For centuries, farmers and their allies everywhere have maintained the diversity in the fields where the crops and plant breeds continue to co-evolve with their pests, and the environment and the knowledge of how to craft agricultural landscapes has sustained food production across the globe. Tragically, the diversity loss is driven by economic interests where constant effort is being made to distribute what are called the “improved seeds and livestock”, which on closer observation have turned out to be inferior to the local-types, except in ideal conditions.
Most of us hardly know where our food comes from and we take it for granted that these resources will be provided by plant breeders and nursery-men, without realizing that we are in a race against time to make sure that the remaining varieties are not extinct. It was Nikolay Vavilov who first articulated the concept of loss of agricultural biodiversity through a process then known as ‘genetic erosion’. The message he articulated was quite important and emphasized the fact that agricultural biodiversity is the corner-stone for building greater food security without which our food system would be crippled by pestilence and plague, drought and flood, global warming and economical & environmental impacts of globalization.
It is well known that the spread of green revolution affected both agricultural biodiversity and wildlife biodiversity. The novel technological development of the green revolution was the production of novel wheat and rice cultivars. Agronomists bred cultivars of maize, wheat and rice that were generally referred to as the HYVs (or High Yielding Varieties). Since the HYVs had higher nitrogen absorbing potential and the tendency to lodge or fall before the harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes.
A Japanese dwarf wheat cultivar Norin and an Indonesian rice variety named Peta and a Chinese rice variety named Dee-geo-woo-gen were instrumental in developing the green revolution wheat and rice varieties respectively.
It was important to note that the HYVs significantly out-performed the traditional varieties only in the presence of adequate irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. The apparent superiority has been challenged contrasting the mono-cultural system associated with the HYVs vis-a-vis the poly-cultural system with the traditional varieties. The introduction of fewer varieties in a country with a vast genetic diversity of species and varieties within species became the root of all the problems that are now called as the ‘fall-out from the green revolution technology’.
It is well articulated by the critics of the green revolution technology that it impacted not only the diversity in agricultural crops such as the staple crops but also the diverse coarse cereals that have practically vanished since then. Many of the foods that sustained people during times of drought and lean seasons were also neglected. The costs of green revolution have been externalized through loss of soil biota, diversity in uncultivated food and medicinal plants, under-utilized flora and fauna, all of which constitute the wealth of biodiversity that was the corner-stone of food for people.
Choice of food had also narrowed over time with the loss of biodiversity. With increased production of mono-culture-based rice and wheat, the rich diversity in food had narrowed considerably to the extent that there had been loss of knowledge and culinary practices that revolved around minor millets, roots and tubers, and uncultivated flora. The loss of diversity was also observed in the live-stock breeds of the country.
Agro-Ecological Zones
It was in the early nineties that we drew inspiration from initiatives across the world to actively intervene in retrieving the vast diversity of crops that were on the threat of extinction. Conservation of agro-biodiversity had to be understood outside of the logic of productivity alone. The different agro-ecological regions identified in India – from the desert ecosystem of Rajasthan in the west to the flood plain systems of West Bengal in the East, from the mountain agriculture of the Himalayas to the wetland ecosystem of Kerala, from the semi-arid rain-fed ecosystem in the Deccan plateau to the highly-developed terraces of North-East – offer mind-boggling diversity. They also represent a fascinating array of practices which embody a vast expanse of agriculture-related knowledge system of the communities across the country.
“The amazing diversity in agriculture in India extends from the fascinating farms under the baranaja system in the Himalayas with their hundreds of varieties of rice, beans and millets to the extraordinary spread of various varieties of rice in the coastal and flood plains of Orissa; from the diverse pearl millet varieties farmed in the desert ecosystem to the diverse spice gardens in the wetland ecosystem of Kerala; from the millet pulse oilseeds of the symbiotic semi-arid regions of the Deccan plateau to the knowledge-rich brilliantly-designed terrace farms of the Northern hilly region. The depth and range of crops and knowledge that are cultivated in these dramatically different ecosystems and diverse farming communities united only in their extraordinary vision of farming that bridges the past and the future of Indian agriculture.” NBSAPs (National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans) [1]
