Agroecology and the Fight against the Green Revolution
The families we work with had lots of health problems — cases ofcancer, tumors — and we linked these health problems back to the food they were eating which was produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
What agroecology means is that we are free fromchemical fertilizers and pesticides and are growing manycrops together — grains, lentils, beans, oilseeds, greens,and vegetables — to create biodiversity, using maximuminputs from the land within the farm, and emphasizingfood security.
Women manage the impacts of climate change by saving traditional seeds, especially millet. Millet is the traditional grain for the people of Tamil Nadu because it is nutritious, efficient with water, and its seeds can be stored for many years and still germinate. Because of the Green Revolution, we gave up traditional practices and traditional seeds. The Green Revolution and the policies that supported it — programs that provided farmers with hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides for rice production, as well as a minimum support price only offered for rice — encouraged everyone everywhere to convert to rice paddies.
But rice paddies use lots of water (and this is a dry region), and the use of chemical fertilizers has hurt the health of the people. 46% of children in Tamil Nadu are also malnourished now, due to their reliance on white “polished” rice, which is all that is grown by the farmers.
At the other end we have agroecology: where the ownership and possession of land may be individual or collective, but always with participatory and local decisions about what, how and when to produce. Every place in the world must build its own agroecology. It cannot be implemented from outside or from above. Agroecology is a path for better relations between women, men, young children, and the elderly. Agroecology must be an alliance between the countryside and the city, and it must be part of the social movements for structural changes against racism and for the end of violence against women. Along with food sovereignty, agroecology is part of this new society we want to build.
The Green Revolution has impacted human health, children’s health, environmental health, and it has erased the traditional systems. That is why we are against it.
The process of marginalizing people’s traditional food through caste connotations — poor people eat millet, higher classes eat rice — changes the way they eat, which is very closely linked to displacing people from their land and their seeds and marginalizing their way of farming. That is why we are strongly opposing Monsanto and Syngenta and the whole GMO package and are working to revive, protect, store, and exchange traditional seeds.