of women or men for that matter. Because these are shaped by their class position, by their ethnicity. You know, are you rich or poor? Do you have land? Do you not have land? Your age? What is the agroecological context in which you are? Are you in a mountain? Are you in a desert? Are you in a forest? Are you in a coastal area? Because you experience very different kinds of climate change. It's also experienced very differently in each of these locations. So this, in sort of gender analysis, we call this intersectionality. that really looking at the intersections of different kinds of social relations or social identities of gender, class, caste and so on. Because looking at the social positionality then helps you analyze the vulnerabilities of particular individuals, women or men.

• Speaker #1

  It's the idea that if we just look at gender, we have a very kind of linear picture of the situation. But if we add more factors to the analysis.

• Speaker #0

  such as the socio-economic background and things like that we get a more three-dimensional picture we can exactly take better decisions exactly i mean just to clarify here that for a long time actually gender itself is not included in climate policy as well it was quite blind it just talked about people or communities so it's a big positive i would say that even the gender language has come in but i think as researchers when we talk about gender we really say that you know You cannot homogenize women. Like I may be an Indian woman, but I'm educated. I'm a professor in this university. My positionality is very different from a woman who is cultivating a one acre plot. Let's say we may both be Indian women, right? But our experiences are very different of climate change or of food security or anything else. So I think the point within gender analysis itself, what we say is that we really need to look at this difference. I mean, it's kind of become now a principle of gender analysis itself. It's good that you're at least differentiating between women and men. But you need to take that one extra step, which I think we haven't yet got to, of recognizing that even men, for instance, all men somehow are taken within the climate policy discourse as somehow not doing much or not contributing. much or in the case of farming as being just lazy and opting out of farming or you know hanging around kind of thing which is not true because i think what we have studied is that a lot of these poor men they actually migrate to construction sites in cities or you know doing urban informal work under hot heat so heat stress is a very big thing you know vending things they live in very restricted accommodation maybe 10 men in a small you room they don't have access to water toilets etc they have to cook for themselves so it's not that you know men are just having a good time as some of the climate policies will help have us believe in this dichotomy that no women are victims they are doing everything and it almost sounds as if men are doing nothing to adapt or to support the family with adaptation. So I think for me, a gender analysis is not about focusing on on women or focusing on men, but it's about looking at some of these relationships, you know, of how these are changing. I think the second very important thing which we miss out is this exactly, that looking at these wider social relationships, we're just looking at individuals. So even if there's a program, it will say, okay, let's target rural women, or poor women, or whatever it is, or men maybe. But Just targeting exclusively an individual or a group with some inputs or some credit is not enough because after all, they are embedded within a society, within a social relations. If I give you something today, let's say credit, and 10 people around you are starving, you're not going to be able to use it for the purpose for which it was given. And this was very stark to me when I was doing research in northern Kenya in amongst pastoral groups, that But some of them said that they live in this household structure. So they are different families. But it's like a compound with like 40 households or 30 households living in separate huts or houses, but within a kind of compound. They're all related in one way or the other. So one of them whom I was speaking to was a school teacher who had a school job. So a government job. And it was severe drought. in northern Kenya at that time. It's a semi-arid area. And he said that because I receive a salary, I'm seen as non-poor. But actually, I'm poor because my limited salary is like split amongst almost 50 or 100 people. I can't keep it for myself and my children. So I think social obligation, social relations, these are very important in people's lives, especially in these rural communities, which we often overlook. in research but also in policy.

• Speaker #1

  You mentioned already the phenomenon of male migration, male traveling outside to find work, and therefore women taking care of most of the farm work and taking over the farms. Could you tell us more about how that...

• Speaker #0

  that affects farming in general in these regions and the lives of these women and yeah things like that that's a really an interesting question and i think even though i've been working for a long time we recently did over the last several years a sort of comparative study even across different regions of india because india as i said is almost like the eu it's a microcosm for a very diverse set of cultures languages populations so we looked at sort of the mountains and then um you We looked at coastal areas, we looked at semi-arid areas, and we looked at sort of indigenous groups and forested locations to look at what is happening, what has been the impacts of climate change. I think across all the four sites, as you rightly mentioned, what we found is that agriculture is not viable as the sole livelihood, and therefore men are migrating out. I think this is something which I've been working on for a long time, that even the nature of migration is such that they end up with sort of low-paid, insecure jobs in urban areas or whatever. And those jobs definitely give income. So it helps to diversify livelihoods, but it's not enough to reproduce the whole household, to take care of all the needs. of the household. So farming is still very essential. So in a way, you know, in a classical Marxist sense, the farm still subsidizes sort of capital in terms of subsidizing the migrant labor. I mean, the employers can pay the migrant labor less, because they know that they have a farm at home, which is taking care of their food needs or the food needs of their households.

• Speaker #1

  I never imagined looking at things this way. So the this unpaid work from from women farmers in certain countries actually a subsidy to capital which employs these men men yes because these men are able to work in those jobs at those uh income levels which will not take care of the

• Speaker #0

  needs of the entire family uh they do depend on agriculture so agriculture and farming is still very crucial to the viability and livelihoods of these families. And women, of course, are taking care of that part of the farming. Now, the experiences, I think, and this was very interesting for us, because the general discourse is that, again, as I said earlier, the women as victims, the poor women, you know, they are overburdened with work. And this is what we see in all the literature on climate change, that, you know, climate change and environmental stress is really increasing the work burdens on women. It's true. to some extent because with water stress there are longer distances to go for water if water supply is not assured in the village by the state and of course farming now we found a lot of difference across these agroecologies. So rather than I think talking specifically about India, maybe if I talk about agroecologies, it has a much more wider relevance as well, that within these mountain regions, historically, men have been migrating. So even when the subcontinent was under British colonial rule, till 1947, you know, many of these because the mountains are harsh, and the mountains have always been harsh in terms of climate. So winters are very harsh, for instance, these villages are very remote. So even right from that time, you know, the men would join like the British Army. There was a Gurkha regiment, for instance. So they were the men were always also seeking to diversify. And they were seen as hardy people because they live in these very remote and very challenging environments. So those areas. Men have a long history of migration. I think it's very interesting that the longer you're a migrant, you also tend to build social networks and relationships in your destination location. You can maybe move upwards in terms of the job that you have and the security that you have. I mean, just to make myself clear, you know, if you look at migrants, we looked into one of the cities, you know, migrants who have come within two years, migrants who've been there for... up to five years and migrants who've been there for more than 10 years. So those who've been migrant for more than 10 years, they almost are settled. So they've got houses, they built their social networks, they have much bank accounts, they have much more social security and support. So in this mountain region, that's what we found, that actually the migrants were not these insecure labour, but they were much more secure because they had been migrating for 40, 50 years across generations. And therefore the remittances. were also much larger and much more regular. And because of this, the women had a choice actually. They could either leave the land fallow if they were unable to cultivate or they could employ labour. to cultivate these lands. And many of them shifted from crop farming to something like livestock, which was less labor intensive, because you could they could be foraging on that field, it didn't require as much of intensive work, it was also seen as slightly more climate resilient. So that was that in those areas. But in some of these other areas, the semi arid areas, the forest, the indigenous population areas, where there are low skills to start off with, low educational levels. These places like the forested area, which I've been working in now for 30 years. Actually, when I first started working there, nobody was migrating. They were all cultivating men and women in their villages. In fact, if at all, women would migrate temporarily to the nearby district for sort of paddy transplanting and harvesting and so on and get some cash wages. Men never migrated. 20 years later, I find that all the men are gone. So it's a very last 20 years. And that's because of climate change, I think, because of insecurity, variability in crops and, you know, what output you will get. But also, I think it's coupled with changing aspirations. People also now today, you know, want to educate their children. They want to have a mobile phone. There's a lot of advertising. There's a lot of communication. So rural people also have the same aspirations that we want a good life. You know, we want these gadgets and good shoes and clothes and things like that. So that has also created pressure. Both climate change and changing aspirations has created pressure for men to migrate out. of these areas and here definitely workloads on women have been increasing. They don't have enough money to hire labor for instance so they just have to do more. One of the studies that I did I think which was quite an influential or an important study was on like time use. of, it was looking at the across different seasons, you know, time, how male and female time is allocated. And this is a methodology that is used sort of within not just gender analysis, but really to understand how labor is divided, how much labor is being done and so on. And I found in that that during these peak agricultural seasons of planting, harvesting, The women were also out in the fields and the men who were there for eight, nine hours. And then they had to spend another, normally they would to do all their household work, cooking, cleaning, fetching water, fetching firewood would take another four or five hours. But during the peak seasons, when they I spent nine hours on the farm. They didn't have another five. I mean, they were too exhausted and there was also not that much time to do these other things. And in our very detailed study, we found that out of these four or five hours, almost half the time is for cooking because they cook on firewood. They don't have gas and pipe gas. Even though there is a government scheme to provide LPG cylinders to rural people, I think getting those refilled and so on and having the money and whether that's their priority. has also been an issue so they still cook on firewood because it's easily available and i found that really the time for cooking is what shrinks uh like almost to half so rather than cooking you know a balanced diet or you know some legumes some rice and some greens or vegetables they might just make rice and then have it with chilies or have it with salt or something like that so this of course has implications also on nutrition, on health, on child development, and so on. So I think, so we found very different impacts on women. So while the farm, they had to do, because that was their livelihood. There was no compromise around the farm work. What really suffered was your reproductive work, the care work, the domestic work, which included cooking, feeding, cleaning. And this then had impacts on, as I said, on consumption and nutrition. And of course, when we take a food system lens, then it's not only farming. I mean, we're looking at the whole system from production to consumption, because ultimately we are looking at, you know, the health and well-being of people and of communities.

• Speaker #1

  I really hope you're enjoying this conversation so far. I just need to take a few seconds of your time to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast, Soil Capital. Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils. They're a fantastic company, I love what they're doing and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast. If you'd like to learn more about them, I will leave a link in the description of this episode. Let's get back to the conversation. Here in Europe, in the UK, we see a movement, it's still small, but it's growing, of regenerative agriculture, of finding ways to produce as much, but working with nature. So being much less reliant on these tools, on these chemicals, for example, and therefore producing as much, spending less money, producing better quality food, and therefore... providing a better livelihood for the farmer. Do you see something similar happening in India as well?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I think definitely. I think there has been a lot of awareness in terms of we needed to become a food secure country at that time. And therefore, it was important to improve productivity and improve yield. But I think pretty soon, the realization came that there are also the downsides of this in terms of you know excessive use of fertilizers decline because of declining soil quality due to repeated mono crops and the same crops so because of these small farms you know they don't really have the luxury of leaving land fallow or doing rotations in that sense so i think if you have irrigation then you end up growing two rice crops or three rice crops so all of these for livelihood security but all of these led to uh even if without using of too much of fertilizers and it still led to decline in soil nutrient quality because the same crop if you grow again and again it withdraws certain nutrients from the soil which you then need to give back to the soil in some way or the other whether through crop mixes or through fertilizers or bio inputs. So I think this realization has been there and I think even there one of the big things are big projects which I would like to mention. has been in a whole state. So it's like a country, European country, a state called Andhra Pradesh in southern India, which maybe about, I don't know, maybe 2017, 2018, introduced something called community-based natural farming as a state level, a large program. So this program was basically built on groups of women which were already pre-organized. over the last 30 years through credit and microfinance initiatives and all called self-help groups. They used them and gave women the leadership training into a range of sustainable practices. In this area, unlike the indigenous areas, which I will compare in a moment, that already that knowledge of regenerative farming was more or less lost because for the last 30 years they have been doing. So the generation which had that knowledge is kind of passed on. So they had to actually start with working with these women's groups and to introduce the ideas of natural farming or regenerative farming approaches. in terms of everything, production planning, what should be the crop mixes, you should have three layers of crops like fruit trees, you know, crops, vegetables, some for cash, like the fruit trees, for instance, could start once they started yielding would provide a source of cash, along with crops for subsistence, about the making of bio inputs and bio fertilizers, like not just manure, in manure using cow dung but also worms and vermicomposting and other kinds of bio inputs. In India we have the neem tree. Neem is a very good ingredient for a biopesticide because traditionally they used to use neem to keep away pests. So I think getting back into extracting neem oil, using that as biopesticides and so on and this has been at a large scale. Now, because the whole state government and I think what was very innovative in this was that apart from working with communities, with the whole food system perspective, so talking about production planning, how to manage farms, inputs, then also the value chains, markets and also consumption. So there was also a component of nutrition and nutrition education and you know, how would you plan your meal and therefore you should plant according to what you would like to eat. And so on. And the one thing that I really appreciated was that the government also recruited graduates, young graduates from agriculture universities and on three years or five years as interns or, you know, and gave them a salary to live in these villages. And they also gave these graduates like a plot of land where they could experiment based on whatever knowledge they had learned within agricultural universities and also see what farmers were doing. and then actually build some kind of a hybrid mix of what works, what doesn't work, and so on. So many of these agricultural graduates also had to do a lot of unlearning in many ways, because they are trained in, you know, modern technologies. But I think it's been a very interesting give and take in terms of the agricultural graduates having some knowledge, women having knowledge, others having knowledge, involving some of the men in terms of, okay, finding the markets. Where do you sell surplus produce? How do you ensure that there's an income flow that goes on? And I think that's been now running for the last seven, eight years. And what they did find is that there's not that much difference in terms of incomes. I mean, if you see per crop yield, it might have gone down. But when you look at the multiple crops. And across the seasons, actually, there's no really decline in income. If at all, there is a five or it's not a huge increase either, but it may be a five or 10% increase in incomes. So I think it's really a very interesting initiative. The government of India has now started to encourage this kind of thing, a new program on sort of organic farming and so on, where they are encouraging NGOs and other extension organizations. to set up what they call as bio input resource centers to really look at particular context, particular soil condition. These have to be very contextualized, right? Farming is not the same everywhere. It depends on your climate, your soil, your temperature, your rainfall, elevation, all these things. So they are actually supporting and this is a very new project. So I'm quite hopeful that it might shift, you know, things. towards a more regenerative element. Just before I finish this, I just wanted to give the contrasting case of indigenous people and indigenous communities who still have a lot of knowledge. They haven't lost all their knowledge. But this knowledge in India as globally is rapidly eroding due to multiple reasons. One big reason is of course land alienation. So the taking over of the land and territories. of indigenous people for so-called development, whether it is building big dams or infrastructures or roads or railways or whatever it is. So we are basically reducing their access to their environment and their biodiversity, forest enclosures which started during colonial times itself, because they needed, the colonial government needed timber, particularly for construction of railways and other kinds of things. A lot of the natural forests were destroyed and replaced by teak or pine plantations, which of course, then you've lost a lot of your biodiversity. And so over generations, clearly, Unlike in Latin America, I think where indigenous knowledge or Canada, which is a very good example of preserving indigenous knowledge, New Zealand, compared to some of these countries, I think in South Asia, where we have a substantial proportion of indigenous people, but the indigenous knowledges have declined because of changes in land use and state policy, but also because of, to some extent, modern education. I mentioned aspirations before. that these children also go to schools which are mainstream schools which unfortunately in the mainstream curriculum they treat they don't really recognize indigenous knowledge but they treat them as some kind of wild people or forest dwellers who don't know much or backward and poor. So these young people who have gone through this education system, they want to distance themselves from their culture and their identity. They see themselves as modern youth with modern aspirations. I want to live in a city. I want to do a job. They don't see themselves or they don't want to see themselves. in that light. So one of the projects that I've been working on for the last now several years, again, since 2018-19, has been really working with young people or youth within these indigenous communities. And it was very interesting, actually, that in a way COVID came as a blessing, rather than a constraint, because this project was using creative tools and digital tools. So the project involved, and with one of my colleagues here, training some of these indigenous youth in filmmaking and in radio, use of radio and so on, to document this environment and their circumstances and their food systems. It was around sustainable food systems, the project. So we had just finished the film training for these group of youth in two sites in India, indigenous youth, and then COVID came. But they had the cameras and they'd had the training and we couldn't go there. So basically, these young people did a fantastic job of going. They also schools were shut, colleges were shut. So they were in their communities and they then went around the forest, went around the community, taking photographs, making small films, talking to older people, talking to this. By the time six months later, March, the COVID lockdown came. By the end of the year, we found that they had set up a YouTube channel and had like 60 or 70 like short three or four minute films documenting the most amazing like biodiversity, recipes, landscapes. And so on. So then we got into a conversation that really, we started looking at these films and talking to them about these films and what motivated you and what did you want to communicate because they also had complete voice since we were absent from the field. And then issues around identity, issues around culture definitely came up. And... In those discussions, I think they realized and they said that actually we had never realized and we were really alienated from this. And the older people, when we interviewed them, said that actually this has really created a very good intergenerational communication because the young people interviewed them. Their grandmothers, their grandfathers went with them to the forest, saw what herbs they were collecting for medicine or for something else. And... realize that actually they know something they may not have gone to school but actually they're quite knowledgeable so there was a mutual respect that that developed anyway to cut a long story short after that what we did was once we had these young people on our side we decided that we didn't want to romanticize but if we wanted to really challenge the mainstream discourse about and you give legitimacy to indigenous knowledge we worked with a group of nutritionists to analyze all these uh foods and both raw and cooked which these young people had documented and i don't have it on me now but we then um they did the nutritional analysis and actually we found that and they developed a little recipe book uh for us uh with the nutrition values which is really that it is quite complete a lot of these uh foods if They're eaten in the right combination. They're quite nutritionally complete. And when we fed that back to the young people, I think that's really made a difference. So what I'm doing now, and this is still ongoing work, is like working with these young people and with communities to try and bring back or recover, if you like, and restore their indigenous, their knowledges, and actually a pride in their knowledges, saying, actually, you have knowledge. So don't feel under that. you know, you don't know anything, because this is the way they've been treated by extension officers and agriculture department saying, we'll tell you what to do. This is the way you should plant. This is the way you should harvest, not really listening to them or what they know. So we're trying to reverse. I think, in this case, we're able to recover some of their knowledges, and then trying to use science as well, to sort of legitimize their knowledge that nutrition science and then now trying to work both with in the agriculture department to say that look these people have some good foods and some good practices you know if you want to give them something to plant why don't you develop varieties or why don't you develop seeds for these mushrooms or these greens and let them grow that in their fields rather than bringing in external varieties because these local varieties the most important thing is that they're adapted they're climate adapted they're adapted to the local soils and the local conditions for generations and therefore they're much more resilient than the external or the modern or the Western varieties which we bring in to these regions.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. I have a very small favor to ask. If you enjoy listening to the Deep Seat podcast and you find this interesting and meaningful, then please support me and my work. And you can actually do that in just five seconds by clicking on the like button, on the subscribe button,

• Speaker #0

  and maybe leave us a message in the comment section. It actually makes a huge difference for me and it allows me to continue doing this work. So thank you so much in advance. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

• Speaker #1

  You've said a lot of really positive things about regenerative agriculture and the regenerative agriculture movement in general, which is great. But I'm wondering, what are... The biggest mistake that you see happening within the regenerative agricultural movement in general, how could we do things differently?

• Speaker #0

  So I think I'm largely positive of the regenerative farming movement. I think that what we need, from my own experience, is perhaps a little more of solid research evidence, which is place-based, that really examines, I think, one, the economic realities of regenerative agriculture. And also the social changes in social relations or the social roles and responsibilities. And this will vary across different countries and different regions and different contexts. And that's why I said place-based is very important because in every context, I think anything new that you do will shape both the social relations of who does what, who takes what decisions, but also it will change, you know, the economics of that particular activity. So farmers clearly are trying many different things and they are very innovative. I think that they have to be very innovative in order to survive in contexts which are very uncertain and risky. But also there is an issue of both time and capital investments that are needed in order to bring this change. So bringing any change, like even shifting from mainstream agriculture or conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, it does require some. um education and awareness but more than that it also requires some kind of you know physical changes and capital changes changes in terms of the kinds of investments you make and so on and i think there's less research i feel in terms of really uh understanding and uh concrete in very concrete ways of what are the costs and benefits of this change and i'm saying it not from a negative perspective. but even from the perspective of supporting farmers to make that change. If we don't look at the constraints, just a little example I'll give you, climate smart agriculture, for instance. I mean, this has become a big thing everywhere that agriculture has to be climate smart, conservation agriculture, various kinds of forage crops, fence crops. I mean, various kinds of things are being promoted as part of climate smart agriculture. we analyzed, I was involved with analysis of some climate smart agriculture practices in South Asia. And definitely they are having positive impacts in terms of mitigation in terms of adaptation in terms of overall environmental benefits. But when we added some gender variables, like time contribution, labor contribution and control over income, we found the results changed. So something like conservation agriculture, which is very good, but it actually is very labor intensive as far as women's labor time is concerned. And actually, women have no control over the output of this conservation agriculture, Because as I said, land... in these countries is primarily owned by men. And this, obviously, if she spends her time on conservation agriculture, then she can do less of something else. But something, another climate smart agriculture practice like home gardens or home gardens, which have also been promoted as climate smart. And these actually are quite beneficial because they also involve a lot of labor time of women. But then women have the control over these home gardens, because the assumption is that somehow these home gardens are linked to your domestic role, they're close to the home, they're used for feeding the family and the children. So women can decide what to do with that home garden. So I think two climate smart agriculture practices, but can have very different outcomes, and therefore very different motivations. So if I'm that woman farmer, and I have limited time, Then it's not that I'm not for regenerative agriculture, but I may decide that there's no point contributing time to my husband's conservation agriculture plot. I better spend my time doing something else. which will help me to fulfill my part of the domestic contract or conjugal contract, you know, in terms of provision of food, etc., putting food on the table and so on. So I think we need to understand these motivations. And these motivations involve, as I said, time, labor, capital. And I think these aspects of regenerative farming you are less well understood. So it's not a mistake, but I think we need to, again, just like indigenous knowledge, rather than romanticizing, I think we need to produce the evidence that actually this is a win-win.

• Speaker #1

  or what is a win-win and for whom i think the question for whom is very important okay so we focus a lot on technical solutions and we analyze them and say they get they're getting these results but then we don't always contextualize those results uh using

• Speaker #0

  intersectionality exactly exactly you've got the word so i was going to say that i would put back bring back the discussion of intersectionality here. to see that, you know, rather than doing a blame game kind of thing, but we can, if we can understand from the perspective of different people, what are their limitations or constraints in terms of taking on something. So just to be very concrete with you. I was talking to a group of indigenous, again, poor women, not only indigenous, and asking them about this. You know, why are you using chemical fertilizer? Why don't you shift to manure? And they said that, you know, we don't put much of chemical fertilizer. We put one bag of chemical fertilizer. But if we were to shift, and this is highly subsidized. Across the global south, fertilizer is one of the most subsidized. The fertilizer companies make all the money. It's not the farmers. And the government subsidized them. And this one bag of fertilizer, she said, or they said, that, you know, if I was to replace it by organic manure, I would need to spend five times the amount. forgetting, because organic manure is not subsidized, whereas chemical fertilizer is subsidized. So I think we need to really analyze it also from the perspective of supporting it, that really, if the country or the government is interested in shift from conventional to regenerative, for environmental and so many other reasons, health, then you also need to shift your subsidies. You know, from remove or withdraw the fertilizer subsidy, for example, and let the farmer choose. You say, I'll give you a subsidy of this much money, whatever you choose. So then even if they're choosing the organic, which they will, you know, they're not going to be penalized. And this is for a poor farmer or a woman farmer who doesn't have any income source. So her husband may be migrant. somewhere, or he may be a farmer with her. They don't have many savings. They don't have a source of income, which they can give to the agent to purchase whatever it is, whoever is selling in the market. We're talking about very low income households. And one of the big problems here is actually credit and debt that you start taking from these agents, you know. loan sharks, you'd start taking money on debt, and then the debt keeps increasing, and you're never really out of it. So I think we have to remind ourselves that if you really want to shift towards regenerative agriculture, there has to be, especially in global south countries, and I think it's very important, apart from here, I mean, in global north, it's very important, because actually a lot of the planetary boundary transgression is coming from farming here. and the practices of conventional farming in Europe and the Americas, and North America particularly. So I think here it's an urgent problem. But that doesn't mean that Global South should do nothing about it, right? And let Global North do everything. And I think it's a really good question. Because at some of these global meetings that I have attended, you know, I've heard people from Africa leaders saying that, you know, we have to push for yields and increase in productivity at any cost, because Africa has very low yields and productivity. That's a reason for famines. That's a reason for hunger. And they're all pushing in the direction of industrial farming practices or conventional farming practices. And you can't blame them, because it's true. When we look at the global distribution of fertilizer and pesticide, Africa actually is using very little. So you can't blame them for wanting to increase. You know, we can't say to them sitting in the global north that no, you should not do this. But at the same time, they will follow the same cycle then if they get into that track. And they are at a point when they're not yet using. So this is a very good moment for, you know, states and governments to say that, no, don't go down that track. Let's show a different pathway for sustainability because they don't have to reverse anything yet.

• Speaker #1

  Yes. Yeah, a lot of the evidence we uncover on the podcast seems to suggest that actually farming in harmony with nature, using the latest science in microbiology and so on and managing systems, while more complex and adds complexity and things like that, are definitely a better path to follow for the future, especially in the face of climate change. And therefore... We shouldn't always talk about farming with nature as making a sacrifice.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly.

• Speaker #1

  Right.

• Speaker #0

  Exactly. And in fact, here in the Norwich Research Park itself, a lot of our scientists are now focusing much more on leguminous crops. For instance, moving away from the big rice, wheat, maize, soya. Because you realize that, you know, if farmers here, like Hodmidods or, you know, Josiah and others, if they're really wanting legumes. What are the varieties of legumes that we have which are suitable to UK conditions, for instance? Because these legumes tend to grow much better in the tropics or in warmer climates. So as I said, some of them have tried to revive, you know, old English beans and peas. But we really need to dig into that and to revive it because it's kind of gone. And I think that can be a role of science or scientists to help with that process of recovery, of selection and so on.

• Speaker #1

  Absolutely, yes. Something that I haven't mentioned yet is that we're on a little trip here in the UK for nine days, recording nine different episodes. And we thought it'd be fun to ask every guest to come up with a question for the next one. And yesterday we spoke to Professor Lynn Dix from Cambridge University. And the question she asked for you was this.

• Speaker #2

  Professor Rao. Hi. So I heard that you're working on the gender dimension of agriculture in low and middle income countries. So here's my question. I have heard through talking to other researchers that when you look at the way that women and men farm, women tend to farm in a way that has more nature associated with it than men do in some parts of the world where this has been studied. Have you ever heard of that? Is that true?

• Speaker #0

  Okay, that's a great question, actually. And I'll try not to make it too long winded. I think there are multiple things here. So within the sort of feminist discourse, there has been a strand called ecofeminism, which is really saying that women are closer to nature, and so on. naturally it's a natural process that women are closer to nature so i don't necessarily think that there's anything natural about women um being closer to nature but i think there is a reason in terms of you know divisions of labor and roles that women often end up performing roles which are closer to nature like fetching water like you know cultivating crops And so on and so on. We're collecting firewood from the forest. So while they do that, they do foraging. So actually, because of women's roles in terms of caring for the household, domestic reproduction, cooking and feeding, they end up doing tasks which are dependent on nature. And because of this dependence on nature for the performance of their roles. They are definitely much more aware of nature and the need to conserve and protect and preserve nature. That's one. The second point I would like to say is really a resource issue, which is a much more political economy kind of issue that women in general tend to have fewer resources available. to them for whatever reason. They may not be landowners. They may not have access to credit. If they are in jobs, they may have less incomes than their husbands because of the gender pay gaps that we know about. So for many structural reasons, women don't have equal access to resources compared to men. So as a consequence, I think even when they are farming, you know, they may aspire to using more of these. chemical fertilizers and so on, but they just don't have the resources to do it. They have to make good with what they have, which is often, you know, organic manure from the one or two cows or buffaloes that they have at home or some goats they have at home or poultry. So they then end up actually adopting, not necessarily out of choice, but actually due to lack of choice. lack of resource access, they end up adopting much more organic and regenerative approaches. And the third element, I think, is also in terms of, you know, thinking through sort of a justice kind of approach is also how much say or how much voice do women have in decision making. So often they may be saying that we want something, but since they don't have access to that resource themselves, they can't go into the market and buy something. And therefore, if they're not heard, they end up with whatever. Having said that, I think. think that now with greater awareness and greater education like in the UK you know around community gardens market gardens which I spoke about and in other places that actually this is a good thing what women are doing you know not doing it because of disadvantage but what you're doing is actually very positive and how can we support it and strengthen it And I think that's a really positive point. So rather than assuming that women are in some natural biological way, inclusive or, you know, nature positive or nature sensitive, because not all women are. I mean, we have a lot of research and evidence which show that, you know, if women have the resources, they can also go into cash crops. They can also become entrepreneurs. You know, they can also exploit the... But I think these two factors in terms of, you know, women's roles and responsibilities, which makes them in some way more dependent on nature and therefore respected, respectful of nature. And secondly, a very economic argument around women's lack of resources, which kind of pushes them to manage to the best possible extent to innovate. with very few external resources, with only what's available to them domestically, which is very, then ends up being organic or regenerative. You know, they can use kitchen waste, they can use cow dung manure and so on.

• Speaker #1

  Fantastic. Thank you so much, Nitya, for your time, for your expertise. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.